Design on a Dime...puzzles

So it's no secret that I'm not a decorator. With limited free time and money it is just not on the top of my to-do list. Aaron and I like a clean and organized home that's functional and welcoming but having everything look like a Martha Stuart magazine just isn't on our priority list or in my talents. Maybe someday. That said, if Mark Brunetz from Clean House offered to come decorate our house for free I would NOT turn him down!

Anyways- we moved Mateo to his new room last June around his birthday and I really hadn't put much on the walls. Since my 2 1/2 year old is obsessed with putting together jigsaw puzzles at the moment, I decided to glue together some of his 24 piece puzzles and hang them up like posters.

Mateo's little work table that has become his "puzzle table".

I found some modge podge in the basement and glued the puzzles together over some wax paper on a cookie sheet. I did need to crack the window!


The modge podge glue gives it a nice glossy finish and I used used a small paintbrush that I had in my teaching supplies....though a bigger one would have been easier. My bottle of modge podge had a price tag of $5 and I barely made a dent in it. Once the front dried I also did the back. Not for looks but just for stability. "Puzzle glue" is the same thing.

My mom gave me the idea of gluing thin wood on the back so one Saturday morning Aaron and Mateo took a "man field trip" to the hard wood store and found some perforated board that would be suitable. It cost $6 for a large sheet and he only used about a third of the board for four puzzles.
This is what the back looked like. The board will keep it from warping. I have glued large puzzles together before and it's always hard to find a frame the right size- so this was a good alternative. Aaron used gorilla glue to attach the board to the puzzle and some tiny nails to attach the "self leveling picture hanger" (that metal thing with the ridges ;)

Clifford!

Mickey Mouse!

Cars!

Winnie the Pooh

So now Mateo has 4 "Puzzle Posters" on his wall that he put together himself and have some of his favorite characters. And it cost just a few dollars plus the puzzles themselves.

Make it yourself: Beans

I didn't know pinto beans came in a can until college when my roommate Renee was making burritos one night. I was mesmerized! Really? I had no idea! I guess I was a little bit naive lol.

Growing up my mom always made "frijoles" by buying the dry beans and cooking them on the stove in this very pot (which has been passed on to me :) It's a very special pot to me and I love each and every crack. I took it out for this picture and when Aaron walked in he said, "Oooh, frijoles?". I had to break it to him that it was just the pot. But he does love my homemade beans.

I often make beans in my crock pot as well. I have found it to be cheaper and healthier and ridiculously easy. Over the last few years I have expanded my homemade bean cooking to include black beans and garbanzo beans. And now that we have a deep freezer I can make large batches to freeze and pull out at my leisure. Below is how I make garbanzo beans (aka chickpeas):

First I sort the beans. This was always my job as a kid and it's important because occasionally you will find a pebble! This is not nearly as common now that I buy them in the bulk section and they are sifted a bit more, but especially if you buy 5 or 10 lb bag of dry beans. Anyways, sort the beans and rinse them in a strainer.

I soak them overnight in my crock pot (or regular pot if I'm going to cook them on the stove). Cover with plenty of water as the beans will swell up a LOT. You could also choose to soak them during the day and cook them overnight (which is what I happened to do with this batch).



Come morning time the beans will have absorbed most of the water. Rinse them again. Then put them back in the crock pot fully covered with fresh water (or broth). Cook on low all day (about 8 hours). The crock pot option is especially nice if you're at work all day or if you're going to be out and about. Traditionally pinto beans in my family were cooked with a ham hock bone. You can cook them plain in water to be seasoned later, add salt, broth, etc. However you want. I cooked these garbanzo beans plain with a little sea salt. Tomorrow I'm going to make pinto beans with some homemade chicken broth.
8 hours later you have a huge amount of garbanzo beans. [If cooking on the stove top you would simmer on med-low for about 2 1/2 -3 1/2 hours...adding additional liquid as needed]


What am I going to do with all these garbanzo beans you ask?

Freeze them in Tupperwares. The smaller containers are just the right amount to add to a salad. The larger containers are just the right amount to make a large batch of hummus. My WinCo receipt said all these beans cost $2.70 and it will last us a long time! Make sure to leave in some of the liquid when you freeze them. You can drain it later.

I also love keeping pinto beans in the freezer to pull out for breakfast burritos, 7 layer burritos, etc. Black beans are especially good in rice bowls (like Yumm bowls), as a side dish with enchiladas, in salads, and more.

Though you may not believe it from some of these posts, I don't like spending a ton of time in the kitchen making dinner. I much prefer to prepare stuff ahead of time. Beans are one of those things that are easy to make ahead of time, freeze and defrost well, and are very inexpensive.

Now...if I can only convince my 2 1/2 year old that beans are delicious....then I will be a happy camper :)

My plump preemie

Alex has officially gained 10 pounds since birth. He's now a beautiful 15 1/2 pound ball of mostly smiles. I love his chubby cheeks and fat rolls.

I'm very thankful for this baby. We had a rough start with this little guy (Preemie, Colic, Daytime insomnia, inability to fall asleep, terrible reflux, etc. etc.) I wouldn't go as far as to say things are easy, but they have gotten much easier. He sleeps at night and he smiles at me. Both those things help a LOT haha.

I know very well that both my babies are little miracles and although I hate c sections and ICUs, they are what saved my babies who may not have survived otherwise. I think of Mary giving birth to Jesus outside in a barn. I'm sure if they had to perform a "C section" back then that the moms probably didn't have high survival rates. Scary thought.

Anyways, I am every thankful for my little guys. Hard to think that they will someday outgrow me. Alex' biggest struggle right now is his reflux (which he is on medication for). It's a very frustrating condition. Besides going through burp clothes (and beach towels) by the handful, he's a terribly finicky nurser, and it's harder for him to keep food down. I'll admit that I don't even bother changing my clothes anymore when I get spit up on. It's just not worth it most of the time and I have so few clothes that actually fit right now anyways.

We had an appointment with the lactation nurse today. Because of all his spitting up and the fact that his weight gain has slowed down a bit, she suggested I feed him every 2 hours during the day now. And go back to pumping twice a day. And wake him up once at night to eat. Ick. If she knew how hard it is to get this boy to fall asleep- she wouldn't dream of waking him up! We'll see what new plan we devise. We may just add a few extra ounces to his "vitamin bottle*" at bedtime. I was just getting excited about sleeping and not having to pump during the night. --sigh-- Oh well. Right now he wakes up on his own around 5 am so I am not going to wake him. But...it's all worth it for this face:


Psalm 59:17 NLT
O my Strength, to you I sing praises, for you, O God, are my refuge, the God who shows me unfailing love.


*Preemies are recommended to have an iron supplement because they are not born with the iron stores a term baby would gain those last weeks (or months). At 6 months or once they start solid foods it can usually be eliminated if desired. Since the vitamin tastes really bad, we've been mixing it in about an ounce or so of pumped milk.

Crazy Crayons!

This weekend my mom and I made the coolest crayons I'd ever seen before. Hands down! Here is what they looked like!When I was teaching, the recycling coordinator for the district would come out and teach a lesson on re-use to classes that requsted it. She would bring broken crayons that different classrooms had collected and the kids would take the paper off and put them in mini muffin pans. She'd bake them in a portable oven and the kids would get disk-shaped "Crazy Crayons" as she called them. They loved it. My mom recently mentioned she'd seen heart shaped crayons in some magazine and I remembered I had two heart-shaped silicone ice cube trays that I never used. So we decided to give it a shot.

I lucked out and ended up finding a whole box of "naked crayons" with my teaching supplies so we had plenty to choose from!We picked out all the reds, pinks, purples, and whites for Valentine's Day. We cut the crayons into small pieces and then filled up the small ice cube trays. We "baked" them at 230 degrees and TA DA!!!!
They popped out very easily from the silicone tray (though I would not choose to use the tray for ice any more lol. I'll reserve it for crafts.)



Mateo and I had fun packaging some of these up to give away to friends and cousins and also kept a few for ourselves. I will now be on the lookout of other fun-shaped ice cube trays that could go in the oven. I envision many more "Crazy Crayons" to come. AND...what a great way to re-use those broken crayon pieces instead of throwing them away.

Revolutionizing snack time.

For some reason during the last 6 or so months I've begun to enjoy baking. I never made time for it before but enjoy making interesting and healthy foods for Mateo. It started with trying all these fairly healthy muffin recipes from weelicous.com. There were sweet potato muffins and carrot apple coconut muffins and a plethora of others. I liked the idea of adding in healthy veggies and fruits for my picky eater. They freeze well and are easy to pull out for a healthy breakfast or snack for Mateo (or me!).

Lately I've been learning how to do a few more traditional snacks that not only contain ingredients that I can pronounce and already have (most of) in my cupboards but they're also fun, healthier, and easy to freeze. Besides the time factor I like to double batches to freeze extra because....to be honest....I hate doing dishes. My least favorite chore and of course I often feel like I am doing dishes all day long. Breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, etc. So it's really no more work to double the batch because I only have to take out all of the ingredients and clean up everything once.

The last couple of years I've also really tried to cut back on unhealthy food addivies like artificial sweeteners, high fructose corn syrup, MSG, etc. All of these have real ingredients in them and are much cheaper than buying a natural snack version.

A few of the snacks I've made recently are:

Oatmeal on-the-go bars (I added chocolate chips to mine :) Picture coming soon. These are the easiest of the recipes and I think they'd be the easiest/most doable for working moms though any of them could be a weekend project with the kiddos. The other three require making a dough and do take a little longer but this one you literally just throw all the ingredients in a big baking dish and cook it. Then cut apart and freeze. Super easy. You can defrost them over night or just in the microwave when you want one. You can choose your own ingredients as far as nuts, dried fruit, chocolate, etc. are concerned too. Mateo doesn't love these, unfortunately, but I do. I haven't given up that he will learn to like oatmeal...

Whole Wheat Cheddar Crackers (like goldfish crackers)

I happened to have a tiny fish cookie cutter but with a double batch of this somewhat crumbly dough I ended up doing mostly bigger crackers.

I used a large teddy bear cutter for the rest and froze quite a few of these cheesy teddy bear crackers. I LOVE that this recipe only has cheese, whole wheat flower, and butter. That's it! NO additives like MSG or even salt. To spice things up at snack time I put some spreadable cheese (like laughing cow or whipped cream cheese) and some flax seeds for the "sprinkles".
These were so good! Though I do admit they are a little bland...probably because there is no salt in the recipe. I suppose you could add it but I like them how they are. I think I will be eating these more often than Mateo.

Graham Crackers (which we call cookies b/c Mateo will eat anything that's called a cookie)These were so tasty that it was a little hard to freeze some of them because I could have eaten them all. Next time I might just cut them into rectangles like traditional graham crackers, but Grandma and I turned this into a project for Mateo... who loves to use cookie cutters and wear his apron and chef hat. My mom made up some simple powdered sugar frosting with cinnamon too but you could eat them plain like crackers.

Animal Crackers (also called cookies at our house haha)

Mateo loved eating cookies in different animals shapes. And of course, he enjoyed biting limbs off the animals. These froze really nicely and make a good snack with some fresh fruit or a smoothie. I love these myself, too!

Next one to learn: Chocolate Chip Granola Bars

Massive amounts of instant oatmeal!!

I came across this comic on facebook the other day and it sure does some up my experiences with babies. I know there are easy, mellow babies out there but none of them are related to me ;)
So I've had to become content with small, little accomplishments amidst very long days. Like making dinner every night or keeping everybody's clothes clean. Those soon become big accomplishments.

Anyways- when I do have time for a project on a good day or some evening or weekend I usually double, triple, quadruple the project because I never know when I will have time to do it again.
Last weekend I decided to make some homemade instant oatmeal.

Aaron often leaves the house before 5:30am. He's an early bird. He's either gone to the gym, to play pick up basketball, at bible study, etc. ( Yes, I'm occasionally jealous of all the baby free early morning fun he has;) But I'm also impressed and thankful that he's able and likes to do these things in the mornings. This equals more time at home with us in the evenings!

As I was saying...he leaves the house without eating breakfast, so he eats oatmeal and a banana at work. [He could eat the same thing every day if I let him.] I used to be on the lookout for coupons for instant oatmeal and occasionally did find a really good deal. But one day he told me he didn't want to eat those anymore because there were about 5,000 unnecessary ingredients. So then we started just sending a big thing of quick oats and a little brown sugar. But that requires scooping, adding, etc. and all he uses is the hot water spiggot connected to the sink at work.

So I set about to ask Mr. Google how to make our own instant oatmeal for dirt cheap. It'd also be healthier and we'd know exactly what was in it.

So...making our own dairy-free variation, I pulled out a food processor (how did I go 28 years without using a food processor?), a bunch of quick oats, some sugar, salt, cinnamon, and some dried blueberries. I mixed everything together and pulsed it in the food processor just enough to grind up the oats a bit. That way they will cook faster.
EDIT: This basic recipe/ratio that I've settled with when I make oatmeal (keep in mind I usually triple this when I made a big batch):

4 cups quick-cooking oats, pulsed slightly in food processor
1 teaspoon salt
1-2 teaspoons brown sugar
1/4-1/3 cup sweetener (dry --I use brown sugar)
1/2 dried fruit (optional...sometimes I use raisins)
Other additions could include powdered unsweetened coconut, powdered milk, non dairy creamer, cinnamon,or whatever flavor you desire!!

I tend to use a little less sugar if I can get away with it and leave out the powdered milk since dairy is not my husband's best friend. With this particular batch I added some cinnamon and dried blueberries that my mom made. Pulse it all together and voila!! So easy. Of course the first time it took us a bit longer because we were experimenting and made up a bowl to be sure that we liked it- but this could literally take me 10 minutes to make up (plus cleaning the food processor).
I measured out 3/4 a cup of oatmeal into 5 ziplock bags (that we can reuse). I got this idea from http://www.thesimpledollar.com/ Aaron now just has to pour the bag into a bowl, add some hot water and that's it! He doesn't even measure the water- just adds enough for the desired thickness.
I put the extra mix to an air tight canister ready to be measured out for future breakfasts.
EDIT: I started using more ziplocs to avoid using the canister.  So last time I made it I had 13 zip loc bags with oatmeal that will last 2 1/2 weeks or so for my husband.  He (is supposed to) bring the empty bags home a few days before he's out so I can have a heads up and get on making some more!

Now I'm sure that people have been making their own instant oatmeal for a loooong time, but it wasn't until just recently that I thought to do it. And it was really, really easy. My type of project. Maybe next time I'll make cinnamon raisin flavor. I'd like to do a cost break down too! The only big expense really is the extras you add. I buy quick oats at Winco for inexpensive.  You could add whatever you wanted!

Behind the chaos of my season of life and behind any complaints or sleep deprivation is a mama who loves to take care of her family. I'm always happy when I find a new way to do this that also saves us money.

Menu planning

I am a huge fan of menu planning and have been for about a year. It is a huge saver on the sanity, helps with grocery shopping, and also keeps your grocery budget down! My goal is $300/ a month for groceries, toiletries, and supplies. A mama friend of mine shared this site recently: http://organizedhome.com/ which I have yet to fully explore. There are tons of ideas on how to get organized, printables, articles, etc. etc. I'd like to read it more if I get time someday.

Most days lately I literally have zero minutes of time to myself and if I don't have some sort of plan ahead of time- then we would never eat dinner. Seriously. With 7 dinners at home a week- that's a lot of food. We don't eat out very often because of a)Money and b) We have two babies...it's sometimes more work than fun! That said- we do build this in sometimes or if we are spontaneous then I'll just do the dinner that was planned a different night- no prob!

So....I print off a monthly calendar and try to plan 1-2 weeks at a time of meals (or if I'm really ambitious longer). I plan this based off what I have in my stockpile, what's in my freezer, what's left in my pantry, and of course what sounds good haha. Looking at past month's calendars definitely helps as I remember which meals we liked most.
You will also want to build in dinners of Left Overs if applicable, see if you can use the main dish from one meal to create a new dish the next day, etc. Do what it takes to get dinner on the table.
I have a plethora of cook books and magazines, too, that I occasionally look through to glean new recipes. Those 90% of you with smart phones can access a plethora of recipe apps. And...by far my favorite recipe website right now is www.weelicious.com. It has lots of ideas for tots and kids- but stuff for the whole family. I like how you can search by type of food- gluten free, dairy free, etc. Our dinners have to be gluten free and mostly dairy free for the hubby- so this helps if I'm stuck on new ideas! And best of all- the site is about healthy, wholesome foods w/o all the additives,etc. I'm beginning to like to make things from scratch and I'm beginning to like to bake even. It's weird, really. In the last couple of years we removed High Fructose Corn syrup and artificial sweeteners from our diet. This year I'd like to use more whole wheat (though not for Aaron...how about brown rice?) and eat more vegetables!

Anyways....I'm one of those people that organizes her grocery list based off store section:
Produce
Bulk
Deli
Dairy
Frozen
Boxed/Canned

Going shopping with a baby and a two year old.....I don't have time to waste and I don't have time to think about what's for dinner while at the store. So planning ahead is a must. I have tried the last two WinCo trips to get two weeks of groceries which was nice because it meant less grocery shopping and it forced me to be creative and use foods up..... but I found this to be a ludicrous endeavor and one not to be attempted a third time. It's just too long of a trip with both boys- while packing the 15 lb baby around, pushing the toddler in the cart, not to mention all the loading, unloading, bagging, and unloading of groceries into the car with same baby in the front pack. Anyways...you just have to figure out a system that works for you in your season of life.

Every night I peak at the calendar to see what I'm making the next night. I'll take out what I need from the freezer. Last night I even prepped the veggies for today's crock pot meal just b/c I didn't think I would have time this morning. And I was right...b/c both boys got up at the same time. I'll work on a little bit of food prep during the day as I have time so that come 5:00 I'm not starting from ground zero.

One meal we had this week:
Crock pot rotisserie style chicken with yellow sweet potato fries, spinach walnut salad, and grapefruit (not pictured).
Favorite veggie of the week was brought to my mind because I helped a friend make baby food a few weeks ago and we used the yellow sweet potato/yams. So yummy!