Have you ever had Safeway (or some other grocery store) deliver your groceries to your house? I tried that this week for the first time, and it was great! I made my list, went to the website Monday night, picked all the stuff I wanted, and told them to deliver it Tuesday morning.

Then at 1 a.m. I remembered a few more items I had forgotten so I went back to the site, added those things to my order, and poof! the delivery guy rolled up to my house at 10:00 Tuesday morning with twenty bags of groceries (that should last about two weeks-ish. I stocked up on some things so the cans of corn will last longer…). My kids were completely fascinated with some nice grocery guy bringing us tons of food (nice, professional, non-scary looking delivery man goes a long way too). The store coming to you sure beats taking the kids to the store!

Safeway often has specials that if you buy a certain number of certain items, they give you some sort of incentive. When you buy online, you can see all the incentive qualifying items together as well as being able to see whatever other discounted items you have in your cart. Being able to see all the discounts in one place makes it much easier to buy with a heavy discount. My bill came to $150 (just under) for twenty bags of groceries (five kids remember, who seem to do nothing but eat and grow, which I think may be related…), and I got a pair of free Spiderman 3 movie tickets on top of that for things that my children seem to think are the only snacks worth eating (namely Gogurt and fruit rollups). They sweetly put how much money I saved from shopping specials, and my savings came to around $65 or 30% of my bill. Hurray!

My other exciting discovery that helps organize the shopping is this great site, www.TheGroceryGame.com, that lets you pick a grocery store in your area, and then it gives you a huge list every week of all the store specials, manufacturer coupons (and where to get them), and every single discount you can possibly get. It’s so cool! The stores run their discounts on a regular cycle, so if you stock up when specific sections are on sale it cuts down your bill.

I made my menu for the week, figured out what I needed for that, and then checked out the Grocery Game list for anything else that I use frequently to stock up on them (my referral email is rachel@gymboreenews.com if you decide you want to try it out. They will ask you who referred you.). I am planning to run this experiment with the Grocery Game and Safeway delivery for a couple of months and see if it actually helps my grocery bill. I will, of course, report back when the verdict is in.

Rachel

Have you ever seen a baby wallaby learning to hop? Hehe. Okay, you caught me. Neither have I, but I wonder if they’re as clumsy at the outset as human babies are when they start walking (a wallaby is a marsupial that’s kind of like a small kangaroo). My apparently not so wee baby (14.5 months) started bipedaling about two weeks ago, and is now tottering around on two legs about 65% of the time. I’m expecting her crawling days to be entirely completed by the end of the week.

Since Faith is our last little progeny, I am greeting every milestone she passes with a frustrating combination of joy that we are moving ahead to the next stage of our family’s life and despair that we are rapidly moving out of the stage of itty bitty kiddies that we’ve been ensconced in for the last nine years.

When I say it that way, it reminds me why I’m ready to move on to the diaper-free, non-napping stage of life. Nine years is a long time to be constantly pregnant, nursing and monkeying with babies, diapers and the myriad accoutrements that come with them! I can’t imagine what life will be like without those things. Very bizarre.

On the plus side, with all these kids (we have 5), in a mere fifteen or twenty years I’m sure to have the beginnings of a cadre of grandchildren to play with. Oh my gosh, that’s depressing on so many levels! How does it seem at the same time like 15 years will be ages to wait for a grandchild, oddly not that long in terms of years at all, and a terrifyingly close amount of time for me to potentially be grandparent material. Aack aack! Psychosis is coming!! Hmph.

Now, because I’m a weenie and whiskey makes me gag for five minutes as it peels all the nerve endings from my throat when it drains down, I’m going to go pour myself a glass of very smooth wine to go cry in for the next half an hour. My gosh, parenting is confusing. Funny how those vacuous parenting books that go around masquerading as mentors conveniently gloss over how parenting makes you completely crazy! Guess that’s what your own parents are for. Pity that we never believe them.

I very clearly remember my Mother telling us that she was perfectly normal until my brother and I were born, and neither of us believed a word of it. Come to think of it, I’m still not sure I believe it, but it does seem slightly more plausible now that I have five kids of my own. I’m fairly certain that my own nutso ratio has been listing toward the batty side of the equation. Oh well, they’re worth it. And they’re so cute when they’re learning to walk (somewhat less cute when they have three teeth coming in at the same time and cry all day, however, which Faith is also doing).

May your week be full of cheerful children, sunny smiles, and lighthearted laughter from the little ones in your care. May the Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you; the Lord lift up His countenance upon you, and give you peace. ~ Numbers 6:24-26

~ Rachel

Did you have a wonderful Easter? Ours was lovely. We had lunch at church (fancy holiday lunch with beef, ham, and lamb. Mmmm… lamb…), and then the fam all came over to our house for informal snacks & dessert. Other than that, busy weekend over here.

We took the kids up the Columbia Gorge on Friday (eighty degree weather that day, which is atypically warm for around here this time of year) and hiked to the top of Multnomah Falls, which is a two mile round trip hike straight up (one mile up, one mile back down). Okay, so it has switchbacks that crisscross the mountain so it’s not straight up, but it’s plenty steep and when you carry a fourteen month old for 97% of the hike it might as well be straight up. In case you were wondering, that is probably not the smartest way to get a ball of chub up a hill.

Handsome Hubby carried our two year old Kyra a good lot of the way too, and we were both bushed when we got back home. The kids hopped out of the car and immediately wanted to go jump on the trampoline. How do they do that??? The older three did amazingly well on the hike, and I think Trinity (age 6) particularly enjoyed herself. We were only planning to walk to the bridge one-fifth of a mile up, but as soon as we got that far she started lobbying to go to the top. She practically bounced like Tigger the whole way up. Such a doodle.

Saturday I spent all day prepping for Sunday and collapsed into bed at 12:30 and spent all day running around again on Monday. Tuesday I sat on the couch and watched the Fellowship of the Ring for three hours to decompress and now I’m all better. Hurray!

Rachel

Not much going on around here lately. Been feeling all spring cleaning-y, so I cleaned out the kids’ toys, books, art supplies, and scrubbed down almost the whole house. I also did the big, annual spring job of going through all the boxes of girls’ spring clothes to figure out who fits in what this year. Trinity (age 6) and Anika (age 5) tend to be only one year apart in clothes, so whatever Trinity outgrows one summer, Anika is in the next year and it’s hard to tell who is going to fit into what.

Of course, they don’t mind because they get to go spend 45 minutes doing fashion show and fighting over who gets which dress this year. Hmmm, now that I think about it, that’s sort of disturbing in that, “what are they going to be like as teenagers” type of way. Yikes! Actually, after last year when Trinity cried every time I pulled out something that didn’t fit and thus became Anika’s (oh no, not my fish dress! oh no, not my apple shorts!), I decided to buy Trinity her new clothes before we sorted through the boxes. This year went much better… Kyra and Faith are also one year apart in clothes, but they’re still little enough that they don’t get bent out of shape about whose is what yet.

You all ready for Easter? We’re going over to Handsome Hubby’s grandparents’ farm this evening for an Easter egg hunt, which sounds like a lot of fun. They invited Hubby’s family and my family (parents and brother’s family) to come too, so should be a pretty good shin dig. For Easter we are going to have a fancy lunch at church (our church has a potluck every Sunday after the service, and on holidays they organize it all into a pretty swanky meal), and then all the extended family is coming over to our house afterwards for snacks, desserts, and hanging around.

This last Sunday my older three kids schmoozed their grandparents into taking them home after church so they could hang around and play with their little buddies for a bit longer (Hubby and I tend to clear out right after the meal so we can get the little ones down for a nap before they completely melt), and my parents decided to stay and spend the evening with us. You should have seen my house! I had started going through all the boxes of clothes on Saturday and then didn’t finish, so my entire living room was completely covered in seven sizes of clothes (three of those got weeded out and are going back to the garage) all piled up by size. At least my kitchen was manageable.

You know, my mother is one of the only people who I don’t mind seeing my house when it is in nuclear bomb mode. It doesn’t phase her at all when my house is a disaster, and she actually believes me when I tell her my house was clean two hours ago (or twenty minutes ago). I don’t think my Dad notices whether the house is studded with landmines or immaculate as long as the couch is empty enough for him to snooze on. Kind of a plus as well. That’s all to say that the evening was relaxing despite the swamp that was my house.

Have a terrific Easter, and I’ll talk to you next week!

Rachel