Grocery Experiments

I got up right at 7 yesterday, blogged, and then got right into schoolwork and such. I created several rhythm practice worksheets. Each worksheet contains 1 measure examples that are meant to be repeated. I'll play music with a strong beat, and call out the # of the example, and the students will clap it. I'll probably turn them into transparencies, or maybe use them on the ACTIVBoard that I will be able to use this year. Anyway, I'm pretty happy with them. I am thinking of using Google Pages to create a website where I can share the teacher resources that I make. When I finally get around to doing that, I'll post them there.

I worked on that kind of stuff until lunch. Meggie and I had pizza, and finished up the 5th Season of Seinfeld. We will have one more season that we have yet to watch. Then, we have to move on to The Simpsons. We have up through Season 8 now, and I have only watched up through Season 5.

After lunch, Meggie and I went BACK to Sam's Club, this time with our grocery shopping list. We walked around the whole store, and wrote down the price and the quantity of everything that we might possibly buy there. Yes, I know it sounds crazy, but it was actually fun. Meg and I were commenting that we feel like little kids in Sam's Club because everything is supersized. There were also tons of free food samples. The prices seem to be really good, but we still need to do the same thing at Wal-Mart, and make some decisions about what we are going to buy where. Sam's Club only carries certain brands, and we still might be better off getting the generic brand at Wal-Mart for some things. We'll have to check it out. It seems like an unusual Saturday outing, but: it was free, it was fun, it will potentially save us money on our grocery bill!

When we got home, Max was acting a little rambunctious, so I suggested we go S-W-I-M-M-I-N-G. Apparently Max knows how to spell now, because I got all excited when I said this. The weather was kinda yucky though, so I ended up letting him in and just watching him from the deck. Then we had dinner, and afterwards, I got some more school work done.

I developed an updated lesson plan format, and then changed gears back to groceries. Now that we are Sam's Club members, we are going to plan our meals by the month. We usually plan them by the week, but if we do it once a month, then we can go to Sam's Club at the start of the month and see what we need to get and store/freeze. Meg and I are discussing rearranging the laundry room so that we can fit shelves in there to store all of this stuff. Eventually, we want to get a chest freezer for down there too.

I'm very excited about all of this. When my Grandmom & Grandpop used to live in Stratford, my Grandpop had this neat workshop off the back of the garage. Along one wall, he had a workbench, some machinery, and a bunch of tools and stuff. Along the other wall, there was what I called the "store." They had shelves with all of this food. To a little kid, it looked like a grocery store aisle. Basically, my grandmother bought lots of sale items and stored them there (I don't think they had wholesale clubs back then). I always thought this was really neat, and now we are talking about doing the same thing. Also, when I used to work at Cinemark (a local movie theatre), I was always fascinated by the stock room for the concession stand. Now we will have a stock room. Now, if we could work on a popcorn popper (which they did have at Sam's Club, I might add), and a soda fountain, we'd be set.

So my task for the rest of the evening was making a calendar on the computer to put our meals on, and actually planning out the meals. It was a little tough to think of 31 different meals, but I made it simpler by thinking of 'theme days.' For example, Saturday is Fish, Sunday is my parents, Monday is pasta, Tuesday is Mexican, Wednesday is chicken, Thursday is pork, and Friday is either the diner or beef. Once I got that down, it was easy to plan everything else out.

After that I went to bed, got up at 7 (still not by the alarm clock, I really gotta do something about that), had breakfast, and blogged. Today we are going to Wal-Mart to complete the other half of our price comparisons. I'll blog about that, plus dinner at my parents', later tonight.