At 9:40 Monday night, Wyatt padded into the kitchen in his socks, opened the fridge and stood in the cold air for a long minute. Then he asked, very politely, whether there was "anything real" to eat. He'd had two full plates of peanut noodles at 5:45. By 9:50 he had eaten the container of shredded chicken I'd set aside for two days of lunches, standing up, with a fork.
Wyatt turned eleven in May. Since then he's grown about two inches, his feet have passed mine, and he eats like his cousin Cody, who plays offensive line. Rosie turns three in two weeks and eats like a bird with strong opinions. Feeding both of them in the same week is its own kind of budgeting. Here's our plan for this week, Sunday, July 26 through Thursday, July 30, and the receipts, which are already in.
The dinners
The oven has been off at dinnertime since late June, so everything this week comes from the grill, the Crock-Pot, the Instant Pot or the air fryer.
- Sunday: chicken fajitas on the Weber, with Eli's plain strips pulled off before the peppers went on. $16.40.
- Monday: cold peanut noodles with cucumbers and shredded chicken, the 20-minute dinner I wrote about last July. It was about $11 then and $12.30 now. I poached a double batch of chicken in the Instant Pot so half could go to lunches. You know how that went.
- Tuesday: Crock-Pot pork carnitas, a 4 1/2-pound shoulder on low since 8 this morning, meant to cover two dinners. $15.80.
- Wednesday: air fryer chicken strips (Eli's favorite food on earth), corn on the cob from the Instant Pot, sliced cucumbers and a watermelon. $13.60.
- Thursday: carnitas burrito bowls with rice and black beans, from Tuesday's leftovers, assuming there are leftovers. $5.90 in new ingredients.
That's $64.00 for five dinners, about $2.56 a serving. Friday is fend-for-yourself Friday, and Matt has burgers planned for the Weber on Saturday.
Where the other $220 goes
Dinner is the cheap part of a summer week. Here's roughly how the total breaks down:
- Dinners: $64
- Breakfasts: about $49 (two and a half dozen eggs, two boxes of cereal, oatmeal, bread, bananas)
- Lunches and snacks for three kids home all day: about $94
- Milk and coffee: about $28, with four gallons of milk this week instead of our usual three
- Household basics: about $25
- Friday backup and Saturday's burgers: about $24
The lunch and snack line is where the eleven-year-old lives. During the school year it runs closer to $40 a week. In summer, with three kids home and one of them hollow, it more than doubles.
Rosie, on the other hand, barely registers. On Sunday she ate four bites of chicken, one tortilla torn into confetti, a small mountain of shredded cheese and eleven frozen blueberries, which she counted out loud. Her daytime diapers came off the spreadsheet this month, too, now that she's potty trained, and only night pull-ups are left on that line. That's a separate line from groceries and doesn't help this total one cent, but I'm still celebrating it.
What went sideways
The Monday night chicken. I'd poached four pounds of chicken breast: two for the noodles and two for quesadillas and chicken salad for the kids' lunches on Tuesday and Wednesday. The second container sat on the middle shelf with no label, and to a growing boy at 9:40 p.m., an unlabeled container of cooked chicken is an invitation. That's on me, not him. Tuesday's lunch became bean and cheese quesadillas, which cost less anyway.
The fix, starting tonight, is a shelf. The top shelf of the fridge now holds one container labeled "WYATT: GO AHEAD" on a strip of blue painter's tape, with hard-boiled eggs, cold rice and beans, a bag of shredded cheese and tortillas, and a bowl of cut fruit. It's his to raid after dinner without asking. Anything else that's spoken for gets tape with a day on it. Tuesday's leftover carnitas will go into a glass container labeled THURSDAY in letters two inches tall.
Matt says he ate exactly like this at eleven. Debbie, when I called her, confirmed it and added that it got worse at fourteen.
The receipts
H-E-B in Frisco on Saturday, $46.18, for tortillas and the pork shoulder and chicken from the meat counter. Aldi on Monday morning, $166.31, with Rosie in the cart. A Walmart+ delivery Monday afternoon, $71.68, for milk, cereal, paper towels and lunch snacks. That's $284.17 for the week, $19 over our $265 budget and right in line with the rest of July. Three kids home all day costs more every summer. This summer, one of them is eleven.
