No more dinner dilemmas

Dinnertime in our house has become a nightmare and I am done. I'm over it. No more, I say! No more begging and pleading, no more negotiating, no more nagging, no more bribing. Now that dinner is the first time we sit down together as a family each day, it WILL be a pleasant time, if it kills me!

I realize most of you will read this and think I'm a Nazi, but I know you have areas where you're fed up, well, dinner is an area where I am fed up. (Um, that sounded funny. No pun intended...)

I figured out a few months ago that if I give the kids an afternoon snack (no matter how light) they don't eat dinner. Easy solution: no more snacks. If they get hungry before Daddy gets home, I will feed them dinner early, but no more popcorn for dinner. Or raisins. Or granola bars. Or apples. And they've finally stopped asking, so that rule is working out well.

Also, I'm not one to cater my cooking to be kid friendly. Lunches more so, but never dinners. I don't make brussel sprouts and liver...I make good food and sneak in many pureed veggies that probably wouldn't get eaten, so I DO try to cook things that everyone likes, but I make one meal...that's it. And it's not chicken fingers with mac 'n' cheese. It may sound harsh, but the kids eat what we eat or they don't eat.

I expect some grumbling with my mommy-attitude, but I've finally created some new dinner rules (mostly for Mommy and Daddy) that should make the dinner hour nicer for everyone.

1. I will serve a little bit of everything to everyone. No more, "You can have a roll after you eat 5 bites of your chicken/green beans/something else healthy." I'll give the kids a roll with their meal and give them the choice of eating whatever they want to eat first on their plate, just like Mike and I do.

2. No seconds until everything on the plate is gone. Kaylin will eat a hundred carrots for lunch some days before touching her sandwich, so this rule goes for lunch, too. I'm glad she likes healthy food, but there needs to be a balance...carrots aren't filling enough to hold her over until dinner.

3. If the kids choose to eat the best part of the meal but are suddenly "full" before they eat anything healthy, I'm fine with that. BUT they will finish their dinner at lunchtime the next day. Wednesday I made soup and cornbread muffins for dinner and gave them the muffin with the soup for the first time. Of course, they ate the muffin and begged for more. I told them they could have another muffin when their soup was gone. But the soup had lentils and they refused to touch it. I'm sick of "you can get up after _ more bites." I've talked Mike into not forcing them to eat their dinner. But I did serve the leftover soup yesterday for lunch. They refused to eat it then, too, so that's what they ate when they woke up starving from their naps. Guess what? When they're hungry enough, they'll eat! Yes, I know this sounds stubborn of me, but my kids are both becoming ridiculously picky and ungrateful. I think about kids in large families or the kids starving in other countries. They eat what they're served or they don't eat. I think as Americans we spoil our kids and allow them to get away with way too much, just to avoid the battle. (and I don't judge you if you don't choose this battle, but I'm not making your kid a different meal if they come over to my house and I don't expect you to do that, either)

4. Everyone stays seated until dinner is over. The kids are asked to do this, so Mike and I have to, too. The reason I started this rule a while back was to train the kids to stay seated for longer periods of time, even when they're done eating. It has come in very handy when eating at restaurants; they know that they can't hop up and run around the place just because they don't want any more food. But when Mike gets bored waiting for the slow-pokes to finish eating and hops up to start the dishes, they get antsy and want to be done, too.

5. Dinner is 30 minutes. No more, no less, unless everyone is done eating. Somewhere along the way, dinner began lingering into an hour or more. With Mike getting home later, we've been going from dinner straight to bed with no time for Mike to spend with the kids. They play with their food, play with each other, have to go potty, get in trouble for gargling milk and go in time out...I'm done. If you're not done eating in 30 minutes, you can eat your dinner for lunch tomorrow. Again, sounds harsh, but this rule has seemed to correct the hour-long dinner problem. If they're not hungry, that's fine, but if they ARE hungry, then they need to eat and get it over with so we can move on with our evening and go play. When everyone's really hungry, dinner is over in 15 minutes, so I think 30 minutes is plenty of time. If not, I'll make it a little longer, but I have a feeling it will be fine.

6. No more force-feeding. I want the kids to trust their bodies and to be done eating when their tummies are full. No more, "3 more bites and you can get up" or bribing dessert for them to eat more food. If they're not hungry, they won't get pressure from us to eat.

We've already started some of these rules and they're working like a charm. Dinner last night was SO nice. We ate, we talked, there was no nagging, bribing or threatening...it was lovely. I sure hope that picking this "battle" won't backfire on me! My kids certainly aren't malnourished or starving, so I think they'll adjust pretty well to the new rules over the next few days. Wish me luck!

30,000 hits

I just reached 30,000 hits on my blog! I logged on and happened to notice that it read 30,002. That seems so high...I find it hard to believe that I've had so many visitors. Thanks for reading, everyone!!!

Menu Planning Basics

Early last year, I began pre-planning our weekly dinners and I've never looked back. It has saved me time and money, I've dramatically reduced our food waste and best of all...no more 5pm STRESS!

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I fought the idea of meal planning for a long time, partially because it overwhelmed me but also because it took the spontaneity out of dinner. But here's the thing: before meal planning, the stressful moments FAR outweighed the spontaneous ones.
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I'm sure many of you out there hesitate to try planning your menus. But hang with me as I break down the process to the basics so you can see how simple it really is.
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* Start by making a list of meals that you make regularly. I categorize mine by type: chicken, fish, beef and vegetarian and also by cooking method: crock pot, stove top, grill and oven.
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* Figure out what you already have that can be used to make a full meal. Start with fresh ingredients and produce then move to the freezer for meats and the pantry for dry items you have on hand. Jot down which items from your list that you can cook without going to the store for every ingredient.
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* Other places I find meal ideas are my recipe binder (to see if there are new recipes I'm willing to try that week or that I have all of the ingredients for), Cooking Light for healthy meals and Super Cook, where you can type in ingedients and it will pull up recipes to use what you have. I like to try at least one new recipe each week so I don't get in a rut, but that's just me...I like to cook and experiment.
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* Once you have about 5-10 meals written down, pull out your calendar (I used a small, checkbook-sized calendar that fit in my purse last year and it worked really well) and slot the meals into the days you'll cook them. (Tip: write in pencil! Plans change, schedules change, you'll end up with extra leftovers, you'll need some flexibility.) I like to plan easy meals on busy days, crock-pot meals on days when I have appointments in the afternoon and new recipes for slower days. I also reserve oven meals for the weekends because it heats up the whole house and we don't need the extra A/C costs when it's warm outside. In December and January we'll cook more in the oven, but I do my best to avoid it the rest of the year.
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* Make your grocery list. Look through the recipes one more time and check to see what you need from the store. Remember to see how much you need of an item or if it may be needed for more than one recipe and if you have enough of it.
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* One thing I have NOT been paying attention to is balancing fattening heavier meals with lighter meals within the same week. I think that's part of the reason my waist line has been expanding. Good food can still be high in calories, especially those with lots of cheese, butter or thick sauces. But who really wants soup every night for a week? Or chicken and rice four times? I need to look at the bigger picture and make sure I'm mixing it up.
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* The other thing I'm going to start doing is varying the contents of the meals. We seem to eat a lot of chicken, but then I'll go on a beef kick and eat too much beef in a week (I'd prefer to keep it to once a week, max) and I really want to incorporate my 65th goal of making three vegetarian meals each week for a month. So far, I'm having trouble just doing TWO.
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* I'm also going to start attempting to cook cheaper menus without completely sacrificing the quality of the meals. I recently found the $5 Dinners blog and will try to incorporate one or two of those each week, too. I've come to finally realize (I'm slow) that part of cooking cheap is shopping cheap and having food that you can use on-hand instead of buying it at a premium at the store. If you don't have much food stocked up, consider shopping from the sale ads and planning the following week's meals around those items. Read my recent post about how to save money at the store to learn how to reduce your grocery spending.
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So who's with me? Are you willing to give meal planning a try? Unless you eat out every night, you ARE planning your meals, it's just a matter of doing it once a week instead of seven times a week. You can still be spontaneous at breakfast and lunch if you just start with dinners. Menu planning definitely works for me!

Tuesday's Time Saving {Lunch} Tips

I'm an efficiency freak, so I love time-saving tips to shave extra minutes off tasks throughout the day. Anyone else like doing things in LESS time so you can have more FREE time!?!?!?

With a little prep work, making sack lunches can be quick and simple. They're healthier than eating out and much less expensive. Now that Mike's working far away from home again, I'm back to packing him lunches every day. I used to have this thing down to a science, and all of my short-cuts are slowly coming back to me.

Time (and money) Saving Tips for LUNCHES:

* Prep once, serve twice (tip 1) - If I'm going to make one sandwich, I may as well make two. I make sandwiches twice a week (and Mike eats them for 4 days) and he gets leftovers on the 5th day. I realized that Mike doesn't mind a day-old sandwich after several last minute staff lunches popped up and he had to save his sack lunch for the next day. PB&J works really well for this, but so does turkey, egg salad, tuna, whatever kind of sandwiches you make.

* Prep once, serve twice (tip 2) - If your family (kids, husband or yourself) is weird about a non-fresh sandwich, use the prep once, serve twice theory for the rest of you who stay home. I make lunches in the morning, so I will make Mike's 2 sandwiches (for the next 2 days) plus a sandwich for Kaylin and one for Ryan, then stick those in the fridge for later in the day. I already have all of the "stuff" out in the morning and it saves me time at noon when the kids are starving.

* Prep once, serve twice (tip 3) - I usually eat salads for lunch and make the same salad 90% of the time. Green leaf lettuce, 1/2 a tomato, 1/2 can of tuna or leftover chicken, feta, dried cranberries, sometimes chopped apple or grapes. Oh, and homemade oil and vinegar dressing. (I make the dressing in a larger bottle and use it for a week or two - 1/3 part balsalmic vinegar, 2/3 parts olive oil, a few shakes of Italian seasoning and a pinch of salt, maybe some chopped onion if I have it handy) When I get my lettuce from the produce co-op or the store, I wash, spin and cut it up right away. I stick it in a large Ziplock with a dry paper towel (to absorb the moisture) and it's ready to go. The only time I buy the salad-in-a-bag is when it's on sale for $1 and I get it free with a $1 coupon. Because seriously...I can make my own! I also use the prep once, serve twice theory with my tomatoes and anything else that I need to chop. If I'm dicing 1/2 of the tomato, I may as well continue dicing the whole thing and save the other 1/2 for tomorrow. Why dirty the cutting board and knife twice?

* Save money on portioned snack food - There's no need to buy those 100 calorie packs or mini bags of crackers and cookies. Do you have any idea how much money they make off those things? Buy a box of crackers and some "snack size" Ziplock bags and portion them out yourself. I watched my aunt in KC do this on Sunday afternoons for years and it was genius. She had a husband and 2 kids, so every Sunday she made 15 bags of crackers or chips plus 15 bags with cookies or another dessert. So as she was throwing the lunches together, she could toss in one of each...so easy.

* Prepare fruit all at once - You can pre-portion fruits and veggies, too. I wash and separate bunches of grapes as soon as I buy them (they also make a healthy and quick car snack) or you can slice apples or pears and stick them in Ziplocks, ready to go. Once cut, they'll last a couple of days - if you don't want them to turn brown or you want them to last a little longer, squeeze a little lemon juice on them and toss them in the bag to coat.

* Make-your-own "Lunchables" - A friend of mine just started doing this. Her son was jealous of his friend's "Lunchables," but she didn't have the money for that particular convenience food. Instead, she got creative: she sliced up some cheese and bagged it up with crackers and pepporoni slices with a small dessert and voila: Lunchables!

* Skip the drive thru - I realize fast food is quick and easy, but it can become quite expensive and is incredibly unhealthy. If you know you'll be out during lunch, whether shopping or on a play date at the park, consider packing a sack lunch to bring with you. Plus, think of how much less clutter you'll have from all of the missing toys from the kids meals!

Okay, that's all that comes to mind now. Do you have any time (or money) saving lunch tips? If so, please leave a comment so everyone can benefit! Next Tuesday, I'll post about other kinds of time saving kitchen tips.

#27 - Attept to make homemade cinnamon rolls

Do you ever feel so intimidated by something that you have a mental block against doing it? That's how I felt about homemade cinnamon rolls.

And now I feel like an idiot.

I've wanted to bake cinnamon rolls from scratch for over 2 years and was convinced I'd screw them up. Notice I subconsciously put "attempt to make..." in the title of #27 on my list! I just noticed this detail. We're talking a serious mental block.

This recipe for no-rise cinnamon rolls took 45 minutes from the time I pulled out the ingredients to the rolls hitting my children's lips. Incredibly easy. I put it on my meal plan for this week to force myself to finally try them. If you try these, two quick tips: I didn't add quite enough milk...they were a little dry. I think they would have been more moist, too, if I would have put them closer together in the pan. I just wasn't sure how much they would expand and the outsides were too crunchy as a result.

Next time, I'll plan ahead and make my friend's "Cinnabon"-like recipe that requires about 100 pounds of butter, some time to rise (I'll make them the night before) and taste like a little bit of heaven. When I do, I'll post the recipe with pictures to share.

Ryan ate his cinnamon roll just like he eats cupcakes...just the frosting on top, leaving hunks of crumbs on the plate. Kaylin ate every last bite and loved it. And I felt a little sick from eating sugar so early in the morning. So I made us all some eggs. (Ryan said, "Mommy, these eggs are good for me. I think I should have an egg every morning!" Fine by me, my little health-conscious boy!)

Then Kaylin said, "Mommy, I have frosting on my lip, just like Frosting the Snowman!" I love kids' interpretations of words.

#27 on my 101 goals list is officially crossed off - fear conquered!

A little laugh for your Monday morning

You don't need to watch all 9 minutes of this video to get a giggle. But do check it out...this guy's laugh is contagious!

Links to Freebies

Okay, friends...I've had many requests for the "how to's" of my grocery geek ways, so I thought I'd link to some current freebies.

But first, I explained my process of clipping coupons and planning my grocery trips in this post. If you don't know where to start with the overwhelming task of coupons, grocery lists and meal planning, read that whole post.

Here are some of the free things you can get right now. Realize that you DO need to print coupons that are linked to the post and bring them with you to get these deals. Just wanted to throw that out there for those of you who think I walk into the store, shop without a plan and save tons of money. My savings are pre-meditated, for sure. And if you clip coupons from the weekend newspaper, whoa mama...your savings will go through the roof. But I digress...

Groceries freebies (or CHEAP) this week:

* Johnson's Soap Buddies at Walmart (they're usually $.97 there and the link gets you to a copon for $3 off 3 Johnson's products, so you can get 3 for free)

* Progresso Soup for $.33/each and South Beach bars for $.38 each at Target - click here for coupon links

* Coffee-Mate creamer (Target and Walmart both have this product on sale for $1.50 right now - FREE)

* Ocean Spray Juice at Target

* Hansen's Junior Juice - anywhere

* Rice Works rice chips - valid anywhere (PS - you can print the coupon several times, but only use it once per grocery trip)

Other freebies:

* Arizona residents can get a free Chipotle burrito, taco, salad or bowl on Saturday from 2-4pm if you wear red (thanks for this Rachael!)

* Get 6 free personalized photo cards for Valentine's day - details here.

Also, I strongly recommend shopping the "deals" at CVS and/or Walgreens. I get free stuff from there weekly. Batteries, cold medicine, hair color, you name it. And sometimes it will be a money-maker deal, where they (technically) pay me $$ to leave the store with the product. (hence the 3 tubes of toothpaste sitting in my closet) For instance, I just got 5 boxes of Soy Joy bars. Have I ever tried Soy Joy bars? No. But they were $6 per package with a $6 ECB (extra cash back) bonus for the first 5 boxes you purchase. So they're technically free. BUT I had two $3 off 10 Soy Joy bars (and the boxes counted) plus 2 $1 off coupons, so again, I spent $25 (in ECB, so it was free) but left the store with $30 in ECB. They paid me $7 to leave the store with those Soy Joy bars. That are healthy and probably taste just fine.

I don't want to reinvent the wheel and list everything on sale at all the stores...that's why I always point you in the direction of Money Saving Mom and The Good Deal Gal. You can see MSM's freebies list here and GDG's freebies here. If going to their sites and seeing ALL the deals is overwhelming, consider saving those links to your favorites and checking in with them every day or two.

Happy Savings!!!

So many freebies!

I had another record breaking grocery trip this week. I saved 86% on my total bill at Fry's. To spell it out for you, I saved $86.61 and spent $14.77. There were so many free deals with sales and coupons, it was nuts. I also saved $30 just in coupons off my $81 bill at Walmart, which never happens to me because Walmart doesn't double coupons.

So, just to entice more of you to come down the road to coupon savings with me, here are the freebies I got:

7 Johnson's Soap Buddies

a box of Kashi granola bars

2 cans of Ro-tel diced tomatoes

2 cans of Hormel chili

2 boxes of Kleenex

2 bottles of Ken's salad dressing

1 package of Kraft cheese singles

5 bags of corn - Green Giant Steamers

1 bottle of French's mustard

1 bag of Quaker rice cakes

4 packages of 4 rolls of Cottonelle toilet paper

3 packages of Kotex pantiliners

3 Hallmark cards (at CVS)

Things I got for $.50-$1:

3 packages of Kraft cheese singles

6 (yes, six) boxes of Cheerios

1 box of Rice Krispies

1 bag of marshmallows (only $.25 - for Krispie treats, of course!)

3 Quaker oatmeals

6 (yes, six) more boxes of Kashi granola bars

1 jar of Kraft mayo

2 boxes of Fiber One bars

2 more boxes of Kleenex

You'll notice I got a ton of cereal, granola bars, cheese, kids soap, Kleenex and toilet paper, right? These are things that won't go bad. (well, the cheese will, but not too soon) My philosophy is: when it's on super sale and you can get it cheap or free, why not? Especially if it's something we'll use up; I am careful not to over-buy. (like 40 boxes of cereal *ahem* ANDREA...)

Seriously, people...if you haven't started clipping coupons, please do! Even though we eat very little processed food, I still get great deals. And I don't have to buy Cocoa Puffs and Rice-a-Roni to do it. I'm buying real, healthy food or household items and saving cold, hard cash. Does anyone else get a HIGH from saving like I do?!?!?