Grocery Shopping aka My Least Favorite thing in the world

As I was perusing my favorite blogs, I came across a post that chastised us Americans for complaining about grocery shopping. After all, there are millions of people starving across the world, living in true poverty, and we have the audacity to complain about walking the overflowing aisles of our local air conditioned grocery store.

And while I totally and completely understood the point, I had to disagree. Yes, I understand how incredibly lucky we have it as Americans. I am not taking away anything from the thousands of people who would do anything to shop in a grocery store BUT as a military mommy, I detest and utterly despise grocery shopping.

Let’s just say that dragging along your child who is in a catatonic and overtired state of mind after 8 hours at daycare to the local Target is no fun trip. When said child conks out in the backseat after you finally make it out of the store alive, all is great...until you get home, to an empty house, and you try to figure out how to juggle sleeping baby tiger and bag upon bag of grocery items.

Do you let the Weight Watchers ice creams bars melt as you deal with the screeching baby, or do you try to juggle both, or do you turn off the car, close the garage door, open the car doors, and run back and forth like a mad woman, dumping grocery bags in the entryway, allowing yourself 3-4 minutes of unloading before you unbuckle the sleeping dragon that is your tired 10 month old?

Why are the simplest things so dang hard when you are doing it alone? Grocery shopping as a military mommy quickly became my least favorite thing in the world....that is until the dog bed story, but that’s another story for another day.

What’s your least favorite everyday task in the world as a military mommy?

Always,
Jesi

I'm not sayin it's gonna be easy

Ok friends, as I read my recent posts I realize that I have a pretty positive perspective on deployment, because, after all we are almost done with ours!

And as excited as I am, and as much as I want to encourage you that you can survive and your deployment can be a good thing, yes a good thing I want you to know that I am not all chipper happy camper sunshine and butterflies all the time.

Just yesterday I freaked out on the phone with Rob because I am so sick and tired of doing our family finances by myself. It really, really, really stresses me out.

Money is tight, and I get super stressed about paying bills and buying things for myself. Even when I buy the necessities I tend to feel a little guilty. I don’t know why! I can’t help that diapers, formula and baby food adds up to $70 or $80. I can’t help that I need sustenance to survive. But I want so badly to handle our finances perfectly and that just isn’t going to happen. I need to relinquish control and realize that it is ok for me to spend $10 on a new shirt off the clearance rack at Target. Life will go on if we aren’t completely debt free by 2011. Life happens and it costs money too.

You may or may not relate with my stress over our budget but I just wanted to share it with you. I can be a total stress case. I have shouted out that I HATE the Army, I HATE this deployment and all I want is Rob to come home. I have shouted it out because I have my days and my moments when that is all I feel, when I am encompassed in the darkness of deployment.

But the moments of sunshine, of Max snuggling with me and saying DaDa, of Rob laughing at a story of our crazy life, of the pride I feel when I see any military family surviving and thriving have started to outweigh the pain and the darkness. And that is why I choose to encourage you most of the time. But don’t ever feel like I have this all figured out, because I assure you that I don’t.
Not even close.
Always,