Food Inventory

Everyone who's ever read a parenting book knows that it's good to offer kids choices because it makes them feel empowered and yada, yada, yada. Thanks to poor planning on my part, snack and lunch choices dwindled down to a critical level this week

Me: "Do you want... uh... these three crackers and some of this orange I was eating... or... um... hey, I think there's a banana in the bottom of the fruit bowl... maybe?"

To avoid any (more) middle-of-the-week shortages, I've created a food inventory to aid with making the weekly grocery list. This is the go-to stuff that my kids eat day in and day out. It's going to become a fixture in my household management binder. If you don't have a binder, my next choice would be to laminate it and stick it on the fridge.

Pantry Foods
Peanut Butter Crackers
O Cereal
Whole Grain Crackers
Graham Crackers or Animal Crackers
Peanut Butter
Raisins
Bananas
Sweet Potatoes
Infant Cereal
Snapea Crisps
Whole Wheat Bread
Fridge Foods
Hummus
Kiwi
Pears
Avocados
Almond Milk
Applesauce

Freezer Foods
Vegetable Pancakes
Spinach Patties
Peas
Mixed Vegetables
Mini Lentil Loaves
Baked Beans
Brown Rice With Diced Vegetables (an Annabel Karmel recipe)
Blueberry Flax Cereal Mix-In
Peach Cereal Mix-In

13 Months Schedule

We've now been back home for a week and a half, and just yesterday did I feel like we had "clicked" back onto a schedule. That, friends, is the dark side of travel. Here's the schedule we've settled back into, at least for now. Our activities vary from day-to-day, but here are the constants.

7:00 - Wake, nurse, cuddle, dress and change babies
7:45 - Breakfast
11:00 - Nurse, nap
1:00 - Wake, lunch
3:00 - Snack
5:30 - Dinner
7:00 - Bath and bedtime routine
8:00 - Nurse, bed

Somewhere in there, I make sure that we leave the house EVERY DAY. This is so, so important for keeping all of us happy. And as they're getting older and more mobile, I'm fitting in as much play outside time as possible. I also schedule "Structured Activity" into each day (the most valuable thing I took away from Toddlerwise by Gary Ezzo). Examples of Structured Activity are finger painting, working with puzzles, reading, or playing a rudimentary version of Simon Says - just something that's led by a parent to help direct learning.

Wait until I tell you about the baby classes I've found for them. They're super dreamy.

Clean House

It's so mundane that no one really talks about it (Well, except for Martha Stewart. And the Real Simple people.), but aren't you kind of curious about how other people clean their houses?

Since I'm preparing to end our family visit and return to life on our own, I've been retuning the cleaning schedule. When the babies were younger, I scrambled to get all of the housework done during their naps. Now that they're older, I no longer need to make baby food. Don't get me wrong - making baby food was easy, but it did take time, especially making it in quantity for two little tummies. But on the other hand, they're down to just one nap now, so getting it all done during nap time is out. And since I don't get any time in the evening to myself thanks to my little bit's intense separation anxiety, nap time is IT for getting my read or write on.

Before, I was cleaning according to making the most efficient use of a tool - like the vacuum on the day I cleaned all of the floors. Now I'm cleaning according to room so that I can keep the babies close by while I clean.

Here's how I've divided the cleaning/chores up over the week:
Monday - Kitchen, Diaper Laundry
Tuesday - Dining Room, Entryway, Stairs, Hallway, Load of Laundry
Wednesday - Bedrooms, Diaper Laundry
Thursday - Bathrooms, Load of Laundry
Friday - Office, Diaper Laundry
Saturday - Living Room
Sunday - Grocery Planning, Shopping

I've also made a checklist for each day that incorporates the daily stuff like making the beds. I'm going to keep the checklists in sheet protectors inside my Home Management Guide so I can check them off every day with an overhead projector marker. Maybe that amount of organization makes you want to punch me in the face, but in my defense A) I love the heady thrill of checking things off on a To Do list, and B) If you know me, you know that I'm just scatterbrained enough to forget any number of the things on the list for months at time.

In case you're interested in creating your own checklist, here's Martha's checklist to use as a starting point for making your own.

Now it's your turn to dish - How do you do it? Do you have a schedule or routine? Just go on an as-needed basis? Let it go until you can't stand it anymore? (*Confession* All of the above have applied to me at some point.)

The Christmas Aftermath

I always start out the Christmas season with lots of enthusiasm... putting up the tree the day after Thanksgiving, decking my halls, planning my contributions to gatherings, wrapping the gifts just so, grinning like a fool in the middle of a department store when they play a holiday song from my high school band days. Then about a week before Christmas, I'm just over it. When the hubby brings home a gift that needs wrapping, I'm slinging gift bags around and wondering if one that's only a little birthday-oriented would pass, flipping the radio off because I CANNOT handle one more pop tartlet's histrionic wailing (Really, Christina Aguilera? You're THAT passionate about everybody being home for Christmas?), and avoiding most public spaces because I think we all know that there's a definite point at which pleasantly contagious holiday cheer turns to something akin to road rage.

So now that Christmas celebrations are over, I'm ready to move on with life.

But thanks to our very generous family (and I really am grateful - do NOT read any sarcasm into that), we have a lot. A LOT. of new toys. The facts:

1. Most of these toys have to make it back our apartment 1,400 miles away... somehow. The easy part will be stuffing some of them into the suitcases. The frugalista part of me is pained by the idea of shipping some of them, but that will have to be part of the toy evacuation plan as well. And then we'll leave some behind that they're a little too young for that can be brought in small installments with visiting family.

2. We're not set up for this many toys at the apartment. Some organization is in order. I'm now in the market for the cheapest, easiest-to-stuff-in-a-moving-van toy storage system.

3. I think it might be the Itso system at Target. It's a cube system with available fabric bins and doors, which is essential since I like to hide mess. I know that the toys will be in a big pile, but I don't want to have to LOOK at the pile.

Do you have a genius toy organization system or know of one? It would please me so.

A Typical Day

Here's a "typical" day for us at nine months. Of course, every mom knows that this day doesn't exist, but it's the plan for where we're going and what we're doing when we wake up. When the punches come, we roll with 'em,

7:00 - Wake, breastfeed

After we eat, the babies play on the floor and then in the jumperoos while I eat breakfast and do a little laundry or maybe load a few dishes in the dishwasher. When I've got the laundry going, we read a couple of books, play pat-a-cake, and maybe sing Itsy Bitsy a few times. Stuff like that.

9:00 - Breakfast for the babies, then down for the morning nap

Once they're down, I scramble to get as much housework done as possible. I have a cleaning schedule that I follow, which I'll post later. I find that if I don't have a schedule, I focus too much on a few areas and neglect others.

11:00 - Awake by now, breastfeed

We either repeat the playing on the floor routine or if I wasn't able to shower the night before, I do so at this point with them in bouncies and me playing peekaboo with them to buy some time. There's more reading of books, some verses of the ABC song. You get the idea. Also, I scarf down lunch somewhere in here.

1:00 - Baby lunch and down for afternoon nap

Again, the housework scramble. If I get finished, which is rare, I start on the day's blog post.

3:00 - Awake by now, breastfeed

After we do all of diaper business and get packed up, we head out to either the park or on errands. By this point in the day we're all bored with the playing in the floor business, so getting outside is fantastic. We swing, we crawl around on the grass, we people watch.

5:30 - We've made it back to the house by this point, and I make dinner for the babies. After they eat, I get them set up with a DVD - usually Signing Time. While they're enthralled with the friendly lady who moves her hands (and she even has colorful tape on her fingers!) and sings songs, I make dinner. Ray comes home, and we throw some food down while trying to tame fussiness and pulling Linus away from the fireplace. Little pyro, that boy.

7:00 - By this time, both babies are in some stage of a meltdown. This probably means that they'd like to have an earlier bedtime, but that would mean not seeing Daddy, and that's not an option. I take the fussiest baby up for a bath while Ray has some one-on-one time with the other baby. Then we trade, give babies supplements, and brush their teeth. With twins, bathtime MUST be an exercise in teamwork. There's no other option. By now it's between 7:30-7:45, and I nurse them down for the night. Linus stays down. Veda doesn't (see She Who Does Not Sleep).

And even after being with them every moment of the day, I miss them at night. It's love, true love.

Weekly Dinner Schedule

I like organization. I like schedules. For the professional mom, schedules are especially important, as they help provide a sense of routine and order to what could be a chaotic sort of lifestyle. It was this desire, along with my enthusiasm for saving money on groceries, that led me to create this handy dandy weekly dinner schedule. How does a dinner schedule save money on groceries? Why, because I've built in a few days that help slash the grocery bill. How does that work? Read on...

Here's the schedule:

Monday: Meatless Monday
Tuesday:
Wednesday: Leftovers Day
Thursday: Salad Day
Friday: Fishy Friday
Saturday:
Sunday: Soupy Sunday

Meatless Monday: You might have guessed that on Meatless Monday, we don't eat meat. We do this for three reasons:

1. Eating less meat is good for you. Unless you live in a cave, you know that a diet full of saturated fat leads to all kinds of health problems.
2. Eating less meat is good for the environment. As certain population centers become more affluent, (take China, for example) they will increase the worldwide demand for meat. It simply isn't sustainable for all of us to eat meat at every meal.
3. Eating less meat is less expensive.

What do we eat if we don't eat meat? We do a lot of pasta and pizza. If my husband didn't hate beans so much, we'd eat lots of beans. Perhaps you've heard that they're good for your heart. Shhh... don't tell him, but I've been thinking of sneaking some lentils in...

Leftover Day: In order to make Leftover Day work, you've got to make sure that you made enough food to have leftovers on Soupy Sunday, Meatless Monday, and/or Tuesday. Leftover Day will significantly slash your grocery bill, and as an added bonus, your fridge stays less cluttered.

Salad Day: Given my obvious fanaticism for alliteration, I'd like Salad Day to be on Saturday. Alas, the lettuce tends to get a little too wilty by then, so Thursday it is. Salad Day is a good opportunity to get in several of those vegetable servings that we Americans are so infamous for not getting enough of. It's also an easier/quicker/cheaper meal if you play your cards right. It's nice to get creative with salad day... keeps it fresh.

Fishy Friday: Not only does this day make me dizzy with alliteration delight, it also fits in with the tradition of fish on Fridays. You know you should eat more fish. Fishy Friday reminds you to do it.

Soupy Sunday: Every frugalista foodie knows that soup is a grocery budget's best friend. It fills you up, and often is chock-full of vegetables. If you make your own stock, it's even cheaper. Also, it's super easy to just make a giant pot that can go on to be lunches, fare for Leftover Day, or treasure for your freezer.

What about Tuesday and Saturday? What do I make on those days? Whatever I want. On at least one of those days, I make something to keep in the freezer. On the other day I might thaw something from the freezer.

Being the easy-going sort of lady that I am, this schedule isn't set in concrete. If I'm short on time one day, I might switch out a more time-consuming meal for a faster one that was dedicated to a different day. It saves a lot of time when I'm planning out the meals for the next week and writing the grocery list. And EVERY mom knows that's important.