Early fall wind blew threw the house as No. 1 and I sat at the dining room table. He was doing homework and I was keeping him company while going through the mail. The girls were alternatingly reading to each other and turning the TV up so blaringly loud that even No. 1 started to scold them like a parent.

Between writing spelling words and their definitions, No. 1 said, "Dinner smells good, Mom."

"Yeah, it really does," I said, thinking I should check the timer on the chicken I had baking in the oven.

It was a Wednesday evening and the fourth day in a row that I had made dinner instead of saying I was too hot, too tired, too annoyed or too lazy to do so and taking the family out for dinner. It had recently occurred to me that we didn't eat out nearly as often when No. 1 and No. 2 were toddlers as we seem to now that No. 3 is a toddler. I hated realizing that.

Eating out is essentially a double whammy for me: I'm wasting money since I have all the fixings in the house for a decent meal, and I always hate knowing that even with the right amount of insulin I shouldn't be eating fast food.

Summer, though, makes it very difficult to cook in our house. The heat can make me so cranky that pretty much all I want to do when I get home from work is sit on the couch and cool off. It doesn't help that our century-old house doesn't have central air and tends to hold the heat in pretty well (a bonus in the fall and spring is that it holds the cool in, too). So turning on the stove or the oven (or both) in a kitchen that's already pushing 80 degrees just isn't appealing. It gets so easy to say: "I'm not heating up the house. I'm not messing up the clean kitchen."

I hope I can make it the rest of the week cooking and eating at home. It's sort of an unofficial goal. Knowing that I've made it four days in a row, though, is motivation to keep going.