I am NOT a housewife on steroids.

When the hubs and I first got married (3 years ago), I loved to grocery shop. Probably to a weird degree. I loved planning our meals and cooking big meals every night. I think I was the housewife on steroids... in spite of also having a full-time job. It must have been the honeymoon phase.

I love Matt more today than ever before (and as we've been together a total of nearly 12 years, that's saying something). But the honeymoon phase of grocery shopping and cooking has loooooong since passed.

Now that I'm a new mommy, my former love of grocery shopping has been completely replaced by fear, loathing, and despair. If we run out of laundry detergent mid-week, I seriously have to weigh the choice of wearing dirty underwear against taking Connor with me to the grocery store. (So far, the grocery store has always won... but no guarantees about the future.)

In Connor's defense, he is usually fine at the grocery store. He is, frankly, the best-natured, sweetest, happiest baby in the world. (I'm not just saying that as a delusional new mommy. It's true.) But there was one really epic, two-hour trip to Walmart a few months ago that involved a full buggy, a bottle feeding, a diaper explosion, and a change of clothes. All. In. One. Trip. So now I'm gun-shy.

So in the last 6 months or so, I have been trying to figure out how to do freezer meals, how to grocery shop more efficiently, how to cook meals that are still yummy and reasonably healthy in less time, and how to spend less on groceries overall. All those things that other modern wives and mommies with full-time jobs seem to be so awesome at, at least according to Pinterest. This is what I have figured out so far:

1. When you find a link on Pinterest that promises 20 freezer meals in 4 hours, know that you are being LIED TO. The last time I attempted such a link, it took 6 hours, and that was WITH Matt's help for the last 2 hours. Meaning, on my own, it would have taken closer to 8. I've made a batch of freezer meals 3 or 4 times now, and it always takes forever... never even CLOSE to what they predict. My times are not improving with practice.
2. Matt pointed this out to me: Most freezer meals, individually, would only take 5-10 minutes of prep to cook the normal way... you know, the day of, without freezing them first. Particularly the crockpot meals. You're throwing in meat, veggies, seasonings, and broth/water... There's really no need to set it up as a freezer meal ahead of time. You're not really saving yourself much time... especially since you have to *remember* (not a strong ability of mine) to take it out of the freezer and move it to the fridge at least the night before to start thawing.
3. Couponing requires way more time and energy than I have available. I'm always jealous when I hear about the crazy amounts of money serious couponers save. But I would rather spend my spare time playing with my son, who is growing up entirely too fast, than clipping and organizing coupons. That being said, I do wish I had a clone... or a butler... or a robot-maid who could do those types of menial tasks for me.
4. Walmart has a pretty cool Savings Catcher app. When you shop at Walmart, you scan the little QR code at the bottom of the receipt into the Savings Catcher app, and they check their prices against the competitors' advertised prices for you... and a few days later they send you an e-mail to tell you whether you saved any money. If you did, they give it back to you on an e-gift card. I've gotten a total of maybe $20 back using this app since December... which is certainly better than getting no money back, or clipping coupons, or even bothering to compare prices myself. The only problem is... it means I have to shop at Walmart to use the app. *sigh* I hate Walmart.
5. In contrast, I love Amazon. My bestie Danna introduced us to the Amazon Mom program, which is an offshoot of Amazon Prime, before Connor was born. We pay the $99/yr Amazon Prime fee, and we get our diapers, wipes, and any other recurring, disposable baby paraphernalia we need for a discount (up to 15% per item) and shipped to us with the free Prime 2-day shipping. Through this program, I've also discovered Amazon's general "Subscribe & Save" program, where you can order various other household items that you use on a recurring basis for a small discount (usually 5%). I've started ordering paper towels and toilet paper through this program, and I'm looking around my house for other things I can order. (Amazon loves me for this.) Frankly, it's not even about the discount to me. I did the math before we signed up, and the $99 nearly equals the 15% diaper discount... though the savings do start to add up when you start ordering other stuff. And I have occasionally compared the prices to in-store prices, and they have always either matched or been better on Amazon. The real reason I love this program is the convenience. It arrives at my front door in two days with NO GROCERY SHOPPING REQUIRED! Whoo hoo! So as long as I'm thinking ahead, this works out great for this busy working mommy who hates to grocery shop with the baby in tow.

The result of these discoveries is that I think I'm going to STOP making freezer meals (gasp), unless a) they are worth the time and effort, and b) it will genuinely SAVE me time later to prep it as a freezer meal now. I am going to continue shopping on Amazon as much as possible because I am going to get the most out of that $99 annual fee! And finally, I am going to try monthly menu planning for the next few months.

Ages back, I started weekly menu planning. Some weeks go well... others, we make and eat half the meals I planned and never get around to making the others. Some weeks, I forget to plan altogether. But I think monthly meal planning might be the answer to several of the above problems, because it will 1) reduce the number of grocery trips (please, Lord), 2) save money, assuming I plan well, 3) ensure that we eat healthier meals because I will be planning them in advance, 4) keep us from eating the same stuff over and over again, and 5) help me to remember to try some new meals now and then, and to pull out old recipes we haven't used in a while. I will definitely add some of the yummy crockpot meals we've tried in my freezer meal experiments into our monthly meal plan, minus the freezing part.

As of this moment, I haven't made up our first monthly menu yet. First I need to search Pinterest for ideas, go through recipes we've already tried and liked, and scour our pantry. Plus, we currently have like 15 freezer meals in the freezer, so we need to eat those before I do another big grocery shopping trip. But I will post my monthly meal plan after I make it, and keep you all posted. :-) One day, I'll be the SuperMom I always dreamed of being!