If it's good enough for breakfast...

As a mom and wife, there are many things I enjoy doing for my family.  One of those things that I enjoy, even love, is cooking.  I love playing with new recipes, tweaking old ones, or just throwing things together and seeing how it turns out.  Most of my meals are homemade or mostly so ( may use a can of cream soup ) and pretty high on the healthy/balanced meal scale.  However, there are times when I just don't have the energy, patience or anything else to prepare a meal--even a frozen pizza.  It doesn't happen often, maybe twice a month, but on those nights cooking is the last thing I want to even think about.  So what do I do when I have 3 kids and a Full Man Grown to feed?

"Kids, tonight's help yourself night!"  They love it and I get off scott free.  So what do they usually do?  Make a sandwich or have cereal or oatmeal.  I know it's not the best dinner ever, but if it's good enough for breakfast--the most important meal of the day--then it must be good enough for dinner a few times a month.

Last night was one of those nights.  Scrat was having a bad day, which translated to Mom having a bad day so I hadn't started anything for dinner.  The older girls came home from school with a headache and a bad attitude, respectively, and we had 1.5 hours between bus drop-off and having to be at practice for the church musical (which is a 15 min drive...unless you get stuck behind slow people on non-icy backroads.  Which, of course, I did.)  Full Man Grown was gone for the evening helping his dad at the farm, so I was on my own.  I told them to fend for themselves and our table looked like this:

Scrat: bowl of Cheerios and a yogurt.
Picasso: PB&J on wheat, string cheese and raisins
Brainiac: PB&honey on 1 piece of wheat and small bowl of blueberry oatmeal
Mom: left-overs from the night before (which was about 4 bites) and a rice krispie bar (don't judge)

The meal was nothing to be desired, but it was food and the kids made it themselves.  I used to really beat myself up about these nights.  Or days when the girls would want cereal for lunch and I'd let them because I just didn't feel like making something or was so busy I didn't have time for a regular meal.  But then I reasoned with myself--It's good enough for breakfast, so why can't it be good enough for any other meal?  And at least I'm feeding them!  They're still getting relatively healthy food options, with milk and the added confidence of doing it themselves.  So I relaxed a little.  And you can relax, too, if you have days or nights like this.  As long as it's not every day, it's okay.  And even if it is every day, at least you are giving them food, right?