meal planning

One thing that just makes me all sorts of giddy is anything that has to do with organizing. Mostly the pretty colored kind. If I see a cute planner, journal, or markers...you can bet they will most likely end up in my cart.

Some people are obsessed with purses..I'm obsessed with colorful pens, markers, and notebooks. I guess it all works out that I'm a teacher because then I have an extra excuse to purchase them. And then don't feel tooooo guilty about it.

Pretty much I'm just a planner freak, but half of my life is still chaos. Makes sense right? Okay I didn't think so.

So today I'm going to share one thing that I have done to "try" to make things a little less chaotic and a little more colorful around these parts. And that's where meal planning comes in.

the middle had my full name. obviously I didn't want that all over cyber space

I just recently started trying to plan a whole week of dinners so we wouldn't have go to the store 500 times a week. You would think I would have learned this early on, but for some reason I never did. I just love not having to go to the store each night after school. Even though I mostly stopped at target and usually snagged up some little pretties too.

So on Sundays I sit myself down and think of meals for each day. Since we go out to eat randomly when we are both just needing a little night to ourselves, Jeff had a good idea of just writing down the meals and eating them whichever night we felt like it. Since we would have all of the ingredients, it wouldn't really matter which night we ate them. And sometimes you just aren't feeling what you decided to cook a week ago anyway.

So I made a little binder. It isn't complete, but it makes meal planning 500 times more fun. Even bearable. I think I dislike it because I can never decide what to have and somehow find myself putting chicken, chicken, chicken, and more chicken each night. I really need to scout out pinterest for some recipes.

*The binder consists of some printables from iheartorganizing and recipes I have found online that we enjoy and just placed in protective sheets (you know because I am the opposite of a clean cook and all).  I also snuck in some stickers from my old Erin Condren planner to use on the monthly printables. And of course I couldn't forget to stick my favorite pen ever inside. I use the Papermate Flair Porous Ultra Fine Point pens and am obsessed with them. Just straight up in love.

So now we actually know what we are going to have throughout the week without dashing off to the store to get a meal each night. Doing the whole last minute thing is not only expensive, but also very stressful. And quite frankly, a pain in the rear. So hopefully this keeps on a working for us! And also thank the Lord that my husband likes to cook too. (and is pretty dang good at it if I don't say so myself)

HAPPY MONDAY. or grumpy Monday, whichever.