What Else Is There?

No, this isn’t going to be some ponderous philosophical post, just a little bit of how I’ve been answering the question at 8:30 after Kara’s asleep, What can I do now to relax? What to do with my free time? Because I’ve not been so good at using it… I’ve mostly just been going to sleep early.

There have been a few crafts, but the only one I can remember right now is, with the help from my awesome friend Mary, making training pants for Kara. With a little inspiration from Pinterest, we (she) sewed the thickest part from some of Kara’s old pre-folds onto Kara’s new panties. Voila! Training pants. Now when Kara has “accidents” (of which there haven’t been nearly as many as I’ve expected from a 22-month-old), we don’t get puddles of urine on the floor.

But the main thing I’ve been doing is rediscovering how good it feels to write. Not to write creative stories, though I like doing that too—but to use a pen on paper and just write something. So, friends and family, I’ve been writing you letters. And they’re very strange, disconnected letters, because my art of letter-writing has gotten very rusty. They’ll get better. I hope.

I’ve tried to do some more reading, too… but I’m not a responsible reader. When I find a good book, especially a fast-paced one, I cannot put it down. Which was fine when I wasn’t a parent, but it doesn’t work so well for me now. It leaves Steve taking the full burden of entertaining our manic daughter in the evening (and also means I miss out on what is often the funniest part of the day), and it also means I go to bed way too late. I got a couple of slower-paced books (Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights), but I still get in trouble of I pick them up before Kara’s actually sleeping. And it’s so hard to walk past them during a slow time and think, Just a couple of pages. Then 20 minutes later my understandably cranky kid is demanding how much longer she’s supposed to entertain herself when I’m sitting in the same room doing, apparently, nothing.

What hobbies have you been neglecting as the necessities of life creep up on your “spare” time? Have you done anything to reclaim them?

My Love Affair

It’s time for me to come out and admit it. I’ve put it off, because no one wants to hear about it, but it’s all I ever feel like writing about. So here it is:

I have a love affair with food.

It’s only intensified in the last three weeks. Ironically, it’s because I went on a diet. I started the South Beach diet again and discovered that there are so many delicious, healthy recipes out there, I hardly knew where to begin.

Know what we had on Sunday? Zucchini lasagna. That’s right: lasagna with zucchini instead of pasta. It was incredible. I had my main dish overflowing with vegetables that even Kara loved eating… with a side of vegetables! Tonight, we’re having eggplant pizzas. I made it once last week, and it’s just one we had to make again.

When I went to the grocery store, hardly anything in my cart was processed. I had my eggs, my dairy things (milk, yogurt, cheese)… and a ton of fruit and vegetables. And I can take these boring raw vegetables and turn them into delicious, filling, hot meals. Day after day. And I can keep losing weight while I do it! (Seven pounds down, 2 1/2 weeks in… just in case you were wondering.)

What’s not to love?

Magnetic Chalkboard

So here it is:

My Dollar Tree baking sheet painted with chalkboard paint, and some magnets. The whole thing set me back $2.47 ($1 each for the magnets and baking sheet, and $.47 for the chalk).

A couple pointers if you do this. 1) When the paint can says, “Allow 24 hours to dry,” it means 24 hours, not 23 hours. If you try to remove the tape around the edges after 23 hours, you will end up with a raggedy edge to your paint circle where the tape took some of the paint off. Hypothetically.

2) When the paint can says, “Allow 24 hours to dry,” it means you should not test out the chalkboard surface with chalk until 24 hours have passed, no matter how dry the paint looks. You may end up with a really cool-looking silver sheen to your chalk marks… until you realize the chalk is actually just chipping off the paint, and the silver is the pan showing through. And then you may need to paint on another coat and wait another 24 hours. Hypothetically.

I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out, all in all!

I Did Something Awesome

First of all, I’ve recently realized that I don’t have much to contribute when I haven’t been making things. Apologies.

That being said, I’ve just finished making things. I’ll post pictures when the paint is dry.

Last week, Kara and I went to the Dollar Tree. My goal was to find something to entertain her when we take a long car trip. First, of course, we went down the toy aisle. Guess what they have in the toy aisle? Among other things, they have magnets. I like the idea of magnets. She can play with them, assuming they’re stuck to something, and my husband won’t have to pick them up again every 5 seconds. Presumably.

But what to stick them to?

Why, a cookie sheet, of course! Dollar Tree has those, too. I let Kara pick out which shape baking sheet she wanted. She picked the circle.

I was feeling medium-good about this idea when I remembered that there exists a thing called chalkboard paint. What if I took this ho-hum baking sheet and transformed it into a magnetic chalkboard? This will be a good bit of fun now when she just likes to scribble on things. And it will just get more fun when she gets old enough to do mixed media art, combining drawing with the different magnet shapes! Fortunately, I have a good friend who had some extra chalkboard paint. She let me use it for the low low price of painting a chalkboard she’d been meaning to repaint for a while. I just finished painting both, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t even get any paint on the carpet.

What do you think? Am I brilliant, or have I just been drinking too much coffee?

Homemade Deodorant (for sensitive skin)

I’ve mentioned before that I’m now using homemade deodorant. My bestest friend gave me some for Christmas, but the baking soda made me break out. So I fudged the recipe a little and now it works beautifully. The true test will be summer, of course, but it works when I work out, so my hopes are high.

You will need:

• Some sort of container. I have a small wide-mouth glass jar. (If you don’t have anything to fish out of the recycling, thrift stores are great places to find things like this.)
• 1/2 Cup of coconut oil
• 1/4 Cup of baking soda
• 7 TB (1/4 Cup + 1 TB) of cornstarch
• Drops of vanilla oil or some other essential oil for scent (optional)

My method of mixing it all together may horrify whoever put the original idea together, but here’s what I did:

Put the coconut oil in a microwave-safe mixing bowl. Zap it for a few seconds. It really doesn’t take long—coconut oil is only solid below 76*, so it “melts” VERY quickly. Once it’s liquid, add the rest of the ingredients. I used a fork; I’m sure a whisk would work well too. Then use a spatula and put it in your container. To use it, I just use my fingertip to scoop out a small amount, about pea-sized, and rub it under my arms. I’ve been using it over a month now and haven’t had any problems with staining. I can also use it right after shaving without it stinging or anything. And I don’t smell bad, which is the main thing.

Now, to clarify, this is a deodorant, not an antiperspirant. You can’t get an antiperspirant without the aluminum, which is bad for you. And I personally don’t care about sweating, just about stinking, so this works great for me.

So I made some soap

I have a friend who made some laundry soap that she found via Pinterest (of course). And I’m just about out of laundry soap. So I decided to make some too. I would love to pretend I had some big grand justification for it, like saving the environment or knowing that it would be so much cheaper, but really, I think I’m just getting addicted to making things myself. I honestly have no idea how much I usually spend on detergent, because when I buy it, I tend to buy whatever soap gives me the largest number of loads so I don’t have to buy it again for ages.

And I helped justify it because, in looking at the ingredients, I’m pretty certain I could use it on the cloth diapers.

Anyway, I mixed up a batch while the dryer was broken. My mad awesome husband fixed the dryer a couple days ago, so I’ve now used the new laundry soap in about 5 loads.

By the way, just so we’re clear, when I make all this neat stuff, don’t get the wrong picture. My stuff doesn’t look like this:

When I made this, it went into 2 OxiClean tubs, a yogurt container I fished out of the recycling, and a 2-gallon Ziploc bag and scribbled “Laundry Soap” onto the containers with a black Sharpie. When I make things in the kitchen, like ranch or granola, they go into neat little glass jars… that still have the peanut butter labels that came on them. But it works.

I like it so far. I think it makes my clothes softer, but that’s hard to know for sure since I’m not only using new soap but also machine-drying clothes right after having line-dried them. It does get out stains that I thought were hopeless. (I very rarely do anything to try to get stains out except throw them in the wash and hope it comes out; it’s nice that I have this laundry soap as an enabler in that endeavor now.)

What have you been making lately?

Diaper Genies and Baby Wipes

So here’s the story of the emergency Diaper Genie refill.

I went to change Kara’s incredibly dirty, particularly stinky diaper on a very bad morning, only to realize that the last bit of bag of our last Diaper Genie refill had already disappeared down the clasp. What does a mommy do when she doesn’t want to spend another $8 on a refill? She uses a regular garbage bag.

I just kept the empty refill cartridge and pulled the garbage bag up through the middle. I opened up the bag, shoved it down into the space in the cartridge, and secured it with a rubber band, like so.

Then I just shoved the whole of the garbage bag into the belly of the Diaper Genie.

It’s worked pretty well. It doesn’t contain the odors quite as well as the name-brand, but since the odors only leak out when you open the lid, I think it’s worth not paying the cost.

While I was taking care of the Diaper Genie, I decided to do something about the low baby wipes situation in our house. I saw this link on Pinterest and decided with the amount of baby wipes we go through, it might be worth trying something a little cheaper. So I went and bought a canister like this

and then realized I already had a container just like this at home from a long time ago when I bought some peeled grapefruit and kept the container. So I put rice in that canister to feel a little less bad about buying this one. Anyway, I got this canister and the smallest roll of Bounty paper towels, so I could be sure the paper towels would fit into the canister. Then I did just what the recipe told me to: I cut the roll of paper towels in half (piece of cake with my ceramic knife) and took out the cardboard tube. In the empty canister, I mixed a cup of really hot water, a tablespoon of coconut oil, and a tablespoon of Kara’s baby wash.

I put the paper towels in to the canister, and voila, baby wipes.

They even pull out from the center, see?

Our initial impression has been somewhat tainted by the fact that Kara has had incredibly dirty diapers these last couple mornings, so she’s had some terrible diaper rash. It’s not possible to say right now whether the rash has been caused by these wipes or by sleeping for who knows how long in a dirty diaper. I think that if it is the wipes, I’d still try again with a different baby wash and/or less baby wash.