Day 21....I Think I Did It Again

Oops, I did it again. I neglected blog-world. It's not like I heard any complaints. :-/

'Tis the season to begin work on Christmas presents. Joy. No, it's not that bad, but considering I often MAKE my gifts, and there are just so many things I want to make and I can't decide what I want to do for who, and.... *sigh* I'll get it worked out.

On the schedule for today:

Cleaning--laundry; wash linens, remake beds; vacuum; sweep, mop; clean bathrooms; dishes....oh gosh, allllll the dishes. Last night I was working on pureeing some pumpkin, but Beast woke and commanded my attention, so had a bunch of dishes that just got rinsed and left in the sink instead of washed.

Cooking--need to at least get the other half of that pumpkin pureed. I went to bed last night, wondering why such a large (no, not cooking pumpkin, but it still works to cook with!!!) pumpkin only yielded me 6 cups to freeze and a little over 2 cups to refrigerate to play with in recipes this week....cause it's only half the pumpkin, dummy. Oh yea. I forgot. So I want to make some syrup for hot drinks. And bread. Or rolls. Or muffins. Mmmm, pumpkin cream cheese muffins.

Social--have a friend going to try to bring by some clothes for the Beast. Yay! for baby clothes. Also have to call BabyGirl's therapist and find out if we do or do not have a meeting scheduled for tomorrow, as she was going to try to set one up but never called to confirm if we had that slot. Trying to transition BabyGirl's therapy to the public school system, from the private sector, now that she is turning three in a few months. :-(

For now, Beast is FINALLY asleep. In his swing, which I was sitting here pushing while typing. Mommy is going to try to sneak a little more sleep before BabyGirl wakes up, since Beast kept me up for so much of the night.

Shhhh, you wake him, you take him....

Day 15...MIA for the weekend

So it would appear that I cannot find the time to write on Friday-Monday, at least for now.
Quick recap of the last four days:

Friday= Clean house, make pumpkin pie spice playdough for BabyGirl to play with

Saturday= Attended a SpookTacular with whole family. Beast slept thru almost the whole thing, BabyGirl dressed as a bunny and received some candy. Not too much for her to do as a two year-old.

Sunday= Attended a Trunk or Treat/ Carnival at a local church with me and both kiddos. OH! I didn't realize it would be so big. Half a dozen fits by the bunny, the little tiger slept thru it all snug in a Sleepy Wrap. Played some games, held BabyGirl hostage from running off while I stood in lines so she could play (at two we are still learning about "waiting"), met a clown who made a pink and purple flower for the bunny....waited 40 minutes in line to get some cotton candy before heading out for the night. The bunny might have been throwing fits frequently, but was just pleased as punch to show Mr.DaddyBear her goodies when we arrived back home! Then, after kids were down for the night, or at least Monster was, headed to kitchen to bake a cake for my "little" brother's birthday.

Monday= Busy day! Usual cleaning; frost and decorate cake; drive to parents' house; dress Monster in bunny suit to act crazy for the grandparents; get her back OUT of the suit to eat cake. Home for nap? Shooooort nap taken by Monster, then up and dressed to pop up to Mr.DaddyBear's work to trick-or-treat from his candy bowl. She cleared out all but two pieces. Home for French bread pizza for dinner (our Monday night regularly scheduled dinner)....

Whew... maybe that's why I don't feel rested after this weekend. Super-Mommy-wanna-be wants to just go curl up in bed for a while longer. Beast says ok, but Monster thinks differently. :-/ *sigh*

Day 10....Five pounds of barbecue chicken...

...is what I made last night to sent with Mr. DaddyBear today. I was told late in the day on Tuesday that a co-worker's last day was Thursday, and they were doing a potluck, what would I like to send? Hrm.

Crock pot barbecue chicken to the rescue!

Super secret recipe....shhhhh!

Open five pound bag of boneless skinless chicken breasts. Dump into crock pot. Pour big bottle of preferred barbecue sauce on top. Cook on high for 3-5 hours. Remove chicken, dump goop. Shred chicken. Stick back in crock pot. Pour more barbecue sauce on top. Take entire crock pot to work to keep chicken deliciously warm. Oooohhhh, ahhhhhh!

Had his co-workers been giraffes, they might have licked the pot clean. Except giraffes are herbivores...so wouldn't be eating chicken. Hrm. Oh well.

Going to try to make it an early night tonight. Super mommy feels like the wicked body is trying to get sick. Super mommies don't GET sick....

Day 9....The mountain demolished

What happened to that pile of chocolatey goodness?

Well, here's the abbreviated explanation I received from Mr.DaddyBear this morning when I checked in at 8:15


He:"....I got skypes and people crowding around my office telling my how awesome we are.... and yes, it is / was a mess."
Me: "sometimes you just need a mountain of chocolate mid-week"
He: "....I put it out with a note that said: Mrs. S's "Mountain of Chocolate": Egg-free Chocolate Cake with Choco-Coffee Icing Stacked with Brownies covered in melted Chocolate Chips..... of course I made it all fancy and such.... by 7:30 it was half gone.... I didn't tell the 6th floor about it until 8:00...and by the time you skype'd it was pretty much history....."

So he made it available about 7 am, folks arrived a little before 7:30, went to break room to grab coffee before heading to their offices and found the Mountain of Chocolate. The ravenous masses really DID attack it, glad I got my photo last night!

Plans for today include the following: make beds, vacuum and mop floors (HOW do they get so dirty so quickly??), make a big crock pot of barbecue chicken for the farewell [to a co-worker] potluck at Mr. DaddyBear's work tomorrow, call BabyGirl's therapist cause I keep forgetting to call her back *slaps her hand*...oops....make dinner...shall I get to it? I mean, since it is 9 am now....

Day 8.... What happened to 4-7??

Um, LIFE. Life happened to days 4, 5, 6, and 7. That would be Friday thru Monday, for those of you not looking at a calendar.

Friday= cleaning house

Saturday= went to a local farm to ride a hayride, pick a pumpkin, look at animals, take photos with the family. Beast did NOT like the wind, and BabyGirl was quite amusing trying to pick up a pumpkin twice as big as her head...

Sunday=more cleaning, and made treats for Mr. DaddyBear's office.

Monday....the treats went to work....ok, here's a little more details on it:


So, because I am a kook, I made these mummies and ghosts out of Nutter-Butters. Basically, dip the cookie in white chocolate or regular chocolate. Add chocolate chips to white=ghosts. Add some white striping and eyes to the chocolate=mummies. A dozen of each of the little boogers. Individually wrapped them, even. Yea, Beast snored in the swing long enough for me to do this. Score!

....then I was told that though they went fast, he thinks I lost points for "icing a store-bought cookie". Umm... I wasn't trying to pass them off as cookies I MADE, I was providing fun seasonal treats.

....so today I made FROM SCRATCH a chocolate cake to send tomorrow. Egg and milk free. And then I was making chocolate coffee frosting for it. Which kinda negates the milk free part of the cake, but it's still egg free. ....And then I made brownies. And iced them with half a bag of chocolate chips. And cut up both cake and brownies to have 48!!! pieces and made a cake/brownie tall tower of gooey goodness. I should have taken a photo. I might still make Mr.DaddyBear take one before the ravenous masses attack.

[Edited to add photo...I had to go sneak to kitchen to snap one after all. It was too awesome to resist.]

Oh, and where is Mr. DaddyBear? In bed, asleep. After all, it is after 11:30 at night. he has work tomorrow. He has no clue that he will be required to carry the giant red cake-taker with him. That sucker is HEAVY! I mean, it DOES have almost a full cake and pan of brownies in there.

Yes, "almost full" cake... cause, you know, they wouldn't all fit. So I'm sending 40 pieces instead of 48. I'm keeping 5 pieces of cake and 3 brownies. No, they really wouldn't fit. Stop judging me.

Yea...ok... I'll go brush my teeth again before I go to bed. Not good to go to sleep with that much sugar having just passed your lips...

Have I lost my mind? Yes, yes I have....

Day 3...Why cloth diapers? (Warning: super long post!)

So, I mentioned the other day that I cloth diaper. That I never planned on it. Not entirely true. When I found out I was pregnant with BabyGirl, I jokingly told Mr. Daddy Bear that I was going to practice EC (Elimination Communication), or at the very least, cloth diaper.

EC, in case you don't know, is where mommy, daddy, whoever the caregiver is, learns the baby's signs of "gotta GO!" and holds the infant over the potty, and the baby goes. I know, nuts, right? No, not really. It's done in many cultures. It's not really weird. Think about it; you take a diaper off a newborn baby boy and WOW! It's the fountain of... well, not really the fountain of youth.... The openness and air makes 'em gotta go. Kids actually learn to NOT go when there is open air, they LEARN to go in the diaper, and then we make them UNLEARN going when they feel material of some sort there when we start potty training. But, EC takes a lot of time on the parents' behalf, and forget about trying to do it in a child care setting, I just don't see how it could work!

And the cloth diapering I was imagining was what you might be thinking of. Prefolds, pins, plastic covers. But, oh, how we have evolved! Cloth diapering has changed so much in the last...um, not sure when the revolution started, but in the last couple decades, things have changed. Cloth diapers are now in so many different styles and varieties, there is literally something for everyone.

However, when BabyGirl was born, I hadn't done much research. And the thought of working full-time (I was a preschool teacher at the time) and then coming home and washing diapers as well as trying to keep up with the basic cleaning chores wasn't exactly appealing. So we did what most parents do, adding diapers to the weekly grocery list. Diapers, diapers, more diapers. Then, at about 6 months, I started my daughter on solids.

And made her constipated. Oh, bad mommy! I gave her a combination of first foods that stopped my kid up good. And nothing was working to get her relief. In a slight mood of desperation, I put her on the potty ring that we'd been given when I had joked a couple months earlier about potty training her by her first birthday. I put her on the potty, thinking that perhaps the position could help her to go. And...she....went.

Imagine my surprised face. Imagine me hollering to Mr. Daddy Bear. Imagine him thinking I. was. nuts. But I wasn't. Because not only did she go that time, but she started going regularly. Not both, just the #2. Hey, I was cool with that. Less for me to clean up! My co-workers didn't believe me; what 6 month old goes potty on the potty? MINE!!!!

Fast forward to a couple weeks before her first birthday. I had started doing some research on cloth diapers. I figured, if she's doing the ickier of the two in the potty, I don't mind washing a few pee diapers! And I had seriously had to change about three poo diapers in a six week span. There were some times she would cry in the car on the way home, because she needed to go and wouldn't, because she was in a diaper and not on the potty.

So, thru my research, I found a number of different kinds of diapers. Yes, prefolds; but also all-in-ones, pocket, all-in-twos, hybrids....I selected a hybrid diaper called gDiapers, since, though it is VERY different in style from a disposable diaper, it is so very easy to clean up. They just so happened to be running a special on a package that included six diapers and twelve inserts....it was fate, right? I talked with Mr. Daddy Bear, who agreed that I could begin cloth diapering BabyGirl. Note: *I* could. He was very clear that he was not changing cloth diapers. He stuck by this resolve for a couple weeks until he saw how easy they were to change. In fact, there was a clear evolution here:

"I will not change a cloth diaper. I will change a wet cloth diaper, but I will not change a poo'd cloth diaper. I will change a poo'd cloth diaper, but I will not swish a cloth diaper." Swish=swishing it around in the toilet to remove some of the solid material. Yes, it took a while, but he did eventually swish!

EWWW!!!! <--I just totally read your thoughts. Hey, did you know you are actually supposed to dump the solid waste from disposable diapers into the toilet as well, not just wrap them up and chuck them at the nearest can? Read the label. Most (though not all!) packages of diapers state so. Something about how dirty diapers with solids in them are a bio-hazardous waste, and landfills are not set up to handle such things? Hrm. I really doubt most people dump it (I know I didn't) and it's highly unlikely that they will track you down based on DNA testing of materials found in diapers to figure out WHOSE dirty diaper it was....

Ok, back to me. And my choices. And my diapers. My wonderful, marvelous cloth diapers. Do I enjoy washing them? No. Do I enjoy doing ANY of my laundry? No, not really, though washing new baby clothes is awfully fun....

But going to cloth diapers has got to be one of my better parenting choices. With BabyGirl still in childcare, we only used them part-time at first--nights, weekends, and holidays. And in the roughly six month span between shortly after her first birthday when we started using them, and her turning eighteen months, when I became a stay at home mommy.... I had those diapers paid off. JUST using them nights, weekends and holidays. And then, I was home, and didn't have to buy any more of those disposable diapers! Woohoo!

Are we still using those same gDiapers? No...but that's because our needs have changed. That's the awesome thing about cloth diapers now, there IS no "one-size, one-kind, and if your kid has different needs (more absorbency, trimmer waist, etc.) then you're out of luck" in the cloth diapering world.
Heavy wetter? Put two inserts into a pocket diaper.
Have two different size kids in diapers? No problem, buy one-size diapers instead of perfect size, and then either child can use it. No worries about running out of a size 1 at midnight and trying to fashion one of your toddler's size 4 on your three month-old...

BabyGirl is now almost entirely potty trained; might have been sooner, had Mommy not messed with her world by presenting her with an adorable baby brother. LilMan, who is now using the same diapers BabyGirl was using a few months ago. The same ones that she wears to bed still, since Mommy can just adjust to what size is needed. And LilMan? His booty has been in cloth since he was about 4 days old.

I have two children under the age of three, and I haven't bought a package of disposable diapers in over a year. That's money in my bank account, to be spent on something a little more fun.

Way more on cloth diapers than you wanted to hear, huh? And you'll probably hear more in the future....Just remember, you were warned!

Day 2... Whomever said using the oven to heat your home was bad....

....just doesn't know how to do it! But that was this afternoon. Let's go back to this morning....

Ok, starting off on a lovely note for the day... got up in the early morning hours to remove my left contact because my eye was red and irritated. Still has not formed any nastiness, so maybe it's not pink eye, but I'm treating it as though it were. Which is so much fun with a two month old who wants to snuggle and a two year old who wants to suddenly play doctor and examine....what else?....my eyes.

Side note--I am so totally blind without contacts. And right now I only have one in. Having half-vision, so to speak, makes me mentally unfocused. Please excuse the randomosity of my posting...

The plan for today was, in no particular order: make beds; wash diaper laundry; vacuum and mop floors; dishes; tend children's needs; make stew for dinner. I was also hoping to do this little seasonal paint activity with BabyGirl. Being half blind and totally unfocused has altered the plan a little.

Cleaning? Um, yea, haven't touched it. Dishwasher is still full of clean dishes. This means, yes, there are some dishes in my sink.*hangs head* Super Mommy doesn't allow dirty dishes in HER sink. I don't get the title today, it would seem. Beds are made. Well, they were. Until BabyGirl laid down for nap in her room, and LilMan and I attempted to nap on mine. But they WERE made. Really. Mostly. Floors? I hope to still get to. BabyGirl has formed a fear of the vacuum. No clue where it came from. So thinking I might wait until Mr. Daddy Bear gets home and can distract her in another room to save me from the scream of terror that has begun to be a familiar sound whenever she so much as hears me rolling the machine from the laundry room.

Children? Well taken care of. Fed, dressed, diapered, pottied, napped.... the children have been well tended. :-) I get stars here. I'd give myself bonus points if I'd been able to 1) get them BOTH bathed, instead of just one; 2) do the painting activity. But the day is not yet done! There is still time!

Food? Stew is in the crock pot; I am desperately pleading with it to taste good. My friend tells me it is nearly impossible to mess up stew. Watch me achieve the impossible tonight... Made bread to go with it. Due to a lack of time, I'm using the "express" setting on my machine and, again, hoping it turns out well. I also realized that I had finished off all my granola bars, so got some in the oven. Left them in for twice as long as they should have been in because Beast woke from nap, and I wasn't watching the time and now I have a lovely pan of completely BURNED granola bars. At present, I am trying to air the smoke out of the kitchen...*sigh* I really wanted those, too.

Twenty minutes til five, I hear a Monster growling in her room, so I am off to go set her free. Maybe I'll still have time for that activity with her, if Beast agrees to watch nicely for a few minutes while I work with sister...

Day 1... ok, Day 986....

Today is not day 1 of being a mommy. It's day 986. Thank you, Day Counter, for your easy layout of "insert date, insert other date, calculate" doing all the work for me....

Day 986 of being a mommy. Day 1 was February 4, 2009 when my daughter K was born. My son A joined us on August 17, 2011. So now in addition to a Monster, my family has a Beast. These two might also be referred to as Baby Girl or Lilman. Keep up on your terms and you won't get confused.

So, no, not day 1 of being a mommy. It IS day 1 of this blog, though, and I'm technically its mommy, so...anyway.....

I. Am. Random. Learn it, love it, live with it, or go read something else. Seriously, I don't think anyone is MAKING you read this. And if they are... well, sorry. I didn't hire them. Promise.

What is this about? What do I plan to discuss? Whatever I feel like, it's MY blog. I might give you my plans of attack on housecleaning for the day, my secret recipe for barbecued fillets (which, by the way, is what we had for dinner tonight, amazingly easy and super tasty, too!), my tips for potty training.... who knows??

For now, a little more intro to me. I'm a mid-twenties housewife who is happy to be so. Two kids, as stated. One hubby. Two cats. Former preschool teacher, specializing in the fantastic dramatics of two year-olds. Nursing, cloth diapering mommy. Did I ever think I would cloth diaper? No. More on that later.

Do I cook? Yes. Well? Sometimes. Will I share recipes? Maybe. Pictures? Probably not, since both my camera and photography skills stink.

Am I the perfect mommy? No. Do I try to be? Confession: some days yes, some days no. No one can be perfect all the time, and living with perfection is annoying.

I might post every day, I might go a week and you hear nothing from me (doubtful). I might make two or three posts in a day, depending on the events...

For now, I'll wish you good night and go tend to the hiccuping Beast.

Oh, one more thing. Who AM I? ...you can call me Aunt Sarah...