Over the years I have been able to put together a list of about 12 or so meals that I rotate through every week or two. I noticed what my husband seemed to like. I noticed what he ordered in restaurants. For years I tried to cook to the children's liking. It made life easier to have child-friendly meals. But guess what? When you have five children, someone's going to not be thrilled with the meal. I had my priorities all wrong on that one, regardless of how many children we have, and now I make what my husband likes. 

The children can grimace all they want (on the inside: we really try not to allow that kind of disrespect), but what's important is I know my husband's happy at meal time. And by the way that picture up there is totally copied from my website people from their stock of pictures; we don't eat fancy like that around here all the time.

Each week, I try to sit down and look at my calendar. I assess the meal mission. I address any hot spots of logistical combat hostility such as afternoon lessons. Then  I plan accordingly. I make a list of meals for the week, based on the previous husband data collection. The list for the week are meals that make sense to have depending what is going on around here. I figure out when my husband's going to be out of town for dinner (sometimes we don't know till right then if he is on call), and I make easier meals if he's not going to be home that night. I save the trickier meals for when he is going to be home. 

I look at my calendar to see when we're going to be at activities that begin anywhere after 4:00 that afternoon. That's gonna be a crock pot day. Or an overcooked meat in the oven kind of day. I prepare that earlier in the day when I am home and things aren't hectic yet. If you have 5:00 violin lessons, you can't make dinner starting at 5:00 (duh, you're at violin). If you're going to avoid stopping by and picking up fast food, you make that meal earlier in the day. When my family eats out, it's because we decided to go do something special, not because we don't have anything to eat at home. Sometimes I prepare the meal earlier in the day, keep it in the refrigerator all afternoon and then put 'er in the oven before we leave the house with the oven timer on. That works well with casseroles. One huge help is to have my son brown the ground beef right when it comes home from the grocery store. Then we store it in the freezer in smaller containers and it's ready when we want to have tacos or make spaghetti sauce. 

There is no rule that says you have to make dinner at dinner time. 

I hardly ever make dinner at dinner time. I set the table at dinner time. But the prep is usually earlier in the day. Even if we're not going to be gone that afternoon, I often do a little dinner preliminary action at breakfast or lunch when the kitchen's a mess anyway, chop up some veggies or make a salad. You can have good meals every day with your family. We pretty much never pick up fast food. It just takes a little planning.

Have you noticed that you always buy the same things over and over at the grocery store? I got an idea from a newspaper a while back (so sorry that I cannot credit the writer or the paper), to create a typed list containing all the things you tend to buy at the store. I thought about my grocery store and the way it is organized, and I created this grocery list divided into sections based on the aisles at my grocery store. My teenage son found the list in my computer and added items such as "dynamite" and "liquid nitrogen" at one point which made me laugh when I read that in the dairy section. I removed his creative additions, just because of space limitations. We keep a printed list stuck to our refrigerator all the time. When people say, "We're out of cream of tartar," I can tell them to circle it or write it on the list.

I took this concept a step further and noticed I am also making the same meals all the time, over and over. And so I created a list of about a dozen meals with all the ingredients needed, so that before I go to the store I have a plan. So we are transferring whatever we need from the meal list, onto the grocery list.

Maybe we need a master list of the list of lists. No, I think we're good. A little planning like this helps you not buy a bunch of random stuff that you don't need, and prevents you from being in the middle of making spaghetti sauce only to realize you need tomato paste. 

I noticed that I was not enjoying the following scenario.

Daughter walks into my bedroom in the morning and asks, "What are we having for dinner tonight?" And I tell her homemade soup and she sighs, and says thank you but she thought we were grilling hamburgers.

Toddler walks into the kitchen later, while I am chopping carrots for the soup and asks, "What are we having for dinner tonight, Mommy?" I tell her homemade soup and she says "Oh no, not again." She gets corrected for being complainy-poo.

I'm doing math with teenage daughter and she asks what we're having for dinner tonight. I tell her homemade soup and she says "Oh, okay." In a polite but not so thrilled voice.

Teenage son walks through kitchen as I'm chopping onions later for the homemade soup and asks, "What's for dinner tonight, Mom?" And I tell him and he says, "Mm-kay?"

Husband gets called away on a trip and won't be home to eat dinner with us tonight.

I know my family appreciates my cooking, but after all this yinging and yanging with all these people, I'm not quite so enthused about my homemade soup anymore. I prayed about it, and got the idea to put a chalkboard on a shelf in our living room, with that night's meal written on the chalkboard. A piece of paper stuck under a magnet on the fridge would work too. 

Now, instead of having the tedious Q&A with my entire family throughout the day, they can take a gander at the chalkboard and discuss amongst themselves.