Maternity Shopping

I remember going to the maternity store at the mall when I was pregnant with MG, putting on the "practice belly" (so you can see what clothes will look like toward the end of the pregnancy), and crying.  I was just so happy to finally be pregnant.

This time, there was less crying, and quite a bit more laughing:

This picture is guaranteed to give B.J. gray hair.

What I Learned On My Summer Vacation

No one wants to hear every excruciating detail of our trip to Nashville and Huntsville, but I did learn several things which might prove useful to you on your next road trip.

1)  Take a picture of the stove and all the knobs that are in the "off" position so that you don't have to come back and check the stove twice after you've left the house (yes, I really did).  Ditto the garage door.  I've started telling the kids, "When Mommy asks you in 5 minutes if the garage door is down, tell me yes, ok, because it's down.  See?" 

2)  ALWAYS take blankets and pillows in the car to encourage napping.

3)  The Happy Meal-sized Toy Story figurines that I got at Walmart were the hit of the trip, and resulted in a lot of excellent car behavior - I got each kid a set to discourage fighting.  They've been playing with them ever since I gave them the toys on Tuesday morning.  If your kids are into a particular movie or character, getting them small toys that they can play with in the car might just save your sanity, too!  I also took a cookie sheet (the jelly roll sort with sides) for each kid, so they'd have a hard surface to color on in the car, and the lip of the pan held their crayons so I didn't have to dig them out of the crevices of the car quite as often.  Did you know that if you leave crayons in the car during the day in Nashville, they'll melt?  I've figured this out, so you don't have to!

4)  If I had made a list, I wouldn't have forgotten our toothbrushes and toothpaste.  Replacing them at the hotel cost $13 (for 3 square headed old-school toothbrushes and a travel-sized toothpaste - highway robbery!).

5)  If you have the option, stay at an Embassy Suites.  It's affordable (ours was $129 a night + taxes and parking), and you get two rooms, so once you get the kids to bed, you can sit in the outer room and watch TV, check e-mail, speak in a normal voice, turn on lights, etc.  This makes a trip with children MUCH more pleasant.  Also, they provide a free hot breakfast (not just stale rolls and old fruit, we're talking about made-to-order omelets and eggs, bacon, potatoes, waffles, etc.).  The breakfast alone probably saved us $25 a day.  Plus, all the people were super friendly, and it was really clean.  We've stayed in the same hotel before, and I love it.  I can't imagine staying anywhere else.  (P.S.  No one paid me or compensated me in any way for plugging Embassy Suites - I'm just a very satisfied customer who wants to share her experience, that's it.  Although if the Embassy Suites people want to compensate me, I'll be happy to accept free stays at their hotels!  :) )

6)  If your dog is a nervous shedder and you're boarding her, ask them to brush her a couple times so you don't get a pound of dog fur in your car when you pick her up.

7)  Road trip algebra:  2SC + 1PL + 3m/3D = 2M

Where SC = small child
PL = pregnant lady
m = museum
D = day
M = Much

(In other words, two small children plus one pregnant lady plus three museums over three days is too much!)

8)  Save a fortune on "in room entertainment" by bringing your own laptop and streaming movies over the wifi.  We watched a couple episodes of Dollhouse on BJ's laptop after the kids went to bed instead of watching TV.  We have a wireless 3G aircard, but it would've worked just fine over the hotel's wifi, too.

9)  Take a break.  My favorite memory of this trip, aside from hanging out with our college friends, is the fun the girls had feeding the fish and the birds that live in the canal behind our hotel.  Vacation doesn't have to mean that you run around like crazy people doing and seeing everything.  Sometimes the best moments are the simple (and free!) ones.

10)  Don't get into arguments with cab drivers, but if you do, remember that their boss's number is printed in large numbers on the back of their car. 

Raising Good Eaters

(Yeah, another post about food.  Sorry.)

I always cringe when I hear mothers say things like, "Well, my oldest won't eat anything but chicken nuggets and macaroni, and my youngest won't eat anything green, so I end up making one meal for my husband and I, and a second meal for the kids every night."  Sometimes they even make each kid a separate meal!

And they wonder why they're tired!

Sisters, you've got to knock it off.  Have you looked around the playground lately?  We're not doing children any favors by feeding them a constant stream of their (HFCS* laden, fat filled, salt and sugar saturated, MSG packed) favorites.  If your kid will only eat kid food, you have one person to blame, and it's the person in the mirror.

I've heard all the excuses.  "Toddlers naturally go through a period of pickiness, we evolved that way!  It's protective!" and "It takes a dozen exposures before any child likes any new food!" and "I don't want him to starve!" and "I don't want every meal to be a battle."

Well, I'm here to tell you that you've got yourself in a power struggle and you need to stop.  Now.

To the excuses, I say #1 - most of the picky eaters I see are well beyond their toddler years, #2 - it has never taken any child a dozen exposures to like chicken nuggets, or macaroni and cheese, or chocolate, #3 - no healthy child has ever or will ever voluntarily starve himself to death, and #4 - it's only a battle if you choose to make it a battle.

Yes, it's normal to make special meals for your kids when they're infants.  Obviously your 9 month old isn't going to eat steak and baked potatoes.  But when your child graduates to finger food, you need to gradually wean them onto eating what the family eats (with reasonable modifications for spiciness, texture, etc.).  By the time my kids were two, they were eating whatever I cooked for the entire family every night. 

Here are the food rules in my house:

Breakfast:  Everyone eats what they want if it's cereal (we only buy Multigrain Cheerios in this house - none of that cartoon crap where the box is healthier than the cereal inside!) or bagels or things that are all equally easy, but if I'm making eggs or pancakes or something I make enough for the whole family and everyone is expected to eat what is cooked.  Everyone in my house likes their eggs scrambled, so that's what I do. But if one person wants toast and the other wants a bagel with their eggs, it's no skin off of my nose, so they can select what they prefer.

Lunch:  It's just as easy to make two different kinds of lunch meat sandwich as it is to make one, so since Claire doesn't like ham and MG doesn't like pastrami, I'll get out both.  But if I'm making something hot (mac and cheese, or soup, or something else that requires cooking) everyone gets the same.  I try to make sure that I have at least one item that each kid will eat, and I include a fruit and a vegetable as often as possible - it's not hard to throw the applesauce and the pickles on the table, or to cut up an apple. 

Snacks:  They choose their own, within reason.  I try to make it fruit.

Dinner:  This is the real battleground for most families.  I plan my meals to be a protein, a starch, a fruit and a vegetable as often as possible (I'll admit that I often miss the fruit, mainly because fruit is expensive and applesauce gets boring).  When all four are present, it's easy to think, "Ok, MG likes blueberries so I'll serve those, and Claire doesn't but she likes broccoli, so I'll make that..."  Everyone likes bread, but not everyone likes baked potatoes, so if I know they'll eat the protein I'll make baked potatoes, and if I'm not sure they'll like it (the chicken has a new sauce or whatever) I'll make bread.  It is very rare, cooking this way, that there's nothing on the table that a single child will eat.

I often leave extras, like sauces and condiments, off of things.  So I'll make chicken breasts, but mine will be barbecue and BJ's will be buffalo and the girls will dip theirs in ketchup (and I try not to gag).  I don't mind making burgers or hot dogs for the kids when we have steak, or fish sticks when we have the $7-for-two-servings stuffed salmon from the deli.  But it has to be similar and no more difficult than the adult alternative (I can grill hot dogs and steaks together, and the fish sticks and the salmon bake at the same temperature).  They are still given a bite of ours to try (once they're old enough not to choke on the steak). 

Everyone has to finish their vegetable and their fruit before getting seconds on any item.

Condiments are free, but we try to limit their consumption of ranch dressing, and we buy the HFCS-free ketchup (hooray Heinz!).

If someone has tried everything on their plate, and they truly don't like any of it, they can have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich AFTER I have finished eating.  Not chicken nuggets or macaroni and cheese or a happy meal, a boring old PB&J.  In 4 years of feeding toddlers and preschoolers (so far) I have made exactly three PB&J sandwiches.

Two of them were tonight because I made pasta carbonara.  It was one of those boxed meals where you add the chicken.  They'd eaten the same box as fettucini alfredo before, but adding the peas and the bacon did them in.  I didn't follow my own rules, so the pasta dish was the only thing I served.  Well, they both tried it but neither kid liked it, so when I was done eating I made them PB&J and applesauce.  Lesson learned.  But hey, it inspired this post, so it wasn't a total loss.

I didn't make a big huff over it, by the way.  Actually, my exact words were, "Great!  More for me!"  See what I mean about not making it a battle?  Eventually even the stubbornest child is going to get sick of PB&J, and he's going to learn to eat what's put in front of him.  And he'll probably even learn to like some of it. 



* HFCS - I've been looking into this stuff, and the deeper I dig, the scarier it gets.  We have got to keep this poison out of our kids to the greatest extent possible.  All this hard work and research is paying off, by the way - I went shopping for maternity clothes today and the mediums fit.  I bought the large, so I'd have room to grow with the pregnancy, but I can't even tell you how good it felt to be OUT OF THE PLUS SECTION!  Shopping for maternity clothes was such a drag when I was pregnant with the girls and I was wearing a 1x or 2x - there was nothing cute!  But now, well, all I have to say is, BJ had better take away my credit cards!

I Have Safety Fatigue

Just in time for our third child to be born, they recall every crib in the known universe.  I'm still trying to figure out how I'm going to safely pick a baby up out of a crib without a dropping side - at 5'4" tall short, it's not easy.  I guess I'll get a step stool.  That should be REALLY safe at 3 am.

I've thrown out and replaced all of our plastic sippy cups due to concerns over BPA.  We also bought Pyrex storage containers to replace our plastic ones, and we use them most of the time.

At the grocery store today, I spent $7.50 for a gallon of Horizon Organic Milk.  We also buy our beef from a relative who only uses antibiotics when his cows are ill, and who doesn't use growth hormones, and who feeds the cows grass most of the year.

But I have safety fatigue.  I find myself wanting to rebel against the constant vigilance that is required of us - today's parents.  I am sick to death of having Google News Alerts for product recalls.  I'm pretty sure the bars of my crib were more than 2 inches apart AND the side dropped, and somehow my fat head and I managed to survive.  I remember riding in the back of the station wagon, and in the back window of the car, and somehow I survived.

There's a big part of me that thinks that they do this to get us to buy more stuff.  We threw out the carseat we used with the girls because it was 5 years old, and supposedly the plastic degrades after 5 years.  We threw out the stroller it came with because it, too, had been recalled, and the "fix" was a cheesy velcro and fabric cover that any baby I've ever met would rip off in about 10 seconds.

We've given up high fructose corn syrup entirely because of this video (we were on our way to giving it up because common sense says it's bad, this, and having to throw out everything in our fridge, pushed me over the edge):



I'm sick to death of anxiety.  I'm sick of worrying that everything from the milk my kids drink in the morning to the shampoo I use on their precious little heads at night is going to kill them.

I'm about ready to call it quits - to ignore the recalls and just keep using whatever works - because I don't trust the people in charge, and I don't want to spend the money, and I'm just plain tired of worrying about everything.

How do you decide, as a parent, what to worry about and what to ignore?  Do you follow every safety recall and take away the things that are "dangerous" or do you selectively ignore some?  Do you buy organic?  Where do you draw the lines?

Because seriously, sometimes my line makes me feel like a chump.

It's Not Easy to Liveblog a Power Outage

Saturday night I received a severe thunderstorm alert e-mail.  I looked at the weather radar and saw a tiny dot of green near our town.  I thought, "Meh..." and went back to surfing the internet.  A few minutes later, all hell broke loose.

The wind kicked up and the rain started coming down in sheets.  It was so white outside that it looked like it was snowing, only it was rain.  I've never seen anything like it.  The newspaper said later that we'd had 70 mph winds.  Like turkeys, we all stood at the windows and watched rather than taking cover in a windowless area of the house.  In our defense, we had friends over and the four of us plus the 8 of them wouldn't have all fit in the closet under the stairs.  The tornado sirens never activated, anyway.

I heard water running in the family room.  The (locked!) patio doors had blown open, and it was like there was someone standing outside with a firehose.  There was so much water!  If we hadn't been home the laminate floor would've been destroyed.  The gate to our fence blew open, too.  We'll need to replace the hardware at some point.  I sent BJ for towels and we sopped everything up as best we could, then we made sure that the post that goes into the top of the door frame was secure, and that kept the doors shut for the rest of the storm.

While we were busy in the back of the house dealing with the water, the beautiful pine tree in the front of our house was losing the top 1/3 of itself to the wind.  It looked like a giant twisted off the top of the tree and threw it into the front yard.  Thankfully, it didn't hit anything on the way down.

As quickly as it popped up, the storm died down.  It wasn't long before I was outside with the neighbors surveying the damage.  The power was out, of course, and stayed that way until midnight Sunday night.

After 30 hours without power, everything in the fridge was garbage.  BJ and I spent last night inventorying it for the insurance company and throwing it away.  Thank goodness that today's garbage day!  We cleaned the fridge out (it really needed it!) and then went to the store to get essentials - ketchup, ranch, coffee creamer, eggs, milk, etc.  I'm glad to report that the 1/4 beef we have in the freezer survived (again!). 

The kids are up at their Grandmother Diana's.  She had planned to come down Monday so I could work, but we didn't have power most of Sunday, so we arranged to meet halfway and I sent the kids home with her for the duration of the outage. BJ and I will pick them up tonight.

It's amazing what we take for granted.  We honestly don't realize how much we depend on electricity until it's gone!  I would never have survived as a pioneer, that's for sure. 

We're all fine, the house is fine, the cars are fine, and we're grateful that the insurance company will replace what we lost to spoilage.  So now you know what I've been up to since my last post!

This is post #1501 on this blog, which blows my mind.