breakfast update

So far this week I've had oatmeal (not the instant kind, the Scottish kind), egg and cheese on an English muffin, leftovers, and smoothies. The smoothie I have by my side now is gray with purple speckles, quite pretty really. It's made of banana, silken tofu, green phytonutrient powder, peaches and blueberries. I usually put in whatever I have on hand. It's the end of the month, so my usual stock of frozen fruit is dwindling down to what we have giant amounts of (blueberries in bulk, maybe picked last year?) and what we only use small amounts of (peaches are tart).

I suspect that the problem with keeping us fed on good homemade stuff is a lack of routine. There are things we have to do each day, but they get done differently each day of the week. Cooking from scratch, meal planning, grocery budgeting -- those things get crammed into the edges of my days of craziness, if I have the energy to put them in at all.

My co-parent lives out of town. He comes each week to spend a couple of days in the house, bringing the Gamer, who is enrolled as a distance student in a democratic high school here. But they are never the same two days, and sometimes it's three days. They don't always arrive at the same time of day, either. Sometimes Co-parent leaves with one of the little boys, sometimes with two of them, and there's no rhyme or reason to who he takes with him that time. It drives me up a wall but the kids need to see him as much as they can.

It's also a whole bunch of my fault. Whether we bus, walk, or bike to school and back to pick up the boys depends on the weather, if someone has a cold, if there's exact change in my pocket, if upstairs cousin is driving to work (in which case he'll bring the boys to school) or biking to work (in which case he probably won't, although the Hero does fit on his Xtracycle). There are two buses we can take to get to school, one forty-five minutes before the hour and one fifteen minutes after. Which of those we take depends on how deep I am into a project (or sleep) when the forty-five minute early bus arrives. There's no structure to it. Here we are in April still having to think through our method and schedule for getting to and from school, every single time. It's exhausting.

If we figure out a plan now, we'll get to work it for only six weeks before school is out. Should I bother? Can I keep a daily/weekly structure running even through the changes and interruptions that co-parent's entirely random work schedule brings?