It took one hour and forty minutes, a full pot of coffee and the back of a church bulletin before any of it made it into the spreadsheet. Last Sunday afternoon at the kitchen table, I planned every dinner and every lunch for the two weeks of winter break in one sitting. School lets out today. Starting tomorrow, three kids are home for sixteen days, three of which we'll spend in Tyler, and the paper plan for all of it is on the fridge under the Texas magnet.
Planning two weeks at once isn't my usual rhythm. Normally I plan five dinners on Sunday and shop Monday. But break throws everything off: no packed lunches, but three lunches at home every day. No office days, but year-end payroll still needs me at the laptop a few mornings. Christmas Eve here, Christmas in Tyler, New Year's at home. If I plan a week at a time, the second week sneaks up on me in the middle of the Tyler trip and we come home on the 27th to an empty fridge with no plan. So I sit down once and do all of it.
The dinners
Week one
- Saturday 20: Matt's smoked chicken thighs, potato salad
- Sunday 21: chicken spaghetti, a double batch, one pan for us and one frozen for Tyler. We pick up our tamale order after church.
- Monday 22: sheet pan fajitas
- Tuesday 23: migas for dinner, then wrapping presents
- Wednesday 24: Christmas Eve tamales and chili with Carol and Gary
- Thursday 25 to Saturday 27: Ron and Debbie's in Tyler. We bring the second pan of chicken spaghetti and a cookie tin, and Debbie does the rest.
Week two
- Sunday 28: leftovers night, whatever comes home from Tyler
- Monday 29: chicken tortilla soup
- Tuesday 30: hamburger steaks with onion gravy and mashed potatoes
- Wednesday 31: New Year's Eve snack supper of queso, smoked sausage bites, air fryer wings and a vegetable tray
- Thursday, January 1: black-eyed peas and greens with cornbread
- Friday 2: homemade pizza
- Saturday 3: Matt grills burgers
- Sunday 4: spaghetti with meat sauce, plain noodles set aside for Eli, and the Sunday reset for the first week back
Lunches for three, every day
Lunch is where break gets expensive, so it has its own column on the plan, filled in for every day, so nobody has to ask me what's for lunch. Quesadillas, grilled cheese with tomato soup, turkey roll-ups with fruit, leftover soup, mini pizzas on English muffins in the air fryer, frozen pancakes from the chest freezer, a snack plate day (crackers, cheese, apples, carrots and a little summer sausage) and, after the 24th, leftover tamales. Each kid's lunch runs about $1.30.
The kitchen closes at 2. There's a snack at 3:30, and then nothing until dinner. That rule is new this year, and there's a reason for it.
How last year's plan held up
I did this same thing last December. We followed about nine of the fourteen dinners as written, which sounds decent until you see where the other five went. Twice we gave up after a long day out and had pizza delivered. One night the leftovers we brought home from Tyler weren't on the plan at all, so the planned dinner sat in the fridge until I had to freeze it. And two dinners got skipped because lunch had turned into an all-day buffet, nobody was hungry at 5:45, and by the 29th the snack drawer was empty and so was my patience.
So this year's changes are aimed straight at that. The Sunday after Tyler is a leftovers night on purpose. Lunch has an end time. And instead of hoping we won't give up, there are two frozen pizzas in the chest freezer, already paid for, at about a third of what delivery costs. They still feel like a night off.
What it should cost
With every meal priced from my receipts, the two weeks come to $612 on paper. That covers dinners, lunches and breakfasts, the tamales, New Year's Day, and a Costco run on January 3. It's $112 over two regular weeks of our $250 budget, and I knew it would be. December runs high every year in the spreadsheet, with kids home and a holiday in every week, and I'd rather plan for the overage than pretend it won't happen.
Tomorrow is Saturday, so the smoker is Matt's. Monday morning I'm fixing to take all three kids to Aldi, in the cart and around it, for the first time since summer.
