Some simple change to our family routine

About half way through the school holidays, maybe three weeks ago we decided to make some changes.

I pose a question to you all, is change good or bad for you? As always looking on Google and asking this question there were a lot of sites and blogs that all have similar concepts in why change is good and here are the top three that I found:

• Change allows you to become flexible and more accepting to changes that happen daily without freaking out about it.
• Change ensures that you experience new and wonderful things in your life preventing it from becoming stagnant.
• Change means you learn something new all of the time even when you do not realise it. Having a wider knowledge allows for more fun stories to the grandchildren…when I were a lad………

Being in the Armed Forces we have to accept change as part of our job role as the situation can change at anytime requiring instant decisions to be made. For me as a chef in the Army the change maybe as simple as soldiers needing to be fed at short notice outside of the routine meal times. Don’t get me wrong after an initial whinge, as we hate change to some degree, the food is always delivered at the highest quality to the demand of the soldier.

Now! Lets take this question in to our home. Routine seems to be normal to any family I can imagine. The kids need to be taken to school on time, meals at the same times and even bath nights at the same time leading to bedtime, at the same time. This routine is good for us as it instils a discipline we all need, especially when we are younger keeps enabling the mind to keep active, precise and can help with motivation.

The changes we as a family have embraced are small but subtle and come in the form of changing the way we eat which is the focus I will keep on. I do believe that as a family we eat very well with balanced meals.

So why change if it seems to be going well? I hear you ask. What we have done is ensure we eat more vegetables and have a more varied set of meals including the introduction of new flavours and foods. From here my wife and I decided to start writing a meal planner to help with this small change.

Has this small change benefited me in many a way? I think it has in some very exciting ways. I can now have that little bit of focus on the blog, as I will now be uploading on a Friday, our weekly menu that we just had. This is so that I can upload specific recipes allowing you to try what we have and maybe let you embrace some small changes in your lives. I am also working on having a menu planner and shopping list creator so keep an eye for this in the near future.

Three weeks on I feel these are some of the exciting elements that this small change has brought:

• The kids get excited to see what they will be having for dinner each day
• It has helped budget for our weekly food shop
• Helped use up stuff in the cupboards which can be forgotten about
• Has introduced more varied dishes
• Has ensured the inclusion of more fruit and vegetables
• Brings a little bit of stability and some nice changes to how I manage this food blog