Greetings! I tried my hardest to get this post out before West and I headed to baby yoga, but failed. Ah, well. An afternoon break to discuss my family's chill chest is still pretty good, right? Yesterday, I shared our freezer, the organizational makeover of which has been really functioning well for us. As promised, here is the fridge.

I care about having an organized refrigerator for the same reason I care about having a tidy freezer: It's just more efficient in the long run. Short term, you do have to do more work when it's time to put away groceries and replace items you've taken out, but the sheer joy of not having to slam shut the door and hope nothing falls out before it closes is worth it.

With the fridge, as with the freezer, my main goal is to make this easily maintainable. I don't have time to clean and organize the fridge every week, and anyway, that's backwards: I want the fridge tidy to help me out with cooking and shopping and snacking, not just for the heck of it. So, to keep things humming along, I find it helpful to have large zones for things. This way, you know where to look for something, which exponentially increases your odds of actually finding it. And what helps keep zones the way they were intended? Say it with me now: Labels. Yeah, that dry-erase tape I talked about yesterday is AWESOME. I LOVE IT. I want to marry it and have, like, 10,000 of its babies. It makes labeling things so easy that you actually get around to labeling things. (This post is not sponsored. I am just a dry-erase tape freak).

My zones are pretty self-explanatory, and they'll change for each family. We don't eat meat, so we don't need a place to have meat that won't contaminate the rest of the food, but you might. We also have a whole shelf devoted to nut butters....so that's probably just us. I find it's key to have a designated spot for leftovers, (top right) because we always have leftovers, and having them front and center makes it more likely we'll eat them. Having a space for them makes it more likely we won't trash the rest of the fridge trying to cram them in somewhere. It's a win-win. Drinks take up the bottom of the fridge, with juices in an easy-pullout container that helps keep things tidy. And finally, Lou has her own zone.

Remember back when I shared Lou's snack zones? Man, they were a good idea, providing an array of healthy snacks that Lou could reach easily. Well, we're still using that system (though I'd be lying if I said the zones are always beautifully stocked...sometimes they get a little low, like the rest of the pantry), and I've actually expanded it. Here's the thing: Lou takes a lunch to school every day. In the fall, when she enters pre-K, she'll take breakfast and lunch. (School provides both, but since Lou is veg, we send her with her own food). And here's the other thing: making Lou's lunch is an inordinate pain in the patooty. I mean, it should not be hard. But (break out your wee violins here) by the time we've made dinner (itself an exercise in chaos), cleaned up after dinner (remember - no dishwasher), given baths to both babes, wrestled with Louisa over undies, jammies, reward stickers, how many stories to read, WHY the gingerbread baby doesn't have friends, gotten some water, said goodnight and made a cocktail, I/we am/are beat. The thought of making a lunch is Just.Too.Much.

So we wait until the morning. And as any family "expert" ever will tell you, that's a bad idea. Mornings are already stressful. Why add onto it? Finally, I hit upon a solution. In the same zones Lou grabs snacks from, I have enough prepped foods that all we have to do in the morning is grab a bunch that make sense and throw in the lunch bag. We have done this out of desperation in the past, but this time I consciously made enough food for her lunches and snacks.

I don't make a ton of fancy stuff. I do rinse and slice fruit (and squeeze lemon juice over fruit that would brown), mix yogurt with jam or honey and put in the tie-dye squeeze pouches, add apple sauce or similar to the other squeeze pouches, cut up veggies, cooking any that need it (like edamame, which I also salt a bit) and apportioning cheese slices or balls.

You might remember that we also had an unrefrigerated snack zone, from which we also add lunch staples: mostly chips, crackers, nuts, dried fruit and seaweed. This is also where we keep Lou's cereal, which she can get herself in the mornings.

It doesn't take that much time to do it all at once, and the lower stress level is way, way worth it. So, I'm pretty happy with all of this. I think taking my time, even more time than I initially intended, ended up being a good move, because I really though through why I even cared about an organized fridge and how we as a fam could maintain it once I had gotten there. And the lunch thing - I dig it. It turns out that I spend about one day a week doing food prep anyway, whether it's soaking beans, cold-brewing coffee, making hummus, drying fruit and (not lately) making bread and tortillas, so adding in some easy meal prep for Lou's lunches on that day is a no-brainer.

And that, my friends, is it for today! I hope it's as gorgeous where you are as it is in New York today. Enjoy and I'll see you soon!