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All my life I have never really cared much for food (the food that is good for you anyways) nor did I understand the importance of meal planning when it was just me.  So when I began to date a cook I thought it was great.  One day he overheard me telling a friend my favorite dessert is blueberry cheesecake and surprised me after church one Sunday with one that he made from scratch the night before.  Needless to say, I knew I had a keeper at that point and we have now been married over ten years.

Since getting married and starting our own family, I now see the importance of meal planning but it hasn’t been easy by any means for me and there have been plenty of times I wanted to throw in the towel on meal planning. To be honest, I had hoped my husband would take over this department since he was obviously so much better at it then me.

Well, after ten years of struggling terribly to learn how to cook meals everyone loves and get this meal planning thing down, I realized I needed to stop trying to do it all by myself.  I decided it needed to be made into a family affair if I was ever to be successful at it.  I knew we needed to start eating healthier and stop spending so much on food unnecessarily from our eating out and last minute trips to the store, but I also knew it wouldn’t happen without first learning how to plan our meals.

I tried to teach everyone to eat their dinner regardless if they like it or not rather then waste food but it hasn’t made for a very happy husband and kids in our household and often the dinner I prepared would just get thrown out and we’d make a trip to McDonalds.  So considering my kids and husband are very vocal about what they like and don’t like I decided we all should take turns choosing what’s for dinner and the person who chooses dinner for the night gets to help me with the preparation and cooking.

I have been doing this almost a month now and my daughter has been loving it and my husband has also been helping out a great deal by telling me what he wants to eat in the upcoming weeks rather then telling me to surprise him. Whenever I would surprise him  in the past, more times then not, it isn’t what he wanted to eat for dinner.  My son on the other hand, I still need to work on.

Some of the benefits we’ve received so far from making meal planning a family affair have been:

* There hasn’t been as much complaining about what’s for dinner.
* We haven’t eaten out as much thus cutting down on our unnecessary food spending.
* Me and my daughter have enjoyed more time in the kitchen together then ever before.
* It has created a family team spirit in regards to doing the meal planning.
* It has alleviated a tremendous amount of stress and pressure on me to make dinners that everyone likes.

It may not be the perfect solution but it has been a tremendous step forward in getting meal planning down for our family. It has given me hope that I might just begin to enjoy meal planning and cooking. Wouldn’t that be a miracle?