Streamlined Meal Planning
Once they turn five, each of my kids begins choosing and helping to prepare one meal each week. I work closely with each child at first, and gradually I turn over tasks for the child to perform without assistance. How fast that happens varies from child to child and meal to meal. Five years ago, I blogged about a new way of organizing our meal plannin g. I was entering the final stages of a complicated pregnancy with a high probability of complications after the birth, and I needed the meal plans to be functional without much help from me each week. This system, described in that earlier post, worked well for us with few changes for five years. But this summer I decided we needed to streamline the process more as well as to shake it up a bit since we had gotten into a rut and, although the food choices were repetitive and boring, deciding what to cook each week was too time-consuming for our current schedule. Pockets store cards not in use. I sorte...