Its been a long time since I sat down and done a monthly meal plan. A long, long time. I used to do it so much that I even added a section to my planner that included the meal plan. And yet, here I am. Never doing it. Boo.

So with the fresh school year comes a fresh start at meal planning. We keep it simple in these parts. On most Mondays my MIL comes to watch the kids and usually brings food. Wohooo! We have tacos, or some Americanized variation of tacos on Tuesday but Taco Tuesday sounds a lot better than Taco-ish Tuesday. We usually have pasta one day a week because it makes life a little bit easier and ensures we have leftovers. I dig fall food so I try to incorporate, squash and pumpkin, chili and stews.

I try to keep food to what the kids like but I'm slightly over that so I'm incorporating a meal a week they might not like and in those cases they'll just have to fall back on the pasta.

I can't make a lot of promises with my monthly plan other than we will definitely not stick to it. Some meals will give us more leftovers than I plan and some will give us less. There will definitely be pancakes for dinner one night or two or three and I'm sure the kids will have fish sticks or chicken fingers. That being said this gives us such a head start on planning and grocery shopping. Bonus points that most of the meat is in the freezer already.

Do you meal plan? How far in advance? How much do you stay the course?