Monthly Archives: May 2012

Green Smoothies Final Update

The 30 day challenge is over and we feel great. Every day that I drink a smoothie in the morning, I feel better. My husband says they make him more… er… regular I guess is a nice way to put it. Even Peanut is starting to drink them again and says she likes them. We’ve continued to make them nearly every day and I plan on continuing for the indefinite future.

I’ve been experimenting with adding flax seed. Flax seeds have some wonderful benefits, including high fiber content and Omega-3 fatty acids. Once again, I don’t taste anything different at all when I add them. They do make it thicker, so you have to keep that in mind. I’ve started adding them every day (though I decrease the avocado to 1/4 instead of 1/2 to make up for the thickening properties).

I’ve also been experimenting with adding other vegetables. My husband doesn’t like fresh tomatoes much, but they’re great for you. I’ve figured out that I can add 1/2 a tomato to our smoothies without noticing it at all. If you add more than that, you may taste it a bit (though not enough to keep my husband from drinking it). I can also add quite a bit of carrots without noticing it at all. Broccoli is a bit more tricky to add and I haven’t been able to not taste it when I’ve added it, but maybe I need to start off slower.

I feel like this challenge has given me a jump start to eating more healthy. I still don’t eat perfectly (As I type this, I’m sipping a cup of coffee with creamer), but I’m feeling more like I want to take steps in that direction. We’ve started drinking kombucha daily. I’m planning on drinking raw milk. I feel like taking healthy snacks when we’re out. I don’t want to eat out as often. I want to start running. Overall, I just feel great. I’m sure a lot of it is in my head, but that’s okay. If mind games make me healthier, I’m okay with it! Here are a couple more recipes if you want to venture out of the norm. Until then, I hope you’re all drinking (or at least thinking about drinking) green smoothies and feeling great like us!

Flax Seed Experiment

15 strawberries

2 kiwis

1 mango

1/4 avocado

1 orange

1 Tbsp flax seeds

4 big leaves kale

1 handful spinach (there was a lot of kale)

ice

I had a lot of issues with this one. First off, I added the orange and extra strawberries because the flax seeds seemed to make the smoothie thicker. The kale leaves were really big, so I didn’t add as much spinach, but it still ended up a lot more green than normal. Lastly, we drank this one after Peanut went to bed because I forgot to make them in the morning and we were gone all day, so that with the extra additions made way too much smoothie. I kept some of it in the fridge to add to the next day’s smoothie. Probably enough for another adult honestly. Couldn’t taste the flax seeds at all though! 

No Spinach! Ahh!

2 oranges

1 lemon

1 lime

1/6 pineapple

2 kiwis

1/2 avocado

1-2 Tbsp flax seeds

1 handful baby carrots

13 leaves red chard

ice

After slowly increasing the more potent greens in our smoothies, I decided it was time to truly delve into the realm of going no-spinach. I  purposely made the flavor fruit in this one really powerful (oranges, lemon, lime, pineapple). It’s really good! I couldn’t taste the greens at all. 

Preparing for Birth Series

A Little Bit of All of It Preparing for Birth Series

Hello and happy Memorial Day! I hope all of you are busy having fun with family and celebrating those who have served our country, along with others who have passed. I often think of my aunt and grandma and how much they’d love to know the girls. I’ll be sharing pictures I have of them with Peanut today to help her to remember those we’ve lost.

When you’re not busy with your family on this lovely holiday, please take a look at this wonderful series on birth created by Julia at A Little Bit of All of It. Every week, she’s sharing links to blogs on certain topics related to birth. It’s such a wonderful resource if you’re expecting!

I’ve submitted quite a few links that you’ll recognize if you were keeping up with my Granola Head’s Guide to a Natural Pregnancy. I’m hoping to write some more for future weeks too. I hope you all enjoy the series and find it as wonderfully informative as I have. If you have any posts you think will work for the upcoming weeks, please submit them! I’d love to read all of your stories.

Cleaning House with Small Children

All the books say not to worry about cleaning when you have small children. One of my favorite books, The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, has this poem as a tear sheet:

Babies Don’t Keep

The cleaning and scrubbing
Can wait ’til tomorrow
For babies grow up,
I’ve learned to my sorrow.

So quiet down, cobwebs.
Dust, go to sleep.
I’m nursing my baby,
And babies don’t keep.

It’s a lovely poem I definitely agree. No one expects for you to have a sparkling house when you have little ones running around un-cleaning everything you’ve just picked up. You shouldn’t expect that of yourself either–it’s just setting yourself up for failure.

You do need to clean though. Yes, you can put off the laundry for a day or two, but eventually everyone is going to run out of underwear. It’s just an inevitability of life that you will have to vacuum before you baby starts ingesting more hair than the cats that shed it. With that said, it’s not always easy. Some days I feel like leaving the house just to avoid the mess. So I came up with some tips for how to keep your house clean with little ones. It’s far from a complete list. Some of them may just not work for you at all. For me though, they’re things I wish I would have known 3 years ago when I was just starting in the business of being a stay-at-home mom.

So here they are:

Tips for Cleaning House with Small Children

  1. Make a to do list. It can be in your head or it can be a physical list, up to you. Towards the end of my pregnancy and shortly after Twig was born, I found it helpful to keep a running list on my white board so I wouldn’t forget everything in my pregnancy- and post-baby-foggy brain. And you don’t need to keep them in order of priority unless that’s helpful to you. For me, that was too much of a hassle. On Monday changing the cat little box could be just something that needs to be done, but by Wednesday, it’s number one of the list. Things change too much to try to keep an order.
  2. Multitask. Accomplishing anything when you have a baby is difficult. It gets, in ways, more difficult when that baby becomes a toddler. How do you get around this? Multitasking. I frequently wear Twig on my back while I vacuum because she’s crabby and I know it’ll help her go to sleep (or at least stop crying while the vacuuming is going on). Peanut helps me push the laundry basket downstairs. Sometimes I’m getting a bit of me-time by watching a show and folding the laundry at the same time. When I’m waiting for dinner to finish simmering, I can unload the dishwasher. Life just can’t be devoted to just one task at a time when you have little ones running around.
  3. Keep projects quick and small. One big thing I’ve learned: if I do one load of laundry every day, I never have huge piles of laundry all over my living room waiting to get re-dirtied by Peanut throwing them around or Twig spitting up on them. When I’m walking upstairs to change a diaper, I take the books that need to go upstairs with me. When I look at my family room and it’s a mess, I pick up all the things that should go in the bathroom and take them with me when I’m heading up there anyway. When the toilet absolutely needs to be cleaned, I can clean just the toilet rather than the whole bathroom. I’ve always thought of cleaning as something you do all in one big spurt and be done with it. While that works for some people, it just doesn’t work for me. I couldn’t tell you how many hours a day I clean because I’m constantly cleaning, but it just ends up being 5 minutes out of the hour every hour rather than 2 hours straight.
  4. Enlist in some help. It was really difficult for me to ask my husband for help when Peanut was small. I always thought of the housework as part of my job as a stay-at-home mom, whereas his job was to go away for 40 hours a week and make money. Now I’m starting to realize that, for us, the bulk of the effort is still mine, but it’s alright to ask him for help. Beyond that, he’s happy to help me. Now we’ve gotten into the habit of him asking me every night after we read books to Peanut what needs to be done. I’m not going to make him spend his whole night scrubbing the tub, but he can definitely do the diaper laundry for me. Which brings me to my final tip:
  5. Decide your priorities. For some people, I’m sure dusting is high up on the list. For me, not so much. Meaning not at all. Why does it matter if the top of the picture frame, which I can’t even see, can go ahead and stay dusty. Same goes for scrubbing anything until it sparkles or cleaning the walls. Well, maybe I do occasionally clean the walls because they have spaghetti splattered across them. :-P For me, it’s all about functionality. If I can’t walk 3 steps without hurting myself on a toy, I need to pick up that room. If I can’t find a burp rag, I need to do laundry. So on and so forth. If it’s not something you particularly care about or care to do, go ahead and stop doing it (or do it less often, if it is something that truly needs to be done). If you hate folding laundry, stop doing it. If you don’t want to clean the toilets, don’t scrub them until they shine daily.

Four Months

This is a continuation of the pictures I’m taking of Twig on her month-day. Past months: One, Two, Three.

For how often this child does a superman on the floor, I’m surprised she doesn’t have a six pack.

Making her current favorite noise, which mostly sounds like “bbbbbbbb”

Working on the next milestone: sitting up! She’s getting really good at it!

Everything. Must. Go. In. Mouth. Nom nom nom!

Gentle Weaning Means Knowing When to Stop

Welcome to the Carnival of Weaning: Weaning – Your Stories

This post was written for inclusion in the Carnival of Weaning hosted by Code Name: Mama and Aha! Parenting. Our participants have shared stories, tips, and struggles about the end of the breastfeeding relationship.

Gentle weaning means knowing when to stop… weaning.

Recently I wrote about my attempt to help Peanut wean a bit more quickly. I just feel done. Not angry or frustrated (as I did directly after Twig was born), just done.

So, even though I am a big proponent of child-led weaning, I decided to push things along a little. I tried counting, singing, delaying (though really I’ve been doing that for a while because she often asks to nurse at really inconvenient times), rules (e.g. we only nurse in this chair), and so on. Things I’ve considered to be “gentle” weaning techniques. Things that, apparently, aren’t so gentle for Peanut.

Tears. Increased irritability. Increased clingy-ness. Anger. Begging me not to count or sing. And more tears.

My 3 year old isn’t ready to wean.

Many people would tell me to just do it anyway. She’s 3, she can handle it. No. She’s manipulating you. No. She’s too old to continue nursing. No.

She’s not ready and I respect that. Even if I feel done, she’s not, and that’s okay. She’s still so young in the scheme of life. Over the last few months, her world has been turned upside-down. Why would I forcefully take away something that comforts her so much right when she needs it the most? Why would I purposely hurt my child?

One day, my oldest will cease to nurse. Until then, I plan on trying my hardest to savor every minute of this special time in our relationship. We will never get this back. One day I will miss it. One day, someday sooner than I can imagine, she’ll be grown and gone and I’ll miss the ability that I have now to cuddle her in my lap while I nourish and comfort her.

Gentle weaning means listening to your child. Gentle weaning means taking their feelings into account. Gentle weaning means knowing the difference between being ready and not.



Thank you for visiting the Carnival of Weaning hosted by Dionna at Code Name: Mama and Dr. Laura at Aha! Parenting.

Please take time to read the submissions by the other carnival participants (and many thanks to Joni Rae of Tales of a Kitchen Witch for designing our lovely button):

Empty the Pantry Challenge

Another day, another challenge.

I’ve figured out that I work well with challenges. I’m a very goal-oriented person, so it’s a big help for me to put something out into the world as I’m going to do it and then feel the accountability that comes along with that. If I just think “I’m not going to eat a cookie,” then I talk myself out of it 15 minutes later. If I tell you AoLG (Get it? I made the blog name an acronym! How did I not think of doing that before??!) readers that I’m doing something, I feel like you’re all going to personally hunt me down if I eat that cookie! With pitchforks! Why am I happy about being hunted with pitchforks?!?

Anyway, I will be updating soon on the end of the green smoothie challenge (end of the challenge, but definitely not the end of our regular green smoothie ingestion). Until then, I’ve decided to do another challenge: empty my pantry!

The basic idea is that I spend way too much on groceries. Last month, assuming I didn’t lose any receipts (since I’m not keeping a running log of money anymore with my envelope system), we spent $380 on groceries. That’s for a family of four, one of which doesn’t eat solids and the other hardly touches her food half of the time. How are we spending so much?!?

And I have a ridiculous amount of food in my house. Like I’m planning for the appocolypse or something. The only problem with this so-called disaster planning is that about 90% of my excess food is frozen and must stay that way. I’m guessing if the world ends, one of the first things to go will be power. Makes those 20 frozen chickens not so useful when the zombies take over.

So I’m having a pantry challenge! Here are some links with people who explain it much better than I do.

My Goals

  1. Clear out the things I don’t use. Either by using them or giving up on them entirely. When I want a cup of tea and I have to decide from 10 different kinds, 7 of which aren’t opened, there’s a problem.
  2. Get rid of the extra fridge. Yes, I have an extra fridge. With a freezer on top. That’s in addition to my regular fridge and my 25 cubic foot freezer. Yeah, I don’t need that extra fridge.
  3. Use meats that we don’t normally use. We bought a half a cow about a year ago and have used almost all the hamburger, but still have tons of steaks and roasts. I need to get into the habit of using them or it’s all going to end up going to waste from freezer burn.

I will continue to shop. I will continue to make my delicious green smoothies with fresh fruits and veggies. The difference will be being proactive about using what we have and avoiding buying things we don’t need. I’m going to try this for a month. From the 20th of May to the 19th of June (our fiscal month). Coming next: the inventory and plan.

Our Garden

Planting our garden with Mema.

Playing in her sensory box when the gardening got a bit boring.

I think this face is saying “bon appetite!” 

 

We have (from left to right): onions, spinach, red chard, peas, cabbage

more onion, romain lettuce, spring mix, peppers, watermelon

more onion, tomatoes (planted later than this photo), more watermelon

onions, cucumbers, a few types of squash.

Our first bounty.

Easy Homemade {and Relatively Natural} Playdough

When Peanut was in preschool on my university’s campus last year, we got weekly newsletters from the teacher. This is a recipe she included for playdough in one of the newsletters. Peanut loves that she gets to help me make it and play with it. I like that it smells good and I don’t need to freak out if she gets some in her mouth! It does leave a bit of an oily residue where you play with it, so keep that in mind. Works just like regular playdough though!

Homemade Playdough

1 cup flour (plus some extra later on)

1/2 cup salt

1 package Koolaid

3 Tbsp oil (doesn’t really matter what kind)

1 cup boiling water

Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl (the water cools down fast, so after a second you can let your child help).

Put it on a flat surface and kneed in more flour until it’s no longer sticky (we generally use about 1/4 a cup, but add it slowly).

And play!

TIME Widening the Gap

I’m sure that by now, you have all seen the cover of this month’s TIME magazine.

My initial reaction was “That’s awesome! Showing an older nursling on the cover of a magazine! I’ve always believed that the more people are exposed to nursing, the more they will accept it. But wait… there’s something wrong here.

I first noticed the camo pants on the child. He looks much older than the almost-4 that the article proclaimed him to be. Why does he look so much older? And this particular mom’s website is called I am Not the Babysitter. It’s supposed to be a play on how young she looks. So why a boy who looks older than she is an a mom who looks younger than she is?

And why on a chair? That’s a really awkward way to nurse. Being a mother nursing a 3 year old myself, I can see the problems with that. My child would bounce and wiggle and probably try to jump off the chair with my boob in her mouth! This doesn’t show a normal nursing relationship.

And, while I do it myself, nursing from over the top of your shirts is, by definition, more revealing. Most moms I see, even the ones who don’t use a cover, don’t do it. I obviously have no problem with it myself and think it’s much more convenient, but it certainly adds to the shock value of this photograph.

That’s just it: shock value.

That’s what TIME magazine was aiming for–shock value. They weren’t trying to get the message out there of this lovely relationship and older child can have with their mother. They weren’t trying to say that attachment parenting is a valid method of parenting. They were trying to shock us. They were simply trying to sell their magazines by making you either hate or love this mother based on this one photograph.

My initial reaction was excitement at bridging the gap between nursing others and those who find nursing to be private, disgusting, or even pornographic. The gap caused by a system who won’t help mothers nurse, but still touts it as “best”. A system that causes guilt and outrage and isolation.

Instead, TIME magazine was trying to shock us. They were trying to cause such a reaction that could cause more magazines to sell. They weren’t trying to bridge any gaps, they were taking advantage of those gaps and widening them. They were trying to put us against each other in order to make a profit.

Shame on you TIME magazine for causing more hate. 

New Cash Envelopes

As I’ve already said on this blog, cash envelopes are really working for us. They’re fantastic. I seriously can not tout the benefits of them enough. Put away your plastic cards people! Cash is where it’s at!

Alright, enough of my soapbox.

While the system is great, my actual envelopes were not so much. I was frustrated that the change kept falling out, but ended up deciding to keep the change in a separate pouch and use it as needed. Sort of a collective give-a-penny-take-a-penny for all of the envelope pals. This realization of how much easier it is came from me also realizing I don’t need to keep a transaction sheet for each envelope. I can keep the receipts and when the cash is gone, it’s gone. The whole reason that I used to track all purchases was to determine how much spent versus acquired, which is no longer an issue with the envelopes!

So back onto the topic. I made new envelopes!

I wanted something that worked better for my little planner I carry around as a wallet. There are lots of fancy envelope systems you can buy online, but they all require that I get a new system. I like my planner. I’ve had it for over two years and it works perfectly for what I need to carry, along with writing down important things. So I decided to keep it.

My current envelope system was actually some semi-pretty envelopes that came in a thing of children’s invitations that my aunt gave me. We didn’t have use for the invitations, so I stole the envelopes from them and made these:

Our Old Cash Envelopes

As you can see, I don’t have the most pretty handwriting. Also, while they were the perfect size for my planner, the planner has rings in it. The rings were making the envelopes push forward and get smooshed by the clasp on the planner. It was also a pain to find the correct envelope. Solution: hole punches. I was in need of a new start.

So here’s a very quick and simple way to make yourself a new set of cash envelopes. It took me about 90 minutes.

Supplies Needed:

Some fancy paper- I bought this at Walmart even though I hate that store, just because I happened to be there returning some crappy charger we got for my husband that broke. The paper was alright, but not as thick as I’d like. I couldn’t use my neat machine to fold the paper because it ripped. Still worth the $5 spent though.

Some fancy letters-Came with the fancy paper in this case. Make sure that you have enough for all the letters! I messed up a G so Gifts ended up being changed to Bounty (which is more fun anyway). Couldn’t do Presents because I didn’t have enough e’s!

Pencil

Scissors

Double-stick Tape

Hole Punchers

Glue (if necessary for gluing letters on)

Varnish and Paint Brush

Step 1: Take an envelope you have already and {carefully} split it open.

Step 2: Trace that envelope onto the back of some fancy paper.

Step 3: Cut out the new envelope and fold where appropriate.

Step 4: Put double-stick tape on the bottom flap and along the bottom where you’ll want the hole punches (be sure to leave enough room for cash and receipts). I did three lines of tape at the bottom of the envelope because I needed the hole punches really deep.

Step 5: Fold it together.

Step 6: Glue on a big letter for the first letter of the word (Yeah, that’s kid’s glue. When you become a mom, you start using children’s supplies on projects. Stuff surely works though!)

Step 7: Stick on the rest of the letters of the name for the envelope (in my case, these were stickers).

Step 8: Mark where you want the holes and get to punching!

Step 9: Paint varnish over the letters (to make them stay on better).

Step 10: Repeat with the rest of the envelopes!

And here they are in my planner:

If I had it to do again, I’d make the space below the hole punches a bit smaller so they would be easier to move in the planner. As it is, they’re alright. I may end up cutting them down later, depending on if it looks awful and/or compromises the structure of the envelopes.

I put them in my planner from order of most accessed to least accessed, give or take. Since it’s kind of hard to read them in the picture (though not hard to read in person), I’ll list my envelopes for you. In the order that they’re in my planner: Groceries, Eating Out, Entertainment, Home, Clothing, Bounty, Doctors, Car Repair, Music, Miscellaneous. Groceries covers a lot more than food (toiletries, pets, etc.) and Music is for Peanut’s music class, which we’re putting away a certain amount every month for so it’s not such a bombshell when we register for a new semester. We also got rid of the Gas for Cars envelope because we do it all through debit because that’s what Costco requires and it’s the cheapest gas around, so it was bothersome depositing money back in for the gas. Instead I’m tracking it on a sheet in my planner.

I still have quite a few papers left (25 in the package and I have 10 envelopes, plus I used one to test and ruined another), so I can make more envelopes in the future if I decide we need more. I’m trying to stick to 10 envelopes, but you never know. It’s nice to have the extras, if just for future cards and other paper crafts I like to make. I love these designs too. I think I may paint one on my wall in my living room.

All in all, it was a really easy project. I’m not a super crafty type and even I made it look okay (or at least okay enough for me). If I can do it, you all can certainly do it too! Now it’s time to see if cash envelopes really are more fun when they’re pretty!

Do you use cash envelopes? How does the system work for you? Did you make your envelopes? If you’re not using them, you should try it! Seriously!