$258. $261. $274. $281.
Those are our average weekly grocery totals for April, May, June and the first week and a half of July, straight out of the spreadsheet where every receipt has gone since January 2022. Our budget is $250 a week. School let out on May 22, and you can almost draw a line from that date to the top of the column.
Summer creep shows up every year in that spreadsheet, and every year I act a little surprised. This year I sat down at the kitchen table on Wednesday night with a highlighter and a stack of receipts to find out exactly where the extra $23 a week was going.
Two asterisks first
April isn't a perfectly clean baseline. We had HelloFresh boxes coming that month, which I counted against the grocery budget, and I bought less at Aldi those weeks to make room. June has our Galveston trip folded into it, including the $112 I spent at a grocery store on the island. So instead of comparing whole months, I compared a typical school-week basket from late April and early May against our last three summer weeks, line by line.
Where the extra money went
- Lunch at home, about $6 more a week. During school, the boys' packed lunches were already in the budget. At home they eat bigger lunches, and a second quesadilla, more fruit and a sleeve of crackers happen in a way they never do at a cafeteria table.
- Snacks, about $7. Three kids home all day start grazing around ten in the morning. Granola bars, Goldfish, pretzels, cheese sticks. This is the biggest line, and it's the one I can actually move.
- Fruit, about $4.50. Watermelon, grapes, peaches, berries. Fruit is cheaper in summer, but my kids eat so much more of it that the total still climbs. I'm at peace with this line.
- Milk, $2.79. We go through about three gallons a week during school. In summer it's four most weeks, mostly Wyatt, who drinks it like he's being paid to.
- Popsicles, ice cream and drinks, about $2.70. Lemonade mix, a box of fruit bars, the occasional tub of ice cream on a 100-degree night.
That comes to about $23 a week, which is almost exactly the gap. What isn't on the list surprised me more than what is. Our dinners cost about the same as they did in spring. Saturday grill nights didn't get fancier. Restaurants and takeout live on their own line in the spreadsheet, so a trip for snow cones doesn't count here, and our meat spending barely moved at all.
The line that got away from me
Here's the honest one. On our June Costco run I bought a big variety pack of chips, thinking it would carry us through the month. It lasted six days. Nobody did anything wrong. A box of individual bags sitting in the pantry just reads to a ten-year-old like an open invitation, and he had friends over twice that week. That was about $15 gone in a week, and it's part of why June jumped as much as it did.
What I'm changing, and what I'm not
I'm not raising the budget in the middle of the year. I'd rather see the overage plainly in the spreadsheet and let the fall weeks pull the year back toward $250. A few things I am doing:
- Snacks go in one bin in the pantry, refilled on Mondays after the Aldi run and not before. When it's empty, the kitchen still has fruit, cheese and toast.
- Afternoon snack is at three o'clock. I don't enforce it with any great force, but having a time cuts down on the 10:40 and 11:15 requests.
- I'm freezing smoothie packs and making our own popsicles instead of buying boxes of fruit bars. More on that soon, with the numbers.
- Watermelon comes home whole. The precut cups cost about three times as much per pound, and Wyatt is perfectly capable of hauling a melon in from the van.
None of this is about the kids eating less. They're growing, they're outside in the heat half the day, and a ten-year-old who just finished a baseball season eats like one. It's about knowing which $23 I'm spending on purpose and which $15 walked out of the pantry in a cardboard box.
Eli just came in to ask if it's three o'clock yet. It's 2:41.
