The inventory manager in my house (me) sucks and should be fired. This is never more true than during the summer when I am channeling Julie McCoy from the Love Boat, scheduling all kinds of activities for my kids to avoid boredom which really just means me sitting on my butt at our local pool chatting with the other Moms and continually asking my kids if we could leave so that I can go food shopping already. They never want to leave, of course, and so the hours tick by until I am forced to order take out, leaving food shopping for another day every day.

My husband, who works from home all the time and thus eats from home all the time, is usually pretty understanding and is good about cutting me slack, but recently he opened the fridge and remarked that the only things to eat were salsa and Tofutti cream cheese. This struck him as odd, but to me it made perfect sense. The only constants in my life right now, besides chaos, are salsa and Tofutti. Salsa is just so damn versatile and Tofutti cream cheese basically keeps my second child alive. When he was a baby, my second had a dairy intolerance. He has long since grown out of it physically but mentally he still can’t put anything else on his bagel. And since bagels are essentially the only things he will eat, I panic when I get low.

Most Moms I know go food shopping once — maybe twice — a week. A few really ambitious ones go shopping once every two weeks and have to attach a rented U-Haul trailer to the backs of their cars. Not me. I Stop and Shop every day. More often than not, I Stop and Shop two or three times a day, because I am only given clarity with regard to our inventory in the car on the way home. I’d like to blame my kids for distracting me but because my husband works from home all the time, my kids are usually not with me at the grocery store. And it’s not like I don’t have a list, I most certainly do, I just leave it at home.

As a last resort, I’ve created an Evernote account that allows me to make a grocery list on my laptop that will also appear on my phone. It’s definitely helping, but what I really need is a high-tech fridge and pantry system that uses sophisticated algorithms to analyze our inventory and purchase our necessities on its own, taking me out of the equation entirely. I’m sure there’s an app for that, but they must be working on the bugs still because I haven’t heard of it. Until then, I’ll be Googling healthy and low-fat recipes that use both salsa and Tofutti.