Oh My, Oh My Dinner!

We are huge into Sandra Boynton board books right now and Oh my, Oh my Dinosaurs! is a fave. Anyhoo, I'm baaacckkk! It's been a while, but I've been busy figuring out how to do this momma/housewife gig. I must be really stupid or totally lame that I couldn't quite get my s*@$ together for almost 8 months, but all I can say is that Baby K didn't sleep through the night until 7 months so I was just dang tired. Now that I'm getting a good 7 hours sometimes more of sleep a night, I am finally back to functioning.

Either way, one of the toughest tasks I have is getting dinner on the table each night. Baby K is an early bedtime kind of girl. I'm talking bedtime starts at 6 and she's down by 6:30 or so then sleeps until 6:30am. We've tried to push it back gradually, but then she ends up getting less sleep and it seems like she's crabby all day. Girl needs her sleep just like her momma. It's nice to have consistency, but her bedtime just happens to be around the time when I would normally cook dinner. We don't like to eat at 8pm so it's been a challenge for me to get dinner on the table for my hubs and I. I love to cook and hate the stress of trying to cook something while keeping and eye on a baby that's all over the place. So, I decided to get my act together and start planning a menu for each week, then making a list for the grocery store. While wandering aimlessly through the aisles of the grocery store, trying to decide what to make for the week is sure fun, momma needed to find a new way of doing things. Since I never had a plan, I ended up buying whatever looked good and so we were always throwing away produce that didn't get used. I hate wasting money like that and it makes me feel guilty when I think about all the families that go without that would not waste like that. No matter what you have or how successful you are being wasteful is lame.

Because of the struggle with timing dinner and the waste, I've decided to try using my crockpot for more things than just roast. I've been scouring the Internet for great recipes and tweaking them to fit my family. So, I'm going to share them with you. Along with a few other tried and true recipes that I keep the ingredients for so that I have something to cook when I can't quite get my act together.

Stay tuned for my first crockpot recipe that's been mommjomma-ized. Oh and anyone else have this problem? Any tips or tricks you'd like to pass along?