The Great Snack Project

Yesterday at the grocery store I completely lost my head. This was partly thanks to the entertaining musings of Caitlin Flanigan in To Hell With All That, which we read for book club. Flanigan is always fun to read. For one thing, she’s a person who can see the guilty side of anything. I closed the book, thought the hell with that, I am the mother I am, and went and bought $300 worth of chicken nuggets.

OK, an exageration. But I did decide that, while I’m still determined that my three will eat real food far more often than the kids menu, I’m going to embrace convenience. To hell, for the moment, with environmental and budgetary constraints. I’m operating one-handed here on the best of days, and I need all the help I can get.

But prepackaged snack foods are either a) stuff we eat only very rarely, i.e. Doritos or b) in too big a package for a toddler or even a kindergartner, except for those 100 calorie packs–for which they charge an enormous premium (Pay More! Get Less!) and use a ridiculous amount of packaging–there’s a box inside the box. So, while we added a few frozen dinners to the repetoire, we couldn’t do much about those munchy moments (we have a shameful number of them).

So I bought our snack foods of choice, mostly booty, bunnies, tings and pretzels with a goodly supply of goldfish. And baggies. Lots and lots of baggies. And today Holly (our babysitter), Sam and I put snacks into baggies. First, we emptied the pantry of half-empty bags and packaged those up, revealing that we have a habit of opening multiple bags of the same thing in a crisis (we? or would that be me?). Then we bagged up some new stuff, and put it in the pantry with the clear understanding that the child who can open the child proof pantry door will ask before getting snacks.

So, portion control, convenience and a lot more room in the pantry. I feel good. Not as good as I’d feel if I finished by post-baby thank yous, but good!


357 Responses to “The Great Snack Project”

  1. motherbumper says:

    What a great idea. You’ve inspired me to do the same. We open snack stuff all the time, forget about it and the pantry is a mess. I don’t even want to know what it will be like once Bumper graduates from Baby Mum-mums. And I haven’t done my baby thank-you cards either so don’t feel bad 😉

  2. boogiemum says:

    Just found your site and wanted to let you know that so far I love it and am going to make one of my Daily Stops. Thanks for telling it like it is!