Going grocery shopping is an inevitable necessity. Before having children, while working full time as an high school teacher, my husband and I would run to the grocery store when ever we needed something. Often times we would find ourselves going to the market three or four times a week. Not much changed after we had our first child. I was still working full time and planning daily meals was not something I did in detail often. It was also fairly easy to take the stroller into the grocery store using the bottom basket to hold the items we needed to purchase. In retrospect, even though we were rather busy with my husband working his way through two graduate programs, I teaching all the while, and having a child, those days seem to hold more freedom. Now that we have moved back to the Midwest our grocery shopping needs have changed. Perhaps it was spurred by a need for normalcy after five years of crazy, or perhaps it was just easier, with a two year old and a six month pregnancy bump, to limit our trips to the market to once a week. Nonetheless, my husband was no longer accompanying me to the store (for the sake of his dissertation and my sanity). I needed to find a day that would work best for myself and our children. Picking the day was easy since our local market has a ten percent discount on their “health market” (organic and natural foods) on Wednesdays. Since I strive to buy organic when possible, Wednesday became our day for purchasing food. Selecting food is actually quite easy with one child, even while pregnant (although my large belly did get in the way while selecting certain items); get a chart and go. After our daughter was born, I needed to figure out how I could get our grocery shopping done with two children efficiently. I thought about using our new double stroller, but there would not be enough room in the basket for all three groceries. I decided the only way to make our Wednesday trip to the market manageable with a toddler and an infant would be to wear the baby with the two year old in the chart like before. It worked! So now our Wednesday trip to the marketplace has become routine and we have not missed one yet!
