Keep Extra Supplies in Your Pantry and Plan Your Meals

We do the household and grocery shopping only once a week- usually on Saturdays. 

Shopping only once a week saves a lot of time and effort and allows us to just focus on homeschool during the week without any interruptions. 

I suppose I live too far away from the store to ever just "run to the store." 

Running to any store usually takes up at least an hour when it is all said and done. 

So it saves us time and effort to shop once a week, but when all is said and done, we find that we actually save money, too. 

We are never using extra gas, never shopping based on mood or impulse, and we are never in the stores mid-week seeing more and more stuff we want to buy, so it really saves to simply go into the store less often. 

To make it possible to go to the store only once a week, we have learned to do two main things:

#1. We have to plan all our meals for the week on Saturday before going to the store, and we make a grocery list based on those meals, buying little to no extra food, which means we save money.  

#2. We also have to have extra products on hand to be able to "shop" from our own supplies that we have in the house when we run out of something mid-week. 

Keeping supplies in the house-

It will take a while to figure out the products you use all the time and need to have on hand. 

It will also take a while to buy the extra portions over time. 

But it's a great idea for any homeschool mom to try and keep a limited supply of all of the products, food and non-food, you consistently use, and these can be stored in your pantry, storage closet, or freezer, depending on the product.  

For example, in the freezer, I keep chicken breasts, ground beef, ground turkey, ham, sausage, etc. in meal-sized portions and each week, as I plan meals and as I fill in the grocery list, I "shop" from the freezer, bringing the meat I want to use up to the fridge in the kitchen to begin to thaw in time for me to use it in the next few days for meals. 

In the pantry, I always have somewhere between 1-12 cans diced tomatoes, tomatoes and chillies, beans of all varieties, refried beans, enchilada sauce, etc. -things I use all the time. I also need to keep extra oat milks, rice cakes, nut butters, tortilla chips, etc., because we burn through those products quickly. 

In the closet, I also keep at least one container of all the necessary household supplies like trash bags, toilet paper, paper towels, laundry detergent, ziplocks of all sizes, personal hygiene products, cleaning supplies, etc. 

Now that I have extra food and supplies on hand like this, I literally never have to take time or effort mid-week to run to the store. 

We can simple "shop" from our storage. 

When we run out of paper towels, we "shop" from the paper towels in the closet. 

When we run out of laundry detergent or dish washing soap, we "shop" from the closet. 

When we need beans for dinner, we run down to the pantry and get what we need. 

If I use the last of something mid-week, or if I notice that inventory is getting too low on an item, I add that to the shopping list for Saturday, but in the meantime, we still have whatever we need, because we got it from our excess in storage. 

Having supplies means our home just keeps moving on with our school day, day after day after day. 

Plan Meals-

We keep a shopping list and add things through the week as we notice we are out of something or running low. 

But on Saturday morning, I also take a more careful inventory of everything in the house- the fridge, freezer, pantry, and closet- and based on what I see, I add needed items to the list. 

I also decide all the meals I'll be making that week (including snacks, breakfasts, lunches, and desserts), and I check to see if I have all the ingredients, or if I have them in storage, and if I don't (or if I'm running low), I add those items to the list, so I can make those specific meals.  

When we come home with groceries, we open the garage and honk the horn, and the kids know to come down and help us carry everything up and put it away. 

We teach the kids where to put things and that way, they can run and get it mid-week when we're in the middle of doing something like making dinner. 

We definitely expect our kids to help with all the household chores. 

It's part of their homeschooling. 

By keeping supplies on hand and planning our meals, we have all we need once the homeschool week begins again. 

Every decision has been thought through and made and prepared for. 

This means that during the weekdays, we hardly have any errands to run- not even one. 

Of course, there's still the dentist and orthodontist and pediatrician, but generally speaking, having meals planned and all supplies on hand means that we are just free to do our homeschool work or read, etc.