If there is one hill I find I hard to scale in my homeschooling journey, it is meal time. I have a child with celiac disease and severe allergies to wheat, oats, peanuts, tree nuts, and seeds. I have another child who is gluten intolerant and my husband has celiac disease and is allergic to dairy. Yikes! What is a Mom to do? It takes time and budgeting to make sure safe meals appear on the table. We can't stop by the local fast food drive-thru or order pizza delivered - even on days when I would love to have an easy option. I remind myself that the children will probably be much healthier over all without eating out much and then I dive into planning our meals. Right now I have a three week system for each season. This means I make three weeks of meal plans for summer, fall, winter, and spring. Then we rotate through the three weeks of menu's for the summer months and then switch to the fall menu's and so on. This seems to work pretty well and I keep an open mind for special circumstances. For instance, my son's birthday is this coming week. I printed out a blank summer menu plan and revised this week to include his favorite snacks and his birthday meal picks on his special day. You can also plug in festivals and special events this way. I highly suggest coming up with a three (or four) week meal plan and then rotating them. A little work at the beginning can save a lot of sitting around wondering what to fix for dinner. I also shop sales by picking up doubles or triple of items we use a lot and saving them for the right week. I am working on putting my grocery lists in the file with my menu's, so I can just print them out. Right now I am still just looking at the meal plan and jotting down what I need for the week. This isn't a brilliant and complicated meal planning idea, but it is a little something in my tool box of organizing my year. Bon Appetit!
