seven hours.

done. finished. whew. it fit.

I thought when the process was over I would be thinking, I will NEVER do this again. But I wasn't, actually I was thinking, yeah, I could do this once a month. The day was nice, Téa was my side-kick, played with her baby and the potty on the kitchen floor, had her first experience with Playdough and took two naps (which is odd for her), Dillon napped, nursed and hung out, either in his saucer or the Ergo, and the boys were in heaven, I let them play in the dirt and ride bikes all day long. And guess what, I finished, I made twenty dinners in one day, I started at 11am and ended at 6pm. So seven hours, not bad, since I was caring for four children and cooking 20 meals. On a normal night one dinner takes me close to an hour, so hey I am up 14 hours already!

All the produce cut up, this was the first step!

YAY! One down, 19 to go.

And I am done!

I wanted to tell everyone that I do not have an extra freezer or even a really big freezer. I have a normal size freezer and I had some stuff already in it, some frozen juice, two loaves of bread, frozen chicken breasts, Eggo waffles and a few other things. My freezer is filled to the brim, but in about 30 days it will be ready to be filled again.

Meal planning squared.

Meal planning to the next level or crazy as my step-dad said. Tomorrow I am embarking on a new journey, an in-home, labor intensive journey. I will be assembling twenty freezer meals, yes TWENTY. For a long while I have wanted to take meal planning to the next level, but never did and it was for good reason. Our family is primarily vegetarian and all the freezer meal menus were for meat-eating families. So I bugged and bugged and poked and prodded the ladies at Saving Dinner and viola, TWENTY VEGETARIAN DINNERS, complete with start to finish instructions, shopping lists and recipes. Hooray!

So today I went to three stores to get all that I needed, such are the joys of living in a small area, not one store has everything you need. The kids were wonderfully behaved, they toughed through almost two hours at Fred Meyer. Then I did the next two store while everyone was asleep. I am wiped out and the preparing hasn't even begun. Cool thing... I got everything I need for about $125.

Well I am off to bed. Please say a prayer for well-behaved children tomorrow, so I can complete this task without wanting to rip out my hair, haha.