When I initially wanted to prep all of the food for after delivery, I was a bit ambitious!
Finally I have made some progress!
I have gotten a good chunk of meal prep done, on top of a lot of cleaning, and some of the final purchases for baby’s play room!
I originally had planned to do all of the meal prep all in one day, but that just did not happen at all.
The first couple days that I wanted to just knock out all of the meal preps, I was just so unmotivated. Then, BAM! Energy!!! I guess that is pregnancy for you.
With all of that energy, I tried to get everything done. Every. Single. Thing. This did not work, sadly, however I did get a lot of stuff started!
I decided that instead of buying a gorgeous, wooden, Montessori style toy shelf (for $90+), we would just build one ourselves. This actually turned out so wonderful!!!
I ordered the cutest ocean creature pictures and put them in frames that are hung on the wall finally!
Also, when we first bought this house, I decided that I hated the wallpaper that was in the small entrance way that nobody uses. We had started to tear the wallpaper down one day in the hopes that it would be a super simple project. Tear down wallpaper, prime over old wall/paint, paint wall a pretty light yellow color. Goodness how wrong were we!!???!? But with all my new energy, and the panic of having a baby soon, I smashed out the main damaged wall with a hammer and decided we can just put in new drywall, skim coat all of the other areas, then sand, prime, and paint. We are still on the sanding step of this, because WOW is this a lot more exhausting than I thought! We will be done before the baby gets here though! Even if I have to paint it during the start of my contractions surges (trying to do hypnobirthing, so we don’t want to say something that sounds negative and painful, like contractions).
At midnight one night, I noticed that our air filter in our hallway ventilation system was SO loud. When I looked at it, it was quite obvious that the previous owners had not changed it nearly as often as recommended, so it was so full of dirt, dust, and dog hair! No wonder I can hardly breathe at night with this and the pollen. So I ordered a new one online through Lowes, and then wondered what other things come with owning a home that should be routine maintenance? I then proceeded to add reminders for the next year, which repeat seasonally or annually as needed, everything that is recommended to check, do, or maintain in a home. But what is the truly easiest way to keep everything nice a little at a time while also prepping for a new baby? Cleaning the whole house! So I also broke down all of the cleaning that needs to get done on a weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly basis. This has been going surprisingly well so far actually!
I also wanted to keep working on the cloth baby wipes and cloth diaper inserts that I am determined to make by hand. I only need to sew the edges now, but my motivation for this quickly runs out. I have all of the fabric for the 100 wipes cut, and maybe 3 of them finished with the edges sewn. I also have all of the fabric cut for the diaper inserts, but have only sewn 3 of those as well.
Finally I made it to the food!
So far I have managed to make:
12 servings of Stuffed Pepper Soup (actually 18, but we ate one of the three batches for dinner/lunch, and it was AMAZING!!!!)
16 servings of Blueberry Scones
6 servings of Broccoli Beef (I’m not quite sure how many servings in this one, but I’m assuming it will cover one dinner, plus some leftovers)
16 servings of Breakfast Burritos
12 servings of Oatmeal Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies (there were originally quite a few more, but they were sitting on the counter to cool and we have two children, a man, and a pregnant woman all in one house, so I only managed to freeze the last 12)
16 servings of Italian Zucchini Soup
16 servings of Steak Fajitas (this one we actually made a third batch also and ate that one for dinner/lunch…..YUM!!!)
6 servings of Ranch Chicken Tacos
4 servings of Spiced Chicken Stew
Looking back at my original post regarding this meal prep journey, I initially planned out that I will need 70 breakfast servings, 70 lunch servings, 112 dinner servings, and 122 snacks.
Between the blueberry scones and breakfast burritos, I have 32 servings for breakfast!!! Only 38 more breakfasts to go!
Since I only made 12 cookies, I still have 110 snacks to figure out. This might not happen with prepped and frozen snacks. I might just stick with cheese sticks and fruit, or some other quick, healthy snack.
I’m not really sure how to divide up all of the other meals between lunch and dinner, so I will just call them all dinners for now, since lunches could easily be peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, leftovers, salads, or really anything else quick. Dinners are where I need to make sure we have plenty of meals to sit down to. So far, I have 60 servings of dinners! I am over halfway done, with only 52 more servings to go! I guess realistically though, since some of these servings will be used for lunch, I should go by freezer bags. I want to make 4 weeks of dinners, so 28 bags. So far, I only have 9 bags, and still need 19 more. Thankfully this means that I should hopefully have about 24 lunch servings from these 9 bags too!
Quick recap (mostly as a reminder to myself) of how much more food I want to make:
- 38 breakfast servings
- 19 more dinners
- 46 more lunch servings, although some of this will come from the dinners
- 110 more snacks, which will likely not be frozen if I am trying to be realistic with my expectations.
Also to do:
- finish sanding the wall
- prime the wall
- paint the wall
- sew the baby wipes
- sew the diaper inserts
- finish practicing for hypnobirthing
- buy my dang rocking chair that I keep putting off
I think that is all. I haven’t even had my coffee yet though, so I am probably forgetting some things!
Serenity's Embrace 