Confessions: Meal Planning Has Saved My Life

When my dad and step-mom got together, they had four children combined (of which I was the oldest)(not that I acted like it). With four kids, there were several things they did to keep or manage what they had left of their sanity.

My dad happens to be not just a computer programmer who thinks best in neat little categories of things, but also a former Eagle Scout. He is meticulously organized in his own way, and a bit - even self-admittedly so - neurotic. Most of this he came by honestly and I can say this now after I spent two weeks living with my grandmother in Portland after we arrived back in the country. But, this meant as kids, the four of us had routines and checklists for absolutely every thing. We had checklists for our bedtime routines (we even laid out our clothes for the next day before going to bed) and star charts if we completed every thing on the checklist. We had packing checklists for vacations and weekends away.  All of our checklists were typed up on the computer and printed out on my dad's dot matrix printer.

(My dad - I should point out - is still this way even with no children in the house. He still uses this grocery list and check list system.)

For meals, the family was just as organized. School lunches were made on Sunday afternoons at the dining room table, with all of the kids and their chosen sandwich ingredients, and a week's worth of sandwich bread before us. The sandwiches were then placed in the freezer with our initials marked on the plastic sandwich bags in black sharpie, and in the mornings, each child just grabbed their sandwich.

Even my little brother, who was 4 at the time. (When Dad and Karen got together, he was three. Just so we older kids didn't think he was being favored for being young, all the dishes were moved to the lower cabinets, so he could unload the dishwasher as one of his chores.)

For dinners, once every two weeks, we sat around the dining room table, at one of our numerous family meetings, and each of us got to pick a dinner each night of the week. Six people in the family total meant that we each got to choose the family dinner one night a week and we had one night of each week, where we either had leftovers or it was fend for yourself night. (This was also how my parents handled the issue of us not liking the food they served us - if we chose what we ate and helped make it, then there wasn't much to argue about - and we chose the night's vegetable as well as the main dish.) The ingredients for two weeks' worth of meals then went onto the printed off copy of the family grocery list. Yes, of course. The grocery list was in the order of the store layout.

There was a lot of this that worked. While we were in Bali, we met a family, whom we became dear friends with, who had four children. My friend, Ginny, the mother, after some family melt down that generally happened either around mealtimes or bedtimes, would inevitably grab me by the elbow, and ask, "What was it your parents did again? How did they handle this? Hold on while I write this all down..."

As a kid, I sometimes found it a bit over the top, and thought it was one of those things that made our family less like the families of my friends, and even a little weird. On the fridge, we had our star chart, a calendar of the month with all meals written on in pen along with whichever kid was helping to make dinner that night, and the grocery list (so we could mark in pencil on the line next to the pre-typed item that was needed), so our fridge looked more like the bulletin board of a well managed boarding house or institution than the fridge of where children lived and brought home paintings and homework. I don't remember where artwork went, or A papers, or successful spelling tests.

But as an adult, I can get it reduced a lot of stress, and in the long run, saved a lot of money (the family budget was a whole other animal). Occasionally, if an ingredient was needed for dinner, a quick trip to the store could be made, however, on the whole, you didn't want to get through a day of work only to come home to four children, who may or may not need help with homework, and still have to get dinner on the table. With four children, you didn't want to have to open the fridge door, peer inside and wonder, "What on earth can we pull off? We have half a gallon of milk, and a bottle of ketchup..."

As a parent now myself, I can appreciate the organization, and I have been grateful I haven't had to resort to the same level of charts and lists.

Until now. And, I only have one child. But now we live in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn (and I imagine New York City) require new levels of organization.  We don't want to own a car in Brooklyn for various reasons. Our neighborhood is full of cute little grocery stores; we even have a lovely organic grocery store just a few blocks away that has good quality organic meat for a surprising good price (compared to how expensive the rest of the store is). Yet, the neighborhood stores can be a bit expensive. Trader Joe's isn't far away at all - we could walk there and often, Fyo and I will take the bus there, load up the stroller with groceries and walk home. Except such trips to Trader Joe's take up an entire morning, and it's still just four days worth of groceries. I don't want to spend several mornings each week grocery shopping.

We did sign up for a Zip Car for three hours, so we can go to Fairway and stock up on groceries. I didn't want to waste the trip and not get absolutely everything we needed. I thought of all the things I didn't want to carry home via bus, subway, or walking. Also, I have noticed, with Husband working long days, life is so much easier when I have thought ahead and planned dinners in advance. The day - and the Witching Hour - are much less witchy when you have a way to combat dropping blood sugars.

So how did I spend yesterday - the eve of our much anticipated grocery shopping trip? At the kitchen table, with my favorite cookbooks spread open in front of me and my calendar and my notebook open, as I planned the next two weeks of meals. I even planned how leftovers from dinners could go in the freezer or for lunches the next day, or how I could roast a chicken one night and use the leftovers for chicken quesadillas. I made the grocery list.

Yep. I made the grocery list in order of the store. (I defended this - that Fairway is much like Ikea, where if you forget something it is a pain to have to back track for it.) It was all I could do - as if I was arguing with my own hard wiring - to keep from typing it up.

Afterward, I felt oddly productive. I felt organized. I felt relaxed despite the chaos of moving boxes we still have to unpack. I felt like I had one small clearing of clarity. And I was slightly embarrassed - that one successful housewife task could have me feel not just satisfied but victorious.

I told Husband, I could see having a month's calendar on the fridge door with all our dinners mapped out on it. Husband said he'd be down with that.

But I didn't put one up. (Yet.) Immediately, the thought of having so much of my own childhood in my kitchen makes me slightly queasy.