KIOS: Cleaning, Part 1: No Paper Products

Posted on October 26, 2012 by Laura

This post is part of my series, “Kickin’ It Old Skool: Why and How We Are Old-Fashioned” or KIOS for short.  If you’re new to the series, please read my disclaimer before continuing on.  I’m keeping a table of contents to this series here so you can see what I’ve already written about and what more there is to come.

I think four and a half months of food is enough, don’t you?  Of course, I keep thinking about more I could write but I’m also ready to move on.  So let’s move from the edible to the inedible. (Although actually, technically, this topic could be edible too.  You’ll see, eventually.)

Once we’d started along our “real food” journey, we also started thinking about other areas of our life that we could apply similar principles too.  Cleaning, or housekeeping, was an obvious direction to move in.  We wanted to follow the same responsible, ethical ideas that we were trying to figure out with our food.

The first area we decided to address was eliminating paper/disposable products from our house, both in cleaning as well as entertaining.  I was inspired in this by my brother and sister-in-law, Chris and Katie, who had mentioned to me a long time before that they’d bought a big pack of washcloths so they didn’t have to use paper towels.

So I bought a pack of 20 washcloths and we’ve accumulated more since then so we have plenty to use for washing dishes and all our cleaning.  It took me at least two years (maybe three) to use up all the sponges that I had bought (*cough* hoarded) from Costco (hey, they send you coupons!) and we’ve been a sponge-free kitchen for almost a year now.

For really messy jobs, like squishing bugs, drying off meat or fish, or greasing our cast iron pans, we have been keeping around a roll of paper towels but we store it in the linen closet.  So it takes effort to get out the paper towels and consequently, we don’t use them that often.  A roll lasts us for many months.  Recently, I had a pair of sheets that was beyond salvaging (not even useful for sewing projects).  So I’ve cut them up into large rags and we’ll start using (and throwing away) those rags rather than paper towels for these same jobs.  We would have just thrown away the sheets anyway so this feels like the perfect “reuse” project for them!

Nik also purged a bunch of his old T-shirts so we are stocked for a long time in the cleaning rag department.

I’ve found that using cloth instead of paper has added a negligible amount to our laundry load but has eliminate a big cost from our budget and reduced our trash.  Win, win all around!

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The Simple Dollar has a nice layout of the cost of using rags vs. paper towels.  I figured using rags saved us money but he’s proven it!

One method for creating a paperless kitchen.

A few nice tips for cleaning safely with cloth.

Posted in cleaning, KIOS | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

The Tomatoes Finally Showed Up

Posted on October 25, 2012 by Laura

I know I claimed a few weeks back that our tomato crop has been a big failure.  Amazingly, thankfully, the tomatoes finally decided to start blessing us with their presence!  It’s late October and the plants are full of green and starting to ripen fruit.

It’s nice to know that we didn’t completely fail at being gardeners this year!

A 20-ounce Cherokee purple.  It was delicious!

Posted in gardening | 5 Comments

A Couple Momentous Firsts

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Laura

Ellie is growing and changing so quickly.  The past couple weeks, a couple things have happened that have really made me realize how quickly my baby is turning into a little girl.

Exhibit A – Ellie’s first loaf of bread

On Monday, I handed her the rolling pin to “roll out” the bread dough while I finished greasing the pan that she had been working on.  Before I knew it, she had given the dough a few swipes with the rolling pin, rolled up the dough, tucked in the ends, and was ready to put her loaf in the pan.  It really wasn’t ready for the pan but I didn’t have the heart to tell her that so in it went!

She pushed it down like we always do and was so proud of herself for making bread!

Basically, she formed that ball of dough into a loaf exactly how I do it.  Not quite so skillfully of course, but she KNOWS how to make a loaf of bread.  I guess I wasn’t exaggerating when I said she would be making the family’s bread by the time she’s six.  Maybe it will even be sooner! (When she wasn’t looking I did spread it out a bit further into the pan, just so the loaf would be quasi the right size but other than that, she did it all herself!)

Exhibit B – Her First Time Sleeping By Herself

We are preparing for our new baby to come so we moved our crib mattress next to the big mattress to start getting Ellie used to the idea of sleeping on that, instead of plastered against me.  (It’s not safe to have a newborn and a toddler sleeping next to each other so Ellie has to move.)  I expected Ellie to ignore the mattress for awhile and that it would be a week or two before we actually started to have her sleep on it.  Rather, as soon as I moved it, she said, “Ellie!” and lay down on it.  She’s taken all her naps on it ever since.

Her first nap on her new bed

That first night, she didn’t want to sleep on the big bed.  She wanted to sleep on the Ellie bed!  She only stayed there until around 11:00 but just last night, she actually stayed on the bed until 6:00 am.  She definitely has been sleeping fitfully and I’ve had to comfort her more times in the night than usual.  But last night was better than the several before and I think she’s getting used to sleeping by herself, rather than with another warm body.

This transition has taken less than a week, an amazing thing to me.  Nik and I switched sides so that I would be near her if she woke up, figuring that transitioning to sleeping in a different bed and next to a different parent might be really difficult for her.

Now, our next step is for Nik and I to switch back so that she’s sleeping next to him.  I’m so grateful that [so far at least] this has been an easy change.  I think I’ve had a harder time adjusting to it than Ellie!  My pregnant, getting-bigger-every-day, body is grateful for the easier time sleeping and I’m glad to know that our transition to having two babies in bed with us should be relatively easy.  I know she’s not rock solid sleeping in her own bed yet but so far so good!

She does look oh so grown up sleeping in her own bed!

Posted in baby, Ellie | 3 Comments

Why We Think B2 is a Boy (But No Ultrasounds for Us!)

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Laura

Before Ellie was born, we were pretty sure she was a girl, mostly because I’d had 2-3 dreams in which I clearly knew that she was a girl and because one of the midwives in our practice had been fairly definitive in her opinion that she was a girl.  Pretty flimsy I know but we ended up being right!

So this time around, we’re trending towards, “Baby B2 is a boy,” and here’s why:

1. I’ve only had one baby-related dream and in that dream, he was a boy.  Granted, he also looked like Ellie’s doll but still, he was a boy!

2.  With Ellie, my hair was excessively greasy.  With this pregnancy, my hair is actually far less greasy than usual.  This points to different hormones in my body and to a boy.

3. People are telling me that my belly looks different, that I’m carrying this baby differently.  So maybe that means boy?

4. The same midwife who touched my tummy with Ellie and said, “Hello little girl!”, did the same thing to me at my last appointment.  Only this time, she didn’t even ask me if we knew boy/girl, she just said, “Hello little guy!”  Will she be right two times in a row?

5.  Two different Chinese birth calendars both tell me that B2 will be a boy.  (One of them was wrong with Ellie.)  (Obviously, we don’t put our confidence in these things.)

So there you go.  Overwhelming evidence that we’re having a boy! 🙂  But don’t worry, we are neither holding our breath or buying lots of blue clothes.  We are fully prepared and happy to welcome either a son or a daughter whenever he or she decides to join us.

Here’s why we won’t know for sure about boy/girl until he/she is born:

We decided not to have any ultrasounds with this baby.  With Ellie, I did have two ultrasounds (a dating ultrasound at 8 weeks and the standard 20-week ultrasound to check for problems).  Those ultrasounds were incredibly stressful and troubling for me, primarily because I know of too many people who’ve been told that their baby will have terrible birth defects, only to eventually find out that the baby is perfectly fine.

This pregnancy, we asked our midwives if we could skip them altogether and they told us that we definitely could.  There’s actually not much compelling medical research to show that routine medical ultrasounds are actually all that useful.  Ultrasounds that are ordered by medical professionals because there are other indications of problems usually are quite useful.  But the ultrasounds done just because the technology allows it usually don’t provide much useful information.  So, we were happy to skip them entirely.

If our midwives think it’s necessary (because they think there’s a problem), we will have an ultrasound but we will only do one as a last resort.

I’ve been really grateful not to have to have any ultrasounds this pregnancy.  I know that probably sounds weird because most women are really excited for the chance to “see” their baby.  I, rather, have really enjoyed just being pregnant without anything from the outside intruding on the experience.  It’s made me a much calmer pregnant mama, I think.

So, little boy or little girl, we’re excitedly waiting to find out what and who you will be, come December/January!  (We’d love the tax credit though so come in 2012 if you can!)

Posted in baby, Ellie | 7 Comments

Our First (and perhaps only) Attempt at Real Food Blogging

Posted on October 22, 2012 by Laura

Recently, my friend Julie asked if we would join her in making a recipe with fair-trade ingredients so that she could participate as a guest blogger in her employer‘s fair-trade food promotion.  I’m always happy to hang out with Julie and to bake but was especially excited when I found out that this meant we got free fair-trade dark chocolate!

The official blog (which Julie wrote and Nik photographed) can be found here.  For the rest of this blog to make sense, you should go read that first.

What we discovered as we attempted to be the most awesome food bloggers ever is that it’s much harder than it looks!  For example, we thought it would be fun to prepare our ingredients mise en place and take a picture of them.  This is more trouble than it sounds like to actually get a good looking picture.  Here’s one of the rejects:

AHH!  Chocolate flecks all over the place!

The trouble just continues when a baby is involved, like this reject:Baby won’t hold still to take picture without showing full features (but yes, still cute)

Or this one:Baby insists on feeding Mama rather than demonstrating how much she herself loves 80% dark chocolate. (I am not complaining about eating dark chocolate though!)

In the end, though, Nik was an incredibly patient photographer, we ate some fabulously delicious cookies (visit the real food blog to get the recipe) and had a grand time doing it.  Plus Julie ever so kindly did all those dishes that mise en place generated and left us with a clean kitchen.  Then she took us out for a delicious dinner.  What more could you ask for in a Saturday? 🙂

I’ll leave you with a couple great pictures, which Nik took.  Don’t you want a cookie now?

Posted in cooking, Ellie, friends | Leave a comment

KIOS: Eating, Part 16: What I Would Do if I Couldn’t Buy Much Local Food

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Laura

This post is part of my series, “Kickin’ It Old Skool: Why and How We Are Old-Fashioned” or KIOS for short.  If you’re new to the series, please read my disclaimer before continuing on.  I’m keeping a table of contents to this series here so you can see what I’ve already written about and what more there is to come.

I have many family members and friends who live in parts of the country where local fruits, vegetables, meat, dairy, etc. are not so easily or affordably obtained.

Additionally, I just finished reading the book, Just Food: Where Locavores Get it Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly by James McWilliams.  McWilliams gets a lot wrong in his book and I’m not necessarily recommending it but he does make a couple really strong points that I think are important to emphasize:

1. If all we do is insist on buying locally but we don’t change any other of our consumption patterns or other lifestyle habits, then we still have a long ways to go towards eating and living responsibly.  For example, if I eat tons of chips every day but now I just buy them from a local chip maker, that’s still a problem for my health.  Or if I buy all my vegetables locally but still let half of them go to waste, I still have a problem with wasting food.

2. As a nation (and as a world), we cannot go on eating meat at our current insanely high rates (regardless of how it’s raised).  There won’t be enough land in the world to raise enough meat if all countries begin to eat meat at the rate Americans eat meat.  His strongest argument is that to eat responsibly, we need to eat less meat, dairy, and eggs.

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With all that in mind, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we would eat if we lived in an area where we couldn’t get much locally.

1. We would emphasize eating “real” food.  That means, we’d follow the food rules that I blogged about in Part 7 of this “Eating” series.  Even if everything we bought was not local, we’d still be eating generally the same food that we eat now.  We would still emphasize buying ingredients to make our own food whenever we could.

2. We would buy the highest quality dairy and eggs that we could find and afford.  We would prioritize buying organic milk and responsibly raised eggs.  It would probably take some research to figure out what eggs to buy (as the labels on egg cartons are not reliably regulated).

3. We would do the same for meat and fish.  We would continue to only buy responsibly raised meat and fish.  This can sometimes be hard to find so we would probably have to restrict our meat consumption in particular.

4.  I would seek out local meat and fish as much as I could.  If we lived in an area with a high deer population, then we might have to become hunters.  If we lived in Alaska, we certainly would try our best to catch lots and lots of salmon every summer.

5. We would do the same for vegetables.  We would try to grow our own vegetables, using as much garden space and summer weather as we could find.  We would seek out local sources for vegetables and learn to love and cook with what we could find locally.  There are lots of cool weather crops that grow plentifully in Alaska so if we lived there, we would adjust our diet to eat more of those and less of the summer vegetables that we eat so much of now.  Realistically, though, many of the vegetables we would eat would probably not be local.  So we’d try to pay attention to any social justice issues inherent in the food we eat (just as slavery and other labor abuses in the growing of Florida tomatoes).  We would make sure not to wasted any vegetables that we did buy and do our best to eat responsibly.

6.  We would try to find as much fruit locally as we could.  If it was possible to forage for wild fruit, we would try to do that (such as picking wild berries).  We would also probably designate a new “local” for fruit.  As in, if we lived in Alaska, we’d buy apples from Washington state but not from Chile.  We still wouldn’t buy tropical fruits.  We’d just have to figure out a way to eat some fruit without feeling entitled to eating all the fruit that we’re blessed to eat now.  Fruit would be the hardest thing for me to figure out in the “not-local” scenario.

Generally, we would eat real food with a focus on spending our food dollars responsibly.  Anyone living anywhere can make changes in how they eat to do the same, even if they never buy a single locally grown vegetable.

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If you’ve read Just Food and would like a short but fairly concise critique of McWilliams’ arguments, this article highlights most of my concerns with what he writes.  (If you haven’t read the book, you can also get the general idea of his main points by reading that article.)

Posted in cooking, KIOS | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Checking Out the Pumpkins (and yes, my belly is getting bigger)

Posted on October 18, 2012 by Laura

Last night, Nik, Ellie, and I took a trip to Weber’s Farm.  We said we wanted to take pictures of Ellie among the pumpkins (which we did) but that was really just a good excuse to eat an apple cider doughnut.  That is the best part of fall!

“baby” pumpkins – Ellie’s favorite

Baby B2, at 29 weeks pregnant

Posted in baby, Ellie | 7 Comments

I Must Admit To Feeling A Bit Conflicted Right Now

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Laura

This morning, Ellie played with the kids instead of staying with me at our moms’ group at church.  I went in to check on her several times, primarily to check if she needed to use the potty but really, as much for me to make sure that she was OK.  And she was fine.  She had a great time and actually used the potty with someone else for the first time in her life too.

I was just across the hall from her and we can hear everything that goes on (i.e. if any babies are crying), so I was pretty sure that she was fine.  But wow, it was hard for me to just leave her there.  I wanted to go over and convince her that she wanted to be with me more than with those fun kids!  But the truth is, she was ready to stay there this time.

This was the third time that she had told me she wanted to play with the kids instead of staying with me.  Each time, I told the caregivers to come get me for anything – even if Ellie seemed happy but just asked for me.  The first time she lasted for 45 minutes and last week she only lasted for five minutes.  But today, she just played and played and didn’t even want to come with me at the end of the two hours!

My plan is to take each week as it comes – always asking and never assuming that Ellie wants to play with the kids rather than be with me.

So yes, Ellie is growing up, she’s maturing, and I have to do a bit of that letting go and growing up myself as a mother.

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I wrote here about our decision to keep Ellie close to us for as long as she needed to be.  In that, I wrote, “When’s she’s ready, she will tell us.” At that time, I was anticipating that she would tell us in words.  Currently, Ellie does most of her communicating with very few words and today she told me with her body that she wanted to play with the kids.  Each time, I went in to check on her, I said, “OK Ellie.  I’m going over to the other room.  Do you want to play with the kids or come with Mama?” Each time, she chose to stay.  So, I am confident that she was ready and I’m glad that she was able to tell me so, even if she didn’t say so in words.  Now I just have to convince myself that I’m ready for it too!

Posted in Ellie, parenting | 1 Comment

Dear Nana,

Posted on October 15, 2012 by Laura

Thank you so much for my fun birthday package!  I especially liked the puzzle and the “baby” blanket.

Love, your granddaughter,
Ellie

Posted in Ellie, family | 2 Comments

October Sewing: Lots of Quick Little Projects

Posted on October 13, 2012 by Laura

Last week, I was flying at my sewing machine and got four projects done in four days!

A little pouch for my sister Rachel and her new little boy!

A blanket for some friends of ours who just had a little boy:

Three dozen more cloth wipes (and it looks like I need to make a few dozen more)

And a girl blanket to replenish our stash so that we have something handmade and gender-specific for our new baby when we bring him or her home.  I still have the boy blanket left from last time but I’ve decided I don’t love it so I’m going to make another one and cut that one up for cloth wipes!

Posted in baby, sewing | 4 Comments