The road to becoming a successful meal planner is paved with good intentions, isn’t it?

I’m a chronic recipe collector. On a daily basis, I tear recipes out of magazines, pin recipes to the personal Pinterest board I call “Yumminess,” I print recipes from websites and stash them into a binder, I borrow cookbooks from friends and neighbours and post ideas for delicious dinners to my blog’s Facebook page. Does all of this make me a successful meal planner? You’d think it would, but no, it does not. It makes me a chronic recipe collector.

This summer I’m determined to be a better meal planner. Planning meals makes life so much less stressful, and for busy working mothers, it can be a life saver during the time of day that is usually so rushed and when so many demands are being made by members of the family.

Standing in front of the refrigerator trying to figure out what to make for dinner drives me crazy, and avoiding that craziness is what prompts me to do meal planning. I want to go from recipe collector to meal planner!

You can do meal planning on as small or grand a scale as you’re comfortable with. When I do meal planning, sometimes I only plan a week in advance, and leave out the weekends, assuming we will do takeout one night and leftovers another. Other times I’ve done a whole month in advance, plotting each meal on a dry erase calendar, using my recipe collection as inspiration.

Regardless of the scale upon which you decide to plan meals for your family, here are five quick steps for making your dream of becoming a meal planner into reality.

Make Meal Planning a Breeze…

1. Collect recipes. (See my habit, described above.) Make it a habit to grab recipes or dinner ideas you think your family will enjoy wherever and whenever you see them. If your kids are old enough, get them into recipe collecting too, and engage them in choosing healthy meals they’ll actually eat.
2. Pick a day to make meal planning your task. I use Sunday afternoons or evenings, usually, to sit down with a sheet of paper and plot out five meals I want to make over the coming week.
3. Plan your grocery list around the meals you have planned. For example, if I know I’m going to make spaghetti and meatballs on Wednesday night, I’ll see if all of the ingredients I need are on hand. Whatever isn’t in the pantry, fridge or freezer goes on the grocery list.
4. Shop according to your plan. (Better yet, if you can afford it and want to save time, arrange to have your groceries delivered.)
5. Post your meal plan somewhere prominent in your kitchen so you’ll easily remember each morning if there’s something you need to defrost or if you need to carve out some afternoon time to prepare the meal. Mine often gets clipped to the front of the fridge, but I’ve used a dry erase board, too.

Try to stick to the plan, but if for some reason, you can’t don’t sweat it. Meal planning is meant to make life less stressful. Swap out a meal for another night or give yourself permission to call for pizza if you run out of time.

What are your favorite sites for recipe hunting?

What tips do you have for integrating meal planning into your life?

My husband and I are partners in a seasonal business that got underway for the year just this past week. Between that and our other means of earning a living, by the time Friday arrived, our week was officially a couple of hours short.

On Friday while he was on his way home from work, Graham sent me the usual text message.

“What’s for dinner?”

I groaned and texted back, “Don’t know yet, gotta hit grocery store before daycare pickup.”

Later that evening after I’d managed to scrape something together for supper, my plans to hit the local grocery store foiled, Graham suggested I do a little research into the possibility of having our groceries delivered.

I couldn’t get to the computer fast enough.

I was delighted to discover that there was, indeed, a grocery delivery service in our area and they would even accept payment at the door. No credit card required! As much as  I wanted to save time, I wasn’t willing to pay interest on our weekly food bill.

I put in an experimental order, arranged a delivery time and presto, the very next morning our groceries were dropped off, all packed up beautifully. All I had to do was pay and put them away. It was beautiful.

I started to wonder what other services I could use to save time, essentially adding hours to my week.

As I gushed on Twitter about my newfound love for grocery delivery, friends online revealed they have shirts cleaned so they don’t have to iron them. Others proclaimed their undying love for their cleaning ladies. One person even admitted to ordering tampons and paper towels for delivery to avoid multiple errands in a busy city.

As for my family and I, we will be having our groceries delivered for the next little while. I’m giving us the gift of time, for a small delivery fee that is totally worth the cost.

What services do you make use of to save time and energy?

The other day, I was sitting in a corner of my local community center’s lounge, trying to finish writing an article on deadline while my daughter was in her gymnastics class.

A mom and her daughter came in a few minutes after I’d settled myself into my work. She must have a child in the same gymnastics class as my daughter, because they’re there at the same time I am every week. And, every week, the same thing happens: She starts talking loudly, either to her older daughter or on her cell phone, while moving furniture around to create a space in which her daughter can do her homework. If there are books on the small table in the lounge, she dumps them on the floor with an exaggerated sigh, and then (loudly) tells her older daughter to start her homework. She glares at the two or three other people in the room if we look up from our books or our laptops. She goes through her daughter’s folder, reading comments from the teacher out loud and announcing each grade on each test.

Which made me think: There should really be a set of rules posted somewhere, for people who have to work in public.
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For years now — decades, really — I’ve challenged myself to make the most of my money. The ability to stretch a dollar or pinch a penny can mean the difference between feeling like we “have” and feeling like we “have not” when it comes to things like groceries and birthday presents for preschoolers’ parties; being the breadwinner makes the process easier in some instances (I know exactly how much money is coming in and going out) and harder in others (I know exactly how much money is coming in and going on).

I’ve found that, for my family, the most straight-forward and simple money-saving tricks work but, at some point, “just spend less money” or “cut out the things you don’t use” isn’t helpful advice. How do you spend less money when you’re spending it on essentials, like childcare when you work full time? What if you can’t cut out cable because you need to have high-speed internet access for your job?
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A good friend once told me that she thinks it’s hilarious that I write about work-life balance when I  have so little of it myself. I tell them that I really write about juggling work and life, my full-time career and full-on family, which means that when it comes to balance, I’m the fulcrum on which it rests, not the one who actually achieves it.

But still, she’s right. And now that my primary office is inside my own house, the scales have tipped way over to the work side of things. Which means that I need to do a better job of going from “work mode” to “home mode.”
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A recent study of 1,364 new mothers found that, over the course of about a decade, the moms who worked at least part time were healthier and happier than those who decided to stay home with their kids — especially when their kids were very young.

It sounds like the latest battle in the ongoing Mommy Wars, but it doesn’t have to be. The health benefits, the happiness… I think it all boils down to whether you’re doing what you really want to be doing.
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I’m supposed to be on vacation this week but, as usually, I have once again discovered that I don’t know how to unwind. Even when I’m not at work, I rarely feel like I can just sit still and be; there are people to see and chores to do and the house to (fake) clean and kids to feed/amuse/maintain. And, after a while, I feel like a wind-up toy that’s stuck in the “on” position, gears rapidly working toward burnout.

The problem is that, with so much on our to-do lists all the time, we working moms have conditioned ourselves to believe that really taking care of ourselves is selfish, or at least not that important. When we do it, we justify it, almost as if we feel guilty about it: We “deserve” time to ourselves, we need to “make time” to exercise. Or, at least, I do.

And it turns out that I’m not alone.
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Hi, my name is Lylah. And, in addition to being the Queen of Procrastination and the Empress of Clutter, I am a Control Freak.

This will come as no surprise to anyone who has spent more than an hour in my company.

It’s not that I need people to do exactly what I say when I say it (though, honestly? That’s kind of nice). It’s that I feel more secure when I know what’s going on, and I’m more likely to know what’s going on if I’m the one holding all (or most) of the cards.

Not realistic. Or healthy. And it only gets worse around the holidays.

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Back in the day—that is, long before he and I were together—my husband was a vegetarian. So much so that when his first child was born, back in the early 1990s, he fed her soy butter and “not dogs” and lots of tofu.

By the time his youngest child was born, though, in the mid-2000s, he was letting the baby lick steak off of a fork at the dinner table. So when the kind folks at Tribe Hummus and Veggie Patch offered to let my family try a bunch of vegetarian goodies in honor of October being vegetarian awareness month, I thought that perhaps those long-dormant vegetarian tendencies might surface again.
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Chris Brogan recently featured a brilliant post written by online marketing strategist Tommy Walker about the 106 excuses that prevent you from ever becoming great. It’s an eye-opening read, because I’ve heard myself say some of them time and again, but hadn’t really thought of the way I was undermining myself with my own words. Words like these:
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