Goals for the Week

Habits:
~Up at 6 every day
~Clean all dishes out of the sink after each meal
~Blog each day (for my 31 Day Challenge!)
~Make my bed each morning
~One special activity with the kids each day
~Lay out my clothes each night
~Do a toy cleanup with the kids each night before they go to bed
~64+ oz. of water each day

To Do:
~Spend one night cleaning out my coupons
~Do a full menu plan
~Clean out my recipe folder
~Organizer recipe folder
~Start my Holiday Control Journal

I've been doing really well with my water lately.  Maybe soon I can take it off my reminder list because it will be so ingrained!  Maybe.  We'll see...

I tried to keep my to dos to small, easily accomplished tasks that will help me eventually conquer my bigger goals.  Hopefully I will actually do them this week!  If I can get my recipe binder all set up, then next week I can start working on tweaking our meals.  If I can figure out how to do that and still find things my family will eat.  That is healthy.  And cheap.  Oh dear.

New Week, Tweaked Plan

I'm sorry I didn't get this up last night.  :) I was quite honestly being lazy.  Here is my new weekly plan split into habits/routines I want to develop and then weekly to-dos that break my goals into manageable steps.

Routines to work on:

• Up at 6 everyday (6:15 just wasn't early enough to squeeze even my basics in...sigh...this will be moving even earlier eventually)
• Exercise for 100 mins (same as last week)
• Empty sink after each meal (I always have a few knives and misc. things that don't go in the dishwasher and I'm trying to keep these from building up)
• Have kids helps me with clean up time each night before bed
• One special (i.e. memorable and fun) activity for kids per day
• Lay out clothes each night before bed (I wasn't going to add this yet, but I've discovered it's very hard to get dressed in the dark every morning now that I'm up before my family)
• Drink 64+ oz. of water per day (Another I wasn't going to add yet, but I've been working on this off and on for a while so I figured it wouldn't be too hard to include)

To Do List:

• Plan an at home date for Saturday
• Complete a Pantry Inventory Sheet
• Complete a Freezer Inventory Sheet
• Clean out Recipes Binder
• Create a full Menu for next week (we do our shopping on Thurs, so mine run Thurs-Wed)

My main focus is to try to get my meal planning, grocery shopping and anything else food oriented under control.  It's been driving me crazy for the longest time, but it feels like such a big task I keep putting it off.  No more!  This week it begins!  :) I'll keep you updated.

P.S. The printables I use for the inventories are found here, and the menu sheet I use is here (I like this one because it's in list form by category rather than day).  

OYOL Week 10

This week for OYOL we're doing Menu Planning.  Oh, how I needed this!  I've been thinking and thinking about this all week because I certainly TRY to do this, but it just hasn't been working for me.  What I've been trying to do is sit down on Wednesday (before my shopping trip Thursday) and plan out for the week.  I have tried doing just dinner as well as doing all meals (including snacks) to try to keep us out of ruts, but nothing seemed to click.  I can do all the planning, get all the food and yet somehow something always happens to distract me.  Either my day goes crazy and we end up eating out, or we don't feel like eating what's on the schedule and we end up eating out, or Kent wants to do something nice and knows cooking is a huge job for me so we end up eating out (noticing a pattern here???).  So, obviously this isn't working and I need to come up with another way to go at this.

So here are the truths that I have to work around:

1.  Kent is super picky.... all casseroles/mixed foods are out, he won't touch them.  Oh, and he doesn't do leftovers very well.

2.  Abigail is picky but doesn't want the same things day after day ... she will eat jelly sandwiches for 4 days straight and then refuse to touch them for a few weeks.

3.  Nathan is still testing new foods for allergic reactions and is also picky ... sigh, what did I do to get all these picky people in my life?? :) Good thing I love them so much!

4.  Cooking is fun from time to time, but not one of my favorite chores (yes, I consider it on the level of mopping, something I HAVE to do) and when I'm doing it for people who are soooo picky it loses even more of it's appeal.

5.  When ever I go into the kitchen to attempt a meal, I have two little locusts swarming me the entire time. One trying to help and wanting to get a lick from everything (My fault, lol, I've let her bake too much...baking I enjoy!) and the other screaming for reasons only known to him.

Soooo, where does that leave us???  I don't know for sure, but I have two ideas that I'm playing with and will probably end up combining.  First is the once a month cooking.  I really like the idea of having everything cooked up at once and minimizing the amount of day-to-day cooking I have to do.  I found this website, Once a Month Mom, that really gives some good info on it.  The other is the idea that was posted on Brenda's Week 10 post by Reagen which is the "30 Meals Plan".  Basically you keep the ingredients on hand for your 30 go-to recipes.  Your 30 includes only those that your family loves so it's a guaranteed winner.  I'm going to start going through meals a few at a time to try to find things that everyone will eat (though, the toddler picky stage where they randomly stop eating things may make this difficult) and try to stick to ones that freeze well.  Kent said he would eat BBQ that has been in the freezer, so that's one of the first that I'll be attempting.  I'll keep you posted on how it goes :).

Oh, and for added fun, I forgot to mention that I'm trying to keep all of this relatively healthy so I don't begin to put back on the weight that I've lost so far.  Just don't tell Kent, because whenever my fried meat and potatoes man hears "healthy", he gets a little nervous :).