Sigh. Total crash and burn this week. A million "reasons," but basically it's all one big fat excuse. I feel exactly like I feel when I fall off a diet or drink too much -- ashamed, nauseated, etc. Basically, I knew today was going to be a bigger bill, because I needed to do a Wegman's shop for staples, but then I got lazy and caved and got everything there, and some extras that weren't on the list to boot. Grand total: $311 -- $174 groceries,* $137 household stuff. And to top it off, Friday was 4 hrs at urgent care + "honey can you figure out food when we get home" = $50 in pizza. $50!!! Not A pizza -- TWO pizzas + cheese bread + nuggets. All of which I am now stuck eating, as the "I don't like leftovers" brigade is tired of eating the giant pile of crap he ordered. Grrr. I'm not even counting his lunch out today against my grocery/takeout budget, since there are like 20,000 calories left in the fridge he is refusing to eat.
So the totals for the month to date are $320 groceries + $140 household + $131 takeout = $591 total. So the $600 budget is shot for the month. Still, I will work an "eat all the food in the house" for the next week and a half to try to limit the damage.
What I need is a better default option for "shit happens/don't want to/can't cook." This is twice now in the last month I've had stuff that pushes me to my limit and I just can't deal with cooking (work, DS's broken foot), and we ended up dropping $50 on takeout. I am good at the "plan," but need a better fallback option when the plan fails because life.
I guess the good points are that (a) this really brings home how much I used to drop on groceries without even thinking about it (I spent the checkout going, holy shit, I used to do this *every week*?); and (b) I didn't even enjoy it -- I used to enjoy buying treats, like this week's prosciutto and melon, but this time I felt nauseated the whole time. So I guess that is a good mental shift, where Aldi's is now "normal," and the splurging isn't fun. I just need to find a way to do the happy medium, where I can get DH his periodic treats without totally falling off the wagon because I walked into Temptation Central -- never been good at that, always been better at one extreme or the other.
*"Real" groceries were more like $130, as the total included the once-yearly tub of real maple syrup and stock-up cheap chicken breasts. But still.