meal planning

This is literally one of  THE  best things we have instituted in our family!
It took us a while to make this a regular thing. We would do it off and on, and say, "hey! that makes things so much easier!" but then we would stray and be lazy and do the usual, run to the grocery store and hope we would find inspiration there. What we did find, what frustration and a larger grocery bill!
I believe that having 2 children under the age of 3 also helped us implement our meal planning, as in, if you can get in and out of Wegmans, with everyone alive and some milk= you are doing pretty well!
So really there is no science to it and I have found the motivation to do this gets easier and easier, because either way I have to make a grocery list!
We sit down with our planners/phones and look at the week. What do we have going on? Are there nights one of us is going to be late, or we're going to run in from work and run right back out for something else?
How much prep can I do before work, how much will be left for whoever gets home first? And of course, just what do we feel like?-that changes with the season too of course!
So that's it, I plug all my needed products into my Wegman's app and it puts my items in walking order for the store! If I get distracted by a 1 year old wanting more animal crackers or climbing out of the cart, I have my list. I know exactly what I need and NO thinking needs to be done @ the store.
VICTORY!
We have also found we spend less, we're not throwing extra things in the cart. We don't have fresh produce etc. going bad before getting around to it.
When we get home from work we don't' have to think, when we're tired and the girls are hungry...what do you we feel like? and do we have the stuff to make it?
One negative from this whole thing. We are mostly out of food before getting to the grocery store again! So come the end of the week, it's like OKAY...let's get moving we need to get to the store ASAP!
Of course we make extra runs on occasion for milk, fresh bread for soup, etc.
RESOLUTION: Keep it up! We eat more well rounded meals and makes the working week 800x easier!