Finding Peace Through Shortcuts And Organization

This journey of  mine has been quite intense. After breaking down and asking a friend of mine who works with energy touch therapy to help me and the incredible experience I had with her as well as a productive workshop which helped me to realize my own passions and potential, then followed by ANOTHER healing session (all of this within a one week period) I have decided to take this week to sit back and "take it all in". To allow the things that I have experienced, the healing I have done, to take it's full effect. I'm finding that I am far more productive even when I'm purposely laying low. I'm not "stopping" myself from doing things, just only doing them if I feel inspired to. And, I've been pretty inspired - but not overwhelmed, which was often the feeling I was left with at the end of the day when I felt like the balance between what I WANTED to do and what I HAD to do was way out of whack. Now, that is taking a back seat and I am learning how to balance myself and do what I CAN do and absolve myself from any further expectation - and COMPLETELY dismissing any expectations my husband (or anyone) has of me that I feel I can not fulfill.

The woman I worked with during my healing session said something to me that really struck a chord. When I told her about my abandonment issues with my mother and how I wasn't really raised by any family figure person (at least not consistently enough to make much of an impact) and ended up in foster care. I told her that I felt like I was getting close to letting go of my expectations or desire for my mother to love me the way I felt I needed her to. She said "If she was in a wheelchair, would you expect her to walk? She is emotionally handicapped and simply can not be what you need or want her to be." WOW. That really hit home. I seriously finally feel free from that, I feel like it's OK to love her as is, and to be grateful for any amount of love that I receive from her. So, life has been pretty amazing and it's only getting better!

Last night I had no idea what I was making for dinner, but I decided while in the store to make lasagna. I came home and thought this might be a good opportunity to make a double batch since I have been wanting to experiment with making meals ahead of time since dinner seems to be like the black plague of my day. It's hard to be excited about cooking dinner EVERY night. I'm sure you all know where I'm coming from. Anyways, I did it! IT was really pretty easy - and though I haven't cooked up the frozen one yet, I'm sure it'll be wonderful.

One thing I've also been doing lately is cutting up all of my veggies and store them in the fridge so that it's one less step later. Plus, we are pretty big into making our own pizza's out of Naan Bread, so having diced up ingredients ready to go has been a wonderful tool.

The price of my meat at the supermarket went up, so I am now buying three pound packages of Organic Ground Beef from Costco for $12.99. It's a good deal - certainly better than what I was paying. Because of this I began thinking that it might be smart to just make a bunch of it up. Why not?

I love sausage on my pizza and knew I was using it for my lasagna's, so instead of combining all of the meat I cooked the sausage first and scooped some out into a separate container for pizza's this week.

Doing things like this gave me lots of good choices for pizza's! Now I can just go into the fridge and get out a couple of things that are ready to go and have a homemade pizza for myself done in 15 minutes.

So, I am not familiar with "make ahead" meals, and I've never really done it before. I basically just doubled the recipe for lasagna and then just made two of them. 

YUM! The cheese is my favorite part. I did actually add some spinach to this too, but did not take a picture of it. I LOVE hiding spinach in food. The kids eat it right up and I know they are getting essential nutrients that they otherwise wouldn't be getting. Especially in a recipe like lasagna where there isn't a lot of veggie going on.

Photo by Kiyra Jo. <3

And, WA-LA! TWO dinners for not much more time than it took me to put together one. Some night in the near future I am going to be REALLY happy I did this.

Finally I labeled it, set it out to cool (I like to freeze things after they become room temperature).

And, we enjoyed the other one....it was GOOD!

So, I basically just made two dinners, and multiple lunches with little effort. I think I might be addicted to this shortcut thing. I really do think this might be the key to my sanity, that's for sure.