Conversations with Mimme

I went to visit my grandmother (my Mom's mom, whom I call Mimme) on Saturday. She turned 89 years old last week, and she lives in an assisted living home about 45 minutes from me. She lived in another state her entire life until just a few months ago, when my parents brought her here to Texas to be closer to them.

Her health has taken a turn for the worse lately (COPD, pneumonia, congestive heart failure), so I really want to make sure I take time to visit her. It's sad, but I feel like I don't know her very well. I am the youngest grandkid, so I probably didn't spend as much time with her as my siblings and cousins did growing up.

It was hard getting her to talk at first, but once she did, I loved to hear her stories. My mom was there, too, and she was able to fill in details as well. I learned that Mimme got married in 1937, when unemployment was still high from the Great Depression and life in America was just tough. I asked her if she and Granddaddy went on a honeymoon, and she laughed. She said that their "honeymoon" was a trip to Chicago--in a big truck full of furniture for a friend who was moving there. Once they got to Chicago, they stayed with the friend's aunt for a few days. As if that weren't romantic enough, it was also in the freezing cold of December!

My granddaddy took the work he could find and helped out on a rice farm for a year. In 1939, he started working at a gas station (which he would eventually run). Mimme said he worked 84 hours a week. WOW! That really puts things into perspective. He earned $10 a week.

I hope to have her tell me more stories each time I visit. I would love to hear more about how life was for her growing up. I think we have so much to learn from our elders.

Baking Day; The Climber

Today I was feeling domestic, so I did a bunch of cleaning and baking. I made homemade wheat bread, which made the house smell fantastic. This is the second time I've used this recipe, and it is yummy!! It's really easy if you have a bread machine or a Kitchen Aid mixer.

I also made some banana bread. This is a different recipe than I'm used to using, and I made it with whole wheat flour rather than regular and applesauce in place of the oil. Tasty!

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Isaac is our climber. Can you tell?

Taking Stock; Couponing

Periodically I like to take stock of how things are going in my life and what I can do to make myself better. It's similar to when I worked full-time and we would have quarterly reviews. Am I on track to achieve the goals I set? What areas can I change? Where am I doing well?

There are many facets of my life, of course, which can easily be broken down into roles: Christian, wife, mother, teacher, home manager, daughter, sister, granddaughter, friend, etc. If I think through each of those roles, I can identify places where I can improve myself.

One of the facets I am currently focusing on is my role as home manager. I know that kinda sounds silly, but as a stay-at-home mom it is my job to manage the home. That means I take care of the bills, the groceries, the meals, the house cleaning, the doctor visits, etc. (Of course, like any good manager, I do delegate tasks to my wonderful husband, who helps SO much! :) )

I am responsible for managing our finances, and this is the specific area I've been working on. In this economy, we have to be extra diligent about not spending more than we need to. You never know when life will throw you a curve ball (my brother, for example, just lost his job), and you need to be prepared. So I am looking through our expenses and seeing where we can trim.

I posted a few weeks ago about a terrific blog I found called Money Saving Mom. I have learned so much from there! She shows you how to make coupons really work for you. I don't think I ever even thought about combining store coupons with manufacturer coupons. But those two things plus a sale mean big, big savings!

I've been educating myself from her blog and others (like Life as Mom), and I was ready to take the next step. Last night after the kids went to bed, I worked on this:




This is my new coupon binder! It's kind of a first start and may morph into something better, but for now it seems to work. It's a floppy 1" binder (I repurposed one that Scott had used at kids' camp last year) with sports card pages in it to hold my coupons. Each sports card page has 9 little pockets, perfect for holding coupons so that you can see what you have! I took the idea from Laura Williams' blog. I just cut up index cards to make the tabs, and I have sections like baby, baking, bread, candy, canned, cereal, etc. In the front of my binder is a zipper pouch with a pen and sticky notes. I plan on putting a little calculator in there, too. (Right now I use the one on my phone, but it's a bit cumbersome.)

I used the binder yesterday at Kroger, and I must say it worked out quite well! Kroger had their Mega Deals going--if you buy 10 participating items, you get $5 off. So here's what I bought yesterday:



I spent $34.63. Here is what I got:

• 2 Irish Spring 3-packs of soap FREE
  
• 1 box of Fiber One bars $.99
• 2 Buttoni whole wheat tortellinis $1.99 each
  
• 7 Lean Cuisine meals $1.49 each
• 1 Soft Soap hand soap $.19
• 1 Soft Soap body wash $1.74
• 3 Classico pasta sauces $1.79 each
• 2 Colgate toothpastes $.24 each
• 4 boxes Raisin Bran $1.95 each plus coupon back for $1.50 off next purchase
• 1 box Nature Valley bars $1.99
• 1 gallon skim milk $1.99

Not too shabby! I have a lot to learn, but it's a good start! (And hey, to those of you I know in real life, if you have coupons you don't want, send them my way!) :)

Book Review: Super Baby Food; A Day's Worth of Food for Isaac

I have been trying to educate myself as much as I can on nutrition so I can improve our eating habits and raise Isaac to be a healthy eater. One of my favorite bloggers, MckMama, is an inspiration in the area of childhood nutrition. She feeds her kids all sorts of healthy fare (and they gobble it up gleefully), so I snatched up her suggestion and bought the book Super Baby Food by Ruth Yaron.

Overall, the book has helped me a great deal. It has a section on making your own baby cereal (she calls it Super Porridge, which I'll get into later) that I have put to daily use in our house. She tells you how to incorporate stuff into your baby's diet that I wouldn't have known what to do with--lentils, dried beans, flax meal, wheat germ, kale, tofu, etc. On top of that, it's actually pretty easy, too! It's worth the time to read and learn how to make your own homemade "Super Baby Food." It's tons cheaper and healthier than that jarred stuff.

I can't recommend the book without a few caveats:

• She recommends giving babies and toddlers nuts and seeds. In most pediatricians' eyes, this is a big no-no! She does encourage you to get your pedi's advice before starting any meal plan, but I wish she'd left out the nuts and seeds. When I asked my pedi about the book and whether I could give those things to Isaac after he turned a year, she looked at me like I was crazy. The only seed she approved was flax seed.
  
• The book is not well-organized and is very wordy. She incoporates lots of "tips" which largely just take up space.
• Sometimes she makes things sound overly complicated. She'll go on for a couple of pages about how to do something, when basically it can be summed up with, "Put the whole oats in the blender. Blend for 2 minutes. Voila! You have ground oatmeal! "
  

She advocates feeding the baby "Super Porridge" in the morning, which is the main meal. It's just cooked oatmeal, rice, or some other grain mixed with fruit, veggies, and/or other nutritional stuff. Here's what mine looks like that I make for Isaac:




He LOVES this. It's ground oatmeal, organic cherry applesauce, flax meal, and wheat germ. I change it up and use different fruits or grains, but this is the crux of it. (If you're interested, the oatmeal part is easy, but it does take a few minutes. Boil 1 cup of water in a small pot. Once it starts boiling, reduce the heat to low. Sprinkle 1/4 cup of ground oatmeal in the water. Stir. Cover and simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occassionally.) You can't tell in the pic, but that's a big adult-sized cereal bowl. He eats the whole thing!!

Yaron recommends having a second meal based on yogurt, and we typically do that. I buy organic whole milk yogurt (whatever is on sale at Sprouts!) and mix it with whatever fruit I have on hand--some combination of peaches, bananas, strawberries, kiwi, or blueberries. I load it all in my trust mini food processor (this thing is the workhorse of my kitchen and gets used at least once a day!) and blend away.



It winds up looking something like this:




Making this for Isaac's lunch is good for me, too. After I make his, I make some for myself (with nonfat vanilla yogurt, fruit, wheat germ, flax, and sunflower seeds). Yum!!

Once your baby can handle a little bit chunkier food, you can just buy bags of frozen fruit (with no icky preservatives!) and keep them in the freezer. When it's time to make the yogurt smoothie, grab your frozen fruit, add a fresh banana or whatever you have on hand, and blend!

I also make my own veggie and fruit cubes. This is the part that saves me some serious money. For example, I spent about $4 on one big organic butternut squash, and I got this gallon-sized bag of baby food out of it. It's the equivalent of at least a dozen of those level 2 baby food jars.



Yaron covers pretty much every type of veggie and fruit puree in her book, or you can go here to learn how to make several of them. The easiest ones to me (and the ones that are almost always in my freezer) are squash, sweet potatoes, blueberries, peas, and carrots. I use these ice cube trays (I actually verified with the company that they contain no BPA) that have covers on them to freeze my purees, then I just store the cubes in freezer bags.

Isaac normally eats about 6 cubes of veggies at dinner, then finishes the meal off with some Cascadian Farms Purely O's (the best organic O-shaped cereal, with no sugar added). He has some of those or some other finger food at lunch, too. We'll be working in some more beans and tofu soon. He also has a scrambled or hard-boiled egg a couple of times a week.

Well, there you have it! That's what Isaac eats in a day, influenced greatly by Ruth Yaron's book Super Baby Food.

The "S" Word

I never thought I would say this. In fact, I'm not sure I can say it. I'll just type it. Please don't judge me too harshly.

I am now... a child spanker.

There. It's out. Phew. That feels better.

I never thought I would need to spank my kids. I thought that if I used the time-out method, my kids would cry and repent and never do wrong again. Well, sort of. But I did think that time-out would work for Caleb. But alas, as you can tell from my last post in which my son was screaming at the dinner table, it has not worked.

So, after some great advice from my friend Linda (who has 6 young kids and knows a thing or two about parenting!) and some soul-searching, I am now a spanker. And so far it's working! Caleb still has his defiant moments, but now all I need to do is remind him what the punishment is for misbehaving. He doesn't like being spanked, so usually the threat works. Usually.

Linda suggested disciplining right at the moment of misbehavior, and that's working for us. If Caleb acts up at the dinner table, he has to get down and get a spanking, then he can return to the table and eat.

I had reservations about spanking because in my mind I link spanking with violence. Will spanking him now lead him to be more violent in the future? My fears have been somewhat realized: since we started spanking, he has become more physical with his brother. He wants to discipline Isaac, and I saw him trying to spank Isaac the other day. But I think if he grows up knowing that spanking follows bad behavior and that he knows that we spank him out of love (and never in anger), he'll be okay. At least that's what I tell myself so I can sleep at night.

No one said parenting was easy! I'd love to hear comments from you guys about how you handle discipline in your house.

Walkin' on Sunshine

It's funny the way kids think. Caleb, on the way out of the church tonight after Awana, said, "The sun's gone down! It went down into the ground. Now we're walking on the sun." Immediately I start humming, I'm walkin' on sunshine...

Then we went to "Taco Banana," as Caleb likes to call it. (Man, Cabana has gotten a ton of our money since they opened here in January!) Caleb has this thing lately with drive-thrus. He asks me to roll down his window in the back so that he can "talk to the lady" too. He's so dang cute. He'll sit back there quietly until the person at the window starts talking to me, then he'll yell out, "HI!!" It almost always takes the drive-thru person off-guard, and they almost always start laughing. It is actually a great way to get free stuff! So far he's gotten a free milk and several kids' toys.

When we got home, we ate dinner. (I know, I'm a bad mommy. Here we were eating dinner at 8:45 at night. But that's just what happens on Awana nights.) Caleb has a methodology about eating his meals. He will eat all of the "good" stuff--cheese, bread, crackers, ham--and when he gets down to just the fruit or veggies on his plate, he'll announce that he's either tired and wants to go to sleep or he has to potty. Tonight was no exception. When the only thing left on his plate was his banana, he announced, "I'm so tired. I want to go to bed."

Not this time, mister! He'd already pulled the I-have-to-potty trick at lunch to get out of eating his banana, so I decided that this time I was sticking to my guns. I calmly said, "You're not getting up until you eat a bite of banana."

Well, I might as well have told him I was going to cut his right arm off. "Noooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!" He yelled, he pushed away his food, he whined, he complained, he appealed to Scott. He had all this energy left to throw a hissy fit, but according to him he had no energy to eat one measly bite of banana. I reiterated. "You will not leave this table until you have a bite of banana."

"Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!!" This time he pushed his chair back from the table so that he was about 2 feet away from it. I just turned my back to him and started doing other things while he pouted. I wasn't going to play that game. A couple of minutes later, I turned around and looked at Caleb. He was asleep, sitting up in his chair.

You win. I carried him to bed.

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Earlier today we went to the pediatrician for Caleb's 2-week follow-up from his ear infection. I told her more about the "flu" that Caleb ended up catching on top of his ear infection, which Scott later got, then I got. She said it sounded more like rotavirus. Seriously? Once when Caleb was about 13 months old, Scott, Caleb, and I all got rotavirus at the same time. That was the most miserable I've ever been! That includes childbirth and gall bladder disease. I remember not being able to walk from one room to the other without stopping to rest. It really was that bad.

But this round of rota was much lighter--evidently after you've had it once, it doesn't get as bad the second time around. Lucky us, huh? Isaac didn't get it because these days there's a vaccine for it, praise God!

One more note from the pedi's visit: Caleb's ear hasn't completely healed. So, he is supposed to take Allegra twice a day for the next 2 weeks to see if that will help clear it up.

Phew. Enough with all this sick stuff! I truly hope this is the last post for a long time that I tag with "illness!"

Byproducts of the Flu

Having the flu was not fun, but at least a few good things came out of it.

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On Saturday night, Caleb was in another room and started calling for me. Scott knew I wasn't feeling well, so he went in there to help. Caleb told Scott, "But I want Mommy!"

Scott left the room for a few seconds, then came back in and announced in his highest falsetto, "Hi! I'm Mommy! How can I help you, honey?" Well, that launched Caleb into a giggle fit and Scott into a whole 5-minute "Mommy" show. Then Caleb announced, "I want Daddy!" So Scott left the room and came back with his deepest, booming voice, "What's going on in here?" I could hear all of this from the kitchen, and I collapsed in laughter right along with Caleb.

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Isaac is now weaned. I didn't really mean to wean him completely by this point, but it works out. He was down to just one nursing a day anyway. Strangely enough, everyone says that the nighttime feeding is the hardest one to cut out. But for us, that was the first one to go, soon after he turned 12 months. Scott, for the last few months, has had the magic touch as far as getting Isaac to go to sleep in his crib, so I was happy to let him just feed Isaac a cup of milk at night and get him to bed rather than me nursing him.

The next feeding I cut out was the morning one. Isaac wakes up every morning hungry, and the first thing he used to say was, "Bah-puh!" for Boppy, the nursing pillow we use. (Which is FABULOUS, btw, and well worth the money.) I got really tired of nursing him first thing in the morning, so we switched to milk a week or so ago for that feeding.

All that was left was an afternoon feeding. Now that one I wanted to keep for awhile. Honestly, it was the only way I could get him to take a nap during the day! But when I got the flu, I was too sick and had to miss that afternoon feeding, so he went a whole day without me. And so I decided that he didn't really need to nurse anymore.

He didn't like that decision yesterday. He cried and cried and called out "Bah-puh!" when I tried to put him down for a nap, but he eventually went to sleep. Today he still cried quite a bit when it was time for a nap, but I finally got him down. It should get easier from here....

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I've been trying to teach Caleb what "germs" are. Just this week he's hit that infamous 3-year-old stage in which his favorite word is "Why?" So when he asked questions about why I was sick, I tried to explain that you get sick because of germs.

On Saturday I was reading to Caleb, and he says, "Don't get my book sick, Mommy."

On Sunday, Caleb took Isaac's cup and drank out of it. I told him that he can't drink out of anyone else's cup or he might get sick. "I might get worms, Mommy?" Uh, that's germs, dear.