"What's for dinner?"

For years I've fantasized about meal planning...yes, meal planning. The idea that you would sit down on Sunday night and plan out each and every meal for the week: to shop more efficiently, to diversify the menu, and to mitigate any dramas at meal time (Lucas, not Kevin). I think Mrs. Cunningham and June Cleaver probably did this with their families, and look how easy their lives looked!!!

So three weeks ago, the weekend before I started working again, Lucas and I sat down and mapped out what he would eat for breakfast each weekday morning. We started with breakfast because Lucas is not a morning person, so our weekday mornings can be the most challenging time of the week. It went surprisingly well that week, and he ended up eating something different every morning.

The next week, I was just planning on doing breakfast again, but Lucas suggested we do all our meals. So we did. We had a couple incidents when our plans changed and we had to move things, but overall, it went well. It was the first week without a single quesadilla for dinner, and only one peanut butter sandwich for lunch!

I can't believe I never did this before, but it makes so much sense. Tuesday dinner is chicken, that means Wednesday lunch he gets chicken noodle soup, of course!

And of course, the shopping is so much easier. We just look at the list, assess what we have in house, and go to the store. No more meandering the aisles, lost in a daze about what I should buy. It's very liberating actually.

So this past weekend, Lucas said to me, "We have to make our menu for the week!" (Success!) I think this has worked so well for us because Lucas knows he has a voice in the process and gets to make a lot of the choices. We also have a couple standards...Friday night is macaroni and cheese, and every Sunday morning we have waffles.

My ultimate goal is to get to at least 10 weeks of menus so we can just rotate them in and out.