Keeping kids fed throughout the day without breaking your budget

While many moms try to get their kids to eat, my kids were good eaters from birth. But having good eaters means they eat a lot and are always hungry. So how do I satisfy their hunger with nutritious treats without having to prepare them every 30 minutes or so?

I have a drawer in my frig designated as the snack drawer. Every time I come home from shopping, I toss in individual applesauce, granola bars, cheese sticks, yogurt, Gogurts, raisins, fruit cups, and carrots. Then when they whine, "I'm hungry, mom!" I tell them to get a snack from the snack drawer. I don't have to worry whether they're eating junk because it’s all nutritious.

My only rule is that they can't have the same thing twice in one day. If they did then all the "good" snacks would go quickly. Of course, as soon as I get home from the grocery store they want to eat all the snacks. But I remind them it has to last for a couple of weeks. I try not to restock unless it's nearly empty because sometimes they'd rather eat granola bars instead of applesauce. But if they’re hungry enough, they’ll eat the less desirable snacks. I also started doing this with the school snacks, such as chips, cookies, and crackers, except I designate a cabinet drawer for the dry snacks.

Though I have to admit, this system is not always fool proof. After having some complaints that someone was eating all the cheese sticks, I started putting their initials on the snacks. Whenever I get home from the grocery store, out comes the sharpie. This worked for a while until we found mysterious snack wrappers around the house with the hungry child's initial on them. After confronting the “hungry” child, we started finding different initialed snack wrappers around the house that weren’t eaten by the child whose initial was on it. But that's another post for another day.

Overall, the system beats having to fetch my four kids snacks every time they’re hungry. And that’s quite often.