Eating as a family is so important. I am totally savoring the fact that right now we can have a nice dinner together almost every night. As Mac and any future siblings get older and busier, it will be harder to sit down together. But right now, we manage to have nice family dinners. I have come up with four different things we use to make dinner extra special on an otherwise normal night.
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Andrew and I have never gardened before. Like ever. But this year, we had a great opportunity that we just couldn’t pass up. So hopefully our black thumbs will turn green this summer and we can grow all sorts of vegetables! We are using a method I haven’t heard of before called straw bale gardening. We have been basing most of our knowledge on the book “Straw Bale Gardens Complete” by Joel Karsten.
As I have written about before, we never used an infant seat with Mac. Many people would question us about how we managed to make things work without one. It was much easier than expected to carry her around. There are three, very simple ways we managed to still go out and about without an infant seat. Two were helpful when she was younger and the third is one we still use today.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. That means if you buy through my link, I may receive compensation at no extra cost to you. For more information, see my disclosure page here.
I have been making slow progress decluttering my whole life after reading “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” by Marie Kondo. The KonMari method is unlike any other I’ve tried before. (To read a little more about my previous progress, read part 1 here and part 2 here.) It is also working so much better than the other methods I have used.
To sum up, you ask yourself if each item you own sparks joy. If it doesn’t, you get rid of it. This has been extremely helpful to me because I enjoy thinking that someone else may discover something I have donated and it could bring them joy. You are also supposed to finish discarding first. This is the step I am still on and that I still struggle with. I don’t have the time or energy to go through every single thing I own at once. But I am trying to take large chunks of my house (like one whole closet or an entire bookshelf) and going through it all at one time.
So, let me show you what I accomplished this weekend.
When I think of most graduation parties, I think of cake, mixed nuts, signing a guest book and bringing a card with some money. Pretty standard fare for an open house. But when I think of my sister’s open house, I think of something all together different. Let’s just say the memory contains baked potatoes, a broken scent warmer and Emotion Storm Molly.
Here is proof that Molly does come through and we all band together to throw her a great graduation open house. A happy ending for everyone, but it was quite a trip to get there.
The toddlers in my room bring their own lunches everyday. And there is one thing I frequently see in there that I hate with a passion: food pouches. I’m talking about the applesauce pouches and yogurt tubes. Most of you will probably say things along these lines:
“But my kids love them!”
“But they are so easy to throw in a lunch box!”
“But my kids can eat them in the car seat on the way to school!” (although for more on why kids shouldn’t snack in the car, read this post.)
Well let me tell, there are three big reasons (and one small reason) why I hate them.
Snacking in the car seems so prevalent nowadays. Many children in my school come in covered in crumbs from eating breakfast in the car. Some are even upset because they have had to leave their sippy cup in the car. And I’m left wondering what happened to eating at a table. I talked a little about that yesterday in my post about using an open glass instead of a sippy cup with toddlers.
Now hear me out, I get it. Sometimes you are on a road trip and you have to get somewhere and can’t stop. Or every once in a while you have a morning where everything goes wrong and the only thing you can do is shove a granola bar at your kid as you pull out of the driveway. We all have those days.
But there are two major problems that come from regularly snacking in the car and no, a dirty car isn’t one of them.
There have been stories in the news lately about sippy cup lids getting all moldy and disgusting. There is a really easy solution to that, but most people don’t want to hear it. It makes them nervous and uneasy. They have lots of questions about how in the world you can make it work. But I have a really easy solution to make sure your child isn’t drinking mold: get rid of the sippy cups and use an open glass instead. Yes, even for babies and toddlers.
Any parent of a toddler is very familiar with tantrums. Toddlers will scream, throw themselves on the floor, and squeeze some tear out for the most irrational reasons. Believe it or not, there is a reason for this: a toddler’s sense of order is just coming into play. If you want to read more in-depth about the sense of order, read this post here.
But imagine if you were an explorer and you mapped out an area before you went to bed. When you wake up in the morning and look outside, everything is different. How confusing and frustrating it would be. That is what the world is like for toddlers. From the time a child is born, they map their world. My toys are in that basket, the couch is over there, the coffee table is there. If we rearrange or even move something small, we are messing up their world. We have offended their sense of order and they just want their world to stay the same.
Anecdotally, I can tell you I have seen numerous tantrums caused by a disruption to routine or physical space. Sadly, many parents seem clueless to the cause and just end up frustrated. Sometimes after a few days where a child has seemed “off” with their mood, we find out one of the parents is on a business trip and their morning routine has been totally different. No wonder they are having trouble! So what can we do? We can keep their map intact. There are two simple ways to do that: keep things tidy and stick to a routine.
As an early Mother’s Day present, I wanted to write a little bit about my wonderful mother and the things she has gone through from marrying into this crazy family. I already told the story about what happened when my mother first had dinner with my father’s family (read about that here) but for some reason, she had a lapse of judgement and ended up getting married and giving birth to three more crazies. She has handled the kookiness with grace, despite some of the more interesting things we have put her through.
Crazy Antics
My siblings and I used to fight. Like crazy fist fight kind of fight. I’m actually not sure how we all survived intact to adulthood. My mom endured years and years of us at each other’s throats. We used to chase each other around the dining room table and if someone was stupid enough to run outside, we would quickly lock the door and refuse to let them back in.
One time when my mom went back to work in August and we were still home, my sister called the school and had my mom pulled out of a meeting to tell her Mason ate her french fries.
We rode all of the laundry baskets down the stairs and broke them. I’m pretty sure Mason rode one down at the age of 22 and broke it also. It is pretty difficult because after the first four stairs you have to take a hard right or you smash into the wall.
