Of Milk and Budgets by Konnie Enos

As I have mentioned, my daughter, Melinda, has taken over the grocery shopping. About a month after my oldest son moved out she and I discussed the fact that our grocery bill had gone up, not down.

I assumed it was due to prices but it concerned me because my husband’s income could not cover the increase and I already knew my temporary job was coming to an end. (Note my last day of work was October 30^th.)

I suppose because I haven’t been doing the shopping for nearly a year I didn’t realize exactly why our grocery bill was so high. Melinda did.

She’s insisted we start doing meal planning and plan shopping trips accordingly. She has also put her foot down on multiple grocery runs a week. She said we’d need one or two items but people would add things to the list so she was spending over $60 each time.

Yeah, that adds up fast. I agree some planning and fewer trips will help.

Now the issue.

We go through a lot of milk. So much in fact that our fridge cannot hold enough to get us through the week. Now with five growing children, I never thought much about going through 10 plus gallons a week. However, now my children are all adults.

Not only that but two of them have moved out and another two of them cannot have dairy products. I also don’t drink milk very much. If I have any, it is to pour some on my cereal, a meal I don’t have very often.

So one day, a few weeks after Melinda and I had discussed the grocery bill, my husband, Jerry, pointed out that we were again low on milk and someone would have to go to the store.

An argument ensued. Melinda refused to go to the store for more milk.

Why?

Because she’d bought 5 gallons only three days before which meant we were going through about a gallon and a half a day.

Now a gallon, or two, a day isn’t unreasonable when you have a houseful of growing children. However, as I said, four of my five children no longer live here or no longer consume dairy and I don’t drink much milk. If you add that up, it means there are now exactly two people in our household who have milk daily.

Two people consuming more than a gallon a day and both those are adult men.

Well, Jerry is insisting we need milk. My son, Royce, is understanding about cutting back but still insists we need milk. My daughter is still refusing to go back to the store.

I’m calculating just how much we’re spending on milk a month and wondering how to curtail it. Then Melinda emphasis the point that she spends at least $60 every single time she goes to the store. Five gallons of milk is less than $20.

I’m starting to see her point. Royce is conceding, he could drink less milk. Jerry is not.

At one point in the argument I finally said, “If this keeps up, I’ll have to limit how much milk people get to a glass a day.”

Now I’ve never limited the milk because I was raised in a household that did limit it, for growing children. This is probably why I don’t consume much to this day. However, I wasn’t about to do this to my children because you need milk for growing bones. The only reason I even considered it was because my one child still drinking milk is no longer growing and doesn’t need to consume half a gallon of milk a day. Neither does my husband.

Now Royce took this limit as already being enforced. Yeah, milk consumption has gone down.

However, when I said this Jerry had a tantrum. “Well, then we have to limit yogurt to no more than one a day.”

Now we always have yogurt in our fridge. Both Chobani and Yoplait, and occasionally some non-dairy yogurt. Yes, we go through quite a bit of it, but what my husband didn’t realize is that none of us eats more than one a day. I am the only one in this family who consistently has one every single day. Me, one person, I eat a Chobani every day.

When he made his statement I turned to him and said, “That’s all I eat.” Then I asked Melinda how often she bought me yogurt.

“About once every three to four weeks.”

Why? Because I plan. No multiple trips to the store.

I’m not sure if my husband is drinking any less milk but we haven’t gotten any since Saturday and it’s Wednesday already. Hopefully, our grocery bill will now go down.

Oh, and thank a veteran for their service. It’s Veteran’s Day.

Smile. Make the day a brighter day.