Family Grocery Shopping
Oct 23rd, 2007 by Bethany
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
One of the things Colin and I like to do together is shop for groceries. We almost always do our grocery shopping together, since we both like the bright lights and colors and want to have some control over the food that comes home. We like to spend time together, too, and it's a little bit of pleasant exercise to walk all over the store.
It's not always easy to shop together. We take the kids with us, and I won't go into all the reasons that complicates things. We also have very different shopping styles, and early in our marriage that resulted in some slightly hurt feelings and we had to work out some compromises. I'd ideally like to plan all of our meals in advance, make a grocery list, and buy only the things on the list. Colin likes to browse the store and pick up whatever catches his eye. So I'd go to all this work to plan omelette's and oatmeal breakfasts for the week and Colin would grab a box of Wheaties as we walked down the cereal aisle. I took it as an insult to my cooking and planning until I found out that Colin just likes to have Wheaties around and it had nothing to do with me.
Now we usually do a combination of both planning and spontaneity, with me making a plan and then if there's something that looks especially good I adjust. I prepare myself in advance for Colin having things that he'll want that aren't on the list and it doesn't bother me anymore because I expect it. He has a lot of good suggestions–he just needs to have the food in front of him as inspiration so it's hard for him to give me the suggestions as I make my list in the first place.
We do a lot of browsing at the grocery store. We both like to go down nearly every aisle (we agree on skipping the beer and potato chips aisle) and admire the marketing prowess of the the food industry. If you want to do this with children, it's important to take them when they're neither hungry nor tired, or it'll ruin the experience. Sometimes I'll go into the store and immediately buy a bunch of bananas for the kids to eat while we shop and that helps a lot (you have to keep the receipt out so that everyone knows you're not stealing bananas).
Last night we went grocery shopping and got a lot of produce: bananas, bell peppers, apples, pears, avocados, artichokes (yum!), carrots, celery, lettuce, and more! We also bought diapers and peanut butter and milk and cereal and hot dogs, to name a sampling. We shopped at Walmart, so we spent a lot of time looking at iPod accessories for Colin's iPod and at Christmas decorations and CDs for me. Degen spent a lot of time on a tricycle that he returned to the display before we left. The last few times I've been to Walmart Degen has ridden that tricycle while I pushed the cart–it helps keep him close by since he can't ride very fast yet.
