Menu Planning Reboot

While I am staying at home with Baby M, I feel some responsibility for doing traditional stay-at-home wife/mom stuff, like having dinner ready when Peanut gets home. He has made it clear that he does not expect this, but I still want to try to do it - for one thing, I need to eat in the evenings anyway. For another, right now my bedtime is around 9 pm, so it's not like I have a ton of time to spend with Peanut when he gets home from work at 6:30. Having dinner together takes advantage of the limited time we have together right now.

However, my desire to do this has been shattered pretty consistently by reality, which says that Baby M is at her neediest during the hours when I would be preparing and eating dinner, and lack of sleep doesn't give me a lot of brainpower to think up healthy delicious any meals at all.

So I'm going to take the thinking out of it.

I came up with several categories (Pasta, Mexican, Crockpot, etc), and made a list of meals for each category. By assigning each day a category, all I have to do is look at the list and pick out a meal from it when planning meals for the week. No more coming up with recipe ideas from scratch!

Here's the plan:
Monday: pasta night
Tuesday: mexican
Wednesday: crockpot
Thursday: Stir fry
Friday: Leftovers or takeout date night

I'm not doing meal plans for weekends, because they're so unpredictable. But just taking care of the weekday evenings should take a lot of pressure off. Now I can simply select meals and make a list, no real planning required.