Look, can we all be honest with each other right now?
Life is gorram hard. Schedules are crazy, people have needs, and more importantly: people need to eat.
The way it is around here has been a bit difficult locking down a meal plan for the week. Breakfasts and lunches are pretty easy, as we’re not picky. We are a family who is perfectly fine with having the same things every morning, and even for lunch (although sometimes we mix it up with dinner leftovers, when there are some). The issue has always been dinner. The same text happens every day:
Wifey-Face: Whatcha think about dinner?
Me: No idea. We have food, we should probably make something.
Wifey-Face: Ok, we’ll figure it out.
Eventually, after she gets home, we do figure it out. Sometimes we just end up getting pizza, some days we just throw something random together or go through the list of what we have and pick the one that we most prefer.
It’s been a bit tough for me on a psychological level, having grown up in a family that had a fresh cooked meal every night. I also grew up learning how to cook and have spent hours upon hours in professional kitchens cooking from scratch. So clearly the whole cooking thing shouldn’t be beyond reach.
But I have to repeat a particular mantra at this point. One that I figured out very quickly once we became members of the parenting population: WE DO THE BEST WE CAN
Despite all the things that we THINK we have to do, in the end, we do the best we can. We eat. We eat good food. What it is exactly on whatever particular night, we don’t know offhand. We figure things out on the fly with the tiniest bit of preparation on the weekend while we’re shopping.
We eat well, we’re generally healthy (the kid is especially eating great), and we do the best we can. Having that set up is #1. Now we can start whittling things down to what we want them to be, shaping them as we go along, and making the best with what we got.
We can do this.
-Ben
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