Dinners Simplified

Dinner time can be somewhat stressful around here for me.  While I was pregnant with Renae, I never thought about dinner until about 5 or 5:30, when Nicholas was screaming to be fed and Brandon was coming home from work asking what we'd be having for dinner.  I usually would ask Brandon what he felt like (I usually wanted cereal or ice).  He would usually ask me what his options were.  I'd get annoyed because if I had options for him, I wouldn't be asking him to choose because I could make that choice myself.  Then Brandon would suggest a few meal ideas, and I'd get annoyed all over again because we didn't have most of the ingredients for those meals.  Then we'd have cold cereal.  Now that I'm back to feeling so well, I've been determined to make better meals for my family, but I realized that planning meals in advance could get tricky with having two fairly demanding kids to deal with in the grocery shopping and meal preparing process.  So I decided to explore kraftfoods.com for easy meal ideas.  I have often gone to this website for meal ideas, so the website wasn't new to me.  However, I discovered the nifty feature of being able to add recipes that I'm interested in preparing to a recipe box.  Then when I looked at the recipes I added, I discovered that I could click on recipes I wanted to make and their ingredients would be added to a shopping list.  Then after clicking on the shopping list, I discovered that I could add anything else to the shopping list that I wanted to.  When I print off the list, all of the items are even categorized for me!  Now instead of grocery shopping each week, we go every two weeks, and before we go, I take 5-10 minutes to select different recipes my family likes or would like to try, add a few more essentials to the list, print it off, and go shopping.  I prefer to either go by myself or take Brandon with me to help with the kids, but let's face it, that almost never happens.  However, last week I went mega grocery shopping with the two kids by myself, and it went so quickly because everything on the list was organized by location in the grocery store.  This has simplified my life sooooo much in the last few weeks!  I wish there was such a simple way for me to get the laundry done!