It’s time to enact some of my exciting plans to be more organized and orderly in this new year. There are actually so many areas where I want to be more organized … it was a mind-scrambling challenging task to figure out where to begin. I made a list of all the things I felt I could be doing better: Meal planning; home school record keeping; house cleaning; blogging; Mama Time. I thought about which of those areas I was ‘managing’ well enough and which needed improvement quickly and decided to begin with meal planning.
See, I have four kids who are home-schooled, which means they’re home all day. And they want to eat. All the time. I also have a husband who likes to eat at least 3 times a day. Every day. It’s absolutely absurd. And more often than not these days, I find myself facing meal time with no plan, no idea, no clue, about what to fix.
I used to be pretty dedicated to menu planning, too, which makes my current state of unpreparedness really frustrating. When my oldest kids were still in public school, I went through the school lunch menu with them each month, marking when they wanted to eat at school and when they wanted a sack lunch. Then I compared the school menu to my list of meals and made out a monthly meal menu. It was wonderful! Every day I knew when I would need to prepare lunches for the kids and what we were having for supper that day – first thing in the morning! On school breaks, I just filled in a lunch meal and it was all good. So good.
Then we began home schooling and I’m not sure what happened. I guess for the first couple of years I got caught up in planning for lessons and teaching and let the meals sort of fend for themselves. Adding a difficult pregnancy and lengthy recovery just made things more frazzled and disorganized.
Which brings me to my current existence … when I all too often look at the clock, see that it’s 5:00, know that I have nothing thawed out or planned to cook and panic … it’s frustrating and aggravating and takes all the joy out of cooking for me. Not to mention the expense of the carryout meals purchased in desperation or exasperation. And the deep, deep rut I’ve found myself in when it comes to the variety of meals I cook. Honestly, I think if I try to feed my family potato soup for one more meal this month, they may fire me.
So meal planning has become imperative for me. I want to stop stressing about meal time. I want to free my mind from the burden of last minute lunch plans and have more time for learning with my kids. I want to enjoy cooking again … because I really do love it. And I want the excitement of trying new dishes or looking forward to special favorites to be the norm for my family … as opposed to the sighing and slumped shouldered response I get these days when the kids ask what’s for dinner.
There are many different approaches to menu planning and meal preparation, and this will be a trial-and-error sort of venture for me. In the past, I simply printed out a monthly calendar and wrote down the dinner for each day.
It looked something like this … December Menu and was quite functional for that time in my life.
Now, though, I need something a bit more elaborate because in addition to daily lunch and dinner meals, I really want to prepare a breakfast meal for the whole family, at least 3 or 4 times a week. (I think everyone will agree that breakfast gets pretty boring, pretty fast.) This will hopefully replace the, ‘I don’t know what to have for breakfast so I’m going to wander around the kitchen for an hour,’ system we are using now. That kind of time wasting puts us behind on chores, school – everything – for the entire day. Day after day.
It’s no wonder I’m frustrated!
I’ve downloaded a few different types of calendars and menu planners and will be trying them out over the next few weeks. I’ll be sharing how I used them, how they worked for my family and what changes (if any) I made.
Check out my Pinterest board Order From Chaos to see some of the ideas I’m testing out, from some bloggers and Mamas who are clearly way ahead of me on the organized life scale.
Here are the criteria I’m using to judge each of the meal planning menus :
- Customization – How easy is this to tailor to my family’s needs? Will I have to print and hand letter meals or can I make changes on the computer and then print?
- Flexibility – How many weeks’ worth of meals can I plan out? Can I plan 3 meals per day? Can I mix and match menu ideas?
- Ease of Use – How simple is the set up and use of the planner? How long does it take me to set it up initially, and how much time to fill it out for each use?
- Aesthetics – Let’s face it, I like things to be pretty. I want a menu that works hard, but looks beautiful … like me. wink, wink
I’m pretty excited about getting the menu system up and running – in fact, it’s what I’ll be working on this afternoon, after I get this posted. 🙂 I’ve discussed things with my husband, who sometimes tackles the cooking if I’m still tied up with school or if pancakes are involved; and we’ve decided to try a basic, 3-meal-a-day, two-week, menu plan first.
Now, while I know y’all are going to be waiting anxiously for my report and analyses of these menu plans so you know what to do … I want to encourage you to mess around with your own custom systems, too. The original December menu above, I made with PrintShop on my computer, using the software’s built-in clip-art library and my own fonts. It was a fun, colorful thing to hang on the fridge door and everyone knew what we were going to eat, without having to ask. I could just recycle all those old menus … but I want to try something new first.
So we’ll see how it goes, won’t we?
I would LOVE to hear about your own experiences with pre-planned meals and menu styles, too … actually, if any of y’all would care to just send me a completed menu each week … hee hee
Love & Blessings,
That Farm Mama
