How do you handle meals?

I have found myself swamped lately, with many things required.  I seems like I never am done with laundry, I always have dirty dishes, and I am so busy running around, I don't even have enough time to sit down and play with my kids as much as I would like.

As I have been trying to figure out how I can simplify I realized that something that takes a lot of my time and creates a lot of stress is food.

First is meal planning.  Scooter has a dairy sensitivity.  This means that we try to do as many meals without dairy as possible, and if it has dairy we try to make it optional.  Also with my fibromyalgia I have found I do a lot better when I avoid processed foods as much as possible.  I try to have as many of my grains be whole grains, avoid processed meats most of the time, (and if my preference was all I went off of, we would eat vegetarian.  However with kids who love meat, we tend to be flexitarian, meaning we eat meat, but we also have a lot of our meals be meatless).   This makes finding meals that we can/will eat difficult. 

Second, is when to go grocery shopping.  Our normal day as a family starts with a goal of breakfast on the table at 7:00.  Sometimes I have been able to drag myself out of bed to go shopping at 5:30, but that makes for a rushed morning.  Then once I get the kids out the door for school, I then spend the rest of the morning cleaning up breakfast, starting or attempting to keep up with laundry, running to therapist appointments, or violin lessons.  I have found that grocery shopping for one week will often take be between 1-2 hours.  If I have time to go shopping in the morning, I have the stress of taking Angel and Bunny with me.  Angel likes to ask me why I don't buy all the things she wants.  Every time.  She also doesn't always stay with me in the store.  This can be stressful.  By the time I am done shopping with them, I get home and it is time to get them lunch and get Bunny down for a nap, and I haven't even started putting groceries away yet.  I don't manage stress very well when I feel like there are multiple demands pressing on me that very minute.  This makes shopping in the morning hard.  When Angel is at school, Bunny takes a nap, and so it is a terrible time to go shopping, then the kids get home from school, and we are trying to do homework, and extra curricular activities.  Then it is time for dinner, more activities and starting bedtime routines which tends to run until at least 9:00 at night.  Lately it seems more like 10:00.  This makes shopping at night hard.  I am drained by this time, and just wanting to crawl into bed.

Third, is making dinner.  We have times when I am busy with kids up until time to eat.  On day's like this I have been trying to do crock pot meals.  The problem with crock pot meals is it often takes me all of the time between Angel leaving for school, and other kids coming home.  On those days I don't get anything resembling a break, and it really wears me thin. And starting it that late, makes it so we are eating around the little girls bed time.   On the days that I try to make dinner that is not a crock pot meal, it seems to take me forever.  Probably because I am trying to multitask, not just make dinner.  My goal at times is to have it ready at 4:30.  Because soccer practice starts at 5:30 and the little girls go to bed starting at 7:00.  I can't usually start until I get Angel home from school at 3:30.  So these meals that are even supposed to be quick fixes don't get done until after 5:00.

Last is clean up.   It seems to take forever to clean up after a meal.  And even longer if we are consistent and try to get our kids to help.  Each kid has a job to help clean up, and it rotates monthly.   However, they tend to eat and run.  Making us have to chase them down for each step of they way, or just do it ourselves.  The hubs is great at helping clean up after dinner.  But even then, if we aren't out running around, it takes our whole evening to clean up.  And the nights that we are running around, it usually piles up for me to try to take care of the mess the next morning.

So after this long explanation, I am wondering if any of you have any suggestions of what can make any of these steps more simple?  Is there something I can do to make things easier and less time consuming?

Thanks for any suggestions  you may have.

Aurora tells me this sounds like the story of someones life, who is really stressed out and then a miracle happens.  I am still looking for that miracle.