This week my husband was out of town. It is harder on me when he travels because I am virtually a single mom during that time. Everything here is still going on – I work, the kids have school and all their activities. Normally, I am the one that does the majority of the kid things. He does help out with homework and some of the after school driving (since he is coach for several sports) and he cooks dinner if I am doing the running around. That said, I am sure he would have more of a challenge stepping into my role for the week as I am the keeper of the schedule and the finder of all lost items.

Things are different when he is away. His routine is not necessarily my routine so when he is gone, we do everything my way. The kids notice it, too. I tell them before they leave for school that we are doing, this, this and this after school and off we go. When my husband is home, I find myself trying to work around his schedule. For example, if I want to eat dinner at 5:00 and then run errands and stop at the gym on my way home, I do it without a thought when he travels. However, if he is home, he doesn’t want to eat dinner at 5:00 because he is working out at that time. My workout time has to move or not happen that night. He wants dinner between 6:00 and 7:30. I am more flexible in order to fit it in my after school schedule.

My husband is a meat and potatoes kind of guy. All of his meals, which are very good, involve the grill. He makes, on average, four kinds of meat per meal to satisfy all the picky eaters. It annoys me because it enables them. I make one meal and you can skip the items that you don’t like. So, like I said, when he is away, we do things my way.

On Monday, we had breakfast for dinner. I made pancakes, eggs (although I did cook them two different ways) and bacon. We ate at 5:30 (I went to the gym at 4:15) in order to get my son to basketball practice later that night. On Tuesday, I made tacos. Everyone will eat them and they can choose what to put on it. On Wednesday, I was going to make pulled pork because, again, everyone will eat it and it is a crockpot meal. However, we had leftover taco meat and I knew we would not eat all the pork if I made it. I told the kids that I would run them to their things, I would go to the gym and we would have tacos again. My middle daughter complained. Too bad, I am not wasting the meat. While I was at the gym, I came up with a great idea – nachos!

Now before you go and judge me, you have to admit that nachos are just as healthy as tacos. The bag of chips is just like a hard shell taco. Adding vegetables and cheese, nachos have items from all four food groups. Our nachos were make your own. Everyone started with a plate of nacho chips. You could add meat, shredded cheese (not the fattening cheese dip), tomatoes, avocados and sour cream. We put our plates in the microwave to warm up the meat and melt the cheese. Everyone grabbed a drink and we were sitting at the table in five minutes.

My husband came home last night. I made pasta for dinner, which is one of his favorites. We ate at 6:30. I didn’t get to the gym. Looks like everything is back to normal.