FuzziBunz has come out with a new one-size pocket diaper. My friend is giving some away on her blog Big City! Baby. I am telling you about this so that I may get another chance to win the dipes for myself. I really want to win them.
Category: Uncategorized
Throwback Thursday – Dancing Queens
This is me (on the left) and my Cousin one year at Christmas time (I’m sure you can tell by the clothing this was in the 70s. Yep, I’m that old). Dontcha love the unselfconsciousness of kids? I think I might have been using that hairbrush (?) as a microphone too. I still can’t dance worth a darn (I can keep a beat but don’t really have the moves!) but I do it anyway. Especially with Miss, who LOVES music and dancing. Her favorite song? “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes.
I’m Eating Pasta Again!! I mean Squash…
I have just learned of the wonders of spaghetti squash. Last week we got a spaghetti squash in our box from the CSA, along with a recipe for a spaghetti squash casserole. I had heard before that spaghetti squash is a great substitute for spaghetti pasta. I must admit, I didn’t really believe this. Having eaten many different kinds of squash before, I couldn’t see how it would be anything like pasta. So, I never bothered to pick one up at the grocery store and thus had never tried it. Well, lo and behold, I ended up with one in my produce box last week, along with a recipe, and decided to give it a whirl.
To back up just a little, my hubby and I have been adhering loosely to the Zone diet (developed by Dr. Barry Sears) for about a year and a half. When I say “loosely” I just mean that we don’t really count blocks TOO strictly. Basically, we try to get the correct proportion of protein, fat, and good carbs. We also try to eat whole foods, rather than processed items, thanks to having read the wonderful book “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.” * In trying to get good carbs, we try not to eat foods with a high glycemic index, so no potatoes, pasta, breads, etc. I’ve sort of missed these things, though less so over time. The discovery of the spaghetti squash, however, has opened my eyes to the possibility of eating “pasta” again. It really is quite like spaghetti in texture when you cook it and scoop it out of the skin! And it actually has an even better flavor. Just for reference, the glycemic index number for white spaghetti is 59, while the glycemic index number for spaghetti squash is less than 20 (the lower the better!). The following is the recipe we got in our box this week from Good Earth Farm. I happened to have all the ingredients on hand except for mushrooms (hate these so never have them in my house), which I left out, and the full 2 cups of mozzarella, which I supplemented with parmesan. I made it two nights ago and it was fantastic! Even better last night for leftovers.
Baked Spaghetti Squash Casserole (6 servings)
Spaghetti squash (1 medium, 1/2 large, or 2 small)
2 T. Olive oil
1 lb. ground Italian sausage (we used venison Italian sausage, but any ground meat works)
1/2 cup sliced mushrooms
1 bell pepper any color, cored, seeded, and diced
1 small onion or 3 scallions, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp dried Italian seasoning or dried or chopped fresh oregano, basil, and thyme
1/2 to 1 tsp. salt (to taste)
freshly ground black pepper
1 1/2 to 2 lbs. tomoatoes, chopped (approximately 5-6 tomatoes, depending on size)
1 T. sugar
2 cups shredded Monterey Jack cheese or mozzarella
1/2 cup Kalamata olives, pitted and coarsely chopped (optional)
1-2 scallions, thinly sliced for garnish (optional)
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Poke the squash several times with a sharp knife to create holes to let the steam out and prevent squash from exploding while baking. Bake whole squash for 45-60 minutes, until a fork easily penetrates the flesh. Remove from oven and let cool until it can be handled. Slice it in half lengthwise and scoop out the seeds and fibers that hold them in the middle. Discard these. Then scrape the spaghetti fibers from each half into a large bowl. Fluff up and separate strands with a fork if necessary and set aside.
Heat olive oil in a skillet over medium. Add Italian sausage and cook, breaking up the sausage into even pieces. Add mushrooms, onion, bell pepper, garlic, Italian seasoning, and S&P, and continue cooking until the sausage is browned and veggies soften (about 8-10 minutes). Add chopped tomatoes and sugar to meat mixture. Cook to thicken, 15-20 minutes. Stir in spaghetti squash.
Heat oven to 350 degrees. Rub a 9×13 casserole dish with a little olive oil. Pour squash/meat mixture into dish. Top with cheese and bake 30-45 minutes. If you like the top browned and crispy, turn on the broiler for the last few minutes. Sprinkle with olives and scallions if desired and serve!
One last thought. I have found that the thing I miss the most about eating pasta is the ease and speed of preparation. Pasta was always one of my go-to dishes when I didn’t feel like cooking anything fancy. I mean, how easy is it to throw some noodles in boiling water and add sauce of some sort, or even just a little EVOO and parm? Over time I’ve come up with other quick and easy Zone-friendly recipes to replace pasta in this way (tuna, chicken, etc). This is good, because I have to say the spaghetti squash can’t quite match the speed of preparation of the pasta. As you can see, it takes about an hour to cook it before it’s ready to eat. But, cooking it whole is super easy and not messy (doesn’t leave much on the dish to clean after) and it is passive preparation, in that you just wash it, poke it, and throw it in the oven for a while. So I would say that it is as EASY as pasta, just not as fast. The flavor and texture make a terrific substitute in other ways! I’m going to try it in some other pasta recipes too.
Next up – Kholrabi puree as a substitute for mashed potatoes. Mmmmm!!
*Pollan, M. (2008). In defense of food: An eater’s manifesto. New York, Penguin Press.
I Jinxed Myself
I knew I would. All this talk about how Miss is sleeping so well now. Yesterday she took two half-hour naps. Not two and a half hours, but two naps, each for one half hour. Oi. Today was a little better, but I swear that little stinker has some sort of sensor, such that she wakes as soon as I sit down to get on my computer. She was snoozing away while I was doing dishes. Fortunately, she didn’t wake while I was taking a shower and drying my hair. But once I sat down to enjoy some coffee and a little blogging, I heard the monitor begin to crackle, signifying the rousing of the Little Miss. This is truly my second attempt at typing this same post about lack of sleep. Ironically of course, the first attempt was aborted when Miss woke up prematurely from her morning nap.
Ah well, at least her sleep at night is still good. Oh wait, no. I jinxed myself there too. Sleeping through the night? Well, sort of. She is now waking once per night, at a different time every night so far, and fussing for approximately 20 minutes. This isn’t so bad, because she’s not really crying. I’m able to let her put herself back to sleep, but of course I’m awake the whole time too. And if you know me, you know I have had problems with insomnia anyway, and unfortunately, if I wake up for that length of time in the middle of the night it is nearly impossible for me to get back to sleep. I think I was getting more sleep when I just got up twice and nursed her back to sleep real quick. But we won’t go down that road again. I’m hoping the sleep all night thing will take pretty soon for good. Until then, early to bed for me. And no more bragging about how beautifully my daughter is sleeping 🙂
GAD Cloth Diaper Giveaway on LHDH
As I mentioned a few days ago, my friend who has the blog Life Happens During Naptime is giving away tons of great stuff for moms and babies in honor of her son’s first birthday coming up. Yesterday the giveaway she posted was for a GAD diaper. I have one of these for Miss and would love to win another, so I’m blogging about the giveaway to get myself another entry 🙂 Above is a pic of her in her GAD.
BTW, I won the Softbums giveaway I blogged about the other day!! Yay for free stuff!
Am I Crunchy?
I was just pondering this question the other day. I suppose the answer depends how you define that term. I wasn’t really sure, but I thought that “Crunchy” was a term to describe people who are concerned about the environment and live accordingly, by doing various things to reduce their impact on the environment. If you define it this way, I suppose I’m pretty Crunchy. Obviously, I use cloth diapers. I try to conserve water. I use cloth napkins and real plates/cups/bowls. I make cleaning products out of natural ingredients like vinegar, tea tree oil, baking soda, washing soda, etc. I do still keep a mixture of bleach and water for some jobs and I have a few commercial products, mostly leftover from my days of living in the nasty rental house when I would have used a sandblaster to clean if I could have. But for the most part I use the natural stuff for cleaning. I recycle as much as I can. We joined a Community Supported Agriculture group, called Good Earth Farm, to get organically and locally grown produce all summer and much of the fall. We replaced beef in our diets with venison from the deer my husband shot bowhunting last year, even though it was a buck and is tougher and more gamey-tasting than a doe would have been (he has promised to shoot a doe this year, and I know many people will be horrified and think this is not really environmentally friendly, but look into it, it really is better for the environment than eating beef and we just aren’t into being vegetarians). I don’t drive a very environmentally friendly car, but I have yet to find one that is both highly fuel efficient and big enough for a baby and two dogs, plus potential future babies. There are some things that I’m just not willing to do, like using “family cloth” instead of toilet paper for example. Not going there. So needless to say, I’m not perfectly environmentally friendly by any stretch, but I try.
This morning I looked on a message board that I pop onto from time to time about cloth diapering, and there was a thread asking “What is Crunchy?” I was intrigued so I took a look. The answers on there included other things that I hadn’t necessarily thought of as “Crunchy,” but I think I was probably wrong about what the term means. If you think of the term “Crunchy Momma” in particular, then some other things come into the picture that don’t necessarily have anything to do with being environmentally conscious but are more related to a style of parenting, such as breast feeding (check), babywearing (check), babyfood-making (check), co-sleeping (nope), not vaccinating (nope), homeschooling (nope), homebirthing (nope), momma-pad-wearing (nope), and so on. Check out this fun “test” of crunchiness that someone posted: How Crunchy Are You? I scored in the “Pretty Crispy!” range. About in the middle I guess. Which is really where I ought to be I suppose when I think about it. It’s not that surprising when I think about the choices I have made, which are not really mainstream, but are not terribly far into the granola world either, compared to some*. So how crunchy are you??
*Note: This post is in no way meant to be a judgement of more mainstream or more crunchy mommas!
Mommy Blog Giveaways
Two posts in one day, so that I can tell you about some giveaways on other Momma Blogs that I follow. The Items being given away are both things that I own and use and personally love. And by blogging about them here, I get another chance to win each of the giveaways myself!! so, here they are:
Life Happens During Naptime is a wonderful blog written by a mommy friend of mine. She is an excellent writer and her blog is delightful on any given day. But this week it’s especially nice because she is featuring a different item that her readers can win each day, in celebration of the upcoming one-year birthday of her adorable son Moose. I have entered all of her giveaways since beginning to follow her blog a few months ago and haven’t won anything yet. But I’m feeling lucky this week! Today’s giveaway on LHDN is for a Mommy Necklace. These necklaces are beautiful, totally baby-safe (non toxic beads, extra strong cord, break-away clasp), and make a great focal point for babies who are easily distracted when nursing. I have three and love them. I’m keeping my fingers crossed because I love the color and style of the necklace being given away!
The second blog with a great giveaway right now is Diapers and Dimples, which I have just recently started following. This is a great blog by a new mommy to an adorable baby girl, Emma. Right now she’s giving away a Softbums bamboo basic pack. Softbums is an all-in-two (AI2) type of diaper that has an outer shell with a snap in liner that comes in terry covered microfiber or bamboo. We all know how much I love bamboo. I recently purchased two sets of Softbums, one red and one yellow, and tried them for the first time yesterday. Love them!!
So, these two great products are being given away on two great Momma Blogs. Check them out. If I don’t get lucky, maybe you will 🙂
My Cloth Story, Part 2
Being good to the environment is important to me. So after our failed attempt at gDiapers, I still really wanted to try cloth. Once we were in our new house with only moderately hard water and a water softening system that works pretty well, I decided it was time to try again. I again immersed myself in cloth diaper information online. I looked at all-in-ones, pockets, fitted, prefolds. . . I looked at BumGenius, Happy Heiny, Imse Vimse, Fuzzi Bunz and a wide array of other adorably-named cloth diaper brands. I just could not decide. Looking at the pictures and reading the descriptions online was just not making it clear to me. I was suffering from Cloth Diaper Overload, which paralyzed me and made it so difficult to make a decision about what to get. What saved me you ask? Easy – Mom and Pop Place. This is a local store that carries lots of parenting items. They have environmentally friendly toys, nursing supplies, baby carriers, and many other things. And, they have cloth diapers!!! It made all the difference for me to be able to go somewhere and look at the diapers in person and see what they were made of and how they work. Plus, the owner of the store and all the ladies who work there are knowledgeable and very willing to answer all my questions. So, I took the plunge.
I decided to start with just a few items to try some different types of diapers, testing them in two ways. One of my big problems with disposable diapers (other than the nasty chemicals they’re made with and the fact that they will still be sitting in a landfill when my children’s children’s children have children. Figure that!) is that they could not contain Miss’s poo. I was cleaning up at least one poop blowout per day. That is not an exaggeration. The final straw for me was a major blowout that went up to her armpits while I was traveling two hours with her in the car by myself. Cleaning that up while on the road was not fun, and it was the second blowout of that day! So, the first test of the CDs was whether they could keep in the poo. And the second was whether I could get them clean. I bought 4 pocket diapers (2 Bum Genius One-Size and 2 Tiny Tush One-Size), six infant Indian prefolds, one each of fitted and contour Kissaluvs, and three covers. I used all of these diapers for a day and a half without a single blow out. Then I washed them using the standard cold rinse, hot wash with cold rinse, extra cold rinse CD wash cycle that I had been told to use. The diapers came out sparkling clean without a single stain. I was instantly hooked, and my addiction to cloth diapers began.
I returned to the internet to find different kinds of diapers to try, in different colors and patterns. I soon learned that I don’t much love using prefolds, that fitteds have their place, and that I prefer pockets. I discovered hemp and bamboo. I learned how to get rid of stains when they did occur (using the sun!!) and how to stuff a diaper to last all night without leaks. I found out how adorable cloth diapers can be and how much money they can save. And most importantly, I could feel great about doing this one little thing to have only the softest stuff against my daughter’s behind and to help the environment. Yay for cloth!
Ahhh, sleep!
We have been working on sleep here in our happy home. After so much travel in the past few months, with the past few weeks being very full, plus teething and who knows what else, Miss had gotten into some bad sleep habits. While on the road, she would often wake 3-4 times per night. And it was very difficult to get her to go back to sleep without nursing her or or else waking the entire household or hotel where we were staying. So, we got into a bad habit of eating in the middle of the night again (her, not me). Miss also started a pattern of fake-out sleeping. Nearly every time I would try to get her to go back down to sleep at night or go down for a nap, she would be peacefully sleeping on my shoulder, and then as soon as I would begin to bend to put her in the crib or Pack’N’Play, she would tense up and be screaming by the time I would lay her down. This would go on for up to an hour, over and over. Sometimes I would go through this for an hour only to get a half-hour nap out of her. I thought I was going to go mad. And for the past several weeks we were never at home long enough in between trips for this to return to normal. Or rather for me to help it to return to normal. I had a plan to address it during this period of three weeks home. So this week we have been working on it.
Wednesday I received Dr. Ferber’s book* at my door and read the relevant sections. I was already familiar with the general concepts of his method, but wanted to read about a few additional points related to night waking. Wednesday night we got a baseline. Thursday night was a bit rough. By Friday night we had successfully cut out one night feeding (she had consistently been waking for two since we’ve been home), and last night she slept through the night. The whole night. She went to bed at 8 and didn’t make a peep until 7 this morning. I can’t remember the last time she did that. And she is back to napping very well, with three to four hours per day rather than two at best. I’m a happy momma. And she is really a happier baby with much less fussing and crankiness.
I’m kind of surprised by how easily she adjusted back to her old ways (she used to be a champion sleeper). There have been some unpleasant moments, but overall this process was not nearly as hard as I expected it to be. Thank you Dr. Ferber. And thanks to all who gave advice, support, and help (I recall hearing something like, “Give me that baby, you look like you’re about to lose it”) during the weeks when sleep was so scarce. I don’t necessarily expect that Miss will amazingly be sleeping through the night every night from now on, but I am happy to know we have drastically improved the situation and have some new routines to get us through any future bumps in the road.
Ferber, R. (2006). Solve your child’s sleep problems. New York, Fireside.
“She’s not chubby, she’s just right!”
This is to quote my mother-in-law. Except she says it with a funny Scandinavian accent so the “Ch” sounds like “Sh” and the “J” sounds like “Y.” Of course, that is absolutely true about Miss. She’s yust right! So why is it that baby clothes don’t fit her?? When I buy pants for her that aren’t stretchy, like jeans or corduroys, I have such a hard time fitting them over her rear end. So, I was thinking it was just because of the cloth diapers, because they give her a bubble butt. But today I tried to put an adorable pair of flowered corduroy pants on her, size 6-9 months. She’s just over 7 months. I couldn’t get the pants on. And it wasn’t the diaper, it was her thighs getting in the way. Babies are supposed to be chunky, so why is it that I can’t get pants to fit her? I always have to buy sizes way too big and then roll up the legs so they will “fit” her up top. I guess I’m just frustrated because these pants I tried today are so cute and I didn’t put them on her when I still could (I thought I had plenty of time for her to get into them!), so now she can’t wear them. I need to just stick to the stretchy kind I guess until someone gets wise and starts making baby clothes with a little extra room in the tush area for the cloth diaper set, and the “shubbies.” I’d rather have rolls than corduroy anyway.