This is a post entirely to satisfy the people who forlornly remember when I could blog every day. Them were the days.
I got a phone with a better camera on it. While the pictures still aren't exactly top-quality--especially when you get them through the convoluted process I had to use (take picture, send it to Baba, Baba emails it back to me--because I don't know how to make my phone talk to my computer)--at least there are pictures.
The Littlest Sasquatch, for instance, experiencing chocolate.
Or waking up with his sister...they have about the same wake-up speed. (0.03 seconds, vs. Buddy's, which is more like 2 hours.)
Miss Boo's hair, which she wanted done up in braids like Kirsten from the American Girls books.
Littlest Sasquatch eating choconana pudding (a bizzare but delicious pudding: put one banana, one avocado, 1/4 cup of honey, 1/4 cup of cocoa powder, and a teaspoon of vanilla in your blender. Blend until it's pudding. Eat it.).
And...something else messy. Maybe tomato sauce?
Wearing his little brother's shirt...
A sunset from my back porch. Pretty, huh?
Relaxing with a book she likes to read to herself.
Because she's of an age now to do that. (*sniff!*)
Wearing the shirt that his brother had stolen earlier...he's remarkably calm in all these pictures, which is fairly accurate about his personality. At least except for the times when he isn't calm.
Coloring with a set of pencils that Oma, the Husband's grandmother, brought us. They've been possibly more popular than the slide that Opa and Grandma brought us.
Miss Boo standing on a big rock in Lamoille Canyon. I promise she is neither as close to the edge nor as far away as the shot makes it seem like. But the kiddos are now definitely addicted to hiking. As in, "can we go hiking today? WHYYYYYYYY NOT?"
("Because it is Tuesday, Mama has a head cold, and we have chores to do."
"But I WANT to go hiking!")
I might be addicted to hiking, too, if someone carried me in a backpack the whole time.
I'll get more pictures soon--perhaps these will help tide you over, however.
In other news, we've accepted an offer on our old house in Texas--woo hoo! (Although not for the price we wanted. Boo.) The housing market there has abruptly come to a screeching halt due to the army base having some layoffs, and people are even short selling their houses. (We didn't have to do that, thank the Lord.)
This, I believe, is an increasingly common phenomenon. It got me to thinking about one of the things that was my goal back when I started writing this blog--to be useful.
As an experiment, upon discovering the less-than-ideal price we were getting for our house, I decided to see if I could just not go to the store this week for anything. To my surprise, upon surveying the stuff I had in the house, I discovered it was entirely possible. Here are some things that I'm doing:
1. I counted the Littlest Sasquatch's disposable diapers and there were 11. So he is wearing cloth diapers during the day, and I'm saving the disposables for nighttime. I haven't yet figured out a really good way to keep him in cloth at night without him getting soaked and upset. And when Sasquatch is upset, he has a way of letting the tri-county area know about it. Plus cloth diapers really are easier on his skin--I've just been too lazy with all my company lately to use them.
2. We consume a lot of milk, and I don't believe it's good for kids (or anyone) to drink nonfat milk. This is a dilemma, because I had powered milk in my pantry, but the kids won't drink it. And who can blame them. The solution: I mixed cream with powdered milk to make it whole milk. I had two bouts of company in two weeks, and for each set of company I made something called Erdbeer Sahne Torte (Strawberry Cream Cake). The recipe calls for 600ml (because it is German) of whipping cream, which is about a quart and a half. So I, very strangely, happen to have a quart and a half of whipping cream in my fridge. (Because I panicked in the store and overbought.) I have to price this, but since it only takes about a cup of cream in a gallon of powdered milk to make it whole milk, I think it would be cheaper to buy cream and mix it with powdered milk than it would be to buy whole milk. Alternately, I discovered there's such a thing as powdered whole milk in the Hispanic section of the grocery store, which is what I'll keep in the pantry from now on.
3. I went through my pantry and fridge and required myself to make menus based on what was already there. It was surprisingly easy, but then I have a big pantry. Also, we like beans. Also, my kids are little. If they were teenagers this might be harder.
4. I baked bread. But then I do anyway.
5. I decided I was okay hand-washing dishes when my dishwasher detergent runs out (immanent). Alternately I found on a blog that you can use two drops of blue Dawn hand dishsoap plus a handful of baking soda in your dishwasher. But I'm a little nervous this would cause a mount Vesuvius of suds. I'll let you know if I try it, though. (I've also seen--and tried--using just salt and baking soda in your dishwasher and putting white vinegar in the rinse aid thingie. It worked fine, but we have terribly hard water here and I think it would leave a film if I tried it now.)
The interesting thing about all this is that I shop once per week usually, and in that shopping trip I spend anywhere between $100-$150, depending on whether I need garbage bags, dog food, diapers, etc. that week. So if I had gone my merry way and shopped this week, I would have essentially been spending something like $120 that I didn't need to spend.
That's not a lot, but it's something--and it's intriguing. How often do we buy things just out of habit? How often does food go bad in the pantry or fridge because we forgot it was there?
Why don't you take a look at what you have in the house this week and see if you can just skip going to the store? It'll save on gasoline, time, and money. You could even be like Brandy and shop only every couple of months, but I don't think I'll achieve that until I have a garden that looks like hers. A girl can dream.
Look, you don't need me to be another voice clamoring about the Economic End of the Age. You can see the headlines for yourself--drought and a lost corn crop, European nations defaulting right and left, government agencies quietly closing locations and laying off employees, the housing market tanking (again), people my age waking up and realizing they have no marketable skills. Ultimately there isn't a lot we can do about that--buying gold, booze, and bullets is silly, in my considered opinion, and so is panicking. The Lord is still in charge, just like He always has been.
And just like always, He blesses us with the ability to analyze a situation and do what we can, while trusting Him for the outcome.
The libraries are still open and the internet still hums. Knowledge costs very little--you can learn to bake bread, set a patch, knit a sock, make soup, fix the toilet, or whatever else you need to know in order to help protect your family. Go ahead and learn it now, before you desperately need it. If you have income, you can think and plan about what to cut out of your life (satellite TV? a landline phone? new clothes each month? new books each month? scrapbooking? fly-fishing? magazine subscriptions? sweets? fancy coffee? organics?) in order to keep everyone fed and put a little bit away in case times get worse. There are a million websites on stocking your pantry; there are several good books.
Don't get panicky because you're not on a farm, you don't have any savings, and you work in a shaky industry. Certainly don't run around wasting your energy on politics just because this is an election year--it won't make that much difference who wins, PBO or Mittens. Trust me on this. Just quietly start doing what you can, and trust the Lord.
I'll be running a series, I hope, on thinking ahead to take care of your family. But in the meantime, keep in mind the components of that sentence: Quietly start doing what you can, and trust the Lord. Quietly, because you're not trying to panic anybody and because the state of your pantry is no one else's affair. Start, because you can know all of this and it still won't do you any good if it doesn't get any cans of soup on your shelf. Doing, because this is work--what you can, because nobody can do everything they want to do. Maybe you only have five dollars left in your grocery budget after you cut out all the nonessentials. That's still enough for a couple of pounds of pasta, a can of chicken, and a can of tomatoes. In other words, stuff you could make into a meal without too much work. And trust the Lord, because otherwise you will get either panicky or prideful.
Oh, and don't forget to buy toilet paper. It's amazing how you forget that having company means going through more toilet paper.
Cheers,
Breanna
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