Family Dinner: Lessons Learned During Week 1

Last week was the first week of my "Family Dinner Every Night" commitment and I'm happy to say I made it happen :) It was really awesome to sit around the table as a family, all of us eating the same dinner at the same time together! For last week I just stuck with easy dinners that I knew wouldn't require much prep. I think I had committed to 2 or 3 nights, since I hadn't grocery shopped for a ton. My menu plan going into last week was primarily planned around what we already had in the house.

Here is what our menu ended up being:

Mon: White chili with biscuits (I cooked the chicken in the crockpot with a jar of salsa during the day then just dumped the rest of the ingredients in when I got home from work)
Tues: Manicotti with garlic bread and salad (when I made manicotti a few weeks ago I made a double batch and froze half, so I defrosted over night then baked when I got home from work)
Wed: we had a visitation for a friend's mother that night, so it was leftovers
Thurs: Frozen chicken strips with rice and green beans (I got stuck late at work)
Fri: Frozen pizza (I had planned beef stroganoff, since I'm home on Fridays now and can do more involved dinners. I was going to shop for ingredients after Kaleb's nap that day, but his nap ran until 4:30 and the roads were getting nasty)

So, while I nailed the "eat together every night" part, I have plenty of room to grow on the menu planning and weekly prep areas.

The main challenge I faced was trying to balance getting dinner prepped, cooked, and on the table while also managing a toddler who wanted and deserved my undivided attention. I did choose dinners requiring minimal prep, but that prep needed to be done right when we got home so dinner could finish cooking in time for 6:30 serving. I already have a standing expectation of myself as a mother to provide my children with undivided access to my attention during the first 10 minutes (minimum) that we are home and together again after a long day of being separated at work and day care. The deserve this time and I am not willing to make any lenience on this so my menu planning will need to work around and with it. Lesson learned here, do as much prep the weekend before as possible and plan meals that don't need my attention the minute I walk in the door from work.

Another challenge that I still need to think more about was the fact that Kaleb wants to eat right when we get home. His new day care does snack at 3:00, so he's hungry again when we get home. A hungry toddler equates to a child with zero patience and even less tolerance for frustrations. I don't want him hungry, but I also don't want him having these huge snacks and then not eating dinner. I don't for sure know the best way to overcome this. For the coming week I am going to make sure I have a healthy snack packed for him to eat in the car on the way home from day care. This will give about an hour and a half between the car snack and dinner, which should be enough time for a growing boy to get hungry again.

A third challenge I ran into: getting caught up at work at least one night last week past my regular end time. This is going to happen, so my menu planning needs to take this into account. Lesson learned here: take my weekly work calendar into account when planning the menu. If I am scheduled for late afternoon meetings and/or training sessions then I need to have dinners that don't need bake times aka crockpot stuff.

The final challenge was simply not having planned the menu and then gone grocery shopping. Last week I worked in reverse, having already shopped before I decided to commit to the family dinner plan. I don't know that I can call this a "lesson learned" since I already could have told you it makes much more sense to menu plan before grocery shopping.

It was really rewarding to have my family sit down to a nutritional (most nights) homemade dinner each night! I was pleasantly surprised to see Kaleb sampling everything each night. I was nervous that I'd find out this past week that I had already created the monster and it was too late now for him to adapt to family dinners where he eats what is served and doesn't get to demand other things.

I'm going to start a separate post to share my plans for this week.

**I just went and read last week's post, looks like I hadn't actually committed to starting the family dinners until this coming week. So, I'll give myself a pat on the back for implementing a week early and cut myself a little more slack on last week's menu :)