Monday Q&A-Breakfast for Dinner, Pantry Staples, and Cleaning Kids Rooms

1. Becky asked,

I’m interested in the fact that you don’t seem to eat a big meal on Sundays. Do you always just have breakfast for Sunday dinner? I find that fascinating.

This is fried mush, a breakfast for dinner staple.

Yup, we eat breakfast for dinner almost every Sunday night. I know that’s not especially traditional, but it works for us. Our church service starts rather late (11:00 am), and so we don’t have a particularly early breakfast on Sunday mornings. Instead of eating at 7:30, we end up eating around 8:30 or 9:00. We usually get home from church around 1:00 or later, so we don’t end up eating lunch until after our usual time (1:00 instead of 12:00).

All of that is to say that we just usually are not that hungry by the time dinnertime rolls around, and so a lighter dinner works very well for us.

Also, we try to make Sundays a restful day, even for me, and having breakfast for dinner means that I don’t have to mess with a lot of cooking and a lot of dishes. Another reason I like to do breakfast for dinner is that it’s really inexpensive.

We do occasionally do other types of meals on Sundays (sometimes we have cold cut sandwiches, or sometimes we have a bunch of snacky things, like crackers, cheese, fruit, and vegetables), but for the most part, we have pancakes, waffles, or french toast.

2. Will asked this question:

Out of curiosity – your pix tend to be of perishables and snacks. I don’t see a lot of old-fashioned staples: flour, sugar, canned tomaotes, bread, etc. When do you get those? How much food do you have in your pantry?

Ohh, I have flour…let me tell you, I have flour! If I remember correctly, you’re a fairly new reader, which means that you weren’t around during Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. Flour and sugar always go on sale at those times, so I buy incredible amounts of them and store them on my pantry shelf in my laundry room. You can see a bit of my flour here.

I’ve just about worked through my sugar supply from Christmas (I didn’t buy as much sugar as flour) but I still have a respectable amount of flour sitting down there.

I grind my own whole wheat flour, using grain that I buy in 50 pound bags. It takes me a while to use up 50 pounds of grain, and so I don’t think I’ve bought any since I started posting grocery pictures.

I buy very little in the way of bread, since I make almost all of the bread that we eat.

And I don’t buy very many canned goods, although you will occasionally see those in my photos. When possible, I prefer to use fresh or frozen items, since they’re more nutritious than canned items.

I don’t have an honest to goodness pantry…I have to store a fair amount of food in my kitchen cupboards. However, I’m blessed to have a nice sturdy shelving unit in my laundry room and I store my flour and some other staples there. How much food I have there all depends on what the sales have been like lately. If I’ve found a lot of good deals, it’s more full, and if the deals have been sparse, it’s fairly empty.

3. Finally, Clare wrote in with this question via email:

Do you have any advice/recommendations for how to help kids (two boys, 10 and 8 ) keep their room clean?You mentioned that your kids clean their rooms every morning–how might you suggest I get started? What has worked for you? Thanks for any advice.

I do have my kids clean their rooms once a day, and while this doesn’t always work out perfectly, it does keep us from having to clean up three week’s worth of mess at one time.

During the school year, we finish up all of our school work and then the kids have to clean their rooms before they can go outside to play or before they can use their half hour of computer game time. Of course, some toys end up being taken out after we clean up, but at least every 24 hours we start with a clean slate!

Depending on how messy things get after our afternoon clean-up, we sometimes do a little picking up before bedtime as well.

To make this job easier for my kids, I try to have a separate drawer/bin for each type of toy. There’s a big bin for Duplos, a drawer for toy food, a big bin for regular legos, and so on. And we have one drawer for little miscellaneous toys that defy classification (we call this the miscellaneous drawer, actually!). This simple system makes it possible for even my three year old to put things away in their appropriate places.

Of course, being kids, they don’t always put everything away where it’s supposed to go…things get shoved under beds, toy jewelry ends up in the food drawer, books get shoved into closets and so on. So, while I have them clean up on their own most of the time, every now and then I go in and help them reorganize everything.

I think think that it’s good to get into the habit of maintaining order and cleanliness instead of letting clutter and mess pile up, so I hope that this method is teaching my children lessons that will serve them later on in their lives.

And just so you’re not too impressed, you should know that my children’s room’s are rarely clean and pristine for more than a few minutes at a time, that they (especially the younger two) struggle to clean up cheerfully, and that all of them have difficulty staying on task when it’s time to clean. 😉