Dinnertime Intervention | Our Attempt at Mealplanning

I just couldn’t take it any­more.  Tony tries REALLY hard, he does, to have some­thing ready for din­ner when I get home from work.  The prob­lem is, it’s just usu­ally some­thing that he likes and of course Ty doesn’t like it either!  So, I decided it was time for a what I was call­ing a “Din­ner­time Inter­ven­tion”.  I’d heard great things about plan­ning your meals and it’s hon­estly some­thing I’d been want­ing to try for some time.

So, we’ve been giv­ing it a go for the last 4 weeks or so and it’s been AWESOME!  We’ve been using e-Mealz.com to aid in our effort.  Every week they give you a list of 7 meals that you can choose from to plan within your week.  Some­times we use a few and then fill in our own around them, but they are an awe­some start­ing point and they pro­vide you a nice lit­tle gro­cery list as well that makes putting your gro­cery list together so easy.

The thing that has sur­prised me the most though is how much money this is all sav­ing us!  We’ve been going to the gro­cery story about every 2 weeks and our bill is what it was usu­ally was for ONE week!  Between this and the GroceryGame.com, we’re sav­ing SO much more money now on our meals.

To man­age all of the meals, I’ve been using one of my FAVORITE “life” tools, the Google Cal­en­dar.  I use these any­way to keep track of our fam­ily activ­i­ties, my busi­ness activ­i­ties and now have one for our Meal Plan­ning.  The best part is, once we decide that we want to keep one of the meals for sure on our list, I set them to recur every 6 weeks.  So, you only need to plan out about 6 weeks of meals and then just tweak them as you feel nec­es­sary, but the bulk of the work is done!  I also have each recipe embed­ded in the cal­en­dar for that day so that we can quickly ref­er­ence it, print it or email the day of or day before.  For things that need to be taken out of the freezer the night before, I have it set to email me a reminder the night before so I don’t for­get.

So far, it’s work­ing awe­some!  The eter­nal ques­tion of “What’s for Din­ner” is no longer.  Sure, we still have the occa­sional drive thru meal, but they are MUCH fewer and far between and it’s not only help­ing our pock­et­books, but our san­ity as well.

Give e-Mealz a try today!

Easter 2009

For once the weater on Easter was actu­ally spring-like! It was about 55 degrees so we were able to get out­side for a lit­tle egg hunt.  We spent the day at Tony’s par­ents’ house with a bunch of fam­ily and had a really nice day with every­one.  It was Bailey’s first Easter too, so it was fun to get her dressed up in the first of many Easter dresses!

The Easter bunny hid Ty’s bas­ket in the front closet this year, this was his face when he dis­cov­ered it:


Check­ing out the goods!

Count­ing choco­late eggs

And we actu­ally got a decent fam­ily pic!

Fore!

Sat­ur­day we went up to Tony’s Aunt & Uncle’s house and we all took turns hit­ting golf balls into the field. This is Tony’s Uncle Wally and let’s just say we had our own lit­tle ver­sion of America’s Fun­ni­est Home Videos not once, but twice! I’m sure he’ll kill me for post­ing this, but it’s too funny not to share. Lis­ten as he hits the ball, he hit the side of their pull barn. Just priceless.