Long Time, No Blog

Another Project

I recently made these wall decorations for the girls' room out of some fabric scraps I've been hanging on to. It's a garden/flower/butterfly themed room, so I thought these would fit in nicely. Joe says they look like modern art--not my typical soft edged style.


Austin's Midnight Moment

Austin, our five year old, has never wet the bed. If we forget to take him potty before bed, he cries in the middle of the night, I wake up, take him to the bathroom, and he goes back to sleep. The other night, I heard "the cry", and was about to get up when I heard stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp (I could tell he was running in place, not towards to door). I jumped up and ran to his room. When I flipped on the light, he was standing on the area rug in the middle of the room with his pants down, peeing on the floor. He pulled up his pants and got back in bed and went to sleep. I pulled the area rug out and took it straight to the front porch so I could deal with it the next day. When morning came, Austin asked where his rug was. I told him he peed on it in the night. His confused look said it all--he had no recollection of the incident. Is that what they call sleep walking?


The Big Experiment

This month is our big food storage experiment. The rules are 1) we can't go to the store to buy anything and 2) we keep track of everything we use. At the end of the month, we'll multiply everything we used by three to make sure our three month supply will actually last three months. To help out, I made menus (breakfast, lunch, dinner) for the whole month. Before the month started I stocked up on stuff we didn't have already in our food storage, including three huge packs of TP from Costco. Our experiment will actually end next Wednesday when we leave to visit my family for Thanksgiving. It's been so nice not to have to shop for groceries--a chore I'm not fond of. I think shopping once a month is a habit I would definitely like to keep. Today we drank the last of our milk, so it's powdered milk for the rest of the month! I've also been grinding wheat and baking bread every other day with pretty good success. The other night for a treat, we let the kids take a quarter out of their piggy banks and we all went to Safeway and got a quarter pop from the machine. You wouldn't believe how happy the kids were to drink pop.

We're also not spending any money other than pay for phone, electric, water, sewer bills etc. We're not even buying gas. We filled the cars up on Oct 31, and if we run out we'll walk everywhere. Joe's been walking to work, and we've only driven to church and back, so for now I think we'll have enough gas to get by. Joe's having a hard time not ebaying and doing impulse buys at Walmart; hopefully this will break him from these habits. I can't wait to see how much money we've saved!

Craigslist Adventures

Before I get into my Craigslist adventures, I wanted to let you all know that Joe is home from the hospital and doing well. He's a little tired after going through such trauma, but he's ALIVE and his body is working, so we are very grateful. Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers.

Now to Craigslist.... I'm a Craigslist addict. I check it everyday. Sometimes you win some and sometimes you lose some. I had one of each of those last week before Joe got sick.

High: I found a Nutrimill electric grain mill aka wheat grinder for $90. They are about $270 new, and it had only been used a few months. If you read my wheat grinding woes post, you can see why this is a major HIGH for me.

Low: I went to look at a hutch for our dining area. When I rang the doorbell, the guy answered the door in his tighty whitey underwear. SICK!!! I saw the hutch from the door, told him it wasn't going to fit, and laughed all the way to the car.

So Much to Say

Another set of mini-posts:

Five Months Old

Ada just turned 5 months old. You've probably wondered why I haven't posted many pictures of her. It's because everytime I take a picture of her, it ends up looking like this:

Our camera has a red light that turns on right before the picture is captured and it always, without fail, changes her happy smiling face into a confused/concerned/curious gaze.

I finally figured out how to get rid of the red light and was able to capture her in all her gleeful glory.

Bath Time

The other day I walked into the bathroom and found Jennabee giving her baby doll a bath in the sink. It's a beanbag baby, but luckily it's not filled with real beans or it would be sprouting by now.

Home Owners

Joe and I are now home owners! His parents decided to buy a home out in the country (the house we rented our first year here) and sold their house to us. We closed on the deal last Friday. The kids are really excited that Grandma and Grandpa's house will now be called home. And I'm excited because it's the perfect house for us. It's big, has a huge, flat, fenced backyard (rare for this town), and is full of fun memories.

Wheat Grinding Woes

I have bought all of the wheat flour that I've been using to make bread until this week when I ran out of store bought flour. I decided it was time to pull out a bucket of wheat and give our hand grinder a try. The crank was SO hard to turn. After about 20 minutes I only had a half cup of flour at most and I was drenched with sweat and out of breath. I burst into tears and called Joe on the phone at work, complaining like a whiny little baby. I told him through sobs that we had to buy an electric wheat grinder because I couldn't get enough flour to make bread for our family. He patiently talked to me when I'm sure he wanted to tell me to just suck it up and act like a woman instead of a little girl. After my venting session, nine year old Joseph helped me grind the rest of the wheat that we needed to make bread. He didn't whine or complain, he just kept going until it was done and did a fabulous job. When Joe came home he explained that the adjustable texture setting was set too fine. I guess you're supposed to grind everything through really coarse and then adjust the setting finer and put it through again until you reach the correct texture. Maybe I'll give it another shot to see if I can get it to work better next time, but I'm thinking an electric wheat grinder would be awfully nice.

Baking Bread

I have not bought bread for the last three weeks. I've been baking all of the bread we eat instead. Last year we built up our 3 months of food storage which we have rotated through and replaced frequently. This year we have started building our one year supply which means I now own a lot of wheat. I decided it was time for me to learn how to bake bread so I can rotate through it.

I have put off making bread for years. I always convinced myself I didn't have enough time and that it took too long. The funny thing is, I was wrong! I can't believe I'm saying this, but I actually think it's lot of FUN! If you have a stand mixer it doesn't take long at all. It takes me about five minutes to throw all the ingredients in and start mixing. Then the mixer kneads it for me, it rises in the bowl while I do other things around the house, then I form the dough into a couple loaves which takes about 2 mintues or less. The loaves rise while I do some more things around the house, I pop them in the oven, and thirty minutes later I have fresh bread! If you do the math, you can figure I spent about seven minutes making bread--the rest of the time was just rising time and baking time. Not so bad, right? I have been baking two or three loaves (one batch, depending on the recipe) every two days or so. That's only about 20 minutes a week.

If you're feeling up to it, give it a try. You might be surprised and have fun with it like I have. If you need a bread recipe to get started, let me know and I'll e-mail one to you.