One thing I enjoy is organizing. Organizing shelves, closets, calendars, cleaning, menus, etc. I enjoy pulling chaos into "manageable chaos". Over the years of homeschooling and living a mom life committed to minimizing chaos, I have found different tools and tricks that have helped me. Over the next few blogs, I wanted to share a few with you.
We will start with the kitchen!! Everyone eats. So why not organize it a little and minimize some of the stress and chaos that can come with that dreaded question, "MOM! What's for dinner?"
Menus. Menus have been life saving for us. It really began when I noticed myself getting angry EVERYDAY around 4:30-4:45. Inevitably the kiddos would come to find me and ask the age-old question "What's for dinner". I wasn't angry because the asked, I was angry because I didn't know. We would have a taste for one thing and have other stuff in the pantry. More times than not it involved getting dear hubby to run by the store on his way home. Usually, because we wanted tacos and had no shells, or spaghetti and had no noodles. So I set out to organize our meals and shopping. Hoping to cut down on the extra trip to the store and the frustration of having to come up with a dinner plan each night. Or and don't get me started on how often I was trying to thaw meat at 5 o'clock.
So here are some of the menu ideas that we have used over the years. One thing you will notice is that all of my menus give space for Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner. I looked and looked to find menu templates like this but never could. Because we do life in our house in a way that includes all 3 meals. Many families do not. That is why so many meal plans or menu templates do not have a place for 3 meal planning. SO....I made my own.
Some of them also have "To-Do" space. I put that there because what our "To-Do" for the day often changed what type of meal I would plan. If DD had soccer on Tuesdays I would put that down because that meant I was planning a quicker meal.
Menu 1- Weeklong
Menu 2- Monthly (I found that I liked planning monthly sometimes. All you have to do is come up with 10-12 meals and then repeat them. Don't try to come up with 30 dinners, 30 lunches, 30 breakfast, that would be crazy)
Menu 3- This is my most recently used one. I like it because I have found that since my kids are older they like to choose a little more.
I have an autoimmune disease that is highly triggered by stress. (I'll dive into my disease and what has helped in another blog) But because of my stress trigger, I have found that when I am stressed I quickly try to identify the source and fix it. Not always possible but when it is, I want to do what I can to make it better. This has caused our family to slow down drastically in many areas of our life. So back to the kitchen..... The menus I was using were great. Except that sometimes I just had brain fog or not enough coffee and just could not come up with meals. That is where Family Favorites came in. I would keep an ongoing list of the "Wow, this is great Mom" meals. I love to try new recipes so this helped to not lose a "new recipe" and make sure I cooked it again. Another thing that helped me was to keep old menus. I would make sure they were dated with at least the month and put them in some wort of order in a notebook. This helped when I really got lazy because I could jsut pull out an old menu and shop according to that.
Family Favorites
Another thing that has been a huge help is Emeals . I have enjoyed their service for a few years now. I appreciate that you can plan according to your way of eating (Paleo, Gluten Free, Vegetarian) You can also drop your meal choices into a shopping cart and shop at some grocery stores. For us, that means dropping my meals into my Walmart online grocery cart and then choosing a pickup time. I even have to go into Walmart. (Talk about reducing my stress) I wish I could tell you that Emeals pays me to say good things about them, but nope....I really believe it (without being paid;-)
Shopping lists have also changed over the years for us. I mainly use my Walmart shopping cart on my phone to make my grocery list now. But before the days of online shopping, I used this shopping list.
Hopefully, this gives you a little help and encouragement. I recently read from Pricilla Shirer- "We can't always control the kind of ground we are forced to march across." This is true but we can choose how we approach it, organize it, and respond to it. She also talked about, "Shalom, the familiar Hebrew word for peace, does not refer to the absence of chaos, but rather to an overall, deeply entrenched sense of harmony, health, and wholeness in the midst of chaos."
No menu, online shopping, or organizing can bring you peace like Jesus. True shalom can only come from the ultimate peace giver.
LL
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