Getting dinner on the table is a daily challenge. A little meal planning can save you time AND your sanity during busy weeks. Maybe you’ll even enjoy cooking for your family a little bit more!
A couple weeks before Christmas one year, I was knee-deep in holiday preparations and getting caught up at work in order to be able to enjoy some well-deserved time off. One day, leading up to the dinner hour with no plan of attack, I was Skyping with a friend and the words “I hate cooking” appeared on the screen.
If you’ve been wondering why my posts have been few and far between over recent months, just take a look around you.
Managing the re-branding, re-design, and re-building of the YMC site has been a labour of love for me that began almost a year ago, kicked into overdrive mid-summer and took over my life for several weeks before our launch. A project this big exercised all of my organizational muscles and tapped out my planning prowess.
Put up your hand if you have too many things on your plate and not enough time to do them. Yeah. We are all not only putting our hands up, we’re waving them around frantically.
As parents, we all strive for a delicate balance of timing to keep it all of our balls in the air. And when one of those balls needs more attention and time than expected, any hope of balance can be lost.
I’ve recently been thrown a couple more huge time-management curve balls.
I work from home every day. Being part of a virtual company like YMC means that there is no “office” for me to go into. We all do our jobs and work together over the airwaves, from the comfort of our homes – and in and around our families. Between the craziness of the Kid ruling the roost and the daunting task of keeping track of everything going on with the YMC site, having a comfortable and organized space I can retreat to helps me stay grounded and focused on my job.
There are dishcloths, tea towels, napkins and the facecloths we use to wipe down the sticky Kid after every meal that pile up every day. And then there are the dirty clothes that Kid is always stripping off as he walks in the door – sometimes at our request when he has been playing in the dirt and sometimes of his own volition (man that kid enjoys hanging out in his underwear!) – that always wind up in the kitchen. This adds up to little piles of not only dirty, but often damp, laundry in my kitchen.
It seems to me that clutter-busting TV shows fell out of fashion a few years ago - I miss them! In the early 2000’s there were a couple shows out there that focused on helping people tackle their clutter problems. Remember Clean Sweep? Or Neat?
I was in a lunch meeting with Erica and another colleague yesterday, when somehow in the conversation I mentioned something about my husband creating a spreadsheet to manage some aspect of our household. Knowing my flair for detail and having received many of my spreadsheets, our lunch guest looked surprised that I was married to someone as organized as me.
I love that our home office has one wall fully outfitted with Ikea wardrobes. The Kid’s room has the same set-up and all that extra storage space on the second floor was a huge selling feature of the house!
My husband received an email yesterday morning from our former neighbour. The other day, he and his wife saw the comic below and they said it reminded them of me:
Yesterday was a lovely, sunny day in Toronto. We had set the whole day aside for delicious Dim Sum brunch and chilling out at home for a bit, but we found ourselves looking for something fun to do with the kids for an hour or two.
What to do? Around here we turn to our Summer Fun List.
