Despite all the warnings from well-meaning friends who have past experience, nothing prepared me for this. been there, nothing could have prepared me for the food my boys (and girls eat!)! I promise you, their legs are hollow and their bellies are bottomless! I feed them, turn around, feed them again, do a load a laundry, feed them again, and well, you get the point. I love cooking and my kitchen is my sanctuary but I rarely ever leave there! And then with me working full-time lately and still homeschooling (call me crazy!), we have had to majorly simplify our healthy eating habits.

Do you know what I’m talking about? If your life is as crazy as ours, I’m picturing you trying to put dinner on the table for your own darling family, but constant interruptions disrupt even your best intentions. A cry from the bathroom while you’re stirring the gravy to drizzle over your mashed cauliflower means your sweet toddler just attempted wiping their own bottom and now you’re stuck cleaning up another mess. Or a crash from your preschooler’s bedroom while you’re slicing the steaming roast means he just tried jumping off the bed again and crashed. Or your independent six-year old spills the milk while you’re setting the table.

It’s exhausting and you wonder why you bother anyway. Does anyone appreciate your effort to feed them healthy food? And now, not only do you have to clean up the kitchen mess from dinner, but you also have to clean up your kids’ messes they made while you cooked. Don’t give up, mama. You’re doing a great job despite the exhausting interruptions. We’ve learned a few things about simplifying our life in the kitchen and we’re sharing them with you today!

Here are 5  Ways to Simplify Your Life in the Kitchen, too!

1) Limit grocery shopping to once a month! (This has saved us $400/month!) We were shopping weekly at a local grocery store and would inevitably end up spending money on things we didn’t need! I now buy 12 gallons of milk at a time and freeze them. At the beginning of each week, we thaw 3 gallons for that week.

2) Cook more than you need. Usually on Mondays, I will cook three times as much meat as I need for that day’s dinner and use it later on during the week or month. For example, last Monday we had ziti, so I browned 5 lbs of ground beef and froze 3.5 lbs. We used those pre-cooked pounds of meet for tacos and cheeseburger pie later on in the week.

3) Encourage responsibility in your children and let them fix their own snacks. Some of our kids’ favorite snacks are popcorn, raw veggies with hummus or ranch, fruit, almonds, cheese sticks, boiled eggs and more! These are all examples of easy, simple, healthy snacks they can help themselves to while building their independence!

4) Stock your freezer with frozen fruits and veggies, bone broth, and pre-cooked meat (shredded chicken, browned ground beef or pork). Meals only take a few minutes to prepare if you have a freezer full of these! Lunches can be a breeze with a tortilla, pre-cooked shredded chicken, a smear of mayo, fresh spinach and
mozzarella! Dinners can be quick with bone broth, frozen spinach and cauliflower, and pre-cooked browned ground pork!

5) Instill a sense of team building in your family and have everyone pitch in to quickly clean up. Little ones can carry dishes from the table to the sink while the older ones help load the dishwasher. They can scrape leftovers into the trash or slop bucket (can you tell we have hogs? lol) or wipe off the dinner table. Older children can sweep and mop (we love our Swiffer for the kids!) the floors. Give everyone a job and the kitchen is clean in just minutes!

Don’t be afraid to let your husband and children how you need help at home, especially around dinner time. No one expects you to do it all, and do it all perfectly or without stress. So if you’ve been giving yourself a hard time because it’s difficult making meals for your family, just stop. We are all in this thing together and you’ve been given grace. Now that you’ve learned what makes our mealtimes easier, we’d love to hear more about what works for you or what you’re struggling with right now with meals.