New Years Resolutions - The School Years

It's been many years since I, myself, went back to school, but this time of the year always feels like the time of new beginnings and with Comfort and Joy going to new preschools [Joy heading off to school for the first time] it is a big New Year for our house.

So, it's a good time for me to address some resolutions. Well, one resolution in particular - meal planning - has not been on my radar. I give it a cursory glance at best. Mostly creating meals out of the same 5-10 menus put in rotation and hoping that somewhere in there we'll go out and have leftovers to cover the rest of the days in a 2 week cycle.

This needs to change. We'll be on tighter schedules and I'll also need to be packing lunches so I'm going to REALLY need to make a concerted effort to get back on track.

What's my plan for getting back on track with meal planning?

• Take stock of what's in the pantry and come up with meals out of items that I already have on hand.
• Look back through the Once A Month Mom site [especially on the months that I didn't cook from the menu at all - like this summer] and see if there are recipes I can pull to incorporate into our repertoire.
• Go back through the Kraft Food and Family magazine that just came and pull out the recipes that I can see my family eating.
• Write out the meals I plan to make so that I have to be accountable. If need be, I might even create a section here to do this. Let me know if this would be helpful for you, too.

And there you go. I think that's where I'm going to start. This weekend I'll be putting together the plan for next week. That gives me a week to get back into the swing of things before school starts for Joy. Planning ahead is going to make things much easier. I know it will. I just need to keep saying it out loud to myself because it's not sexy but it is definitely a Cool Idea!