I'm Lisa. I'm an accountant at a mid-size firm (yes, tax season is exactly as bad as you've heard; no, I will not do your return), my husband Dave manages a hardware store, and we have two kids, Emma (9) and Ben (6). Both of us work full time. This page is not about having it all. It's about the actual mechanics: the chart, the freezer, the calendar, the neighbor, and the very specific compromises that get two kids to school with their lunches and their shoes on and two adults to work more or less on time. None of it is brilliant. All of it is written down, because the thing nobody tells you is that the system only works if it's on paper where everyone can see it.

I started this page in July, on a night when I couldn't sleep, mostly to have somewhere to keep the recipes. If any of it helps you, I'm glad. If you have a better way, please tell me. I'm not proud.

This is taped to the kitchen cabinet at kid eye level. The rule is that whatever is on the chart is not up for discussion, which saves roughly eleven arguments a morning. The school bus comes at 7:25. We work backward from that. Everything that CAN be done the night before IS done the night before: lunches packed, clothes laid out (including socks; socks are the enemy), backpacks by the door, permission slips signed.

What makes it work: the same breakfast every day (I know), clothes chosen the night before (Emma picks her own; Ben picks between two), and the bottom step. If you're on the bottom step with your shoes on, you're done, and you can read until it's time. Ben has read more books on that step than in his bed.

What doesn't work, still: hair. Mine especially.

Once a month, on a Sunday, I cook for about four hours and fill the chest freezer in the garage. It sounds like a lot and it is, but it means that on a Tuesday night at 6:10 when I walk in the door, dinner is a matter of turning on the oven. We do not eat takeout more than once a week anymore and we used to eat it three or four times, which was costing a fortune and making everyone cranky.

The plan:

• Saturday: make the list, shop. I buy ground beef in the big family packs, cheese in the big bricks, and a flat of cans of tomatoes and beans. The warehouse club membership pays for itself in two months of this.
• Sunday, 1 pm: Dave takes the kids to the park or his mother's. This is important. Brown five pounds of ground beef with onions in the big pot, all at once. This is the base for both the lasagna and the chili and it goes into two bowls.
• 2 pm: Two lasagnas (one for dinner that night, one frozen) in foil pans. Chili in the big pot on the stove, simmering while I do the lasagnas.
• 3 pm: Chili cools, then gets ladled into quart freezer bags, laid flat on a cookie sheet to freeze, so they stack like books. Muffins in the oven, two dozen.
• 4 pm: Something else easy if I have the energy: a double batch of meatballs, or chicken thighs in a marinade in bags, or soup. If I don't have the energy, I don't.
• 5 pm: Wipe everything down, label everything with a marker (name of the thing, the date, and how to reheat it, because if I don't write down "350, 45 min, covered" Dave will call me at work to ask), update the freezer inventory on the fridge, and sit down. Everyone comes home to the smell of the first lasagna.

This gets us dinner about three nights a week. The other nights are eggs, pasta, breakfast-for-dinner, the one takeout night, and whatever Grandma sends home on Thursdays.

Freezer Lasagna (makes two 9x13 pans; each serves 6, or 4 with leftovers for lunch)

• 2 lbs of the browned ground beef with onion (from the big pot), drained
• 2 jars (about 26 oz each) spaghetti sauce, plus one 15-oz can of tomato sauce
• 1 teaspoon each dried oregano and basil, 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• 2 boxes (1 lb each) lasagna noodles, cooked a couple of minutes less than the box says, drained, laid on towels
• 2 lbs ricotta cheese (or cottage cheese; nobody in this house can tell)
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan
• 2 lbs shredded mozzarella

Stir the sauce, tomato sauce and herbs into the meat and simmer 10 minutes. Beat the eggs into the ricotta with the Parmesan and a little pepper. In each foil pan: a thin layer of meat sauce, a layer of noodles, a third of the ricotta, a third of the mozzarella, then sauce, noodles, ricotta, mozzarella, sauce, noodles, the last of the sauce and the last of the mozzarella on top. Cover tightly with foil. To bake now: 375 degrees, 45 minutes covered, then 15 minutes uncovered, then let it stand 10 minutes or it will slide. To freeze: do not bake; wrap the whole pan in a second layer of foil, label it, freeze up to three months. To bake from frozen: 350 degrees, covered, about an hour and a half, then uncover for the last 15 minutes. Or thaw it in the fridge the night before and bake as usual. This is why the labels matter.

Big-Pot Chili (about 6 quarts; freeze in quart bags, each bag feeds the four of us)

• 3 lbs of the browned ground beef with onion, drained
• 2 green peppers, chopped (chop them into the beef while it browns if you're smart)
• 3 cloves garlic, chopped, or a big spoon of the jarred kind
• 3 tablespoons chili powder, 2 teaspoons cumin, 1 teaspoon oregano, salt and pepper
• 3 cans (28 oz each) crushed or diced tomatoes
• 1 can (15 oz) tomato sauce
• 4 cans (15 oz each) kidney beans and/or pinto beans, drained and rinsed

Everything in the big pot. Bring it to a boil, turn it down, and let it simmer, uncovered, stirring now and then, for at least an hour, longer if you're busy with the lasagna. Taste it; it usually wants more salt. Cool it (I set the pot in the sink in cold water), ladle into bags, squeeze the air out, seal, lay flat to freeze. To serve: thaw in the fridge or run the bag under hot water to loosen it, then heat in a pot. Cheese, crackers and a bag of shredded lettuce on top and it's dinner. It is mild; the kids eat it. Dave adds hot sauce at the table.

Banana Oat Muffins (two dozen; these are breakfast, snack, and the thing in the lunchbox that comes home eaten)

• 3 cups flour
• 1 1/2 cups rolled oats (the regular kind, not instant)
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking soda, 1 teaspoon baking powder, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 4 very ripe bananas, mashed (the black ones; this is what they're for)
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 1 cup milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• Optional: a cup of chocolate chips, which is the difference between eaten and not eaten

Oven at 375. Line two muffin tins with paper cups. Mix the dry things in the big bowl. Mix the wet things (bananas, eggs, oil, milk, vanilla) in the other bowl. Pour wet into dry and stir just until you don't see flour; lumps are fine and overmixing makes them tough. Fold in the chips. Fill the cups about three-quarters full. Bake 18 to 22 minutes, until the tops spring back. Cool completely on a rack, then into gallon freezer bags. To thaw: one from the freezer into the lunchbox at 7:00 is perfect by lunch. Or 20 seconds in the microwave. Emma eats hers frozen, which I've stopped arguing about.

School lets out at 2:50. I get home at 5:45 on a good day. That is three hours, five days a week, and nobody has one answer for it, so here is our five answers. It is a quilt. It comes apart about once a month and gets sewn back together.

Snow days, teacher workdays, and the day one of them throws up at 10 am are handled by a phone tree: Carol first, Grandma second, then whichever of us has fewer meetings. We have a "sick day box" in the hall closet with new coloring books and a video that only comes out on sick days, and I keep a folder of work I can do from the kitchen table. It's still the thing most likely to make me cry in the car.

One big paper calendar, the free kind from the insurance agent, on the fridge, held with the good magnets. Four colors of marker: red for me, blue for Dave, green for Emma, purple for Ben. If it isn't on the calendar, it isn't happening. This rule has been tested by a nine-year-old who mentioned a birthday party twenty minutes before it started, and the rule held, and there were tears, and she has written down every party since.

Sunday night after the kids are in bed, Dave and I sit at the table with the calendar and the coffee and go through the week: who's driving where, which night is the one takeout night, whether either of us has a late meeting, what's in the freezer. It takes fifteen minutes. It is the most important fifteen minutes of the week and we've skipped it exactly twice, and both weeks were disasters.

Also on the fridge: the freezer inventory, the Y's monthly schedule, the school lunch menu, Carol's phone number, and Ben's drawing of the cat, which is not organizational but is not going anywhere.

1. The same breakfast every day.
2. Store-bought cupcakes for the class party. With the sprinkles already on. The kids do not care. The kids have never once cared.
3. The Y. For about a year I thought a good mother would have found some way to be home at 2:50. A good mother found the Y, where her children play dodgeball with twenty other kids whose mothers also found the Y.
4. Not volunteering for the field trip. I volunteer for the things that happen after 5 or on Saturdays. That is my share and it is enough.
5. Paper plates on Sunday freezer-cooking day. I have already washed every pot in the house.
6. The one takeout night. It is Friday and it is pizza and it is a tradition now, not a failure.
7. Letting them watch TV at Carol's. Carol is a grown woman running her own house.
8. Going to bed at 9:30. I used to stay up to have "my time." My time was watching the news and feeling tired. Sleep is my time now.
9. Saying no to the PTA treasurer job. I do numbers all day. I said it three times before they heard it.
10. Working. Just: working. I like my job, we need the money, and my kids see a mother who likes her job. I stopped apologizing for that sometime around Emma's seventh birthday and I have not started again.

Still working on: the hair. And the fact that the sick-day thing makes me cry in the car. Some things you don't get over; you just get a folder for them.

People ask, sometimes a little pointedly, what my husband does. Here is what Dave does. He does every pickup, every day, because the store closes at 5 and my office doesn't. He does the dishes every night, which I did not ask him to do and which is the single most romantic thing he has ever done for me. He does Grandma, in the sense that she's his mother and he's the one who calls her. He does bath and bedtime three nights a week. He does the Sunday calendar with me and the Sunday park trip without me. He does the grocery run on Saturday with the list I write.

And he does mornings on Tuesdays. Every Tuesday I leave the house at 6:20 and go to the early spinning class at the Y and then straight to work, and Dave does the entire chart above by himself, all of it, hair included. Emma's hair on Tuesdays is a ponytail. Ben's hair on Tuesdays is whatever it wants to be. They get to school. Nobody has ever been late. I did not see this for the first year because I was in the habit of checking, and then one Tuesday I didn't check, and it turned out he'd never needed me to.

I say this not because Dave is a hero for doing a fifth of the mornings. I say it because for a long time the answer to "what does your husband do" was "he helps," and helping is not the same as doing, and it took both of us a while to learn the difference. Tuesdays are where we started. We'll get to Thursdays.