What's for Dinner?

I don't know about you guys but my kids start asking me what's for dinner before we've even left the house for school!  I try really hard to plan meals and know ahead of time what we're having for dinner. 

I'm always looking on Pinterest (you can follow my recipe board here) and blogs for easy meals that most of my family will eat and love.  I've fallen in love with Six Sisters' Stuff.  I love their blog posts, meal plans, and recipes.  They recently started a 4x4 Family Dinner Challenge for March.  Even though March is almost over, I really like this challenge and you can start anytime.

Basically the challenge is to eat dinner together as a family 4 nights a week for 4 weeks.  My family does eat dinner together at the table almost every night.  Occasionally, we'll eat pizza in front of the TV.    I'm super glad we have this ritual in my house, because there was some interesting research brought up in the blog post about the challenge.

Family dinners are more important than play, story time, and other family events in the development of vocabulary of younger children (Harvard Reserach, 1996).

Kids who eat most often with their parents are 40% more likely to get mainly A's and B's in school than kids who have two or fewer family dinners a week (National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University).

One tradition, we've started at dinner is that everyone goes around and shares one good thing and one not so good thing about their day.  Usually the kids like sharing a whole list of good things about their day.  One lesson we've learned the hard way is to make the rule that you can only share ONE not so good thing.  Or dinner turns into a big whine fest.  It's really good hearing what the kids have to say about their day, and it's taught them to listen to others while taking turns.

My real dilemma is getting dinner on the table.  Since I'm commuting with my new job, I've really had to rely on my crock pot.  I wanted to share with you guys some of my favorite crock pot recipes.  Seriously, these recipes are all easy and taste good.  My family approves of them all.  Click on the pictures to see the recipes.

Kailua Pig is a local favorite here in Hawaii.  I make the same recipe only I don't cook it for 16 hours and I just use regular sea salt.  I  just cook it all day on low while I'm at work.  We use the pig for bbq pork sandwiches, Kailua pig tacos, or quesadillas.  Yummy!

Whole Chicken - We love a roasted chicken in the crock pot.  I usually serve it with brown rice and a veggie.  If there leftovers, I use the meat for quesadillas.

These pork carnitas on corn tortillas are awesome!

This is a new one I just discovered, but we've already had it twice.  The first time we ate it with potatoes.  The 2nd time we used the meat to make french dip sandwiches.  So good!

Do you have any easy recipes to share?  I love trying new ones!

Balancing Act - Making Life Work

What I've learned is that being a teacher is demanding and time consuming.  That's not necessarily a bad thing.....but it can be hard to be juggle it all.

I've also learned that being a mother is demanding and time consuming.  And being a wife is demanding and time consuming.

With all those demands and time consuming things, it's hard to make it all work.  Since moving to Hawaii, I've had to readjust some things to make life easier for me.  It also means that I've had to become a little more organized and efficient.  That has been a good thing.  Otherwise, I might go crazy!  And nobody needs a crazy teacher or momma.

Right now, life seems to be one big balancing act.

Don't you just love the chevron background in that picture?  My sweet friend Corinna from Surfin' Through Second made it, and I love the hand drawn work!  She has a great selection of frames, papers, and fonts in her TpT store {click here}.

Let me show you my biggest dilemma.  My kitchen in our rental house.  Ummm....it's small.  Incredibly small.

First the cabinets.  Do you see how narrow this is?  Who in the world designed these things?  And what should I put in there that will fit? 

Let's just not mention the not so great quality of these pics I took on my phone.

Then there's the size.  It's a TINY kitchen.  You can open the oven door.

Or the fridge door (partially) but not both.  Seriously, every time I open the fridge I need to take deep breaths or I might cry.

And if anyone else comes in the kitchen while I'm in there, I get a serious feeling of claustrophobia.  Needless to say, I've been trying my hardest to make SUPER simple meals and keep myself out of the kitchen.  Not really a good objective when a bunch of hungry kids want to eat.  But I'll post more about dinners later.

Basically, I need to be super organized.  Here my kids go to the school on base, and I commute to work about half an hour away.  That means the kids go to before and after school at their school, and we leave the house around 6:25 everyday.  Lucky for me, they get up early anyway!

I knew there's no way I could get them up even earlier to eat at home before going to before school care.  I also don't let my kids eat or drink anything with red dye (lord help the boys' teachers if I did).  That means it's up to me to feed them breakfast and lunch.

Here's our solution that has been working out really well so far.

Every night, I set out this.  The tropical flower bags (and the ziploc bag for the kid who forget his at school) are their breakfast bags and the other ones are their lunch boxes.

In the breakfast bag, I put stuff like this and I throw in a yogurt in the morning.  The ziploc bag has a cinnamon roll in it.  I'll add things like blueberry muffins (make a batch on Sunday), Nutrigrain bars, and sometimes a poptart.  The kids are happy.  I feel like they've gotten a decent enough meal to last them during the morning.  And it's not too much work.

For their lunchboxes, I use these awesome containers that I got at Target.  Each compartment is sealed. You can put things like applesauce in there, and it doesn't leak.

The container is marked Not PB, because the kids school is peanut butter free. This week I started making them sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwiches.  So far, they love it and haven't complained.  We also put in leftover quesadillas and pizza.  They don't care that it's cold so that is another easy lunch.

I also add these ice packs that came from Target.  They seem to keep everything cold enough.

So that's how I keep my kids from starving during the week, except they still act like they're starving when they get home every day.  How do you other moms make it all work?