things I've learned from my daughter

Whenever I start to doubt my success as a mother, I take just a moment to reflect on the amazing adults my children have become. It may have nothing at all to do with my mothering, but it does help me forget my mistakes as I find myself learning and growing from their examples. I just returned from spending a few months near my grown daughter. The list of important, truly important things I learned from her would fill a book. Things like: "my family is my world"; "my home is sacred", "I can make peace by being the first to ask forgiveness", "make time to play each day" ... and on and on. She is wise beyond her 20-something years!


Today, though I want to focus on just one little temporal thing I learned from her. It's simple, really. And probably most people do it. It was just really neat to see it in action and watch the results. Each week she'd create a simple dinner menu. And then and this is the trick! stick to it. Brooke is a meticulous budgeter. One would think they paid no attention to grocery budget by the amazing meals she serves, but it's really because of her habit of careful planning. So this is our first week home. We've been gone for several months so there was really no food in the house. I did as Brooke taught by example and created a menu, then shopped for that menu rather than hunger-shopping. As a result, this was our dinner last night:


I call it "Spaghetti Squash Fall Festival". Served warm, it's seasoned with salt, pepper, curry powder and chili powder with just a small swirl of olive oil. I added fresh chopped scallions and 2 nice sized tomatoes. Then shavings of Romano Cheese. Which brings me to another very practical thing I learned from Brooke: Buy a big triangle of hard cheese (parmesan, romano, etc) and add a few shavings created from a potato pealer. This is WAY less expensive than buying grated cheese. Plus, it looks a lot fancier. I served some homemade bread with this which brought the total cost of this Meal-For-3 to $3.17. BAM

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