The "big" shopping trip

Besides produce, milk, and bread I do most of my grocery shopping in one big trip for a 2 week period. Then, as I see deals around town that are too good to pass up, I swing by and make purchases for my stockpile. A few months ago, when I was brand new to couponing, I felt awesome when I spent less than $120 in one trip. I suppose a bi-weekly trip of $120 wasn't shabby for 2 adults and a toddler, but it wasn't really that great either (although it was a massive improvement over the $200-ish per week we used to spend pre-kids, and we ate out all the time- I don't even know what we were buying!?). Since I began stockpiling, this amount has dropped quite a bit, a good trip is less than $80 and every week I seem to nudge that total down just a bit. I'm sure it'll go up a bit once the newest gets onto food in about a year or so. We skip babyfood and just go to solids when they're older, but they eat so little when they first start out!

Over the next 2 weeks, the plan is to eat from our stockpile quite a bit so none of it gets pushed too far back and forgotten about. I made a list of everything we had and then made the menu from that. This trip (no pics- sorry! bad day in toddler-land) included:

• waffle mix
• 2 cans peas
• hershey's cocoa powder
• 4 cans del monte corn
• stiry fry sauce
• 2 bags mini oreos (free with coupon wyb milk and include them as part of your M&M promo)
• 2 bags tortilla chips
• 2 boxes barilla piccolini pastas
• 1 dozen eggs
• 2 gallons milk
• bread
• 2 packages bone-in-chicken breasts (2 per pkg.)
• 1 lb. baby carrots
• and six candy bars (on sale buy 3 get 3 free, and I used 3 BOGO free coupons to make them all free!)

Things in italics were counted as part of the mix and match (buy 10 items save $5) promo. I got a total of 28 items with a total spent of $29.09. My savings for the trip were $31.41 or about half. I will have to go back for more milk and produce PLUS buns and hamburger patties for the birthday party bbq we're doing next weekend. I also picked up a couple of pumpkin scones marked down at QFC when I went this afternoon with my mom (she wanted $1 artichokes).