Grocery shopping

In the past couple months, I have reduced my shopping trips. I was going once a week. I hate shopping, so I decided it was high time to quit going so often. I grow food and cook from scratch,so this was the next most logical step to take towards my quest for food self-reliance. So I figured out to shop only once every two weeks. That went real easy. So easy in fact, I probably could have gone 3 weeks on my last grocery trip if I had planned a couple of items better. So I had my shopping trip to Kroger today. I planned on enough to last 3 weeks. In reality, it should last an entire month. I will need to make a trip to town later this week, and there I will pick up my remaining 3 week supplies at Aldi. (My local Kroger and Aldi are not in the same town, and I really wish they were!)
My biggest challenge so far has been having enough dairy products. We currently use about 4 gallons of milk a week and use lots of cheese. So in order to have a months supply of milk, I have been freezing it. Kroger has had some fabulous deals on milk lately and I have been getting it for $1.76-2.00/gallon. That is dirt cheap around here!
Milk in the freezer.

At this point, it makes monetary(and health) sense to be producing our own dairy. However, I have a toddler and my dh is away from home often. We want to have more children (God willing) and I need to keep in mind that pregnancy and breastfeeding and diapering, etc, etc all take alot of time when I have to do alot of it by myself. So I have to pick and choose until I have children old enough to help me more. I would really love to be able to raise all of our animals products and entirely quit going to the grocery! Did I ever mention I hate shopping?

Note: I wanted to add a note just to clarify my shopping habits. We NEVER just keep a week or two worth of food at our house. I feel that would be irresponsible of me. I always have canned foods and meat in my pantry and freezer. If I don't go to the grocery one week, we won't starve. When I talk about grocery shopping, I'm talking about things like dairy products, fresh fruit and veggies (when we aren't growing them), toilet paper, soaps, juice, crackers, cereal, etc. It also includes restocking the pantry/freezer as needed. These would include(but not exclusively) beef, chicken, pork, canned fruit/veggies, flour, yeast, sugar, etc. My ultimate grocery goal is to be able to shop for 6 months at a time, or even better, one year!