Meal Planning

Happy New Year weekend! We are repeating a few of the same appetizers from Christmas Eve (we prepped extra when we made them the first time) plus we are adding in french fries and mini tacos in place of meatballs and shrimp. But that’s about as exciting as we get around here. The kids will still be in bed at a fairly normal hour and while we might see midnight, it’s mostly because we don’t need to leave the house the next day and not because we we want to see the year switch over. 

Final push for grocery shopping before Christmas! We took the extra from last week’s shopping trip plus a little more we had set aside from previous trips to make sure we could get all our last minute items. I’m so ready for all the great food! We are spending today finishing up prep so we can just pop things in the oven, fryer, or our mouths for the next two days 😉 

(Note: This post may contain affiliate links. Possibly several of them. I will earn a small commission if you use my links to purchase a product but your purchase price does not change. Check out the disclosure policy to find out more. Thank you for supporting My Joy in Chaos.) A peek at our weekly grocery …

Weekly Menu Plan #96 + a look at the weekly grocery shopping for our family of 7 Read More »

I’m excited to start prepping more food for our holiday menus! We will be spending a bit more this week because I wanted to buy the brisket now for our Christmas dinner. I budgeted $40 to be sure we’d have enough for the giant slab of meat. In order to offset what we spent extra this week we’ve been setting aside a little from each week’s trips that were under $80 to put towards this month’s groceries. Even a couple dollars each week can add up quickly! 

I screwed my whole shopping trip up this week, you guys! I made this list of everything we need for the month of December for meals and normal groceries. Well I didn’t think closely enough about the extras we need – like produce! Ugh. Thankfully Micah had an hour or so to kill while the kids were at dress rehearsal for the Christmas pageant at church and we got to run out for the forgotten items. That’s what I get for trying to overplan – I completely missed the basics! 

It’s a small grocery trip this week because we did the double stock up trip last week. We needed a few small dairy items plus produce, nothing crazy. We spent right around $110 last week out of the max of $180 so technically we had a little less than $70 to spend… but my goal was to stay under $40 this week while grabbing what we needed plus a few extras. Did I do it?

Oh my goodness! We’ve hit Thanksgiving week. Eeek! It came so fast this month since it’s the almost the earliest date it can be. I seriously keep thinking I have another week since it’s feels soooo early. I gotta get my butt in gear!