Sleep before Food

For me, sleep always trumps food.

Elliott, now 9 months old, has recently decided that he loves me (aka separation anxiety). I love that he is delighted by me and wants to spend every moment with me... but at some point he needs sleep and maybe more importantly, I need sleep!

So during the last couple weeks, I have eaten anything that is convenient and yummy and quick so that I can sneak in a few minutes of sleep when I finally get him to nap or to go to bed.

But now, we are in a new month and I have a plan.

A food plan.

Good eating doesn't happen by accident, so I need to make it happen. There will always be challenging phases that come and go as a parent, and I can't revert to bad eating all the time.

So during this long Thanksgiving weekend, I made a plan for the entire month of dinners. Yes, the entire month. We'll, actually I planned about 8 meals that we'll eat each week and repeat for the month. This streamlined my shopping and if I'm really organized I can cook a double meal and free part of it for the following week.

I gave it a try last night with my chicken tortilla soup. This time I used Bear Creek package mix as a base, but I hope to make it from scratch soon. (I'll post the recipe I use when I figure it out!) The fun of this meal was adding whole foods to the soup mix. I added black beans, chicken, corn, rice and some seasonings. It was a delicious, bubbling pot of comfort food goodness that was much healthier than my recent food choices.

And the best part: I froze half of it for next week so I have one less meal to cook!