I’ve already told you how organized I am.  Remember my weekly schedule?  Well, I also have a monthly menu of dinner ideas.  I have separated this menu into weeks, and after I choose the corresponding week, I make my weekly grocery list.

I’ve had a weekly menu for almost as long as I can remember, but after Gabriel was born and I didn’t have the time to look through recipe books and magazines for hours each week.  I decided to sit down and make a menu that would cover an entire month’s worth of meals so I didn’t have to make a menu every single week.  It has saved me lots of time!  To keep it exciting I have one night per week open for dining out, and one night for new recipes I want to try.  During the warmer months we have salad as a main dish a few times per month, and during the cold months I just switch those salad nights out for soup nights. We have pizza every Friday night, so that’s an easy one to remember.  I love having this menu.  I have it saved in “my documents” on our computer and every week when I’m ready to make out my grocery list, I just sit down and look at my menu for that week to see what we’re having.

To make my shopping easy, I write my grocery list out in the same order as the items in the store.  I have what is on each aisle memorized and make my list out in this order.  It makes my shopping so much easier because I don’t have to back-track and search for things.  It saves a lot of time too, which is good when you’re shopping with kids who are ready to move on and be done at the grocery store.

I love this method of having my menu ready for me and making my list out each week.  What about you?  Got any tips on how I could improve this method even more?  I’d love to hear from ya!

You  may think I’m crazy, but I have a weekly schedule for myself.  What can I say?  I love to be organized and know what to expect every day.  Plus after having Gabriel, I realized the days of getting all of my chores done in a single day were over for a while.  So, let me give you a run-down of my week.

• Mondays are grocery days.  I go to one store because this is the easiest thing for me to do.  And I like easy.   I make my weekly menus and my grocery list on Saturday.
• Tuesdays are laundry days.  I tackle the bulk of our laundry on these days, but as you can expect with small children, there are other times during the week when I do small loads.
• Wednesdays are for cleaning the bathrooms and vacuuming.
• Thursdays are for dusting.
• Fridays are for sweeping.

Thursdays and Fridays are easy days and if I need to make a trip to Wal-Mart, or if we have guests, or anything else out of the ordinary, I can do my dusting and sweeping on the same day instead of splitting it up.

My little guys have even picked up on my schedule!  A few weeks ago I was vacuuming and Gabriel said “Grandma and Grandad are coming over tonight!”  I’ve read before that routines are great for little ones, so this probably just adds a little more routine to his life and he has come to know what to expect on different days!