Home Management 101: Making a Menu

July 28, 2:54 AMAnchorage Family ExaminerKellie Davis

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Today my husband received his pay check and it was time for me to go grocery shopping. I think that the kitchen and food are areas that I will be able to get in order faster than the rest of my house. When listening to Sarah’s advice, she told me to just try to make a menu if I was inclined and that I’d not be tied to it. I had wanted to make menus for breakfast, lunch and dinner because of my fantasy of Kellie Davis being a corseted June Cleaver with an apron and pearls making nutritious meals for her family all the time.
 

Well, the three meals didn’t go over so well because I got overwhelmed. Who says you can’t repeat meals? Someone must have told me that because I wanted to pre-plan 21 meals (and to then times it by two for two weeks.) As it was noon, Guy asked me if I was going to go buy groceries or if I wanted him to throw together some rice, leftover noodles, and one of homeschooled 13 year old Cloud’s science experiments that has been sitting in the fridge for three months. I told him to clean out the food and science experiments from the refrigerator and I’d go grocery shopping.
 

Taking the first step is 90% of the way to a destination, so I hastily wrote up a menu for dinners:
 

• Monday: tuna casserole or tuna salad
• Tuesdayt: breakfast for dinner!
• Wednesday: vegan burritos
• Thursday: meatloaf
• Friday: Vegan tacos with textured protein
• Saturday: Turkey
• Sunday: Turkey Sandwiches or soup

Of course I had to start doing the menu idea right before the Eastern Orthodox go on a strict 2 week fast. I have decided to not bother with the fast for now, I am just now starting to get my act together on getting a menu set. I’ll worry about the details of my religious fast later. We are always very tight with money and with back to school, who has the money to spend extra on vegan alternatives? Some orthodox do eat fish during the fast, but it costs a lot of money.
 

(My next step is to establish a chore chart. This will either make the kids very happy knowing who is doing what and there will be no two days in a row of dishes, out there will be mockery of the alliteration of the words “chore” and “chart.”)
 

I showed the kids my menu and they all agreed that Tuesday nights are their favourite night of the week. Guy was happy about breakfast-for-dinner-night falling on Tuesdays because they don’t go out on weeknights, so they won’t miss it!
 

What is getting to me on organizing my home is that my feelings of being nervous about it are akin to walking into a gym for the first time. I got busy this past weekend and I just wasn’t able to clean between my bed and the dresser. I got the dresser top decluttered only to have it get cluttered again, but it ws new clutter and the old clutter has either new homes or got tossed out. It was like getting a two weeks pass to a local gym and not being able to use it ebcause life happened to you. But this is home, my mess and unlike the gym trial membership, my mess will still be hore for me to work at.
 

It’s embarrassing at the gym, if you are comparing yourself to other people, that you are barely able to pick up five pound weights and have to pick up the 2 ½ weights. You want to look like your yoga teacher, but she has been doing it longer. If you don't start where you are, you will burn out and give up.
 

On the same line, when I started public speaking, I stuttered. I was in speech therapy in school but wanted to be on the speech team and in drama. At first I compared myself like crazy to the more talented people and my coach convinced me to stay even though every time opened my mouth, it was like audible lights flickering off and on.  She said I was focused and I’d do it, she’d seen others do it. It turned out that no one with speech problems joined her team, the best in the state, with any problems. She’d never seen anyone come from where I was, but because she convinced me that I could, I thought, “This will be easy!”  I started out doing simple drama exercised that she told me to do with nursery rhymes and within fifteen months, I was placing in every tournament.

It’s probably the same with getting on top of managing your home. You won’t organize it in nine days if you have a budget and stuff you want to keep, and seemingly every surface except for your kitchen cupboards and bathroom vanities have clutter on them, so you clear off a dresser top, you make a menu for dinner for one week, you create a chore chart so things get done. The bigger things will happen, but you have to work up to them. Sarah suggested that I try a menu service, but I realized that I am not quite ready for the menu service because even though I can cook well, I am still too overwhelmed to look at what she has. In a month or two, I will be doing this like I've been doing it for the apst 12 years of my married life. Like the gym or acting, the only thing that canhelp you get a clean home is perseverance.

Making the dinner menu was my 2 ½ pound weight, saying “Hickory, Dickory Dock!”said as if I were an elephant. You start out with what you are capable of doing, then move on and up from there.