I started writing this post 11 days ago. Yeah it has been that hectic here!
Well we are chugging along. Very busy with the classes we are taking for fostering.
One of the things that the class forced us to do, is think about meal planning differently. We are gone at night till about 9pm. Tony goes straight there from work so eating is a challenge. We cooked up 8 freezer meals before the classes started and that is what we are eating on those nights. Some of them need to be cooked when we take them out of the freezer, some don’t. It has really helped us and to our surprise we are finding we are having so many left overs that on our “off” days, we have enough food to stretch. So now we just need to figure out for a couple of days a week, instead of every night.
We like this so well that we are going to do it on a slightly bigger scale. I just subscribed to Once A Month Meals online. They allow you to adjust portion sizes and print out prep lists and cooking day instructions to make best use of your time. Everything then goes into gallon or quart size ziplock bags. They even give you labels to print out with how to fix it on the other end. 🙂
So I have spent some time just learning about the system, and then figuring out our meals. They have pre-made meal plans that help a lot, but they also have the ability to switch what wouldn’t work in your family. Tony needs to eat Paleo. The rest of us don’t. They typically give you 3 breakfasts, 4 lunches and 8 dinners in a typical plan (you double the recipes to make 6 breakfasts, 8 lunches, and 16 dinners). Tony has breakfast more or less figured out for himself, and lunch he skips more often then not. So those the boys and I could use eating to what we need and around our allergies. I also created a separate plan for snacks and side items that would be good for some of our meals. What I have ended up with is 5 side dishes, 3 snacks, 3 breakfasts, 3 lunches, 9 dinners; all of which we will double (in some cases quadruple as things like granola bars just need to be). I have the grocery list and surprisingly it isn’t that long. It is WAY shorter then when we were doing strict paleo with Emeals. It does have some large quantities in it, 5 pounds of this meat or that, but still not bad. I might see if I can photograph or time lapse our cooking days. I will have 2 just to make it easier as I have 2 plans that I am working from.
Well I never did do the time lapse. It took about 8 hours to do the meal prep but it is GREAT now. We have all this food in the freezer and have lunches in there so if the kids are hungry and we are not, we can just pull those out and it is a quick reheat. 😀 That might happen tonight.
We are done with our Fostering classes. To my surprise they don’t require us to be certified in First Aid and CPR. I think that is odd. Especially given they will not let us have a trash can without a lid on it in our house (or out for that matter). Anyway, now we need to focus on getting ready to pass licensing. For that we are having to change bedrooms, loose our office, and do some odds and ends around the house, some of which are just general maintenance, some are more child specific. We have to have working door locks on all bedrooms and bathrooms. This house is 60 years old. Those don’t really work anymore. So we need to fix that. We need to touch up all paint that is damaged for one reason or another, from floors being refinished to just general wear. Our list is long and we have less then a month to do it in. So needless to say we are working on something all the time it seems. It will all get done… though at times it seems and feels like the list is endless. Today I spent the morning going through Lowes with 2 kids in tow crossing off as much of the list as I could. I had 5-6 people helping me at one point or another. I even had 1 person take pity on me and cut wood that they normally don’t cut. I guess it pays to go there with 2 kids on a Friday… especially if you are a woman. I was able to fit everything into my van without any help. So that was good.
Tomorrow is Tony’s 42’nd birthday. We are going to go to the German restaurant that we went to for Max’s birthday. That should be fun. Nathaniel also starts T-ball tomorrow. Max is performing at German as well. So we are double booked and we will have the one parent with one child, one with the other. Nathaniel may only have baseball this year. In September he starts German so he may not be able to do baseball again. 🙁 However he will have fun for this year, next year we will deal with next year.
I do have photos to share of different things that have happened but sadly I will have to post that at another time. I have a whole book to scan into the computer for Max’s German tomorrow. So I need to get to that. 🙂