Home Family Art Homemade Frugal Living Travel

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Working Mommy Wednesday



Welcome to my 2nd week of hosting WMW. Today's topics are:

1. Meals for the week, do you cook every night? If so HOW do you working mommies do it???
2. What is the best complement you’ve ever received at work?



I will write about meals because it's a subject I really enjoy. Growing up, my mom managed to put food on the table every day by 6pm, a full meal! She was a full-time teacher at the private school myself and two brothers attended and we were home every day by 4pm. I guess that gave her adequate time to finish a complete meal.

I find myself working until 5 or 6pm and coming home to entertain kids for an hour while husband prepares our meals. Of course I love to cook but since he's a stay at home dad and I miss seeing the kids all day, they are ready to pile all over me when I walk in the door so we try to give him an hour to make dinner.

On the weekends I follow my mom's rule. I make a meal list for the entire week and buy groceries accordingly no later than Sunday. This way husband has the food and menu in hand and makes the evening meal a little faster.

Other shortcuts we've developed are to have a few core dishes on rotation, make in bulk and freeze several meals in our deep freezer. This way if one of us is running late, we have a faster meal to prepare.

It all sounds great right? But I can assure you we still have evenings when we eat way later than we'd like to. We are still struggling to find a balance but we have two rules we stick to every day:

1. The entire family eats at the table regardless of who's having a bad day/hating the menu/or just general crankiness.

2. We are not short order cooks. We serve a balanced meal and nothing more. This is a recent rule after putting up with recent tantrums from 1 year old and dolling out crackers to bring peace. We'd really rather him get used to eating what we've prepared, even if it means hating the Chinese food! We may not be so quick to put that back on the menu for awhile but the point was to eat what was prepared that day.

I can't wait to read your stories. Looking forward to your link ups!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Rachel!

I missed both weeks ;-( How do you get the word out? Through a post the Monday before? Would love to join...

Steph

R. Molder said...

Hi Steph, that's a great idea. I'll try to put together a list of emails who have joined Julia's WDW page and send out the prompts on Monday. Thanks for stopping by!