Get Organized: Low-Stress Ways to Plan Your Grocery Shopping List

Does this sound familiar?: You get home from your two-hour grocery shopping trek, in which you carefully selected delicious-looking items you thought each and every family member would enjoy (and managed to find some awesome sales—yay!). Then suddenly the complaining starts. "But you didn't get ..." "But I don't want ..." "But where is the ...?" Why should you feel like the bad guy when you did all the work?

Next time, get organized. Make every member accountable for what they want at the grocery store. Give them all a deadline for turning in to you their own personal shopping list—the things they want you to buy (that they're allowed to have, of course) next time you head to the grocery store. Make sure they know if they don't get organized to get the grocery list to you by the designated time, they're going to eat what you buy and can't complain.

Sure, you might feel a little like their errand girl, but don't you kind of already anyhow? Plus, this will save you from having to hunt everyone down before you leave for the store to take their "orders." And save you from having to remember that one kid hates the ranch-flavored chips and the other needs to bring oranges to soccer practice next week. Genius!