~Menu Plans~

Right after the Bear and I were married I created a menu and shopping list. I print them out double-sided so I don't waste paper (showing my OCD for recycling and saving paper). This is what the front side looked like.

It has worked well for 11 years with a few adjustments after having kids.

And this is what the back looks like.

After I'm finished shopping I put it on the fridge and there are no questions about what there is to eat.

I also have a list of menu ideas. They are separated into a variety of categories, including: beef, chicken, pork, fish, sandwiches, soups, etc. Even with all this in place I was still struggling with what to put on the menu each week. It seemed that the menu ideas got old really fast.

So recently I decided to try something new. Now we have each day of the week assigned to a category. And now our menu looks like this. The back has stayed the same.

The kids love it. I was surprised at how well they went for it. And my kids do not like change. They love the idea of pizza Saturday. We each choose the toppings we want and add those to the grocery list. Then we mix the dough in the bread maker (Mona Lisa's hoping to be able to do that all by herself soon) and each of us works on toppings. If we have a busy Saturday, we just pick up Papa Murphy's. And Breakfast Monday. Huge hit. Within the first week they had the days memorized. It's pretty easy since we have an after school activity almost every day of the week.

Another thing we do that works really well is having a white board on the fridge that has the headings: Groceries, Target, Costco, and Other. Whenever we run out or come close to running out it gets written on the white board. And it really does about 95% of the time. [It's Mona Lisa's big thing right now. She loves that she can write down what she (and Ratchet) want picked up at the store. I love finding items such as favrit crakrs and choklt.] It's a system that works for us and has been great.

I thought the way we were doing it was working great. But, as we all learn quickly, nothing is perfect, the same thing doesn't work for everyone, and there is always a way to improve.