Hi! Welcome to my kitchen! I can’t promise you any exotic dishes this week, but I am excited to share our week with you.

My name is Angie and I’m a 30-something homeschooling Mom to three kids (ages 9, 7, and 4). I have been married to my high school sweetheart, Eric, for 13 years. We are both Midwestern through and through, each of us only having spent about a total of one month outside the Midwest in our whole lives. (How sheltered does that sound?) I suppose it all might sound boring to some people, but we can’t imagine living anywhere else (though we might think about it just a little bit during the middle of winter).

My husband works full-time as the engineering manager of a machine shop. He also goes to college half-time, working on a degree in business management. Although I spend most of my time at home with the kids, I also work a few hours a week providing in home therapy (using my degrees in elementary and special education) to children under the age of three with delays and disabilities. Not only does this make life a little busier, but it also can make dinner time a bit crazier (since I do therapy just before dinner time, after Eric has arrived home from work).

During some of my “free” time, I blog at Many Little Blessings where I talk about faith, family, household management (such as cooking, cleaning, and gardening), crafting, homeschooling, going green, and attempting to live a more content life. I initially started my blog while my family and I were going through the lengthy process of joining the Catholic Church as a way to talk through some of the experiences that we were having. I quickly realized how much I enjoyed sharing my reflections about our life and expanded the topics that I was writing about. I love blogging not only because I love having people come visit my blog, but I also love reading lots of blogs.

During the summer of 2008, as we geared up for our first year of homeschooling, I decided that I would really love to be part of a group blog about homeschooling. That was when I founded The Homeschool Classroom which was even nominated for the 2008 Homeschool Blog Awards just a few months after it began! We are very proud of our blog, and we love the opportunity to connect with people in the homeschooling community.

Now, enough blog talk – let’s have some kitchen talk!

Several years ago, when my husband became the manager of his department, his pay schedule changed from every other week to monthly. While some people may wonder what that has to do with our kitchen, I’m sure some of you know exactly how it changed our kitchen. At that point, I began planning out menu one month at a time, and would then have one large grocery shopping trip per month. More than seven years later (and still with monthly paychecks), I continue to plan monthly.

When I plan our menu, I first check to see what meals we still have at home. Then, I make a list of what we’d like to make and then I grocery shop from there, keeping an extra watch out for sale items. During the month, I still make small trips to the grocery store for perishables like produce, milk, and bread, including other things that I just run out of. From our larger list of monthly meals, I plan each week what we will actually be having that week.

I’m excited to have you all in my kitchen this week! I hope that you can forgive me that my meals may not be fancy or exciting – I had big plans, but then decided that we moms have enough pressure as it is, so I just needed to keep it real. So, join me for a very real week in my kitchen!

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