Helpful Habit: When do you shop?

A look at our week: 1. Notes tucked in Operation Christmas Child boxes | 2. Weather Kid & Junior Joker Middle Girl – on 104.7 The Fish (Click and listen below!) | 3. Pones of cornbread for Thanksgiving dressing | 4. Faux Pecan Pie – allergy-friendly Thanksgiving | 5. 1,000 Gifts App – free – thanks to Ann Voskamp | 6. Chick-fil-a – I could eat there 7 times a day | 7. Stone Mountain Park – Family BD Destination for Lil’ Buddy | 8. Train-loving almost 4yo gets his first train ride! | 9. Driving by the Golden Dome – GA State Capitol in Atlanta | 10. Thanksgiving Unit Celebration program | 11. Dressing | 12. Pumpkin pies – egg-free on the left

• Listen to both recordings of Middle Girl on our local Christian radio here (this will open a new window and you’ll need to click the little play button): Junior Joker – Maggie (to air 11-22) and Weather Kid – Maggie (aired 11-21-11)

Helpful Habit: I’m keeping up the habit of sharing a helpful habit on Fridays. Today, I’m answering the question I feel is appropriate for black Friday: When do you shop?

• I don’t.
• Really. I don’t.
• My husband does. Here’s why: (1) He’s the best.

(2) The Lord provided my husband with a job in a building right next to the warehouse store. Talk about provision! Twice a month he does our grocery shopping there. See, Hodgepodgedad grew up in a family with four other siblings. He learned shopping skills from his mother. Strategies for saving money. How to look at cost per ounce. He can also walk very fast. A proven fact that the less time you spend in a store the less money you spend.

I make the grocery list and menu plan – twice a month. I map out a meal plan for two weeks at a time. First, I plan our meals around what we have in the pantry and then I take a look at what is coming up on the calendar. I also take requests from the Hodgepodge. Then, I update the list to Evernote.

We make use of technology. Hodgepodgedad explained how we use the Evernote app in his post. (love this app!) I keep a basic, running grocery list in Evernote. The list is broken out to match the lay out of the warehouse store – for peak efficiency. Here’s the bonus: If I forget something, I can update the list, click the sync button, and my added item appears on Hodgepodgedad’s iPhone – even while he’s in the store.

• Now I do swing by the store if I need to. But I try not to. When I do swing by the store it’s always when I am already out. While delivering girls to drama, on the way back from a piano lesson or from church activities.
• We also take advantage of shopping time as one-on-one ‘date’ time with a child.
• Interested in our other shopping and meal planning habits? Right when the food comes in from the store, I use my slow cooker to do twice-monthly batch cooking. This and more in my Back to Basics series.

Speaking of shopping, we are not going out to the stores on this Friday. We’re taking it easy and relaxing over this holiday weekend.

We went as a family to Stone Mountain Park on Wednesday. Lil’ Buddy has a birthday coming up and since he loves trains, we knew he’d be thrilled with a train ride around the base of the mountain. And he was! It’s ended up being a year full of family destination birthdays.

We enjoyed a simple Thanksgiving yesterday – our first without Grandma and Grandpa since they moved back out west. (We sure missed them!) We decorated our tree (oh how Lil’ Buddy enjoyed that! He’s so thrilled with all the celebrating). We watched the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. And Hodgepodgedad and I are going to enjoy a date!

How about you? When do you shop? Do you head out on Black Friday?