Food, It Starts With It.

So..... I'm x number of days into a Whole30.  I can't remember and I'm not going to count.  I sat down last weekend and made a meal plan for the week.  It took me two hours, no joke.  Then I went shopping with my Little3 and spent $400 and didn't even get everything I wanted.  One would think a recipe called Sunday Gravy that had ten servings would be on the affordable side.  Uhhh...$50 for just the meat? NO THANKS! I'll buy steak instead.

Also, Mark got me a new phone: an iPhone 6s Plus.  We were testing the image quality

In my never-ending quest to streamline everything in my house and tame my wild children, I came up with a brilliant idea.  As I was driving home from my Costco run, I pondered why the schools spend 13 years, not counting college, teaching kids math and only a half of a semester teaching them cooking and other homemaking skills.  This should be inverted.  People actually need to eat and tidy every single day.  Complicated math is rarely used.  Yet the the determining factor on whether or not they have a successful future depends on their ability to do higher order math.  You can't get into college unless you spend four years in high school taking Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, and Calculus. And you aren't going to be successful if you don't go to college.

Lula prepares to sleep at the counter because she won't finish her dinner.

Now I use math all the time.  I don't think people shouldn't take math; that's stupid.  But there sure are a lot of dumb people online that have no idea how to think for themselves in the kitchen.  So kitchen skills are becoming a bigger part of our day.  My kids are going to know how to feed themselves and not live off Pop Tarts and cereal.

Super Soup! Ten minutes in the InstaPot!

Fiona and Daniel, being the middles kids, often fall through the homeschool cracks.  Daniel is wicked fast and is often done with his schoolwork before anyone else is up.  He then spends the rest of the day getting in trouble.  Fiona is slow, but is neat and has a great talent for pleasing the eye.  The two of them work pretty well together if they have a task in front of them.  And they both love to play restaurant.

This week I'm experimenting with letting them be in charge of preparing snacks according to my meal plan and helping with dinner prep.  It frees me up to do other things and it keeps them busy.  They are building amazing kitchen skills (I can't believe I let Daniel use a sharp knife to slice cucumbers) and the kitchen is staying cleaner because I don't have a bunch of free range kids helping themselves to toast all morning while I'm busy doing something else.  And everyone is eating healthier too.  We had veggies instead of endless toast this morning.  Fiona's sense of "The eyes eat first" makes sorting the food into serving size containers a great way to work on her multiplication and division.  Daniel just benefits all the way around. I can't wait to see if this is something we can keep doing!