Weekly Menu Planner

I have been seeing a lot of these weekly menu planner ideas lately.  I kept thinking I need to do something like that.  But maybe not exactly like that.  Meaning, I need to put my own twist on it.  If you haven't already started to figure me out, that is the way I do most things.  I can't just follow a recipe/ pattern/ instructions exactly as they are written.  I have to do something to make it better.

Anyway, a lot of the menu planners I have seen included some type of chalkboard or dry erase calendar.  I am not a fan of chalkboard.  Or dry erase for that matter.  And call me lazy, but I am not a fan of writing things down over and over.  So I thought... MAGNETS.  That is what I need.  I need to come up with some kind of magnet that I can write every possible meal on each one, then I can reuse them each week.  That would not only save me from having to write down every meal every week, but it would also make meal planning easier because I would be able to see every possible meal written down on magnets right before my very eyes.  It would also make it easy to swap out days, which I seem to do pretty often. 

So this idea has been in the back of my head for some time now.  I knew I wanted magnets, but I was not sure how or what I would use for them, and I was not sure what to put them on.  I thought, should I try to find a magnetic board to hang in my kitchen?  Nah.  I don't really have a place to hang it.  Besides, what would I do with it?  Write days of the week on it or print a calendar to glue to it?  Nothing quite seemed to work right for me. 

But then, last week I finally got around to buying my 2012 calendars.  I chose the Family Plan-It Calendar, which, unbeknownst to me, included this:

A laminated, weekly planner sheet with magnets on the back.  The perfect thing to stick on my fridge and stick meal magnets to.  So I got started making magnets.

This is what I needed to make the magnets:

Old bottle caps

Magnets

Pencil

Fine-tipped sharpie

Scrapbook paper

Tacky glue

Quarter

Scissors

(I know there is a glue stick in the picture.  I did use it at first but then realized that the tacky glue works much better.)

Start by turning the scrapbook paper over to the plain side and tracing around the quarter with the pencil.  Repeat over and over until you have enough circles for your bottle caps.

Then cut out your circles.  On the pretty side, use the sharpie to write the names of your meals on the circles.  Glue the circles inside the bottle caps with tacky glue.  Then glue the magnets to the bottom of the bottle caps with tacky glue.  This should be easy because the magnets will stick to the bottle caps.  The hard part is making sure you don't put them too close together when they are drying because the magnets will stick together and will be very hard to pull apart while the glue is still drying.  Ask me how I know.

I already had all of the supplies for this project, but I did splurge a little.  I bought this magnetic basket to hold extra magnets and a set of mini dry erase markers.  Just to make it all a little nicer looking.

So, altogether, a pretty simple project.  Don't know why it took me so long to figure out something that would work for me.  Here is my finished product:

The only thing is, I have about 100 more little circles with meals written on them, but I ran out of bottle caps to glue them on.  Guess that means I will have to buy more beer.  Ha!