It rarely starts with the schoolbag. It starts around a quarter to seven, when you realise three people are hungry and nobody has a plan.
The first weeks of school always feel busier than you expected. Not because one big task appears, but because ten small ones do. Gym kit, swimming certificate, a diary to sign, new times for football practice, an email from school you still haven't opened. And in between all of it, every single evening: what's for dinner?
In July and August, dinner is allowed to be late. A salad at nine is fine. From September it isn't: there's an hour by which the table needs to be set, and that hour doesn't move with your day.
On top of that, the rhythm hasn't settled yet. You don't know which evening will turn out to be the busy one, who's home when, or how long that drop-off really takes. So in those first weeks you end up deciding all over again every day — and that's the part that wears you out. Not the cooking. The deciding.
The quickest win isn't cooking faster. It's deciding less.
On Sunday, pick four fixed evenings and put them on the fridge. Not recipes, just categories: pasta night, tray-bake night, leftovers night, something-from-the-freezer night. Whoever walks in at six doesn't have to come up with anything. You feel that difference immediately.
And leave one evening deliberately blank. Not as a gap in your plan, but as a valve. There's always one evening that goes differently.
Somewhere along the line we picked up the idea that every evening should be a proper meal, with fresh vegetables and something for after. That idea costs more energy than it gives back.
Three nights a week, dinner is allowed to simply be ready. Warm, enough, on time. That isn't giving up — that's what makes a working week with kids realistic. And the evenings when you do enjoy cooking tend to get better for it.
That's where a meal box earns its place: our dishes are already cooked, so a few minutes of reheating puts a full meal on the table. You pick from twelve dishes on a menu that changes every week, and anything you don't use before Friday goes straight into the freezer.
Meal prep works, right up until it doesn't. Nobody keeps up three hours of cooking on a Sunday evening for four weeks, and September is a marathon, not a sprint.
Do the small version instead: chop vegetables for two evenings, cook one portion too much rice or pasta, and set out the lunchboxes. Twenty minutes, and your Monday and Tuesday are solved. That one you'll actually keep up.
The first weeks of school aren't going to be calm. They do get noticeably lighter the moment dinner stops being an open question.
So if there's one thing worth sorting out this month: make sure there's food on three evenings a week. The rest falls into place more easily after that.
In the middle of exactly that? Have a look at this week's menu — twelve dishes, a different line-up every week, delivered over the weekend, and you can skip any week you don't need it.
Read next: When exams take over the house: small ways to make family life easier