Mmm...Pudding

The following is a guest post from my wonderful husband, Ted, the father of our 5 beautiful girls!

Hi, I'm Ted, and I'm the husband of a couponer. When I was a bachelor, I did not eat well. I ate cheap. Breakfast was cereal or eggs. Dinner was on-sale frozen pizza, nachos, spaghetti, and brats wrapped in a piece of toast, mixed vegetables, and broccoli. Admittedly, lots of sodium and I'm sure a good proportion of mystery meat that I willinging pretended that it wouldn't matter. Recently I was introduced to the term "belly fill", for firefighters and such who need dense, calorie-rich food to sustain them through potentially long stretches between meals. I wasn't a firefighter, or even very active, but I was a grad student then post-doc, and stress can cause you to burn lots of calories too. The mixed veggies and broccoli arguably were the only healthy things I ate, but fortunately I loved them. I think they provided the much needed detox to my system from the onslaught of bachelor food.

The point is, I was cheap. I'm not embarrased to admit it. I bought the most calories to get me through the next day I could for the least amount of money. I traded nutritional diversity for convenience, with a few good choices, and lots of bad choices. But, except for the occasional store-brand on-sale cookie or oatmeal cream pie, I didn't buy that many sweets. A couple of small cookies to give me a quick fix, but anymore would have been wasteful -- because I hated going shopping, so that was another reason to not make my portions too big!

So, yesterday, after mowing the lawn, I treated myself to a small snack pudding that my wife often finds good deals on. Mmm... pudding. I would never have bought this for myself. I would probably never have found it on sale enough for me to buy it for myself. But, Jessica gets an incredible amount of food to feed our family, with much better nutritional content, for not too much more than I paid for myself as a bachelor. Through the coupons, deal-finding, and judicious stockpiling, our whole family can enjoy occassional creature comforts like pudding.

I am very grateful my wife is a couponer. She has tested and tweaked her approach and found what works for her. And I'm very happy to say, as I enjoy my snack pudding, that it works for me, too. Yum!

From Jessica: Stockpiling and saving money with coupons allows us to afford simple luxuries, like snack pudding. I know my husband likes it, so I make room in our budget for it. :-)