A Swimsuit Snafu & Dinner Dilemmas

The transition to full time work has gone wonderfully. The kids, it seems, haven't even noticed. Now that I am at the office more, I no longer bring work home and feel more caught up. It has been great!

However, since I gave up the "catch-up" days that I used to get organized, prepare meals, do laundry, etc, it has been a new challenge to fit them in. In general, I like to do "chores" during the week so that our weekends are free and open for fun. Balancing the chores and keeping all our activities straight has definitely been more of a challenge.

The lack of organization manifested itself in a swimsuit snafu that yesterday when I mixed up the "water play" days of my older two kids' classes at school. My son was ready to spash and play (he was very excited), and my girl was dressed in school clothes. When dropping the kids off, my husband did some quick thinking when he realized my error and put my son's swim trunks & t-shirt on my daughter and dressed our son in the extra clothes he had brought (much to my son's disappointment - he was NOT happy). In the end all was well - my son had a great day and is back in his swimsuit this morning for water play, and my daughter participated in her first and ONLY wet t-shirt contest in a very cool dinosaur t-shirt and Lightening McQueen swim trunks.

Meal planning and dinner prep has become harder since my time to fix a meal in the evenings is more limited. In addition, our family doesn't eat out much and doesn't like frozen dinners (at least, my husband & I don't)...so most nights I cook from scratch. What seems to take the most time is the prep - chopping, measuring, etc, not the actual cooking.

My goal over the next couple of weeks is to come up with a regimen that works well for both meals and organization- I'm going to try the following to see what works:

• chopping & prepping on the weekends so that all I have to do is cook on the weekdays
• planning for more leftovers so that there are fewer days I need to cook
• finding some more good crockpot recipes
• consolidating all the different calendars into one calendar/planner - seems I have 2-3 different calendars going at once, my work one, home/school one, and workouts/training schedule - they all need to be consolidated so I can see all our activities on a given day at a glance. I'm not sure if a paper or electronic format would be better.

I'll never have everything perfect and will always have a frozen pizza in the freezer in case of emergency, but I hope to have to use it less and less. :) We'll see!