December Menu Challenge

I'm a pretty organized person, but I see friends posting month long menus and start making excuses as to why that won't work for us:  "Our schedule is too hectic and changes too much."  "Well, I'll just use my meals out of the freezer",  "I'm staying on budget: and just plain "why bother".

I'm beginning to see a lack of discipline in my life and realized that meal planning is one more of my areas of responsibilities where I'm lacking discipline.  Now I'm not just feeding HandyMan and myself but also GBaby.  Good nutrition is important and when I'm making meals on a whim, we're not always getting all our food groups.

Last week my friend Sarah at Simple Pleasures blogged about how she went about making up her monthly menu.  She and her husband are grad students with classes and jobs.  Surely they have a pretty nutty schedule, right?  She can do this, I can at least give it an honest try. (Thanks for the kick in the right direction Sarah!)

I sat down with a calendar for December and our calendar as well as my list of meals in the freezer and a mental list of what's in the pantry.  My main goal is to cut down the grocery bill and use what we have.  Given our schedule, I usually cook on Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings and the somewhere in the week we run out of leftovers and I pull in another meal.  So I filled in those days and then made a separate list of 6 ready to go meals to pull from.  I also added a list of breakfast items that are stock in the fridge and freezer so I have a ready-list for breakfast too.

We'll see how it works out.  Any veteran menu planners out there have any tips for me?