Home Family Art Homemade Frugal Living Travel

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Working Mommy Wednesday

Welcome to another week of Working Mommy Wednesday. This week our prompts are:

1. What are your "super mom" tips for balancing work and family life?
2. What are some of the biggest challenges you see facing you this year and how do you plan to tackle them?

------------

My super tip is meal planning. For 2011, I made a meal plan every week for dinners and bought groceries accordingly. To make this job go faster, I made an excel list of all the meals my family enjoys and then once a week I'd select 7 meals from that list. If feeling adventurous then I'd break out the cookbooks and reference a new recipe. If it's a good recipe, then it goes on the list. Provided we stuck to our meal chart, we stayed on budget.

After this year of conditioning, we are ready to move to the next step. I discovered The Better Mom's super handy meal chart that plans breakfasts, lunches and dinners!!! She even let's you download her template which I customized to fit our needs.

Lately husband and I have been wasting precious morning minutes debating breakfasts and lunches. I realized that by downloading this chart and making the entire week's decisions that we could save time and most importantly stress in the mornings.

This past weekend I created the following chart:
By day 3 I've noticed the following results:
  • Leftovers have been promptly eaten, which achieves one of my annual resolutions to not waste food - yeah!
  • Freezer meals are getting eaten because they are assigned
  • Breakfast is on the table faster because there's no discussion!

This chart took some effort to prepare and we even did revisions but once it's hanging on the fridge it makes the day go smoother! This works for us, now I'm looking forward to your ideas and blog posts! Link up below and I'll stop by later this week.


10 comments:

Annette Kerr said...

Hi Rachel!! I'm back in the Blogosphere!! Yay!! :D

Your menu plan idea fits perfectly with one of my New Year Resolutions! Thanks for sharing! :)

Steph said...

This is great! Love the calendar to give help keep you on track and also give you ideas when you are exhausted from the work day... Thanks!

D Unpolished Parenting said...

Meal planning definitely makes things easier.... so why do I fight it??? I may have to download that template and just do it!

Caterina said...

Oh how I wish I did that! Meal planning is by far a big stressor in our household.

I wish I had some really good tips. All I can think of is my birthday party gift idea. We get invited to a lot of birthday parties and I always stress and waste time trying to figure out what gift to get. One party I gave the birthday girl a beach pail paired with some shovels, beach toys, and a beach towel. It was a hit! So next party I did the exact same thing. It's a relatively inexpensive but nice gift. And you can stock up on beach towels and beach pails/toys so that you can just whip out a gift in no time!

I know, silly, but that's all I got.

reeseviv said...

This is awesome! I've been looking for something like this since I've started to try to plan weekly meals. Since I don't plan lunches, I used that row to put what activites we have planned for the evening. This lets me know if we have to eat early or later and if it needs to be something quick like pizza or can be a real sit-down meal like steak and potatoes. Thanks for sharing!!!!! Love your blog, BTW.

rubberbacon said...

I'm so glad it was useful for you Viv! I love how you coordinate activities for your little family, that sounds really fun!!

rubberbacon said...

I think one can never have too many beach shovels because ours are always getting lost or left behind! Great gift idea for S. Florida!!

rubberbacon said...

Honestly it took me years of discipline and an ironclad will power to get control of my budget! Once I got addicted to staying on budget, it was easy to get myself to make the meal plan and stick to it!

rubberbacon said...

You are very welcome! Hope this calendar works for you.

rubberbacon said...

Welcome back! I hope this meal planner works for you!!