Uncategorized

A few years ago, I started having a weekly tip smackdown on Tuesdays and after a while I got sick of it and petered out. But I’ve been missing it for quite some time (Oh how I love harvesting your minds for ideas!) and so I’m starting it up again. Today we’re talking about one of the never ending chores of family life, feeding the people so that the people can live.

I get sick of making dinners but unlike Tip Tuesdays, I can’t just discontinue dinner. Someone might notice. Someone might complain. Someone might call the authorities.

So I try to make it as easy as possible. Here are a few of my tips.

1. Make a plan. If I wait until dinner time rolls around, things will get grim. Boxes and cans that should really be saved for the apocalypse due to their shelf-life, lack of nutritional value, and imperviousness to nuclear radiation are often brought out and combined in unappealing ways. These meals can involve canned meat. They never involve happiness and satisfaction.

First I have a list of emergency meals I can make in a pinch. These include scrambled eggs, quesadillas, sandwiches, spaghetti that I boil and then pour the bottled sauce on top and let the noodles warm it, pancakes, etc.

Then I plan a week’s worth of “real” meals and shop for them. So, I’m never left wondering “What’s for dinner?” and even though I may decide not to really cook one day, I can use one of my fall-back meals.

2. Form a Dinner Co-op. I’ve talked about dinner co-ops and super swapping before on this blog. I’ve done this off and on for years and I love it. It’s really saved me during this pukey part of the pregnancy. Once a week I’m forced to cook a really nice main dish for a few other families and deliver it to their homes. Then the rest of the week warm delicious meals magically arrive at my door and all I have to provide are the veggies to go with them.

We all buy matching pyrex and tupperwares and pass them around as we cook so we never worry about getting our dishes back. We have a scheduled drop-off time so we know when we can expect to be fed. Once a month we send a list of the meals we’re planning on making to the scheduler, who makes a calendar for the month, spreading out the foods so that we get a good variety each week. When you’re only cooking once a week, you bring you’re A-game so we get some really delicious food. We save money buying in bulk. I don’t have to worry about dinner most of the week. It helps the kids feel a sense of community as we deliver and receive meals from various families. Each night they ask who the dinner came from. It’s like a commune but with more frequent deodorant usage.

3. Have an emergency back-up plan for crazy times in your lives. I found this in the form of a book by Mary Jo Rulnick. The book is called The Frantic Woman’s Guide to Feeding Family and Friends. It does all the planning for you, complete with shopping lists, recipes, meal plans and preparation tips for every season of the year. It’s really a great resource even if you don’t follow all of her recipe plans but if you do, it’s like a brain vacation for dinner preparation. She does all the planning and all you have to do is follow her daily instructions for shopping, prep and cooking. The recipes are simple and it’s the perfect answer for those times in your life when you just don’t have the energy left to plan one more thing.

She also has great general tips on saving time and effort in the kitchen and sections on what to do with holiday leftovers, an entire week of ham recipes and an entire week of leftover turkey ideas.

So here’s the part I like best about Tip Tuesday, the part where you leave your tips in the comment section. What do you do to make dinner time easier or more enjoyable? Do you have any simple meal ideas you can share with us?

I was lounging around on Sunday, napping upstairs in my room when Dan went downstairs to help the kids with something. An hour later, I wandered downstairs and found them like this:

Playing the eternal game that makes everyone cry but then beg for more.

The apron is because he had washed all the dishes before starting the game.

While he washed the dishes, he had them clean up their toys, using a game of Sorry as incentive.

I’m really starting to like this guy.

And I have the ability to bear children.

So I’m pregnant, right? The cuteness of the babies being born in my area recently, combined with the slow decline in my all-day pregnancy sickness is causing me to be more excited about the 5-inch little guy growing in my gut.

There are great things about being pregnant. My favorite one is that suddenly my potbelly is all part of the cuteness that is a child-bearing woman. Soon I will get to feel the baby move inside and be sure that’s what I’m actually feeling, which is something that never gets old.

I don’t like the sickness but the rest of it is pretty darn okay. I love the kids’ excitement. I love how tenderly Dan takes care of me. He becomes downright gallant. I love imagining the baby and planning for it.

In regards to Lassie and how similar we are, I will tell you a story. Yesterday a group of friends were playing at a local ball field with our kids, confused by the appearance of this strange golden orb in the sky but intrigued enough by its warmth to venture outside to experience it.

The kids ran wild and the moms drifted in and out of conversations, everyone sort of taking care of everyone else’s kids. Suddenly I looked up and saw one of the three-year-olds standing at the top of a cliff-like rock wall about 2 stories up, sort of wobbling back and forth and grinning. Her mom was across the field with my children. We all sort of yelled at the toddler to stop where she was.

“FREEZE! I’m coming.”

My inner Lassie came out and I shimmied up the rock wall to where she was standing, happy as can be. I picked her up (not with my mouth) and carried her down almost to safety when I slipped on a patch of mud, twisted my knee and ankle and went tumbling down the rest of the hill. She was scared but fine. My small person was fine in his water bed due to the ample padding I provide but I was in a fair amount of pain.

Then I got home and realized it was my night to make dinner for the families in my dinner group. So I spent 2.5 hours on my feet making chili and cornbread, only to be reminded by Eve that we were going to have a pizza dinner that night with our preschool group. At that point my ankle was in ridiculous pain and I wondered, “Did this ever happen to Lassie?”

I seem to remember her limping along at times but then the next episode, she’d be fine and well-groomed. Well if today’s the next episode, I am not fine and certainly not well-groomed or even showered. I woke up with a sore throat and cough in my chest. Magoo’s is worse but mine feels like it’s heading that way. And my foot is still really sore. I’m limping around a bit but mostly lying on the couch and elevating it while Magoo watches TV. I don’t remember Lassie ever needing to hold Timmy down while he screamed like death and child abuse, pin his arms to his chest and shove saline solution up his nose so he would stop crying about how bad his boogies hurt.

I’m sure she would have, if called upon. I just don’t remember ever seeing that episode.

Not only did no producer come in and bathe me or brush my hair but I didn’t even get a fresh bandanna. (So I’ve looked it up and can’t find a picture of a bandanna on that collie but I swear I’ve seen one. I think it was red.) The good news is, I have the dinner I made last night to eat today and my kids are very sweet when they’re either pathetically ill or completely physically exhausted. Some other times too.

Laylee spent the day at “Track Camp” at the High School, running laps and learning how to throw a discus and shot put. Apparently they let her use both hands, which I appreciate since apparently they were using the same equipment the high schoolers use. She’s dog-tired but still willing to fetch things for her ailing mother and pathetic little brother.

I hope tomorrow’s episode finds me with a clean shiny head of hair, new clothes and a spring in my magically-healed step.

I have set a limit of four days on this:

It’s been three days and today I gave warning. The Stuffed Animal Utopia of Bliss must be dismantled by tomorrow night.

“But the animals will be so sad.”

“But you set up every toy, stuffed animal, laundry basket, block, doll blanket and interesting-looking household item we own in a mess-like pattern in the living room.”

“But it’s so much fun.”

“But the living room’s the first thing people see when they walk into our house and it looks like the toy room vomited all over my entry way.”

Blank stares. Squinty eyes. Cocked heads. Looks that say, “And that’s a problem because?”

The Utopia is coming down tomorrow.

What makes for an award-winning wine list?

Nice font choice?

Good use of white spice?

High quality paper?

I hardly think it was the art work.

I wonder what it would take for my To-Do list to become “award winning.”

I’m very tunnel-visioned when I feel yucky like this. I feel like it will go on forever. I feel like no one has ever suffered so greatly. I feel that my feelings are self-centered and off base and yet I feel them and live in my tunnel whining just loudly enough for everyone outside the tunnel to hear me.

Luckily there are reminders in my life that tell my why I’m doing this, why I’m glad I’m doing this, why there’s nothing I’d rather do.

A few days ago, Laylee put this folded piece of paper outside my bedroom door. I saw it. I saw that it was made out of one of my stationary cards. I resisted the urge to remind her that I’ve asked her perhaps 37 times not to use my stationary cards without asking. I waited.

Yesterday afternoon she implored me, “Mom. Do not move your mail box like you did last time I left one for you. If you move it, you just won’t get any mail.”

I know you’re shocked that last time I found a crumpled-looking piece of paper on the floor outside my bedroom, I threw it out. This time she made it a little harder for me to discard by writing its name on the paper. OH! It’s a Ma-ole Box. Got it.

She told me that “some kids from school” had sent home letters for me and dad and that she’d deliver them later. She said the kids wanted to remain anonymous. I pretended I hadn’t seen her write the letters or helped her spell “Kathryn” on one of them.

Then last night, I came home from a church dinner, emptied the dinner out into the porcelain dinner receptacle and headed upstairs to change my clothes, discouraged and with a mingled sense of hunger and food-loathing.

In my ma-ole box were 4 letters. One was for Dan from a secret admirer:
Envelope:

Card:

One was for me from a similarly “secret” admirer:
Envelope:

Card:

Then there was one for Dad from Laylee.
Envelope:

Front:

Back:

And one to me From Laylee:
Envelope:

Back:

The backs of the 2 cards from Laylee are what really got my motherly feelings flowing straight through my eyeballs. I’ve felt so lame and inadequate these past few weeks but in her mind I am still the source of soaring hugs, floating hearts and love. I want to be those things and according to my daughter, I still am. This was what I needed.

Last night was less than fun. I was up barfing at 11, got to sleep by around 11:30, only to be awoken by the alarm on my cell phone randomly going off at midnight. I woke up in sort of a panic and it took quite a while to get calmed down and back to sleep. A few hours later the kids started their shtick. Laylee was crying that her ears hurt so Dan carried her downstairs for some ear drops and a cough lozenge. He told her she could stay up until the lozenge dissolved.

I love the guy but he obviously doesn’t understand the ability of a determined 6-year-old to permanently preserve a candy in a dry spot in the side of her cheek if it means she can stay up all night watching Rick Steves and his glasses tour Europe.

I’m sure that the original manuscripts of the 4 gospels would be perfectly intact to this day if they’d been given to a child who was told, “Hold these in your mouth until they dissolve and then you need to go to bed.”

So Dan sat with Laylee while I laid in bed until 15 minutes later when Magoo woke up screaming that his throat hurt. I cuddled and calmed and shushed him and he continued to scream out and grab the side of his neck every few seconds.

“Is it your ear that hurts, buddy?”

“No. MY FROAT!!!!”

Now if it really was his throat, I’m not sure that ear-piercing screams were the best therapy for it but it was hard to convince him of that and so I brought him water to drink and held him while he screamed. Eventually I was moved to employ the Tylenol placebo. “If he is in pain, it might even help with that,” I told myself. If you give a kid medicine they’ll shut up and sleep, right? Or maybe they’ll just want some milk to go with it…

Of course as he swallowed it, he began to rage as though I’d poured acid down his throat. “It HURTS. OW! I WANT MY DAD!” he screamed. “Oh, for the love, you can have him,” I thought as I headed downstairs.

“Trade,” I said to Dan. “I’ve poisoned the boy with cherry-flavored-poisonous-pain-killing-death and he wants his dad.”

As Dan headed upstairs, I looked at Laylee’s airtight sealed cheek and smiled as sweetly as I could muster in the middle of the night and suggested, “Chew it and swallow it. You have 3 minutes.”

This morning we took the kids to the pediatrician and they’re both all swollen up with ear infections. Antibiotics all around! We stayed home together, laid around and watched the time pass. Tonight they are drugged and appear to be sleeping. Hooray for small miracles. I wonder how long after I go to bed they’ll decide they’re in agony again.

Over at Parenting today I’ve written about our kindergarten experiences with Mean Girls and exclusive cliques. Go on over and let me know, have you noticed these behaviors happening this young with your kids?

Before I announce the winner, I want to let you all know that now through January 31st, Daring Young Mom readers can get a 10% discount on YNAB software by entering the coupon code “daring” on the YNAB.com site. Jesse was impressed with the response you all gave and wanted to help out because there are so many of us who are struggling with finances right now. Yay Jesse!

And the winner of the You Need A Budget software giveaway is Donna, commenter number 29. Please contact me and I’ll get you set up with your prize.

Click to Read My Product Review Policy

I’m sure many of you have heard about blogger Stephanie Nielson’s plane crash in August. She and her husband were critically injured and she has been undergoing surgeries and procedures for months in order to heal and get back to loving her 4 beautiful children.

Stephanie’s blog was popular for her obvious love of motherhood and the joy she found in the small moments in life. I didn’t personally come across it until after the accident but reading through the archives, it’s easy to see why she’s loved by so many people.

Since the accident, friends and readers have rallied to raise money to help pay for the family’s staggering medical bills. Most recently Sue from Navel Gazing at Its Finest has put together a book of funny posts written by some very talented writers and me.

Please consider supporting Sue and her efforts to help the Nielson family by buying a book or 12. You’ll get an enjoyable read and they’ll get a bit closer to having the financial portion of their troubles taken care of.

When I think of Magoo, I hope I always remember him running down the hill to our house, his fluffy hair bouncing, his little McQueen-crocked feet pumping like bolts of red rubber lightning. I violated my rule of not buying “character” clothes when I saw the look on his face at the shoe store.

They were like the air to him.

It was a good decision.

I never had his baby shoes bronzed. Maybe I’ll do these.