More food for thought

I've written many times now about our family's eating habits; the buying, storing, preparing, and eating of food takes up a pretty hefty chunk of both our time and money, so it's a topic that's bound to come up often. A "quick trip" to the store to "pick up a few things" for us means a full cart and a few hundred dollars these days. More often than not, we've filled our cart to overflowing by the time we get about three-fourths of the way through the store. I'm going to have to come to terms with the idea of grabbing *two* shopping carts at a time, in hopes of actually being able to get a weeks' worth of goods in one trip. The funny thing is, none of us are very big people, yet we seem to consume an enormous amount. This morning for brunch after church I cooked a full loaf of bread into French toast, and a whole pound of bacon. Several people were still hungry, so Matt made eggs and toast for himself and a child, and Paul made himself an egg sandwich. Several children were still complaining of being hungry, at which point I declared the kitchen officially closed and pointed to the fruit basket. I'm going to start sending them out on the front yard to graze!

One reason for the jump in our food consumption, besides a number of rapidly growing adolescents, is that Baby D has started eating quite a bit of "people" food. He still eats some pureed baby food, and still gets his milk "on tap", but he's now pretty much eating what the rest of us eat. His favorites are chicken cutlets, bananas, and goldfish crackers. You can see the entire table behind him that is full of his food. I told Matt we better not let him try bacon, or before you know it I'll be frying up four pounds at a time just to feed everyone breakfast!