Making baby food

Who knew it was really so easy to make your own baby food. Yes, you have to be a little careful and make sure it's pureed smooth and whatnot....that's the hard part. I got an acorn squash at the store a few days ago (before the elbow incident) and today I baked it while Tom was down for his morning nap. It came out of the oven just a little bit ago and I scooped out the flesh into the container I used for pureeing it. I bought a stick blender (aka - an immersion blender) so that I'd be able to do this even easier and with less clean up than a regular blender. Wow! We are really going to save a bunch of money....time, well, that's another story. But, all in all, it's not any harder....I can spend time with the kids while things like the squash bake and it takes less time to puree and serve than it does to open a jar. How crazy is that?

As a side note, it appears that I didn't break my elbow...just jammed it very hard. Dan's bursitis is not just bursitis, but also an impinged nerve. I'll keep you all updated as we know more.

Growing Food

Garlic
Originally uploaded by ZJ&TS mom

Well, we had some garlic that started to sprout before I cooked with it...I know, I know....so I decided to plant it. It's going gangbusters now!

The obligatory poop talk

Well, it occurred to me that many of you who might be reading this didn't know that we (that's probably the royal we) switched to cloth diapers. It's nowhere near as difficult as I had thought it would be. I started by using gdiapers in an effort to start leaving less of a footprint and live a little greener. (More on greener living in later posts, I'm sure.) Turns out that our plumbing is a bit sensitive to the flushable liner. It wasn't too expensive a lesson, but it was definitely learned quickly. So, we started flushing only part of the liner. The part that breaks down faster than toilet paper. But, that still left us with a smelly pail. Yeah, I know...mom talk. So, in an effort to get the smelly pail out of the house, I researched my options and man are there a LOT of options these days. I decided that to not have wasted the money on those very cute gdiapers covers, I would just buy what would normally be stuffed into a pocket diaper. So, now both boys are wearing those adorable covers stuffed with an insert made of 55% hemp and 45% cotton. Here's to hoping that Zach will learn that being wet is just as uncomfortable as being poopy and will at least start telling me when he needs his diaper changed, if not telling me when he needs to go potty.

I started this this morning because I changed a messy poopy diaper of Tom's. Man, breastfed baby poop is just plain messy. Thank goodness it doesn't really stink much. Zach's, on the other hand, is easy to clean up. Just dump it in the toilet, then put the cloth insert into the pail waiting for laundry day. I guess I prefer the stink and ease to the non stink and 5 minute routine of trying to get it all rinsed off into the toilet. They do make handy contraptions for rinsing cloth diapers. I don't know if they had them when my mom was changing my diapers, but I do know that she got down to the toilet and actually put her hands in the bowl to rinse out mine and my sister's. Our toilet happens to be close enough to the shower that I just use the shower head that's on a hose to get them rinsed off. Yay for modern technology!!!

And just for good measure, I've put in a couple of pictures of both boys in their diapers. Yeah, they are a few months old, but that's what I have available right now.