It's 8:40 on Sunday night. Three backpacks are lined up by the back door, Eli's new shoes are sitting on top of his like he's worried they'll leave without him, and the paper plan for the week is stuck to the fridge under the Texas-shaped magnet. School starts tomorrow. Wyatt goes into fifth grade, Eli into first, and Rosie, who turned two yesterday and still has a little frosting in her hair, goes back to Mother's Day Out on Tuesday.
First weeks are always wobbly, so I plan this one tighter than usual. Five dinners, Sunday through Thursday, two of them on my office days, and nothing that needs me at the stove before five o'clock.
The plan
- Sunday: spaghetti with meat sauce, plain noodles set aside for Eli. I made a double batch of sauce and froze half. Tonight's dinner came to $10.40.
- Monday (first day): breakfast for dinner, chosen by the kids. Eli won the vote with pancakes, and Wyatt negotiated bacon and migas for the rest of us. $9.85.
- Tuesday (office day): slow cooker pork carnitas. A 4-pound shoulder goes into the Crock-Pot on low before I leave, and I crisp it in the cast iron when I get home. $14.30.
- Wednesday: sheet pan chicken fajitas, with Eli's chicken pulled off before the peppers ever touch it. $13.50.
- Thursday (office day): leftover carnitas, crisped again, over rice with black beans and whatever cheese is left. $6.40 in new ingredients.
- Friday: fend-for-yourself Friday. Cody's football season hasn't started yet, so it's leftovers at home and an early bedtime for everyone, me included.
That's $54.45 for five dinners, about $2.18 a serving, which is lower than our usual because Thursday is mostly leftovers.
Setting up the week
I shopped Saturday morning instead of my usual Monday so tomorrow stays clear: Aldi for most of it, and a Walmart delivery for milk, paper goods and lunchbox snacks. We started a Walmart+ free trial on Friday, so that's an experiment I'll report back on. This afternoon I spent about 75 minutes at the island setting up my station for the week:
- Sliced the peppers and onions for Wednesday and bagged them.
- Mixed the fajita seasoning and the carnitas rub into two small jars.
- Washed and cut fruit for lunches and breakfasts.
- Filled the lunch bin in the fridge with deli turkey, cheese, tortillas, yogurt tubes and baby carrots.
- Measured the dry pancake mix into a bowl for Monday, so all it needs is eggs and milk.
Packed lunches start tomorrow too. I'll write up the rotation once we've had a few days of it, but the short version is that two lunchboxes cost us about $1.60 per lunch.
What already went sideways
Two things, and the week hasn't even started. First, the freezer. Our old chest freezer died last weekend and took most of what I'd normally lean on for a week like this. Tuesday's pork shoulder was supposed to come out of the garage freezer, and Thursday was supposed to be a frozen casserole. Instead I bought a fresh shoulder on Saturday for $8.36 that wasn't in my original numbers, and Thursday became leftovers. The new freezer is running and only partly full, and I'm refilling it slowly on purpose.
Second, the very first Walmart delivery swapped Eli's plain Goldfish for the colored kind. In Eli's world, those are a different food. Wyatt is thrilled. Eli's lunch tomorrow has pretzels, and I've learned where the substitution settings are in the app.
There's also a small, quiet thing I'm watching. The first week of school is when our dinner time slides, because everyone is tired and nobody wants to stop doing homework to set the table. I've written 5:45 at the top of the plan in marker, which will either help or become a family joke.
Receipt check: Aldi came to $168.52 and the Walmart delivery to $102.62, so $271.14 for the week. That's $21 over our $250 budget, in a restock month, with new lunchbox supplies and a few pantry basics I let run down over the summer.
Tomorrow I'll walk the boys in, come home, and probably stand in the quiet kitchen for a full minute before Rosie asks for a pancake. The plan's on the fridge. That part, at least, is done.
