It's been a particularly hard day at work. As I drag myself through the door at six o'clock, I am met by two hungry kids, and a husband due home in ten minutes. There is celery, grapes, and milk in the fridge. Everything else edible is frozen solid. What do I do? Break out the pizza pops, of course!

It is not like this everyday. On shopping days I have food. Sometimes I even get so organized as to double the casserole recipe and freeze half for just such an emergency. However, most of my scheduling abilities not toward planning full course suppers, but to juggling how I am going to pick up two kids at two different locations simultaneously, or how I will l l get that extra hour of work I brought home done between the PTA meeting and shopping for a gift my son has just absently told me he needs for a birthday party the next afternoon.

In my mother's day, there was no greater sin than to serve a frozen, store bought pizza pop to your children. I grew up in the mid-sixties, a time when the worst "kitchen crime" you could commit was consuming a convenience food. My mother abhorred boxed cookies, and canned spaghetti, cake mixes, and frozen mixed vegetables were gazed upon in frank horror. Every cake and pie had to be whipped up with her own hands, and she always made sure there were several dozen homemade cookies in the cookie jar. All vegetables had to be bought fresh, then peeled and symmetrically cut by hand. Soup was started from scratch first thing in the morning and tended to more often than a new born baby. Perogies took even longer since the dough had to he mixed the night before - to let it 'rest' overnight. The next day was a flurry of activity as several pounds of potatoes were mashed and hundreds of perfect circles cut into the dough. Pinching came next - each perogy was filled, pinched, then boiled before being frozen on cookie sheets for future use. It took a full day to complete this task.

So of course when got married and started a family of my own, I expected to be able to make every morsel of' food from scratch. It took me several years to realize I couldn't do it, and several more years to stop feeling guilty about not doing it.

I soon discovered that trying to make full-course homemade meals every night for my family meant, never having any time with my family. By the time supper was cooked, consumed, and cleaned up, it was homework time, or laundry time, or bedtime. I was sacrificing hours I could have spent with them putting

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