Going back to work!

I am beginning this blog as I begin my new job. Not really new, but full time for the first time in years. I have been a stay at home mom for the last five years and now with my youngest about to start full time kindergarten in August (and a bank account that has been battered by surviving on one income) the time has definately come. I have had the pleasure of working casually at a nearby hospital while I stayed home with my kids. My employer has been there through the loss of two parents, a couple of scary health issues with my mother in law and four years of my bringing in baby pictures almost every time I came in to work. I typically worked only four shifts a month but it definately is an environment that I love to be in. I am happy and excited to be going on full time and in this economy, I feel very blessed that I was able to get a job at all. With a great hubby, two beautiful kids and an employer that appreciates me, I think I am blessed in general.

So the thing is that it is all happening really fast. In the last four days I have been offered the job, hired a summer nanny, found a daycare for when school starts, had a gazillion conversations with my hubby about how we're going to do __________ (fill in the blank). Did I mention I start tomorrow?

Before I go switch laundry loads (my newest Sunday job LOL) I thought I would try to explain what I am doing here. What my purpose for starting a blog is in the first place. Maybe you'll be interested and choose to follow, maybe you won't, but either way it's ok. I haven't been really religious about keeping up with blogs in the past but I figure that since meal planning is going to take up a bit of my extra time and since I have to write it all out anyway, I might as well share it. Here goes nothing, right?

So my new shift is from 12 noon until 8:30pm. Not great, but do-able. Weekends off with the family makes it even more do-able. Someday I may get to move to dayshift but for right now it's all good. I figure that since my husband will be home with the kids during the dinner hour and I will be at work, I had better try to think of some way to feed them. Please don't think for a second that my husband wouldn't feed them something but I really want them to have a little more variety than hamburger helper & pizza five nights a week. (sorry honey!).

And you should know that I can actually cook. I used to be able to burn water but sometime along the way I learned to cook and I love it. So I figured if I made a list of five tasty tried-and-true dinners a week that aren't that hard to pull together OR that can be made ahead to just be reheated OR could be thrown in the crockpot before I go to work AND if I made a shopping list and did a weekly shopping trip to get all the stuff I would need to have it on hand to make the food for the week then I would be well prepared. I figured I would look around and see if anyone else was doing the same thing so that maybe we could compare menus and ideas. I found that yes, others ARE doing it and yes, they will share their menus IF you pay them. Sorry, not interested. My little sister posted on facebook that she would be willing to pay for my tried and true recipes in weekly meal planning format and it got me thinking that maybe it would be a good thing to start a blog about it (no payment needed!). So here I am. With a blog. Wow.

I have put together the first week. Well, actually, that's kind of a lie. I printed out a sample menu from one of those paid sites that came with a shopping list. I looked it over and realized that I already had a lot of those recipes and mine were better so I am making the meals my way. My thought is that I will do this week, making changes as necessary, and then post the weekly menu/shopping list by the weekend so that if anyone else wants to try it out, they can. For FREE.

I welcome all comments and ideas! Thanks for coming by.

Michelle