What's for Dinner? Day 27 of Babystep Challenge To A Peaceful Home

What's For Dinner?

Do those words fill you with dread? What about when it's 5 o'clock and you still have no idea what the answer is as you're standing in front of the refrigerator just hoping something will assemble itself and jump out at you? Now do you feel stressed out?

At this point, many of us would feel tempted to pick up a phone and order in. Or tell the kids to hop in the car for a "treat". These choices will cost LOTS more money and give you much less nutrition, and much more chemicals and fat. Which you know you don't want to do.

3 Reasons to Make a Menu Plan

1. Save Your Brain!
   

I don't know about you, but my brain is......hibernating. It started with my first pregnancy. You know: Pregnancy Brain. And then it was New Mommy Brain. And then it was Living With Little Children Brain, then more Pregnancy Brain, and so on. So while I used to consider myself an intelligent, thinking person, that person has been sliiiiippppiiing away, and I want to conserve whatever intelligence I have left so that I might be able to write coherent blog posts. In other words, the fewer decisions I must make on a daily basis, the better! It's much easier to decide in one sitting what we will be having for dinner each night than to have to do it every day. And in doing so, I can plan to actually have the ingredients when I go to make the meal. Who would've thunk it?

1. Save Your Money!

We'd all like to save money and use it for more important things. When you eat out, you spend MUCH more money than you do when you eat home. When you buy last minute items at the corner convenience store, you also spend much more money than you would for those same items at the supermarket, if you'd known you would want them. And when you buy random things at the grocery store, things spoil because you don't have a plan to use them. What a waste!

1. Eat More Healthfully

When you make your own food at home, you are (hopefully) not going to fill it with MSG and other poisonous preservatives. You can be sure that convenience foods are toxic to your bodies, and with a little bit of planning, you can avoid these and know you are helping your family to be healthier. And it's really easy!





So Here's What You Need To Do.

1. Pick an amount of time you'd like to plan. I usually do 1 or 2 weeks at a time, but if you're new to this and it seems too much, try 3 days.
2. Write down a dinner meal for each of the days you are planning for. Dinner is the most important meal to plan, so focus on that meal first. Remember to include side dishes.
   
3. On your shopping list, write down each of the ingredients you'll need to make your meal. $5dinner.com has some nice printable planning sheets for menus and grocery lists.
4. Go shopping and save money because you're not buying things you don't need or won't use.

It really is that simple.

And if you really don't want to do all of this, you can go to SavingDinner.com and buy their menus, complete with grocery lists. They're very inexpensive and will still save you lots of time and money.

What's For Dinner is the theme of Day 27 of the Flylady's babysteps. I'm so glad I've made this a habit because it's really helped me. I even aspire to plan a whole month at a time and get into more freezer cooking....but I'm not there yet. One step at a time!

I usually post my weekly menu on Mondays. Doing this has helped me be accountable for getting it done. I love linking up to others' menus; if you post one, let me know!

Do you menu plan? Why or why not? How long? I want to know what works for you.

Give a Home Haircut - Frugal Friday

Before you say "NO WAY", just hear me out.

It's not THAT hard.

OK, it's a little hard, but not really. If you've never done it before, learn a few tips, and then you learn by practicing. And here's where little kids come in handy. They don't really care if it's not quite right.

I have given all of my boys all of their haircuts since they were babies. I started learning on the first one, and got better with time. Now, I have four whose hair I cut every 2 months or so.





Here's what I do:

• Sit child wearing bib or apron on top of table, at corner (so I can stand on the side)
• Play video in front of child. This helps him sit still and not try to watch what you are doing.
  
• Spray hair with warm water. Using a fine tooth comb, hold a section of hair up between your second & third fingers. Cut desired length.
• Repeat, cutting section adjacent to already cut section. This is how you make sure it's the same length.
• On the top of the head, make sure you go front to back, and on the sides and back of the head go up to down. Otherwise you end up with stripes. (ask me how I know).

I'm sure there are some video tutorials on YouTube; at the time of this post I didn't have time to look for one. But I will add one later on if I find a good one.

I had NO previous experience. Really. And I make a few mistakes now and then, but not too bad. Honestly, it's not that hard. I think the hardest part is to be willing to do it, to believe that you can, and to not be afraid.

It grows back. :)

For more FrugalFriday ideas, visit LifeAsMom.com

The Poop on Cloth Diapers (part 2)

The Poop on Cloth Diapers (part 2)

I used to think that disposable diapers were the only way to go….

In my previous post, I started giving the reasons why we switched to cloth diapers a few years ago. In this post I’ll cover the environmental and money-saving benefits of cloth diapers over disposables, as well as discuss basic cloth diaper care.

Except for very limited uses, we’ll never go back to disposables!

Cost To The Environment
(from an article by the Sustainability Institute; entire article here: http://bit.ly/KIuk2)

..."18 BILLION disposable diapers are used in th US each year. Each one has an outer layer of waterproof polypropylene and an inner layer of fluff made from wood pulp plus super-slurper sodium polyacrylate that can hold a hundred times its weight in water.

Those 18 billion diapers add up to 82,000 tons of plastic a year and 1.3 million tons of wood pulp -- 250,000 trees. After a few hours of active service these materials are trucked away, primarily to landfills, where they sit, neatly wrapped packages of excrement, entombed undegraded for several hundred years. "...

Cost To Our Pockets

“Disposable diapers” was absolutely the highest on-going expense we had with our first two babies. Consider this:

Your baby will use about 6500 to 7000 diapers from birth to 30 months.

Most parents seem to spend an average cost of $50-$80/month for Huggies® or Pampers® OUCH!!! That would come to $1500-$2400 over a 30 month period, more if you diaper longer -- and there are reports that show cloth diaper babies often potty-train up to a year earlier than those who wear disposables.

Now….I've been using Mother-Ease One Size diapers since March of 2006, and (full disclosue) we will soon be offering them for sale here on my blog. The same diapers fit my newborn all the way to my toddler. It only takes 4-6 months to completely recoup our family's initial costs. After that, we're essentially diapering for FREE. The laundering costs are minimal in both time and money.

By choosing cloth diapers over disposables, you will save thousands of dollars on each child!

Especially in these difficult economic times, who doesn't want that? Let’s face it, who doesn’t NEED that?!

Caring for Cloth Diapers
Caring for the diapers is quite simple: just rinse poop into toilet (NOTE: we have a sprayer attached to our toilet that makes this easy; in the US where it's not as simple to connect this, I think most folks dunk&flush) & place diapers in a covered pail with water and some vinegar (neutralizes odors). When ready to wash, empty the soak water into toilet, do a prewash or rinse cycle, and then a full cycle in hot water with detergent. Dry. That's it! We wash diapers every night before we go to bed. Our older children (even the toddler who still wears one at nighttime) know how to fold them and put them away. It's as simple as that!

I love knowing that my babies are touching comfy soft cloth and not toxic chemical-filled plasticky-feeling stuff. I love knowing I'm doing our part to keep disposable diapers out of landfills, and I LOVE the amount of money we have and continue to save!

(There’s a lot more to say regarding using cloth diapers vs disposables -- including the benefits of natural fibers, tips for making the care of cloth diapers even easier, and the scientific links of disposable diapers to asthma and male infertility. I will cover these issues in future posts.)

The Poop on Cloth Diapers (part 1)

The Poop on Cloth Diapers (part 1)

With a new baby in the house, of course we are changing a lot more diapers -- and even with five children under the age of seven, with two in diapers full-time, I’ve been reminded why I love using cloth instead of disposables.

When I was pregnant with my first child, my environmentally-conscious husband approached me to consider using cloth diapers. I didn't know anyone who used them, and didn't know that "modern" cloth diapers had been designed. I was too overwhelmed with all that would come with being a first time mom and never looked into it. When my second son was born only 11 months after my first, I was once again too overwhelmed. Not until my third did I dare to enter what I was sure would be a complicated world...only to find that it wasn't! I wish I'd started using them sooner.

The cloth diapers I use really are simple (ours have built in snaps to accommodate all sizes, so there is no pinning) and don't take much time at all to rinse and wash. I love that I never need to worry about running out of diapers, like I used to with disposables.

The way I see it, there are 3 main reasons to choose to cloth diapers over disposables:

1. To avoid the toxins (and their negative effects on health) in disposable diapers

2. To reduce environmental waste

3. To save a bunch of money

In doing research for this post, I discovered that the many costs of disposable diapers were more than I realized:

Costs To Our Childrens’ Health
from an article on The Diaper Hyena; entire article here

SODIUM POLYACRYLATE - This is the chemical, added in powder form to the inner pad of a disposable, that makes it super-absorbent. When the powdered form becomes wet, it turns into a gel.

Can absorb up to 100X its weight in water.
Can stick to baby's genitals, causing allergic reactions.
Reported to cause severe skin irritations, oozing blood from perineum and scrotal tissues, fever, vomiting and staph infections in babies.
When injected into rats it has caused hemorrhage, cardiovascular failure and death.
Banned from tampons in 1985 because of its link to Toxic Shock Syndrome.
Has killed children after ingesting as little as 5 grams of it.
Causes female organ problems, slows healing wounds, fatigue and weight loss to the employees in factories that manufacture it.


DIOXIN - This is the chemical by-product of the paper-bleaching process, using chlorine gas, in the manufacturing of diapers.

Carcinogenic (cancer-causing chemical)
The EPA lists it as the MOST TOXIC of all cancer-linked chemicals.
In small quantities it causes birth defects, skin/liver disease, immune system suppression & genetic damage in lab animals.
Banned in most countries, but not the United States.

If we really care about our babies’ health, isn’t this information alone enough to make natural-fiber cloth diapers the right choice?

(In my next post, I’ll cover the environmental and money-saving benefits of cloth diapers over disposables, as well as discuss basic cloth diaper care.)