And Now For Something Completely Different

It all started with Mr. Money Mustache. 

Last year around the time that Little H joined us, The Mister stumbled upon a website and immediately started obsessing over this very frugal living family. There was an unsettling spring in The Mister's step and gleam in his eye. I have tried, and failed, at many a budget, and the Mister and I come from very, very different families and backgrounds regarding money which means that he and I were constantly at odds because of our mismatched philosophies and upbringings and compensatory habits regarding emotions and pretty sparkly things. In fact, early in our marriage, when he even broached the subject innocuously by saying, "Hey let's talk about money stuff," I would immediately burst into tears.

He encouraged me to read some blog posts. So I read. And read. And read. And read until I was pretty sure my eyes were going to fall out of my head and then all of a sudden the realization of what I wanted our life together to be like (ADVENTURE! FUN! TRAVELING! FOOD! COMMUNITY!) was not achievable on our (my) current plan. And talking! Oh so much talking. My man is a bit of a strong silent type and I think this is the most constant talking over several weeks we have ever done, and most of the conversations started when he walked in the door with, "So I was reading on Mr. Money Mustache..."

I have spent years frustrated by my own duality - wanting to live simply and way beneath our means but having absolutely no skills nor really even a working understanding of what that meant. The Mister would say things to me like, “Well, just don’t spend money.” That just absolutely did not compute, and quite frankly still doesn't. People spend money every day, right? Moms toss around memes that go something like “Heading to Target! See you in $150! LOLZ!” I mean, having Amazon Prime means it’s Christmas EVERY TWO DAYS for goodness’ sake. And THINK OF THE CHILDREN. They need clothesdiaperswipesspecialHonestCo.windowcleanersandoxypodsandsandboxesandwatertablesandlighttablesandsocksandshoesandhairbowsandballetslippersandballettightsandleotardsandbooksandDVDsand...FOOD! Oh don’t even get me started on food. We have been on a lifetime food journey together and we started pretty much where everyone starts...things that are fast and convenient, restaurants that we think are awesome and delicious, eating out whenever we want instead of like when we were kids and only went out for birthdays…

     

The problem was (is?) that maybe because we live in a town of movers and shakers and people with serious scratch that we (I?) became numb to what constitutes as “normal” consumer habits. Or even what the rest of the world lives like. Americans are rich beyond measure pretty much at baseline and we don't see it. I even read Jen Hatmaker’s “7” a few years ago and even though I was horrified by so many truths about how the rest of the world lives, still would buy the odd bit of fast clothes, occasionally looked at my overfull fridge that I just filled from a ridiculously priced trip to the grocery store and then closed it and ordered pizza, and popped in to Starbucks for a chai latte on the regular.

But somehow, amidst the postpartum hormones and something I like to call “Hello Frontal Lobes!” I got it. I started to see what a regular Starbucks habit would cost me now if I wanted to maintain that habit when we retired. And then how long it would take us to retire if I kept up with that habit. And then how long we would have to put off all the TRAVEL! and ADVENTURE! if we constantly got takeout or even dropped cash on brunch instead of squirreling all that fundage away for amazing brunch in say...Paris.

I saw excess everywhere in my house that I just kept cleaning up over and over and over when my little preschool tornado tore through it. Toys and clothes and trinkety decorations and things I had kept that didn’t necessarily have pleasant memories associated with but felt like I had to because they had somehow melded with my identity. Books that were given to us that we would never read and just...stuff. Everywhere. The worst part of the whole thing is that I was all happy to have nested and gotten rid of -I’m serious- 10 trash bags of stuff and here I was staring at MORE STUFF and quite unsure as to how it all ended up in my house/garage/livingroom/CRAFTROOM/closet/BRAIN.

Y’all. The mental clutter that all of this brought was making my inner world hell. Well, that plus hormones plus then the holidays were looming....

Yuck.

Eventually, we saw a way through, and we are now on a path toward sweet simple living and despite my best efforts, are totally kicking ass some days and totally sucking the next and then getting back on track and then having wild adventures. In fact, the mister STILL says to me, "Hey just don't spend money," but now I hear it as, "Hey think really hard about how and why you want to spend this" or I hear myself telling my daughter, "Do you want to get hot chocolate here or do you want to get hot chocolate in Puerto Rico" (if that sounds harsh it's because she is 4 and would drink ONLY chocolate milk with whip cream on top if I let her. She even conned her babysitter into three chocolate milks while I was at work one day.)

There are a lot of parts to this story that we are still writing every day, so if life and love and adventure and creativity is something you're into, then wheeeee let's go!

Thanksgiving Countdown and Forbidden Stew

This past Sunday we did some epic meal planning. Since we had a week and a half before Thanksgiving, I only wanted to go to the grocery store once. We planned for 7 meals plus whatever we had on hand in our fridge/freezer/pantry already, hoping to get us to the holiday. 

Here's what we picked:

Roasted Chicken with Squash and Broccoli (a recipe from this book)

Chicken Pot Pie with Biscuit Topping

Lentil and Mushroom Ragu

Squash & Cabbage Quesadillas

Crock Pot Baked Potato Soup

Crock Pot Chicken and Wild Rice Soup

Crock Pot Beef Tikka Masala

We did the roast chicken first because I needed stock for almost everything else and the chicken for the chicken pot pie, and we even had more chicken left over for lunches. The squash we cooked with it was the top end of a butternut squash and I saved the bottom part to cut into rings for this recently discovered fall yumminess later in the week or on the weekend. I went ahead and made everything between Sunday and now, so my fridge is full of premade meals that we can just pull out and eat. I have the feeling that I'm going to be a little frenzied between now and Thanksgiving and want to simplify as much as possible. 

So far, we've demolished the roast chicken and the chicken pot pie, with rave reviews all around for both. Today I made the potato soup, the tikka masala and the wild rice soup. The first two turned out perfect. The third? Complete failure-turned-amazing-dish.

See...when we went to the store on Sunday, wild rice was something silly like $10.99 a pound, while the forbidden rice right next to it was $3.99 a pound. I had never cooked with forbidden rice and had no idea that it would turn everything purple. PURPLE CHICKEN. Not only that, but as I was cooking, I accidentally grabbed what I THOUGHT was chicken stock but in fact was an apple-boozy-concoction made my a good friend for Christmas last year when I was pregnant so I waited until chilly weather to drink it...and when I stored it, as I do most things, in a Ball jar, I didn't label it, and it looks a whole lot like chicken stock. I may have been able to say, "Oh well dumb luck," if this isn't the second time in as many weeks that I've done this. The first time was to some brown rice that ultimately became unsalvageable but since this was a giant pot of food and I was NOT going back to the store, I had to get creative. In my defense, last night my mom gave me a second-degree burn when she spilled some hot tea on my leg that I had to get treated today so my head wasn't entirely in the right place.

At first it was off-puttingly sweet and I doubted that we were going to salvage the thing. I had everything in the pot and had to figure out a way to save the meal because I hate throwing out perfectly good food. So I started adding savory spices like a madwoman...big chunks of garlic, onion powder. Still horrid. Then we added smoked paprika and cumin, then tomato sauce and more cumin and finally decided to make chicken chili and threw in a bunch of chili powder, then some beans...and it started coming together.

We decided finally that we had made a sweet chicken chili that tasted a whole lot like chicken mole. And thus, a new dish was born! Not that I'll ever make it like that again. I was proud that I could improvise enough to save the dish. We ended up serving it with cilantro, tomato and sour cream, and it was delightful and my husband is taking it to work for lunch tomorrow. Bam.

Afterword

After the birth of our second, everything changed. All of it. I was most worried that I wouldn't have enough love in my heart for everyone. Baloney. It overwhelms me at times. Everything isn't sunshine and rainbows every second of the day - the transition from one to two was HARD.

IS hard. And then you turn around and realize your relationship with your significant other is also different so you have to figure that out again too, amidst the regression of the things and the mess of a house and ALL THE NOT SLEEPING. At the very least, the not sleeping the second time around is totally expected and therefore not so much rage-filled. Maybe just a little ragey. A cute little rage monster. The thing that I struggle with the most, because I am quite a distracted individual at baseline, is how to be fully present with A while in this crazy storm of life with the little one. Even three months into this things have settled down a little, but she tells me she wants "just girl dates. No boys. No daddy, no little bro." and I have to figure out how to do that without jumping up to clean/email/text/whatever.

This I think will be the struggle of the millennial generation - finding meaningful connection via technology and knowing when to put that aside, sit on the floor and look your kid square in the face and say, "I'm here. Let's play." Hands Free Mama is a good place to start...although I'm reading it on a tablet and that feels wrong...and I think that it also has wisdom for people without kids. I also am enjoying Notes from a Blue Bike and The Art of Simple by Tsh Oxenreider. Simplifying, being present, and living life in this age of consumerism and more-more-more-all-the-everything are all inextricably linked. I wish I had a BLAM! one-size-fits-all fix for this, some prescriptive thing I could read or checklist or whatever but I don't. It's lots of little checklists and no's and conversations about how this or that makes someone feel and whether this THING makes you happy or your life better or what someone wants their life to be like, what they want their kids to remember.

All the big questions and the small questions at the same time. It's kind of a rollercoaster.

I know as a perfectionist yet fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants person that I can beat myself up about missed opportunities or things I could have done differently...currently I am evaluating my craft room, throwing actual DAILY BAGS OF TRASH from there and wondering why the hell I accumulated so much worthless stuff...things that I would "eventually get around to" that eventually just amounted to jumble in my brain and guilt for not having or making the time for the (SEEMINGLY) important but what turned out to be (ACTUALLY) unimportant...eesh.

So yeah, that's the reason for the blog redesign. As a family we're fumbling our way toward an unhurried, intentional, adventurous life.

Is it weird that I say "here's where I document all this unplugged-ness on a blog." ? Yeah probably.

Food for the Kiddos

I just got back from a MOPS meeting where we had a presenter on the importance of nutrition, and it reminded me of an Email that I recently sent to my sister-in-law and cousin about little miss A's pretty amazing eating habits. My kid eats like a rock star. Mr. S. and I made the decision early on that growing an appreciation for food in our daughter is super important to us and we took specific steps accordingly. Anyway, what follows is the Email I sent.

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Hey Loves,

I wanted to tell you how awesome it was to have you notice what a good eater A is. It is something I really wanted to focus on and have her be a diverse eater. I am so proud of her and it made me feel so good to have someone notice. I wanted to send y'all resources and thoughts that have been helpful to us when tackling food and approaches and such.

First up is 'Super Baby Food' by Ruth Yaron. It has tons of great healthy recipes and foundational principles of child nutrition. I get into ruts and this book is my go-to for new ideas and reminders of why we are doing this. It's a huge book, and so useful. Don't read the whole thing and get all overwhelmed - I have found it much more manageable to get in there and read just the developmental level appropriate for whatever stage A is in. There are SBF kits you can get including ice cube trays to make it all easier - just look them up on Amazon. I used to think the mini prep baby food maker things were dumb but if I could have something that would steam AND purée my food with the push of a button? Maybe I will get one for kid #2. The author of the next book talks about using these things and as far as I am concerned, whatever makes it easier is totally worth it. I stay home and I have the time, but something more convenient would be worth it.

Next is 'French Kids Eat Everything' by Karen le Billon. I am not a French-culture worshipper or anything and was hesitant to read this because I hate parenting books that make you feel bad about what you're doing wrong. I ended up really liking this book because it read more like an anthropology book. It did a lot of comparing of the subtleties of Western and European food culture and Mr. S and I had a lot of conversations about what kind of food culture we wanted to create within our family. It raised a bunch of questions of our own personal eating habits and where those come from, and there were some things we wanted to tweak - especially me because I come from a cultural heritage of, "hungry? Eat! Sad? Eat! Bored? Eat!" It has good recipes at the end, which the whole family has enjoyed. This is the book where we got our no snacking rule - that's a lot of why A eats the way she does - home girl is hungry :)

Another good resource is Weelicious.com but it's more of a supplement to the above books.

More things we think about are local availability and seasonality, where our food is coming from (what we wanted to buy organic or not - EWG.com has a clean and dirty list that we try and shop by. There is also emerging research on how pesticides and GMO foods effect children that I can track down and send if you want) and also what A sees us eat. Food in season just straight up tastes better. We hate eating tomatoes in December because they come from far away and are mealy and gross - I wouldn't expect A to be passionate about food that doesn't taste good. Some books and videos that have guided our food philosophy include Food, Inc. (there is a whole chapter in this film about a child who contracted E-coli and died after eating a fast food burger on a road trip. It is incredibly informative) and anything by Michael Pollan. In terms of watching us eat, we make sure to eat meals together as often as possible. We sometimes eat breakfast all together, and A and I sit down and eat together for lunch (if we're not out and if we are we have packed a lunch or are sitting at a restaurant), and we always always eat dinner together. Babies are little imitators and it almost goes without saying that if they see their parents eating food, then they'll get curious and want to eat. Also, if we have hangups or things we won't eat, we can't expect our kids to have diverse tastes. I have started tackling the things I tend to avoid (fish), and adding different foods (leeks or kohkrabi or fennel) to our menus. Being a part of vegetable co-op has helped with all the above.

Out of sheer laziness I didn't want to make or buy separate meals for her so would start her on purées of stuff we were already eating, having her food be simpler versions of ours but also simplifying our food to make it more accessible. If the developmental stage called for starting her on bananas and avocados, we would have bananas and avocados more in our meals, and so on, as her choices broadened.

Mr. S has a couple things to add. First, we skipped baby food meat altogether, and just waited until she had almost if not all of her teeth to introduce it. I am pretty sure she ate salmon before any other kind of meat because it was so soft. She also may have gnawed on a pork rib before actually eating the meat. Keep in mind that the addition of meat makes their poop more like real person poop. I therefore put it off as long as possible and we had actual conversations as to whether we wanted to wait until she was pooping in a toilet before making her an omnivore. We learned that for a kid to go from not liking to liking a food it takes something like 15 to 20 tries. I can't remember if the above books talk about it, but I do know that the French book suggests offering the foods a bunch of different ways to keep 'em guessing. We tried a bunch of different textures of the same things - making different consistencies of the same food (cauliflower steamed or in a puree) as well as adding different flavors (cauliflower with fennel in a puree). Something we have run into recently is getting her to eat her vegetables first if there is also, say chicken and noodles (her passion) on her plate. This has translated to eating more in courses (another French trick) - there is a squash and spinach soup we love to lead with - and making sure that the most important things make it onto her plate first. Mr. S is also really good at keeping things light at the dinner table, making eating exciting and fun.

We also talk all the time about not using food as a reward, and not bribing her with, say, dessert, to get her to eat anything. We want her to have a healthy and exuberant appreciation for food with no guilt attached and there are so many facets to consider and discuss. I don't remember where I read it - maybe in 'Unconditional Parenting' - but at some point we have to accept that our kids are their own person and there's no amount of cajoling, controlling, or forcing of food that is going to intrinsically motivate a child to love new foods. As they get older the best thing we can do is provide them with healthy and diverse food and introduce it in encouraging ways and the rest is up to the kid.

All that to say there are for sure times that I grab the Amy's mac n cheese. It took me a long time to work through all the questions I had of our own eating habits at the same time trying to stay on top of steaming, pureeing and organizing bags of frozen baby food but it has been all kinds of worth it.

Let me know if you have any questions or need advice on anything - we all know I am bossy as all get out and love telling people what to do ;)

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So...there you go.  Food is crazy important - I believe it's the foundation on which everything else in life (physically at least) is built. Immunity, mental health, behavior, all of that. If you have any questions, or have any recipes or things you have done to get your kiddos to eat, let me know.