I outsourced 2 family dinners a week. Sometimes good parenting means doing less.

• Deciding what to cook every night was one of the most exhausting parts of my week.
• I started ordering meal kits for just two dinners a week.
• Having fewer meals to plan has significantly reduced my mental load.

There are a few questions in my household that irritate me more than “What’s for dinner?”

I think it’s the casual assumption that I have created a meal plan for the week, done all the food shopping and prep, and gotten dinner on the table at exactly the time everyone wants it, all while trying to accommodate my kids’ likes and dislikes. Not to mention the cleanup after.

We are a family of four, and just the idea of “What’s for dinner?” can be exhausting. Every parent deals with this every night, but that doesn’t make it any less of a pain in the butt, even when my husband helps out.

I tried a meal subscription plan

This past spring, I was at peak meal-planning-overwhelm, when I remembered I’d gotten a card in the mail offering a discount if I signed up for a particular meal delivery subscription — one that we had used in the past right after my second kid was born — but hadn’t tried in years. “Their food was pretty good,” I mused to myself. The wheels started turning, and the next thing I knew, I had signed the family up for two meals a week.

The impact was immediate and incredible — for me, at least. Just having those two nights a week covered for dinner made such a huge difference in my mental load.

Deciding what to eat is what bothered me the most

Grocery shopping was not my main inconvenience; it was deciding what to have for dinner each night, and then all the prep work. It felt like I was wasting so much mental energy on what we should have, did we have that too recently to have it again this week, does one child hate it so much that she won’t eat it even though the other child loves it, and so on.

I could do more than two days a week, but then the service starts getting pricey for our budget.

Another thing I love is that meal delivery lets me try recipes I wouldn’t usually make. If a recipe calls for spices or sauces I don’t typically have in my kitchen, I find I’m less inclined to make it. But when every ingredient is sent to me in the exact amount needed, I’m all in.

I am not a gourmet chef. I do not toil over recipes of my own invention until I’ve perfected them. But I do know how to follow a recipe and cook the basics, and the meal delivery services I’ve tried make it even easier. Each recipe gives you step-by-step instructions and the exact amount of every ingredient. And if you can’t stand cooking, some services offer pre-made meals that just need to be heated up.

These days, I am no longer irritated when someone asks, “What’s for dinner?” I simply say, “Chicken burrito bowls,” or “Pork stir fry with lettuce cups,” and go on my merry way.

Do both kids love every meal every time? Absolutely not. But the subscription has lots of options every week, so I can easily find meals that work for everyone most of the time. Then I find it much less daunting to have a meal plan for the remaining nights of the week. And that to me is worth its weight in gold.