Stahlke Adoption

Making Sack Lunches

I tried out a new store today--a wholesale grocery store called GFS that is directly on my drive to work. We've been members of Costco since the kids came. It's a wonderful store for us, but since it takes a lot of time to shop there, I go about once a month and spend several hundred dollars. The GFS is small enough that I can buy just a few items and be on my way quickly. The time that the kids are in school is precious, and it's impossible to work at church and do a big shopping trip on the same day.

The reason for this wholesale shopping is clear, but I'll give you a few details. While making sack lunches today, I used an entire loaf of bread, a large package of bologna, a complete head of cauliflower, a bag of apples, and an entire can of Pringles potato chips. For meals at home, we buy eight gallons of milk at a time--the store now loans me two milk crates to help carry it all home. By limiting the kids to one glass a meal, we can stretch the eight gallons to about ten days. One of our important purchases before the kids came was the extra refrigerator/freezer that sits on our back porch.

Several churches and many individuals have been wonderful about giving us food. It's also a great way for the children to try out new foods and learn "American" tastes. A majority of the children will now eat pizza, which initially had the dreaded ingredient cheese. And some of them will now cheer when we have corn, fried chicken, cottage cheese, or peanut butter/jelly. It goes both ways, however--last Easter we bought traditional Ukrainian foods and I could hardly eat the anchovies, mostly because of the salt. For our kids, that was the best part!

posted by Stahlkes @ 1:09 PM