You may have noticed that this year has brought a few new changes to our meals and way of planning. I have to say, I’ve been very happy with how it’s been working for us and I’m already feeling less angst about the whole meal planning process as a whole!

At a request from a few of you, I’ve decided to share our weekly meal plan with you where I will include links to the corresponding recipes (if one exists). 

But before I do that, here’s a little recap of how I’m tackling this part of our lives:

• I am using a weekly/monthly planner to write/plan out each weeks meals. I chose the largest, simplest design I could find to offer me the space I needed. Additionally, I really love the fact that once I put the work in for a month or so, that I will have a great rotation of meals that I won’t have to think about! Here’s the planner I’m using
• Each week I plan breakfast + lunch + dinner. I have all 3 kids at home with me for each meal, so it frees up brain space and any added stress during their afternoon witching hour (just before dinner) with the never ending dilemma of “what’s for dinner?”. 
• In most cases, my kids eat a separate meal from us. We’ve chosen to eat breakfast together in the morning (despite sometimes eating different things), I have lunch with them in the afternoons, but dinner is separate about 90% of the time. Toddlers are picky, and while we create healthy options in their meals we (my husband and I) don’t always want to eat like toddlers and the kids don’t always want to eat like adults. We are outnumbered and mealtime can be very stressful between us all. We do this because it works for US! I realized that I lost my passion for food and cooking over the past few years trying to get us all to a) eat the same meal for dinner and b) have everything ready and able to all eat together at the table. With my husband’s work schedule, this just wasn’t feasible and created a very stressful environment. If family dinner is important to you, and your kids will eat whatever you make, then by all means: keep doing it! Although! I will advocate for at least one meal a month, without your kids, as an opportunity to have a simple but nice date-night in 😉

Recipes

• Mississippi Pot Roast (note: I never sear the roast first, I just throw it all in!)
• Pork + Sage Breakfast Meatballs (aka: sausage balls)
• Instant Pot Cheeseburger Helper
• Crockpot BBQ Chicken

The pasta and chicken salads are my recipes–they aren’t posted anywhere pretty as I’m not a food blogger 🙂 But if you care to know those recipes too, just ask!

Hopefully this gives you a better idea on how you can start meal planning for yourself and your family, but if not I plan to do a more detailed post (a repost from my old blog) that walks you through the whole process from start to finish! I just love being able to create and share ideas in this space with you, so I hope you find this both helpful and inspiring ❤️

xo, Jess