Social Distancing Day 3 — The Filling Of The Chug Jugs

When you go grocery shopping for you and your husband and your five kids ages 8, 9, 10, 13, and 14, you look like you are getting ready for the end of the world when really you have just enough bread, milk, eggs, and produce to last about a week.

Yesterday I went to two different grocery stores. First I went to ShopRite to get some stuff on my list and to pick up a bunch of things for my parents since both of them are over 70 but especially since my mom is getting her sixth round of chemo next Friday and is seriously immunocompromised.

Then I went to Costco where I got most of what I needed. Except for eggs and toilet paper. I anticipated the absence of toilet paper.

But I didn’t anticipate no eggs! We eat a lot of eggs.

We only have about 12 rolls of toilet paper left. And it’s not the Scott tissue sandpaper kind that lasts a long time. That’s the kind I normally get. That was gone from everywhere I went last week, even before schools were closed and sports were cancelled. So I got the thick, fancy, one-roll-lasts-for-about-a-day-in-my-house kind of toilet paper.

In a little over a week, we will be resorting to corn cobs, leaves, and unmatched socks to wipe our behinds.

Anyway, that’s a story for another time.

I went shopping with a list and a plan in an effort to seriously limit the number of times I have to go grocery shopping, because I believe very strongly in the importance of total social distancing whenever possible.

Since there is only so much you can fit into a grocery cart, especially when you are shopping for a total of nine people, I didn’t go crazy. To someone who didn’t know me, it might have appeared like I was preparing for the apocolypse.

But I was really only doing a normal weekly shop.

Maybe two weeks if I can be really, really organized.

In my shopping travels, I only bought one gallon of orange juice.

That’s not much for us.

But it’s enough to last a week if we control ourselves.

Last night at dinner the kids started fucking pounding orange juice. 

And I don’t know why because we never have orange juice at dinner.

So I had a slight freakout.

THAT HAS TO LAST US FOR AT LEAST A WEEK! WHAT ARE YOU DOING????

The orange juice was put away.

I talked to the kids about needing to limit how often we go to the store, and how I’m not running to just pick up this and pick up that every couple of days. That we really have to be strategic about things.

And then today I tried something that worked really well in the drink department.

All the kids have chug jugs.

That’s what Number 3 calls them, anyway. He first started using one for travel baseball a couple years ago, and then I got them for all the kids last summer.

Their chug jugs hold a half gallon of water.

We have well water here at home. It’s great for drinking. We don’t need to buy water.

So today I told the kids that every morning, they are to fill up their chug jugs.

When they finish all the water in them, then they can drink something other than water.

They are pretty good about drinking water in general since that’s what they pack for school and they always have a water bottle at swim practice and wrestling practice.

But I anticipated some sort of push back.

I was pleasantly surprised when they didn’t complain one bit!

And they drank a shit ton of water today.

They all polished off their chug jugs by dinner time, and then they got their rationed cup of orange juice. 😂

This is something we could have been doing pre-social distancing.

It definitely helped slow down the eating of all the food and drinking of all the drinks within the fist 24 hours of grocery shopping.

So we’re gonna stick with the daily filling of the chug jugs from now on.

Social distancing or not.