I just love giving and getting handmade gifts, but especially getting. Who doesn’t? It’s wonderful to receive something that someone put time, thought, and effort into just for you. Suzy and her mom made me a diaper bag and nursing cover, Kim made me two hooded towels, and now Noelle has given me a handmade wipes holder. I just love the colors. Orange is one of my favorites.
I love to see how creative people are, especially if I’m the lucky recipient!
We finally got around to getting the bunk beds for the girls so we can start making progress with the nursery. The bunk beds were delivered yesterday.
The beds can be taken apart so they can be side by side instead of bunks, which means I’ll be able to use them for years and years. I really like the stairs because they’re safer than a ladder and they have drawers so I have more storage space for the girls’ stuff. The bedroom is unfortunately quite small, so storage space is a big need. Joseph went out later in the afternoon and got a couple of mattresses so that I could make the beds and have them ready for the girls’ bedtime. Eventually we’ll get matching bed sets and repaint that ugly sea green on the walls. You have to see it in person to truly appreciate just how ugly it is – I didn’t do it, it was the people before us, I have better taste than that.
Alice’s old bed went downstairs to the sewing room so I could return my mom’s air mattress to her. It’s nice to have a real bed (and a smaller one) in that room now for all our guests. And boy, do we get a lot of guests! We’re just very lucky to have a floor plan that can accommodate having lots of people. We really do love having visitors. Right now we have our friends from Sacramento visiting us with their five kids and amazingly enough, we actually have room for all 11 of us, thanks to getting the bunk bed and re-arranging the other beds and having a few air mattresses.
My best friend Suzy and her mom Sandi sent me a baby shower gift. They had sewn a matching diaper bag and nursing cover. They are gorgeous and totally me. I love anything that has blue and green, but this is even better because it’s got paisley too, and I LOVE paisley! This is such a great set!
They even sewed pockets on the inside of the bag to so it’s not just a simple four-sided bag, I mean this thing is a real live diaper bag, and it’s got even more pockets all around the outside. This is going to work out great for the baby. And the colors are so spectacular! I love, love, love, it! Suzy knows me so well.
Here’s the nursing cover, which I can’t wait to use. I was going to make one for myself, but I kept putting it off and never getting around to it, so this solves my laziness problem. Suzy made me one and I couldn’t have asked for anything better. I think this is truly one of the best gifts I received for my baby shower. Suzy and Sandi gave me exactly what I wanted and needed. I intend to use these until they’re threadbare! That bag especially is going to get a ton of usage for years to come. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Apparently Alice wanted to be like Rachel and get her own hand wrapped up too. Remember this oldie-but-goodie from Rachel? :
Well, now Aggsie has an injury of her own:
We were at my dad’s house last night and she used the bathroom downstairs (my brother’s bathroom). There was a razor out on the counter and she picked it up (you can see where I’m going with this) and took off the end of the pad of her finger.
She came to the upstairs bathroom to rinse it. I went in with her, but she wouldn’t tell me what happened. She just kept saying that her finger came open all by itself. I told her that this stuff doesn’t just happen on its own. I asked her if she poked her finger on something. No. Was there any glass? No. I couldn’t get anything out of her. That thing would not stop bleeding no matter how much we rinsed it or wrapped it in tissue. I finally got 2 bandages on it and it seemed to stop.
Later on back at home, we bathed up the girls and were getting them ready for bed, when Aggsie said it was bleeding through. Sure enough. So I got more bandaids out and took off the old ones. All the while she’s crying and being hysterical and saying it hurts and stings. We started rinsing it again and trying to wrap it up, but that thing would not stop bleeding, it just kept coming and coming. I tried to make a pressure dressing to stop the bleeding, but it came through in just a few minutes. I asked her all the same questions again about what happened and finally told her to please be honest with me because I couldn’t fix the problem if I didn’t know what happened. She finally admitted to the razor thing and then I could see that part of the end of her finger was missing (it had been too hard to see it through all the blood when it first happened). Lemme tell ya, she got really hysterical when her dad and I started talking about her going to the ER for possible stitches. She calmed down a smidge when I said that her finger was so little that they might only be able to do steri-strips and not stitches.
So Joseph took her to the ER at 10:00 at night and when they came back at midnight, she had this:
The doctor had said that it could take about two weeks to heal because of how deep the injury was. And that’s just for the skin to regenerate, not all the healing. She’s going to be very tender for a while, but I told her that this is a lesson for her to be honest with me and not try to hide things when stuff like this happens or we can’t help her. She didn’t want to tell us because she thought she’d be in trouble. Why do kids always think that? K ids always seem to think they’ll get in trouble for everything.Why do they think THEY will get in trouble when something bad happened TO them? I guess because she knew it happened when she was going through other people’s things and didn’t want to admit it.
I worry that they’re getting to know us a little too well at the ER and Urgent Care. What is wrong with my kids that they’re always getting hurt? And why can’t they ever do it during their pediatrician’s office hours? This only happens after hours and on weekends. It’s costing us a lot of money…..
My friend Kim (a master couponer whom I idolize) sent me this link for a coupon for Angel Soft T.P.
http://www.angelsoft.com/coupons.html
And note that Albertson’s has three double-your-coupon-amount coupons in their ad this week, so don’t miss out.
I have two different emails – a real one where friends and family contact me, and another where all my junk emails go. So I went to the link and printed out two coupons, one with either email address. If you’re going to be a couponer who prints coupons online then it really is handy to have a junk email address for this very purpose. Normally I don’t spend much time printing online, but once in a while there’s something good that I think is worth it. For instance, if I’d had these 50 cent off coupons when I was at Walgreens the other day, then I would have paid just 79 cents per 12-pack of toilet paper instead of the already terrific clearance price of $1.29. So it’s not like I wasn’t already getting a good deal, but it would have been that much sweeter with the coupons, and I might have been able to impress the people in line behind me with my coupon prowess.
I’m sure that any of the guys I used to date who are now reading this wish they’d held onto me because I’m a money-saver, I’m tellin’ ya.
This is just great! I went in for my regular OB exam and they have you do a urine test each time so they can monitor your protein and sugar. My sugar was just high enough to make them do a finger stick on me and check my blood sugar level. 144. Those of you who have any experience with diabetes (my mother is diabetic) know that’s a little too close to the high end. You don’t want to go above 160.
So I have to go back in next week for another blood check. It’s not bad, it just feels like someone flicked the end of your finger hard. I’m just afraid that it will come back with bad news. I know that I’m at risk for gestational diabetes every time I get pregnant, but this is the first time I’ve gotten this close to having it actually happen. I have a genetic hormone imbalance that comes part & parcel with insulin resistance, so I’ll be a diabetic risk all my life, but I can try to prevent it with good diet & exercise, which is why I lost 35 pounds since last year. I went from a size 16 to a size 7 or 8. It was fine until I started gaining all the weight back so fast with this pregnancy.
The good news is the risk of gestational diabetes will end in about 7 1/2 more weeks when Baby Michael arrives, but I’ll have to be careful about my diet & exercise for the rest of my life so I don’t end up with regular diabetes. In a way it’s a good thing, because Mother Nature has made me HAVE TO be healthier. It’s not a bad choice to be forced into. And it’s helpful that I already like all that fruit and veggie and bran and high fiber stuff anyway.
I have recently started getting really into coupons and sales ads. I used to be good at watching the ads, but I let it go to the wayside in favor of one-stop shopping because all the Walmarts and Targets here are supercenters. However, I’ve really had to tighten my budget and I’ve also faced the hard fact that we had almost no food storage or any kind of supplies, so I knew I needed to change and start being a frugal person again and planning ahead. So I started taking the sales ads and coupons from my dad’s paper each Sunday when I was over there for family dinner. That way I don’t have to pay for the paper and my folks aren’t using the coupons anyway, so it’s one less thing for them to have to put in the recycler. Many of my friends have recently become couponers too and that’s really where I got the inspiration for it.
This afternoon I was at Walgreens and I happened to come across 12-packs of toilet paper on clearance for $1.29. Crazy! So I picked up five packs, and then further on down the aisle I found 13-ct freezer bags on clearance for 75 cents each. So I got four of those and am tempted to go back and clean out the rest of them tomorrow. I’ll never find that price again, and I’ve started doing a lot of make-ahead freezer meals, so I really need freezer bags. All told I spent $10.10, but my savings was $26.46. So I saved more than two and half times what I spent!
I have learned that Walgreens & Rite Aid and those places are a great little secret for stocking up on household goods like deodorant, toothpaste, toity paper, dish soap and the like. I get the best deals on food items at the actual grocery stores, but if you need to stock up on household goods, you really ought to go to Walgreens and those kind of drugstores.
For almost two years I’ve been using up a lot of stuff from my food storage room, but until recently I really haven’t been putting anything back in there and it was worrying me how low our supplies were getting. But now I’m able to put 2-5 bags of groceries in there each week because I watch the sales ads, use coupons, and shop the clearance items at each store. It’s also helpful that I make up a monthly meal calendar so I know what I need to buy each week for the next week’s meals. Some people think it’s so much work to do all this. At first I DID have to put in extra time, but now I’ve got a system and it doesn’t take much time at all. Also, I highly recommend doing all the clipping and planning and ad reading AFTER the kids are in bed. You have the time all to yourself and no little hands are grabbing your coupons off the table. Oh, and I got a simple coupon keeper from the Dollar Tree and keep it in my purse so it’s always handy when I’m at the store.
Here’s what my food storage room looks like now that I’ve started adding to it again. I know that it may seem a bit sparse in some parts, but let me tell you that this is about three times as much as I had in there a year ago.
Here’s the whole room….kind of. It’s hard to get a good shot of a narrow space. I also use it as a place to keep all our board games (far left side) because we don’t have any bookshelves in our basement living room to store them.
You can see that I’ve already started stocking up on diapers and baby goods on the bottom. Cereals, canned foods, & freezer bags on the lower shelf. Snacks, spices, chips, aluminum foil, wraps, canning jars, and of course, my Atari on the next shelf up (I’m keeping my precious Atari away from the kids). And dish soap on the top shelf.
I have a whole bunch of #10 cans of flour, oats, and pancake mix up top (there are more outside of the picture), then my baking section on the next shelf. I canned all that strawberry jam myself, thank you very much. I think there are about 2 dozen jars there, and I bought a flat of peanut butter when it was on sale. The grocery stores here have case lot sales about 3 or 4 times a year and you can buy entire flats or cases of various products. We eat a lot of PB&J in our house, so I bought a flat of PB.
Here are the shelves beneath the jam and peanut butter. More baking stuff like powdered sugar, brown sugar, cake mixes, icing, pie fillings, baking soda, cornstarch, etc. On the floor I have cases of flour, sugar, rice, oats, instant potatoes, hot chocolate and other dry foods like that which came from the church cannery.
Here I have my canned fruits and soups, and dry box mixes. You can also see my 72-hr food kits off to the right side in those #10 cans. I canned all those pears on the top shelf, by the way. Please hold the applause, thank you, thank you. We used to have about twice as much, but we’ve been eating them, which is the whole point of food storage anyway, so it’s obviously working just fine. You can see that I have the overflow of toity paper next to the water bottle supply on the floor there.
This is the same area, just a little more to the right. You can see all my paper goods like napkins, plates, paper towels, & T.P. On the upper shelf I have all my pasta stuff, dry beans, bread crumbs, and such.
The only thing I don’t have here is a picture of my tomato products shelf (some other time maybe). So I’m really pleased with how much I’m building up my stock. I love to see it growing each week. I want to take frequent pictures so I can see it as I get it all the way filled up. I definitely need to add some more supports to the shelves because I intend to fill them to capacity. Oh, and also in the opposite direction of the food shelves, there’s a cedar-lined clothing storage closet for off-season clothes and it’s all organized with a shelving system. I tell ya, I LOVE Utah houses with their special storage rooms in the basement! This is how every house should be built. You gotta have some place to put extra stuff and store your supplies.
Well, I’ll talk more about couponing and sales ads later. This is plenty long enough.
I went to Enrichment Night with my sister-in-law Trinette and the class was about cooking once a month and stocking your freezer with 30 meals. This woman was amazing!!!! I sooooo wish I’d taken all my sisters and my friends. They would have loved this thing. The gal’s name was Carole Ellis, she’s from Boise and has seven kids, so you can see why she needed to find a better, more efficient way to get meals done. She also wanted better nutrition for her family and to save money on groceries (don’t we all?!). She even wrote a book about it. However, the great thing is she doesn’t sell her book, she gives it away for free online! You can go to her website and print it off for free: http://www.myquickcuisine.blogspot.com. I’ll also add the link to my sidebar as myquickcuisine.com. She just got the site going a few days ago,and is still refining it, so keep checking back if you see an error somewhere, I’m sure she’ll get it fixed soon. I printed it off last night when I got home so I can prepare for my grocery shopping this Friday.
Carole gave us some awesome tips about food storage, how to use it, how to buy it economically (we all need that right now), how to do your cooking, tips for making it freeze and thaw well, how to store it better, how to use it up, blah blah blah, just everything. I wish you all could have been there. The Q&A session could have gone on forever. Everyone wanted to know more. Carole brought actual examples from her own freezer in a cooler for us to see so we’d understand what she was talking about when she was teaching about the proper way to freeze the meals. She uses gallon-size ziplocs and either builds the meal inside the bag (lasagna, enchiladas, etc.) or makes it and then just pours it in (soups and such), then she seals it and lays it flat to freeze so everything is flat and kind of thin so that it thaws out easier and isn’t in a big clump. She says that all her freezer bag meals will easily fit into a large crock pot or a 9×13″ baking dish after thawing for a little while.
Here’s a good tip for those of you who have small babies and/or want to know about using up the grains that we’re encouraged to have in our food storage (but always sit there for 20 years and then get thrown out): millet and quinoa (which are readily available at your grocery store) are actually easier for a baby’s stomach to digest than rice cereal. Rice was previously thought to be the mildest grain to start a baby with when they first start solid foods, but no, it’s now millet and quinoa. So try that next time you need to use up your #10 cans from the dark recesses of your pantry. Just cook it and mush it up with a fork, and you’ll have a nutritious and more easily digested meal for your little one. I’m totally going to do that with Michael when he’s ready for solids. Oh, and another good use for millet is in any meal made with beans. If you want to reduce the “gassiness” of beans in your soups or Mexican meals, add a 1/2 cup of millet while cooking. The millet will mush up and dissolve for the most part, but will draw out the gassy properties of the beans. Kind of like how adding potatoes to an oversalted dish will help draw out some of the salt and make it edible.
OK, here’s the best part of all: recipe time!
They didn’t tell us until afterwards that the refreshments they were serving were made from one of Carole’s recipes. You’re going to love this – these brownies are made with black beans! I know that seems totally weird, but I can’t tell you how well we were all fooled. Nobody suspected that they were anything but regular brownies. I am very picky about my brownies, but I swear to you I couldn’t tell the difference, the beans didn’t change the fudgy flavor AT ALL. The great thing about these is that they’re almost fat free, very low-cal/ low-sugar, high in fiber and protein, and totally delicious. I don’t feel the least bit guilty about eating a few at a time. I made a batch myself today just to see if I could make it work. Mmmmmm Mmmmmm Good! The recipe recommends making them in a muffin tin instead of pouring into a pan. It helps them cook all the way through and keeps them in healthy portions. Besides, they’ll fit nicely in a freezer bag so you can freeze them for later when you need a fast dessert for a neighbor or for company or for a potluck. Carole planned it that way on purpose, of course. She’s all about using the freezer.
Here’s the recipe. I really really advise all of you to try it at least once. They’re healthy and delicious. Also anyone with egg or dairy allergies can have these because they’re egg/dairy-free.
BB Brownies
1 box of brownie mix, 1 can of black beans (replaces eggs, oil, & water)
Directions: To loosen settled beans shake can before opening. Drain liquid out of can. Rinse beans (in can) 2-3 times with water. Fill can (with beans in can) with water. Pour water and beans into blender and blend until smooth (there may be pieces of skin visible). Pour dry brownie mix and beans into a bowl and mix thoroughly by hand. Grease a muffin tin and fill each cup about 1/2 full. Bake at 350 for about 19 mins. Cool completely before removing from muffin tin.
There’s so much more I’d love to tell you, but go to the website and check it all out there. You’ll be glad you did!
Ho hum. The honey-vinegar mix smelled so strong when I first coated the chicken with it, but after cooking it was so mild that it was bland. I was really expecting something tangier and stronger. It was okay, but I think it would do better as a baste (basted several times) if mixed with BBQ sauce too to strengthen the flavor. I used the honey-vinegar mix with some brown sugar as a glaze on skillet pork chops tonight, but it didn’t do much better. The flavor was only slightly stronger than before. I think that cooking it makes the flavor cook off. So anyway, that’s my verdict.
We’re trying out a new chicken recipe tonight and it was so easy to prepare I thought other people would like to have it too. I assume that because of the ingredients it will end up as a tangy honey type thing.
HONEY CHICKEN
1/4 c. honey
2 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 1/2 c. bread crumbs
2 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
6 chicken drumsticks
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 13×9″ foil-lined baking dish with olive oil. Whisk together honey & vinegar; coat all chicken pieces. Pour bread crumbs into a bowl and coat all chicken pieces again. Place in baking dish and bake for 30 minutes.
I’ve got it baking right now and the scent is tangy. I can’t wait for dinner! Now, let me add my own notes to this. I’ve never baked chicken at 350, I’ve always done 375 or 400, so I preheated my oven to 375 to make sure it’s cooked thoroughly. I’ll check it after 30 minutes, but I don’t know if it will be cooked enough to take out. Please remember that I live at about 4800 ft way up on the side of a mountain. Altitude wreaks havoc with cooking.