Yesterday I blogged about fun lunch ideas and today I’ve got a great meal planning giveaway for you!

Families with Purpose is a wonderful company founded by Polly Schlafhauser to “inspire and enable parents to create a meaningful family life for themselves and their children by providing products, resources, and services which empower parents to take control of their family life and build a warm and loving home.”

Their tag line is “Helping Families Build Their Best Life.”  How awesome is that?! Their website is just chock full of parenting help. There are tons of resources for organizing and planning, running a busy household, simplifying, having family fun time, and building strong family bonds. (All things I love dearly and post about a lot around here too!) Sign up for their free newsletter–you won’t regret it!

I must admit, I also really connect with them because they’re working moms. Motherhood is difficult no matter how you cut it, but working moms face a different kind of challenges and the resources at Families with Purpose really cut to the heart of the matter for me as a working mom.

So when Polly asked if I would like to review her new E-book, Stop the Meal Planning Madness, I definitely said yes.

I already do weekly meal planning, but the idea of having monthly (and yearly!!) meal plans is both overwhelming and, well, brilliant to me.

And she had me at the first line…”A few years ago I began to worry about how my inability to handle certain aspects of running a household and managing a large family were affecting my kids.”

This simple little E-book is not about giving you a one-size-fits-all answer. It’s not a list of 365 meals for your family. It’s an engaging, down-to-earth workbook to give you a system for developing (and maintaining!) a meal plan that suits your family. Chapter 1 starts out with how to develop your family’s vision for meal time. The “atmosphere and experience” you want to achieve when you sit down at the table.

I loved doing these easy worksheets. I started thinking about the difference between reconnecting and simply engaging with each other. I realized that what our family seems to need right now is peace. We want to teach our children to engage quietly and calming at the table. We want to share our days with each other and reconnect at the heart level–but not to engage in lively debates. That might work for some families–or even for us in the future. But right now we need to have a place to unwind and relax from the hustle of the day.

Stop the Meal Planning Madness is a complete package, including all the worksheets, planning pages, and checklists to create your own personal yearly meal plan, one step at a time–starting with weekly plans, then monthly, then seasonally until you get to a full year.

In addition, I had the opportunity to review the MomAgenda Weekly Meal Planner (and continue to use it!).

This weekly planner pad has a huge magnet on the back so it hangs easily on the fridge and is perfect for laying out the weeks meals, jotting down grocery needs, a noting special activities that might affect your food choices that week. (We always have pizza on weekday church nights.) There’s 52 pages on the pad, so you could just save them all as you use them and go back to review and modify what worked and what didn’t work as you go through your yearly planning exercise with Polly’s book.

****THIS GIVEAWAY IS CLOSED****

And Families with Purpose is offering one of these meal planning sets to one Walking in High Cotton reader! That’s one copy of Stop the Meal Planning Madness and one MomAgenda Weekly Meal Planner to one of you!

**ENTRIES** (Leave a comment for each, only one entry per action.)

• LEAVE a comment telling me what your biggest struggle with meal planning is.
• LIKE Walking in High Cotton on Facebook.
• LINK UP a summer fun post with Family Connections {Summer 2012} (no need to leave a comment, all post will be automatically entered)
• FOLLOW @FamiliesPurpose on Twitter.
• LIKE Families with Purpose on Facebook.
• SIGN UP for the Families with Purpose newsletter.

This GIVEAWAY will close on Monday, July 30, 2012 at 11:59 pm, and I’ll announce the winner via Random.org on Tuesday morning.

{Note: This giveaway is sponsored by Families with Purpose. I received a free copy of Stop the Meal Planning Madness and the MomAgenda Weekly Meal Planner for the purpose of this review–but I’m recommended them all from my own great experience. Walking in High Cotton is an affiliate of Families with Purpose, see PR & Disclosure for details.}