family | Offbeat Home

This is Offbeat Home's archive of family posts.

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I plan my meals every week.
It saves me time and money.
It helps me visualize when I'll need extra help, or when to scale back or when to pull out the fancy forks.(Just kidding, I don't have any fancy forks. Do you?)

It keeps me from wasting food.
It takes less than 15 minutes a week.

So, what are you having for supper tomorrow?

How a Meal Plan Comes Together

There's a logic to my meal planning, teased out through years of the effort.

Our meal plans are, on average, followed 60% of the time. Some weeks (especially the broke ones), it's 100%. Some weeks (the busy ones) it's 25%. All averaged out, 60% followability.

And like I says, 60% is better than 0%.
I'll take it.

Here I'll go through the whyfores of how I plan my meals in the hopes that it might save you a little money, time or effort yourself. So, what are you having for dinner tonight?

We moved in a month ago and have worked extremely hard to make it feel like a home. We are strong believers in “reduce, reuse and recycle” and try to apply it to our home as much as possible. We tend to shop at thrift stores and garage sales — and love a good Craigslist deal. Take a look around and I hope you find inspiration in what you see.

While in college, we gave up TV in order to see more of each other. Seven years and two kids later, and we're still without TV — and it's enabled us to live more richly!

As I mentioned last week, I'm spending much of this month in the rustic log cabin that my parents built in the mid-'70s. I lived in this house from ages 2-18, moving out 18 years ago — which means I spent roughly half my life living in this rustic log cabin my parents built on Bainbridge Island.

Needless to say, it's really weird being back.

It was 1975 and my parents' "back to the land" impulses were in full swing. Although they had an infant (me) and were a geography professor and a nursing student (him, her) with no experience in construction or building (any of us), they decided to build a log cabin on Bainbridge Island, WA. My father, ever the researcher, read a bunch of books about the subject, and March of 1976 they broke ground on the 1000 square foot cabin I grew up in.

In 2011, I temporarily moved back in.

"Well you'll have to move, of course" a close friend said to me the other day when I brought up our next adoption. She said it so confidently that I hated to disagree. This is easily the number one thing that people who know us bring up when the conversation turns to kids. I'm not surprised, because when we were in the middle of our first adoption process people said the same thing, or something similar.

Mica Sue and Stephen live with kids Phoenix, Ocean, Anna, and Garrett and pets Holly and Mr. Kitters in a three bedroom house in east Tennessee. And it's all a bit… chromatic. And full.