The Kassel Family Project Life 365

Samuel Adams Boston Lager and Guinness

We ended up with a little over 8 inches of snow!  So beautiful!  The kids and I will stay home today and enjoy the day off.  Andy will head into work a bit later in the morning.

The highlights of our days today were:

Andy – Getting one of the panels on his new cubicle at work moved so he’s not facing directly into someone’s office anymore.

Erica – Completing as much as I could on a work project.  I had two full hours to relax! 

Laura – Swimming with daycare at the ARC.

John – I’m guessing it was *either* story time at the library or swimming with daycare at the ARC, but he’s too busy playing with his trains to answer my question.

Somehow, I think the kids had better days than we did!  🙂

In March of 2008, we went to visit Jim and Jill in South Carolina.  While there, Jill had a daily menu plan on the refrigerator.  I asked her about it and she told me that she did daily menu planning.  She talked about how easy it made things and how nice it was not to have to think about what she’s making for dinner.  She mentioned that it really cut down on the nightly stress of the exact same conversation that Andy and I had every night.  The conversation always went something like this:

• Me:  What do you want for dinner?
• Andy: I don’t know.  What do you want?
• Me:  I don’t know.  Any suggestions?
• Andy:  How about chicken/steak/pork?
• Me:  Not thawed out.
• Andy:  Whatever.
• Me:  Fine.  I’ll come up with something.

So, on the way home to Columbia, I mentioned it to Andy.  He said, “That sounds like a good idea and we should give it a try!”  As we talked a bit more about it, we realized that menu planning would allow us to finally try all those recipes that we saw in my multitude of cookbooks, but never seemed to have the ingredients for.  Almost two years later, I’m still menu planning.

I can’t even begin to tell you how absolutely fantastic and stress free our nights are now.  I try to plan two weeks at a time, but it isn’t always possible.  There are also weeks when I just can’t seem to find the time to plan our menus.  Those weeks where there is no menu plan, I feel almost lost at times.  This makes life just so much easier.  No more conversations or frustration over what we are having for dinner.  It makes it so we can have a varied menu and so the kids get to try lots of different types of foods.  If we want to try a new recipe, we add it to the plan, I buy the ingredients on my weekly trip to the store, and off we go!  Over.  Done.  Easy.  If we really like a new recipe, it goes into the “rotation.”  Also, we’ve saved a ton of money this way.  My grocery lists are specific to what we need for the week instead of a bunch of varying things that we *might* need for the week.

Why do I go on about this?  Because it also allows me the time to do what I did today.

Both Lasagna (for tonight) and Spaghetti (Tuesday, January 25) are on the menu plan for the next two weeks.  Today, I spent part of the afternoon making two Lasagnas and a batch of Spaghetti Sauce.  We will have one of the Lasagnas for tonight’s dinner and I’ll freeze the other for another time.  I’ll also split the Spaghetti Sauce in half and freeze one half for later.  As Laura is fond of saying, “Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy.”

Today, the Chicago Bears played in the playoffs against the Seattle Seahawks.  Sundays during football season is always devoted to watching Da Bears.  We have even had NFL Sunday Ticket through DirecTV for about ten years now.  I’ve been a huge football fan most of my life.  I remember always watching the Bears as I was growing up and I always looked forward to Sundays.  Andy and I are determined (since we live in either Rams or Chiefs territory) that both of our kids will love Da Bears whether they win or lose!  Our beloved Bears won today and play the MUCH hated Green Bay Packers next weekend.  The last time it happened was 1941 and the Bears beat the Packers.  We are hoping for a repeat!  Go Bears!

I’ve got to make sure to wash our Chicago Bears jerseys this week so that we have them ready for next weekend.  Every member of the Kassel Family has them!  Andy wears #34 Walter Payton; I wear #23 Devin Hester; Laura wears #54 Brian Urlacher (we have both the orange and navy blue versions); and John wears #6 Jay Cutler.

The kids had a snow play date today with our neighbor, Brent.  His Mom, Jenna, came over to hang out with me while the kids played.  Laura played in the snow, but John was tired so he just sat next to me on the back porch.  Laura’s favorite snow play activity is to eat it!

John played a little with his Tonka truck, but it didn’t take long for him to decide that he didn’t want to play anymore.  I did get a good picture of him though.

Andy is off today helping with the University of Missouri’s Sigma Chi Chapter Initiation.  I think at some point he and Jeremy are also heading to Hooters to watch one of the football playoff games and eat wings.  I’m hoping for a bit of time to clean up the house.  Then I’m going to sit down and relax.  I’ll probably have a glass of wine and read some magazines.  I have quite a stack to get through.