this post's for you, auntie A!!

Happy Earth Day everyone. The buzz today in everything is being eco-friendly and environmentally aware. While it is fun to see and hear this everywhere today, for S and I, we try to practice this everyday. To us, taking care of the environment is just plain being good stewards of the creation that God has given us to take care of. Growing up on a farm has instilled a literal love of the earth deep in me and while I would make an awful farmer (have the biggest respect for my dad and brother who are wonderful farmers), I will do what I can to take care of the earth. So we try to make environmentally friendly choices when we can and when money allows. Being "green" can take a lot of "green" and sometimes it does not make sense to us, as God calls us to be good stewards of our money as well. Which brings me to kind of where I am heading with this post and choices in the groceries that we buy.

After S was finished with pharmacy school and actually had a job was the first time we had a little bit more in the grocery budget and really thought about the option of buying organic food. It was also the first time we had been away from rural small (or smallish) towns where you knew where the food was coming from. In the big city, looking at the ground beef in the giant grocery stores just scared me. And THEN we had kids! All of a sudden we am responsible for what we put into their little bodies, and that kind of pushed us over the edge into making more organic choices. Now we do we buy organic everything? Goodness no! Once again, we try to be stewards of our money as well. We make what we think are the best choices according to what our family eats. I won't bore you all with the details, but instead, I will bore you with the savings on organic foods that I have had the past couple of grocery trips!

Dear auntie A has been "couponing" for a number of months now and has been finding the savings incredible. Enough so that when she lost her ~10 hr a week part-time job, she found she didn't have to look for another one - they are able to live off her other ~30 hr a week salary, even with M in school. She blogs about her couponing adventures here if you care to take a peek. I have always been a fan of coupons (after all, I am Dutch!! =), but only casually used them here and there when I had the time to look through the Sunday paper and I remembered to bring them to the store. A has been inspiring me to pay a bit more attention to coupons and I have been able to find quite a few organic ones in the past week due to Earth Day which has been fun. I also have been utilizing our local co-op's seasonal coupons and monthly specials (do this all the time), and scoured our Blue-Sky Guide for extra coupons too and it all added up to these savings on organic products in the past week:

(I would love to type out everything that I got like A does, but this tired momma needs to go to bed sometime today too! I basically bought - and stocked up in some cases - things that we either normally get organic, stuff that with coupons would be at or less than what I pay for non-organic things we buy, and just one or two things to splurge because I had a coupon too! =)

Local Co-Op (love this place!!! =)
Total before sales + coupons: $85.75
Total after sales: $70.25
Total after monthly member discount: $ 65.97
Total after coupons: $43.97
Total savings: $ 41.78 (48.7%)

-- ok, I will admit this is a crazy amount to save on a trip to the co-op and won't happen this big very often, but I was pretty excited about it none-the-less!

Rainbow
Total before sales + coupons: $38.84
Total after sales: $26.51
Total after reusable bag discount: $26.11
Total after coupons:$ 25.11
Total savings: $13.73 (35.3%)

Cub
Total before sales + coupons: $123.63
Total after sales: $102.37
Total after reusable bag discount: $102.12
Total after coupons: $85.62
Total savings: $38.01 (30.7%)

GRAND TOTAL
Pre-savings bill: $248.22
Post-savings bill: $154.70
Savings total: $93.52 (37.7% savings)

Not too bad for organic shopping....