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

The author signed up for a meal service twice a week.

Courtesy of the author

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 planThis 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 mostGrocery 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.