Just when you think it's all easy

Yeah, so just when you are all "We are headed/heading out of town and taking it easy..." You get the call from home that the heat is out.

I guess the good news is that we were making this trip in stages, so Brian is still home to be the lucky one to come home to no heat. Or we'd be coming home to burst pipes. But yeah, the house is 55 and the pilot light is out. And the forecasted low is -5 tonight.

And the "emergency" number Brian called can get someone there in 24 hours. Thanks, St. Paul Plumbing and Heating, but no thanks.

Oh and have I mentioned my poor mom has come down with a horrible flu and is spending the night in the hospital 25 miles away? She is ok, but has had a horrible 36 hours.

Is if 2010 yet?

Sitting in the middle of nowhere

We have arrived in the middle of nowhere. Well really, on the shores of Lake Superior. But close.
Snowing lightly. Totally quiet. Not a thing to do but sit and relax and be together.

As my brother said to me when we talked earlier this morning, "can't wait to hang out in pajama pants." And that is what we'll do. Just what the doctor ordered and the perfect way to ring in the non-event that is New Years.

Time to go put on some pajama pants and do nothing.

Testing, testing, this thing on?

Alright, here we go, my first stab at mobile/email blogging.  So really, this is just a test to see if it works.  I am about to head out on my first car trip with all three kids...solo.  Eeek.  DVD players.  Check.  Movies.  Check.  Snacks.  Check.  My own iPod.  Check.

We're headed off to "the middle of nowhere," a place where there isn't a whole heckuva lot of wifi, so the laptop is staying home.  But I tend to get cell service, at least on the main road, so I thought I'd see if I could stay connected that way.

Wish me luck (with the kids in the car deal, not really the staying connected part).

There's Nothing Better Than...

There's nothing better than...coming home from a stressful day at work to your house that you left a disaster this morning.  And knowing it will take easily four hours to clean it up.

There's nothing better than... remembering at 5:30 p.m. that you were the one who suggested everyone bring two meals to the family's weekend getaway that you are leaving for solo with the three kids for the four-hour car trip in the morning, and realizing you haven't gone to the grocery store.

There's nothing better than...realizing all of that when it's 2 degrees out, you are wearing high heeled boots, the ground is covered in sheets of ice, and you have all three kids with you.

There's nothing better than...looking at the clock and seeing 8:50 p.m. and not having eaten yet.

There's nothing better than...it being 8:50 p.m. and you also haven't started packing.

There's nothing better than...sitting down for the first time at 8:50 p.m.

There's nothing better than...getting ready to put the two oldest kids to bed and having the oldest one have a complete and total meltdown, sobbing, and in hysterics wailing, "All you do is work, work, work.  You never get to play with us.  All you want to do it work.  You love working and cleaning and that is all you love."

There's nothing better than...trying to reason with the hysterical 8-year-old while you, yourself are now feeling even more horrible about the job you are (or aren't) doing balancing it all.

There's nothing better than...knowing what he is talking about.

There's nothing better than...only having an two waking hours with your kids a day.

Yup, nothing better.

Eating from the Pantry - A month of tomato paste and beans?

While reading Money Saving Mom's Blog today I came across her plans to dedicate January to eating through their pantry.  Long and short of it, the idea is to eat through what you have on hand, creatively, to use it up and save some money.

Last night, as I was lamenting to Brian that, post-holidays we are, well, probably as broke as many of you are, too.  You combine Christmas with the new business and we're feeling the pinch.  (And thanks, for those of you who have asked, the business is going well.  It's still definitely a new business, but so far so good.)

I actually heard myself saying, "You know as well as I do that at this point, most of our expenses are set -- mortgage, student loans, daycare -- so what do we have left to cut?  Food and heat."


"Food and heat???!!!"  Brian couldn't stop laughing at me.  Now clearly, I didn't mean that we were going to shut off the heat (Minnesota, people, Minnesota) and we will not stop feeding our family.  But we need to do both as responsibly as possible.


The heat, well, we're about as low as we can semi-comfortably (depending on who you ask) go on that one.  60 when we sleep, 64 when we are awake and 58 when we are gone.


But I have often thought about trying this idea and seeing what happened.  We certainly could stand to clean out our freezers.

My pantry is a bit goofier.  Lots of tomato paste and canned beans.  Wow, doesn't that make you want to come for dinner?  But I'll see what I can do there, too.


Now my concern in doing one of these deals is, okay, it's all well and good for a month, but then you are out of everything and go back out on February 1 and stock back up.  So I am going to do it in moderation.  Here are my three goals for January.  I may come up with more as we go along, but so far, here is my plan:


1. Completely eat through the basement freezer.


2. Cut our monthly food/Target spending for the month of January by $200.  (In October 2009 we spent about $450 at grocery stores and Target.  Not all food...these were Target runs after all.)  So the goal is $250.


3. Eat through the canned soup that I used to buy, but don't anymore, to free up a shelf in the pantry.


Let's see how it goes...

What $42 Will Get You

Bona fide passport photos.

 (And no, we didn't plan the rainbow shirt outing.)

Yeah.  Looking back at my lovely bathtub effort, we came to the conclusion that we'd both be pretty angry if we got to the post office only to find out they wouldn't accept them because there was a bottle of Pert Plus in the background. 

I'd like to say it went better with Eli than the shower experiment, but that would be lying.  We frantically ran out of the house this morning to try to get this all done before we both had to be at work and the boys had a bus to catch for a field trip.

Not wanting to risk Walgreens again, we headed to CVS.  I tried putting Eli on a stool in front of the white back drop and he wasn't having anything to do with that.  No Way Hose B (as we say in our house, opposed to No Way Jose).  He was screaming and flailing and producing massive amounts of snot.  Even more than in yesterday's photos.

I tired to reason with him and tell him that he will have this passport until he's nearly 7 and he'll probably want a good photo.  But that too bombed.

Then I got my brilliant idea.  I'd hoist him up on my shoulders and they could take his photo that way.  All good except for the part when he kicked me (accidentally, I am sure) in the mouth on the way up.  I, of course, had put some nice dark, MAC lipstick in anticipation for my lovely photo op, and he smeared that all the way up and onto my nose.  So much for a great passport photo for me.

So what we got was a mug shot.  One he will hate when he is 6.  But we think it's hilarious.

Oh, and while the official USPS web site said that they didn't take photos at our particular post office, when we got there, she told me they could have just done them there.  She then looked at the CVS ones and told us they were too small.  But after some creative trimming, made them work.  Another $455 for passports and processing fees and we were done.

Ah yes, if that isn't my life, I don't know what is.

Day Nine of the 500 Pound Declutter- Undoing Christmas

Continuing on in the storage room...I wish I could say this mess all happened over Christmas, but alas, it didn't.  Too many "Oh hell, that birthday party is today?" moments met with too many "That is a helluva deal on a gift bag" moments to create this lovely vignette.

 

I actually went to Target an purchased a new system to organize it.  And that's what is funny.  Once I dug in, I realized it wasn't the "system" at all that was the issue.  It was me.  I was the faulty system.  The drawers worked just fine.  I cleaned up, organized, tossed broken bags, got rid of the ripped tissue (I know, family, amazing) and put it all back together.  Landing here.

Only one more pound down.  But hey, paper is light.  And I made progress.  And I no longer get tissue paper stuck to my foot when I do laundry.

Grand total so far:

121 pounds

The worst passport photos ever

My parents will celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary this spring.  And so, in honor of that, they have generously offered to take me, my two siblings, and our families (spouses and kids) to Mexico to commemorate the event.

To get there, of course, we will need passports.  While Brian and I have had them, let's face it, we haven't really been international jet setters since Caleb was born.  And so mine, with my photo circa 1990 has full expired.  As has Brian's.

Tomorrow was to be the day to get new passports.  Understandably, you have to have both parents present to get a child a passport, so with the kids off school, and us able to arrange our schedules around it, tomorrow was it.

I picked up the kids from daycare and their winter break program and we all piled back in the car to go to Walgreens to get photos to use their passport photo system.  Evidently, while you can take your your photos, that requires a white background.  At last count, we had 14 colors of paint in our home and no while walls.  (And no photo editing software either.)  So the $7.99 a pop Walgreens deal was the way we would have to go.

We get there and all haul into the store only to see about 10 signs (no joke) announcing their photo lab was down.  And would be until Wednesday.  Aaargh.

The guy told me we could drive back four miles to another location.  Um, no thanks.

I decided then and there that I really didn't care what our passport photos looked like.  And remembered that we did have a white wall in our house.  Okay, so it's the wall of the shower, but it's a wall all the same.

I don't recommend that approach.  Especially with a toddler.  Who really doesn't appreciate being stood in the bathtub in his tennis shoes and clothes.

Here is what you get.

Well, okay, the 8-year-old gets it.

Same for the 6-year-old.

The 20-month-old?  Not so much.

 

 

Potty Training at Night ... When all else fails

In my decluttering, I came across this funny blue box the other day.  As it took us forever to learn about it (one of those well-kept parenting secrets), I thought I'd go ahead and share it here in the off chance that someone reading is in the same situation we were in and can do something about it sooner than later.

Potty training at night.  Ugh. (So there you go, read no further if you don't want to go there...)

The Malem Ultimate Selectable Bedwetting Alarm with Vibration

Neither of our older boys were particularly difficult to toilet train.  It went about as you would expect it would.  However, there was one key difference.  Noah started staying dry at night before he was even staying dry during the day.  It just happened.

Caleb didn't have the same experience at all.  I remember feeling all kinds of stress and anxiety about it, and I am sure Caleb was feeling the same.  He was 5 and still having accidents every single night.  As he got bigger, the pull-ups wouldn't or couldn't do the job anymore, so we were changing sheets every single day.  It was exhausting and gross and frustrating and, man, you just felt bad for the kid (and his parents).

There seemed to be this outside pressure to "Night Train" him.  Friends would talk about night training their kids and I was just baffled by it.  Really?  Training someone to do something other than sleep at night seems a bit odd.  And heck, I wasn't so great at just sleep training my kids, how could I possibly do this any better?! 

But we tried.  Oh, did we try.  For two years we tried.  We limited drinks before bed.  We limited drinks several hours before bed.  We even thought about limiting the amount of liquid he was having for dinner.  But really, that just seemed wrong.

We tried pullups, no pull ups, overnights, character underwear, plain underwear.  We tried waking him up and sleepily walking him into the bathroom before we went to bed.

We changed sheets.  We tried having him change sheets.

We tried setting the alarm for ourselves in the middle of the night to do it again.  Brutal.

We nurtured, we coached and sometimes, I am quite sure, we even got frustrated or angry.

And then we heard about this product from our pediatrician.  We bought it online and waited for it to come.  I admit I was skeptical.  I was more than skeptical, I was annoyed that I dropped $100 on a pee alarm.  But we were feeling desperate.

The way it works is that you clip the alarm unit itself to your child's pajamas.  It has a cord that extends down and you connect it to their underwear.  As soon as the underwear gets at all wet this alarm starts ringing and vibrating to wake the child up.  It is loud and obnoxious.  You talk to your kid ahead of time, letting them know that as soon as they hear the alarm they have to do two things.  They have to try to stop going to the bathroom and they have to put their feet on the floor and start walking to the bathroom.  We talked to Caleb about those ideas for a few days before starting.

Reading through the materials, it warns you that the first few nights will be rough.  But that with each accident, you need to get your child up, take them to the bathroom, put on dry underwear and start over.

And they weren't lying.  I think the first night (this was some time ago) we were up five times.  If I had a recommendation it would be to put several layers of sheets on the bed to start with waterproof pads in between them.  That way you are not completely remaking the bed all night long.

The second night, he woke up two times.  And the the rest of the first week he had two accidents.  That was it.

Amazingly, while he wore the alarm for a month after that, I think there was only one more accident.

Really, he had to do it himself, but this alarm was an incredible way for him to learn to better understand his body.

And Brian and I say this was the best $100 of parenting money we may have ever spent.

*I did not receive any compensation to talk about this product.  Again, just cause I loved it.

P.S. I'm adding this into a Bloghop over at Mom Tried It.  Be sure to check her out for other great tips from moms.

Christmas Snyder Style

Thought I'd do a quick picture review of the holidays.  We spent them at my parents' home.  Arriving on December 23, Christmas Eve Eve as we call it, we settled in knowing the big snow storm was on its way.  Brian has been reading "A Christmas Carol" to the boys each year now, and it's always the goal to get all the way through it between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  They succeeded.

Over the three nights we spent there, we opted to feed the kids at their usual time and do the bedtime routine before gathering as grown ups for our dinner.  The first night was seafood -- crab and shrimp and dips a'plenty (my kind of meal).

Christmas morning, my dad ran out and got sleds for the kids.  Our backyard is about the size of a postage stamp, so the kids love coming to my parents' home to run in their big (for a city lot, at least) back yard.  The plow had come through making mounds of snow big enough to sled on, so the boys made it work.

Fun with an elf hat followed. 

And then, for the second time in three days, I took something hot from the oven and threw it across the room.  I am incredible that way.

Christmas morning, we managed to contain the kids until 8:00 (as promised) and then all headed into the family room to get ready to go review Santa's gifts.  I was getting the camera ready when my parents burst into the room dressed as elves.  No I am not kidding.

 

Not sure what was funnier, watching them sing and dance around or the kids dumbfounded looks while they did it.

 

 

 

After checking out Santa's stuff, we settled in for a day of lazy present opening, wrapping paper tossing, tissue paper refolding and cookie eating.

The boys ended the day by getting some starter snowboards from my parents.  And then headed back outside to "hit the hills" in my parents' very flat backyard.  I give Brian a ton of credit here as he not only built up and "groomed" the "hill" for the kids, but he also exhibited the patience of a saint while trying to teach them.

Would You Like To Come To Dinner at the Snyders?

Tonight we were having a nice lasagna dinner as a family.  Okay, truth be told (and for those of you who know us, this will be no surprise), it was a semi-nice dinner as lasagna has cheese in it and Caleb announced several years ago that he doesn't like cheese.  Any of it.  Unless of course he doesn't know a meal has cheese in it, and inhales it, and then has to try to save face when confronted with the fact that he just ate a dinner full to cheese.  But, I digress.


So Caleb hates cheese.  And I was serving lasagna.  So most of the dinner was filled with him whining about hating cheese, while Noah and Eli inhale it, and Brian and I telling Caleb he has to get over it and that cheese has as many tastes and textures and flavors as, well, just about anything.  And that life will be downright miserable if he doesn't learn to like cheese (at least sporting events, and sleepovers and birthday parties...)  And this went on and on and on.


And then we look over at Elijah, who by the way is still shoveling lasagna in, and see this.

A little closer, you say?

No joke, he has both fingers full out stuck in his ears.  As if to say, "Enough you people.  Blah, blah, blah, blah."

And we just have no idea why he would feel that way.  As this is often what dinner looks like.

But yes, they are cute.  And silly.  And while Caleb may have picked apart his dinner, and still claims to hate cheese, we're just keeping on, keeping on.

Even if, sometimes, we have to plug our ears.

Day Eight of the 500 Pound Declutter - More Kitchen

Christmas is officially behind us.  I have successfully carted everything back from my parents' home and, for the most part, found new homes for the kids toys, clothes, books and other new treasures.

Eli is napping and Brian has taken the big boys out to find a small hill to practice with their new snowboards, so I thought I'd do some decluttering.

There are a few spots in my kitchen that we both seem to curse every time we use them.  As I mentioned earlier, our kitchen, while nice enough to look at, lacks a lot of sense.  It was clearly put together on spec and not by someone who ever cooks.  The drawers are shallow and skinny, the cupboards slideouts are a bit to short, etc.

So here were today's challenges.

The tupperware cupboard.  Admittedly, we are big leftovers people.  Goes back to that being thrifty and cutting back stuff.  But the tupperware had gotten out of control.  And try as we might to carefully stack or organize, about once every three days it would all tumble out making one of us very unhappy and usually blaming it on the other one.

So yes, there is a need to have a decent amount of tupperware.  But here is where my issue was, I think.  I also try to be pretty green about how we do things.  So if I emptied out a butter or a yogurt container, my inclination was to wash it out and keep it to reuse it.  And so each week, the piles got higher and higher.  And this is where we started (bear in mind, there are probably 10 other containers in the fridge).

 

I dug in and started by matching bases to lids.  I easily had twice the number of lids as I had bases.  And so I started tossing.  My goal was to get the majority of it on one shelf.

And then I opened the cupboard next to it.  Eek, how inefficient is this?!

And so I decided I would try to also consolidate.  After all, they are all food storage items, right?

Here is how it landed.

 

 

Much better.  And a total of three pounds of tupperware was tossed.

Next, the other "I HATE YOU" place in out kitchen.  The drawers next to the stove.  The hold, dishtowels (and yes, it is usually closed, I just did laundry today, and the drawer is so full that if I really tried to put them all away, this is how it would look).

And the other three drawers are utensils.  Lots and lots of spoons, spatulas, measuring devices, etc.  Too many.  In fact, when I first tried to open the drawer to take photos, this is what I got.

And that is why this is an "I HATE YOU" region.  Every single time we try to open these drawers, something gets stuck and causes us to aggressively attack the drawer to get it open.  Which has led to a good deal of bent spoons, flattened whisks and snapped spatulas.

I finally was ready to admit that we just had too many things.  We don't need this many.  Yes we like to cook and bake, but we're just a family of 5, not an industrial kitchen.  And so I started purging them. 

I was able to get rid of about 20 utensils and find a new, not life entangling home for the whisks.

The final results looked like this:

The dishtowels also got a good once over.  As I started taking them out, I found this at the back.

Yes, they are almost brand new.  Again.  Too many.

Got rid of these.

And ended up with this.

All in all, I managed to purge 12 pounds of clutter from the kitchen, bringing the grand total in eight days of cleaning out to:

120 pounds!