Holy Healthy Eating, Batman!

Ok, so I'm doing this happiness project with some of the girls from work. (Sorry for the shameless plug, actually, no I'm not. I love where I work!) I think I told you to read the book The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin way back when we visited in October last year. I think you were a bit busy, so I guess you can be off the hook for not reading it yet. But I totally think you should. And then you should start your own happiness project, because it is... well not really life changing, but it is empowering. And it's making me get off my butt and be productive.

Anyways, the idea is that you set aside one thing to remember or change or work on each month. This month my thing is to take better care of myself. You know how I eat (or rather how I don't eat). I know that Z's still pretty young, but I'm afraid of her picking up her eating habits from me. So I decided that we're going to start having family dinners. Which Mom made seem really easy to do. I don't know how she did it. I know that we always had a fridge full of food, but until now I couldn't understand how she did it. Our fridge is always just the bare minimum of stuff. Anyways I was perusing Pinterest, like you do. And I came across a menu planner someone made. A bell went off in my head and I realized that if we planned dinners out for the week and just went shopping for that stuff then we'd be able to eat better. (You don't want to know how we use to shop.)

So I made one up for us.

I took a piece of foam board that I've had lying around our home forever and covered in scrapbook paper. The days of the week go down the middle, the left side is for main dishes and the right side is for sides. I used velcro to attach them to the board (the rrrrrrip is so satisfying!)

 I like being able to change up the meals by mixing different sides with different main dishes. Also we have some really simple main dishes - like "Chicken Breast." But that gives us more room to play with what we want to do and allows us to change menus without having to make a bajillion new cards. I also made up two fill-in-the-blank cards, one for main dishes and one for side dishes. I covered them with clear packing tape and I can write on them with dry erase marker. That way we can test out new dishes without having to make new cards for them. (See the main dish for Saturday?)

We had an unused recipe box, which is perfect for storing all the unused cards. And since I had so much of the navy card stock left, I cut it up and store it in the back of the box as well. Now if I want to add new cards, I just need to print them up and glue them to the card stock.

Of course I had to make the recipe box match the menu planner, I couldn't just let it be boring brown.

Yay for spray adhesive. I know you're not a big fan of it. But it made the recipe box covering so easy. I just cut out the pieces of scrapbook paper then sprayed them and stuck them on the box. *Note: Don't be lazy - make sure you have a drop cloth or newspaper or something under the box. I didn't and ended up with a sticky kitchen floor for a few days. 

So yeah, I had fish tonight for dinner. I still don't like it, but I ate it. I like to think that Mom would be proud. She'd probably also say something along the lines of "About damn time." :)

(I would like to apologize for not having step by step photos, but I'm working on doing it better in future posts... like way in the future. The next couple of projects are lacking in the step by step photos as well. In my defense, they're pretty easy projects and the step by step photos would be boring.) (And now I have the Step by Step theme song stuck in my head... Step by step, day by day. A fresh start over, a different hand to play....)