1 Year Swapiversary

2 of many mid-week meals that would never have happened without The Swap

It has been one whole year since Shalinee and I started our Swap. Last week we treated ourselves to a decadently leisurely lunch of sushi and plum wine to celebrate our year-long-accomplishment! We have religiously swapped dinner meals every Tuesday for the entire past year. And while we’ve missed a few, it has always been for a good reason, and mostly we’re just shocked at the fact that we’ve managed to keep up with The Swap for a whole entire year. It has been a lot of work (Monday nights are killer!), but it has been so worth it! I know this sounds crazy, but seriously, The Swap has revolutionized my life. Don’t get me wrong, getting dinner on the table is still a major challenge, but The Swap makes it a lot easier. Some of my favorite parts of The Swap:

• My family is consistently eating great, healthy, home-cooked, nutritious, delicious, food prepared with love.
• Although I’m still frenzied with the burden and daily grind of providing food for my family of five, it is much easier than it was before. Coming home from work knowing that dinner just needs to be heated up is a major relief. We almost always sit down to a good wholesome family dinner every single night of the week. The Swap hasn’t taken the pressure off completely, but it has taken the pressure off tremendously.
• My kids are developing an amazing food palate that is at least twice as broad as it would be without The Swap.
• My kids are seeing first-hand what a super-strong-reciprocal-friendship is all about; they see the work that goes into a friendship like that, and they see the joy that comes out of a friendship like that; they see their mom having a best friend.
• Thanks to Shalinee the J-Ms get to eat Indian food a lot! We love Indian food and always have… so this is a huge treat for us!
• Somehow, somewhere along the way in the past year, The Swap has changed my feelings about leftovers. Previously I avoided leftovers like the plague. But over the past year I’ve found that we’re eating leftovers regularly, I’m re-constituting food regularly, and we’re feeling totally differently about leftovers. All this lovingly-prepared-good-food is just too good to waste, and we are motivated to make our Swap meals stretch to cover the weekdays. It is such an interesting and unexpected twist to The Swap, and it is all good.
• The Swap inspires me to think creatively about food and I find myself investing in cooking as a creative outlet again – not just for the Swap meals, but all week long.
• We are eating pasta a lot less often (the kids aren’t thrilled about this, but I sure am!).
• I don’t feel bad anymore on the occasions when I serve my bambinos mac-n-cheese and pizza and chicken nuggets… because it happens so infrequently— thanks to The Swap.

There are lots of other reasons I love The Swap, but there’s my short list.

In the past couple of months Shalinee and I have been really bad about posting our Swaps. We’re just two really busy working moms who are struggling to find time to blog. There is no question that we’re going to keep on swapping indefinitely, but right now we’re trying to figure out how/if to approach the blogging of it. We’re toying around with a whole range of ideas from creating a whole separate Swap Blog to quitting blogging about it altogether. If you have any thoughts on this, we’d love to hear them… so what do you think? Should we keep blogging our Swap? Should we re-define our Swap blogging? Should we quit blogging it altogether? What are your thoughts?

Thanks for reading and Happy Swapiversary!  ~H