The time has come for me to return to work. Today is my last official day of summer, and I am lamenting the end of the beautiful two weeks my family had without visits, chaos, and extreme stress. We were in survival mode almost all of last school year. With Baby Girl coming the first day of school, the subsequent medical crises, and the roller coaster ride that was court proceedings, I was hanging on for dear life to get to summer. Going into this year with a huge part of our worries behind us (although there is still a long way to go on our journey...), I made a promise to myself to "get my shift together". That phrase comes from an exercise challenge group, called Shift Shop, that I have been taking part in the past three weeks. The premise behind the program is to shift your mind and health to a new level through healthy eating and exercise. There were three areas that I just let go of last year out of necessity: my physical fitness, meal planning, and finance. While those three things might seem essential, when trying to balance as much as I was as the head of a one-parent family, those were the pieces that I let slide, whether that was a conscious choice or not.
This summer, I made it a priority to get workout time in almost daily. Sometimes I was able to do it during nap time, and sometimes the littles were hanging out with me. I felt guilty at first taking that time, but I found that I was really setting a good example of self-care. The Little Man soon learned that exercising was important and made you feel good, and he would join in or cheer me on when I started to fade. I used to train for triathlons pretty hard-core, so to let my physical fitness go has been a very frustrating experience for me as I try to regain a shadow of what I once was able to do. I feel like I have made this part of my routine once more, and my plan is to wake up at 4:00 every morning to get it in before my day starts.
The second thing I needed to tackle was planning and preparing healthy foods to fuel my fitness journey. I joined a group on Facebook (yep, I still am on Facebook, and I'm not ashamed!) that teaches you how to plan and prepare all of your meals for the week in one day. By joining the group, I was provided with grocery lists and recipes for the week. Sweet! The planning was already done for me? Sign me up! There are benefits to still using other social media sites!
So today, I set off on the adventure of meal prepping for the entire week. I had outlined the meals that I was choosing from the meals provided, ordered my groceries, and now I was ready to go...except...I didn't buy meal prep containers. It was that moment I knew that my time meal prepping was probably going to be filled with some swear words in my head...or maybe out loud.
My first step was to get the kids to take a nap, during which they fall asleep precisely at the same time, and awake hours later when everything was beautifully put together, cleaned up, and I was relaxing casually on the couch. Can you tell I went to church this morning? I must believe in miracles!
Next, I set out all of my ingredients. Apparently, the key to successful meal prepping is doing four things at the same time for five different meals. By setting it all out, I could eyeball what food items might be prepped for several different recipes at the same time.
Hmmmm...maybe I should have taken more notes in this meal prep class...
I always see how people make these cute meals in mason jars, and since I canned one summer and had oodles of them AND forgot to plan for containers, I dug those suckers out of the basement.
There we go...NOW I look like I know what I'm doing!
Ok, I had zero idea of what I was doing, so I decided to start with the first meal of the day...breakfast. The coach of the meal prep class had chosen overnight oats, so I put together six containers of a pretty delicious and healthy breakfast choice.
One meal down. Many more to go. Oh, shoot. I should have started cooking the meat first, right? Yup, I should have. It needed time to cool! Well (more swear words)...I guess that is a lesson learned for next week. At this point, I was starting to feel my stress level rise. Thirty minutes had already gone by, and the sleeping children were like a ticking time bomb. Any moment could be the moment that one (or both!) wake up and my meal prepping adventure would come to an end. I definitely needed to step up my meal prepping game! The next two meals were put together simultaneously, and I'm just praying that a piece of raw meat didn't end up in the taco salad.
It was at this point, I started to hear Baby Girl stir. A quick check of the monitor showed that while she was awake, she was sucking her thumb contently, and I needed to buy some more time. I threw the rest of the taco salads together as quickly as I could.
My sister, who also decided to try meal prepping today, sent me a few pictures of her beautifully put together snacks and meals. She was all finished. I still had a couple of miles to go before I finished this race against nap time. I think my response to her was something like, "Whoever said that meal prepping only took a bleeping hour is a bleeping liar." Baby Girl started stirring just a bit more, and I began chopping vegetables ferociously. And then...I cut my finger.
Ok, now Baby Girl was really getting restless. What was supposed to take me an hour had stretched out to almost two, and I hadn't even cleaned the kitchen up yet. Another 15 minutes to pack the fridge and clean the kitchen, and I was finally done.
Whew! Everything fit. As I was going upstairs to get Baby Girl, I realized that I didn't have two snacks a day perfectly proportioned in separate containers. The goal was to grab and go. However, my time was up, and I guess it leaves me something to improve upon for next week. Holy cow, do I really have to do this again next week?? I definitely need to think through all of the details much more thoroughly, because what could take me three hours easily is only supposed to take one. I still have a lot to learn, but maybe next week, I can have a more zen experience. I can see I have a lot more "shifting" to do, but I am determined to make this school year much smoother than the last one.
(Gifs courtesy of giphy.com...all photos are my own, just in case you thought they were taken by a professional ;-)