Monday

Today is Monday... Grocery day and Kitchen cleaning day. My least favorite day of all!!!!

Sometimes people say things to me like "What do you do all day long staying home???" Or "Your house must be so clean since you stay home." But yet, my laundry isn't done, my dishes are never clean, the floor really needs to be scrubbed, and there's dirty diapers over-flowing out of the garbage (we're lucky to get the diapers changed, taking out the garbage will have to wait!). Sometimes I don't understand where the time goes... until right this minute. I have just realized where it's going... all my time is going into trying to save a little time. (let me explain)

Since we got married, I have gotten up in the morning and made Casey's lunch. When we had Benson, that all stopped... I have been wanting to get back into it because it's so much healthier and cheaper and I want Casey to have good lunches. But it's hard to get up at 6 a.m. to make him lunch. So Casey and I devised a plan to make it a little easier for me to make lunches, and a little easier for him to make his own lunch if I can't.

We made a list of groceries we needed (I mostly stuck to the list, but completely blew the budget). We tried to think of things that would be healthier than frozen burritos (which are REALLY easy to pack in lunches).

I always buy things like cottage cheese, thinking that Casey can put it in a little tupperware and eat it for a snack at work. But last time I bought cottage cheese, I threw the container away a month later (it had never been opened). So the ingenious plan we came up with was to put things like cottage cheese into individual containers now so it would be easy to take later.

So I got home from the grocery store and as I unpacked the groceries, I re-packed them into lunch-sized containers. I put the cottage cheese into little tupperwares, I cut up the brocolli, cauliflour, and celery and put them into little baggies. I put the frozen chicken patties into their own baggies and I took the buns for the chicken patties and put them in their own baggies as well.

Today I'm going to make a breakfast casserole and put it in little tupperwares so that Casey can take something for breakfast besides a pop-tart. And after I make that, I'm going to make chicken & cheese casedillas and put each casedilla in it's own bag to freeze so they will be easy to take.

I bought little bottles of ketchup, mustard, miracle whip (light), and ranch. Casey will take them to work and keep them there so when I make sandwiches, they won't be soggy.

I got little juice boxes and little packages of crackers and oranges and little cans of pineapples and bottles of water.

Then after all of the grocery shopping and putting everything into individual sized servings, I rearranged the fridge and the freezer... I made a little section set aside for lunch stuff, so that it will be easier to know what to take for lunch.

I left for the grocery store at 10:00 this morning and it's 3:45 right now. Casey will be home from work in 15 minutes, which means I have that long (if Benson stays asleep) to get the kitchen cleaned....

So that is where my time has gone today. It has been consumed by trying to save a little time in the morning so that I can make my husband lunch. It might be a crazy scheme and I'm not even sure if it will save any time at all, but that is where my day has gone.

And so I want to tell all of you nay-sayers out there who think it's easy being a stay at home mom, that it is NOT that easy and that yes, our days can be consumed with silly things like baking cookies and scrubbing toilets, but it's an important job to take care of your husband and children and somebody has got to do it.... I'm just glad it's me!