February

We did a little better this month.

Our total came out to $230.71. When you subtract the $20.00 for our vitamin credit, it comes to $210.71.

Which brings our daily figure up to $7.53/day.

But February was a really weird month. It started out with sickness. For the first 10 days of the month, someone in the family was sick. I was getting up 4-6 times a night with various children and was just a wee bit tired. This really shot the planning side of my month. Which would have wrecked our month, except that we were eating less because we weren't feeling great. Being tired also may have affected my record-keeping--as I wasn't always recording things right away, which meant that there was a little more guesstimation going on this month. I think it is still very accurate, but it is possible that there are more errors in my record-keeping.

I did make 2 smallish changes in the way I do things also. I didn't count the vitamins I buy--deciding that they weren't actual food. And I only counted a portion of our $17.00 cow share. We've been getting very little milk from them since it's the time of year when the cows aren't producing much. And, yes, we'll get more later on in the year when it warms up and they have babies and stuff. So, yes, it's kind of cheating not to count it all now in the lean month, but I'm doing it anyway.

Next month, I'm planning to go full-throttle. When I told Kip this he sort of groaned and said he thought we were already going full-throttle. Which we have been, but there's been a learning curve. In March I'm going to try to capitalize on that. I've got a menu and a more comprehensive shopping list posted.

Here's the breakdown of how we spent:

Fruit/Vegetable: $54.21

Grain: $44.10

Dairy: $39.41

Meat/Eggs: $25.07

Sugars/Sweets: $27.82

Nuts/Beans/Legumes: $16.24

Fats/Condiments: $14.86

Yeast/Leaveners: $2.00