Slightly Deranged

A few weeks ago the enchilada casserole turned out extra-crispy which we thought was just the result of lack of attention, but then we noticed that the turned off oven was still going strong and further that it was the broiler, which hasn't worked in years. When the smoke alarm went off we decided our only option was to flip it off at the breaker, which did put a stop to it. Subsequent tests revealed that even if the oven was never turned on at all the broiler started heating up immediately. We could use the stove top, but only for about twenty minutes before the house started filling with smoke, or we could broil something very quickly. 

We put in a call to our friendly local appliance repair company, who have fixed our stove many times before, and they replied, without even looking at it, that if it was doing that now it was beyond further repair. So we adapted for a few days, doing a lot of scrambled eggs on the pancake griddle and tea in the microwave and soup in the instant pot. On particularly brave days we would cook a very quick supper on the stove top. The rest of the time we kept it flipped off at the breaker.

It's never a good time to replace an appliance, but right now is a particularly bad time as, if we ever get past Phase 1 of our building project to add on enough bedrooms and living space for Bookworm and Rocketboy to join us, at some point we will get to Phase 3 of making the kitchen fully wheelchair accessible at which point a new stove will be needed that would not fit into the current configuration. 

However, we were alerted to a free stove along the side of the road and DOB rounded up people to load it up, bring it home, and after much straining and some swearing, haul it all the way up and around the back and get it into the kitchen. 

While this had been going on, Deux had been making supper and noted that, for the first time in a week or more, the broiler had not come on. But that just seemed like a fluke, and the project was too far committed to withdraw, so we pulled the old stove out, brought the new stove in and . . . discovered that there was more than one type of stove plug. Some of our helpers considered swapping the cords between the stoves but thought better of it and finally with enough googling we found out that there were adapters that could be used and arrive in a few days. 

In the meantime we had two stoves in a kitchen that definitely was not designed for two stoves and no one wanted to drag the other stove back outside somewhere, so we plugged the old stove back into the old stove slot, shoved the new stove into a corner where it has converted the kitchen from difficult to navigate in a wheelchair to difficult to navigate in corporal form, and resumed using the new stove. 

Since then, the broiler has never come back on. We don't trust it. We try not to leave the breaker flipped but sometimes we forget. I baked gingerbread, which takes an hour of steady temperature, and it came out perfectly. We still don't know if the other stove even works because no one wants to drag the now-functioning stove out of the wall and plug it in to test. 

I am not sure what the moral is here but hey, at least we're not out the money for a new stove. Yet. 

Simplicity Itself

A couple of weeks ago, I was so tired that I ordered pizza.

That probably doesn't sound blogworthy, but you would have to understand how bad things have to be before I order pizza. I feel about ordering pizza as a pacifist president feels about pushing the red button. It's just not on my list of Things I Might Do. There's the agony of knowing how much it costs compared to pretty much anything that could be made at home; there's the dubious nutritional value; and then there's the fact that the kind of pizzas you can get delivered to your door just don't taste all that good. (On very special occasions we have been known to get the Papa Murphy's take and bake, which do taste good, at least. Only with a coupon, though.) Also, formerly, there was the challenge of composing my thoughts on the phone, which, if I am tired enough to be ordering pizza, I am definitely too tired to be doing.

Anyway, the pizza places have taken away that last objection by online ordering, and even when I am too tired to speak, I can usually still point and click. So I ordered it, and luckily DOB woke up in time to answer the door, because even walking that far was out of the question at that point.

But I have since been devoting myself to the project of Not Needing to Order Pizza. Wondergirl and His Majesty kindly saw to it that the chest freezer finally got moved from my grandparents' garage to the shed, and I am stocking it with cooked hamburger and grated cheese, and yes, hot dogs. Even hot dogs are cheaper and healthier than pizza, and the Duchess can cook them, although the freezer is not yet full enough for me to trust any child to go fetch things from it without falling in.

Shortly thereafter I was reading an online discussion on simplifying life, something I always fantasize about. And then the toaster broke. On the one hand, life might be visually simpler with one less thing on the counter. On the other hand, I kept burning the toast under the broiler and the kids couldn't make toast unsupervised any more and bread and butter was out of the question because the house is too cold for pliable butter.

 So, I had DOB get me a new toaster. And I snagged one of the pancake griddles from Grandpa's house, which, although it will be difficult to store, makes a family-sized meal of french toast in ten minutes. And that's what I call simple.

Dear Grandchildren,

I'm not saving stuff for you.

Maybe by the time you come along we will have progressed to the point where all toys are holographic projections and cleanup consists of hitting the off switch. (Wow. THAT is a fantasy.)

Or maybe we will have regressed to the point where all you have to play with is sticks and dirt. (Oh, wait, that's what your parents are playing with.)

Or maybe things will be pretty much the same, in which case, there will be yard sales.

Or maybe your parents will stay true to their preadolescent forswearing of reproduction. In which case, they won't be your parents.

Whatever it is, we can get along without me saving things.

I didn't actually get rid of the blocks yet. Those inch cubes are pretty handy for teaching volume, so I can justify them through at least third grade.

By the time you come along, the colors that looks so cute now will be ghastly. The toys that are educational will be passe. The river will move on.

I may as well let it sweep some of this stuff away with it. Let somebody else enjoy it before it expires completely.

Of course, nobody will let me get rid of the Duplos yet, even though they have long since officially graduated to Legos. 

Or just let it go to the landfill. My time is not worth sorting out the cards from dollar store games of Old Maid, from cardboard puzzles that are warped and missing half their pieces. Some things even the poor don't want. And I need the space.

You want your grandmother to reach her old age with her sanity intact, don't you?

So . . . don't complain. When you come along, maybe we'll go to the park. Or the library, where they have librarians to make sure the pieces go back with the right puzzles. Or switch on the toybox holograph.

I may have to hang on to the elf hat. Your daddy was just too stinkin' cute in it. And it doesn't take up space. Much.

It's That Time

It is August. Children eat popsicles and contemplate the start of school. Geese contemplate the trip south. Leaves contemplate turning yellow. I contemplate cleaning up this horrible mess before I go completely insane and take it all outside and light a match to it.

Which would be bad, because there's a burn ban on.

Back in the olden days, I think I would have been a tolerably good housekeeper. I like menial labor--it gives the mind lots of time to work while keeping the hands busy. Scrubbing, sweeping, dusting--all nice, soothing activities.

However, modern surfaces need little cleaning and modern cleaning supplies take little effort. The test of a good housekeeper nowadays is not her willingness to put in a little elbow grease, but her ability to remain calm and organized and decisive in the face of the unrelenting onslaught of STUFF.

At that, I am a miserable failure. I am not calm in the face of STUFF. STUFF terrifies me. STUFF steps on my toes and shoves me into the wall and tweaks my ear and makes me cry. I hate STUFF.

And I can't organize. Not anything I have to touch. I can organize ideas beautifully. Can take a directory of ten thousand random documents and turn them into coherent narrative for trial. Can take an incoherent jumble of thoughts and turn them into a clear and eloquent pleading. But as soon as my hands get called on to do anything but type, it's hopeless. I'm at a preschool level. I can't even sort laundry and match socks without getting hopelessly muddled. (Sadly, this is not an exaggeration for the sake of the blog--it's the unvarnished truth.)

If it were just me, I could keep up, most of the time, because I also avoid acquiring stuff. But I have children, and children are to STUFF as socks are to burrs in an August meadow. It follows them home. It coalesces around them. Nice, organized valuable belongings melt into STUFF just from their presence. I was, of course, supposed to teach them "A Place for Everything And Everything In Its Place" back when they were two, but I was kind of busy trying to keep them alive back then, plus I couldn't remember the Places, plus the Everything kept changing.

So here we are, and once again, the STUFF has taken over their room and spilled over into the living room. We spent all morning at it and they, with a promise of extra computer time, worked as well as could be expected, and we took out bag after bag of garbage and basket after basket of toys to go in the basement to be sorted later. Blood, sweat and tears all put in an appearance. We did all this a couple of months ago and it's worse than ever. It just  . . . grows.

It is a problem that they have no space for their own things, except piled on top of their beds (which makes for uncomfortable sleeping and absolutely miserable emergency sheet changes). So in addition to the load to Goodwill and the library, we stopped and bought four identical underbed containers and labeled them. It might help for a little bit.

But I know the STUFF will be back.

A Dress from a Shirt

DOB had a Very Nice Shirt that turned up with a rip in the sleeve. I couldn't bear to throw the shirt away but a patched sleeve didn't seem quite the thing for work.

So I decided to try transforming it into a dress for D1. I came across various levels of complication in attempting this, and determined to go with the simplest method possible. I used a simple jumper-type top pattern and just flared gently out from there, using the existing yoke and buttons. I sewed some pink bias tape that had been in a bag of freebies around the neck, armholes, and top of the pocket (which I moved down). I cut the bottom straight across and gave it a rolled hem.

I thought about adding an elastic waistband--I had enough bias tape to make a narrow band--but decided it wasn't worth the trouble, especially when I discovered I didn't have any elastic.

It's a little big at the top, but we decided she can wear it as a jumper this year and a sundress next year. I might have to add a ruffle at the bottom for that.

All told it cost however many pennies' worth of thread I used and took about three hours.

WWBCE?

Or, What Would Baby Carrie Eat?

It seems that these days we have two options for feeding babies--either we can spend a fortune on matching little jars (admittedly useful for all those VBS projects) or we can spend a fortune in time laboriously creating gourmet meals at home. Some sites dedicated to making baby food make it sound like a meal I wouldn't expect to get unless someone gave me a very large gift certificate.

Neither of these options appeal to me. I have always made my own baby food, in a fairly simple manner (cook up extra of whatever plain meat/vegetable is around, puree in blender, freeze in ice cube trays). Nonetheless, with twins life becomes even more complicated and I don't always have the perfect balance of meat, starch, green vegetable, yellow vegetable, and fruit that I carefully fed to the older two.

Then one day the older children were playing Laura and Mary as usual and I asked myself: "What did Ma feed Baby Carrie?" She didn't have little jars and she didn't have a blender or freezer or even a baby food grinder. I bet she didn't even follow the four-days-before-introducing-a-new-food rule. Yet somehow Baby Carrie survived.

The obvious answer finally dawned on me: breastmilk (or good-quality formula) is complete nutrition for babies. It's not enough to keep older babies happy, especially when they see everybody else eating that interesting food, but as long as they're continuing to nurse, they're getting a well-rounded supply of nutrients, and pretty much any food will work to give them practice swallowing and digesting. No doubt Ma simply fed Baby Carrie the mushier parts of whatever meal she was already cooking: hasty pudding; boiled squash, mashed potatoes, pease porridge cooled off.

Eventually babies have more complicated nutritional needs, but by that time they also have more complicated mouths that can chew softish food and have practiced enough on the really mushy stuff to swallow more complicated textures without gagging.

And the four-day rule? For common allergens or if you have serious reasons for concern, this makes sense. (I found out that D3 had an egg sensitivity that way, although I'm still keeping my fingers crossed that she'll outgrow it.) But it occurred to me one day when I was cooking pea soup for everyone else and worrying over the fact that I had yet to introduce the babies to onions, celery, parsley or marjoram, that I had never heard of anyone of normal health and constitution being allergic to any of the above. Babies don't need to eat all their food in bland, limited-ingredient mixes.

I haven't entirely given up on my blender and freezer, because I don't always cook that much mushy food (especially in the summer) and because the babies go to bed before the rest of us eat supper, but I have stopped worrying if I run out of this or that.

(Now there's one difficult question: What about meat? I happen to think meat is a pretty important part of the diet even early on, because of the need for iron--I don't do special baby cereals--and we all seem to have high protein requirements. I slow-cook and then use the blender. I have heard, however, of mothers who simply pre-chew the baby's meat. It's not really that gross--I mean, consider how else you feed them. It just seems like an awful lot of chewing for twins. So I've never actually tried it.)

Cheap Thrills

I'm trying out this using baking soda to wash your hair idea that's going around. Supposedly it takes your hair awhile to get used to not using shampoo, but mine looks normal so far (i.e. sticking out every which way, but that's my hair). It certainly feels clean.

I'm a little disconcerted by all these possible uses for baking soda, though. Is it really appropriate to use the same substance to wash your hair, brush your teeth, scrub the sink, deodorize your fridge, and bake your biscuits? What if it turns on us? Will we fall under the control of Big Soda?

The babies have also been wearing cloth diapers for a few weeks now, at least during the day. Fortunately, the existing stock of diapers is quite adequate to last them both two days, which is about time to run a load anyway. I calculate on the most expensive possible wash and dry, it could cost $1 to run a load of diapers, whereas it would cost $4 to keep both babies in the cheapest disposables for that amount of time. Since I didn't have to buy any new diapers, that's $1.50 a day I make by running one extra load of laundry every other day instead of taking out the trash. And no more blowouts! I'd much rather wash a load of diapers than agonize over another ruined t-shirt. (So we can add savings on stain remover, too.)

A friend from church volunteered to come over and help, specifying that she didn't like to cook, but did like to clean and organize. No problem there, cooking happens anyway and cleaning doesn't. So with her help we tackled the basement to make a play/project area for the kids. I really have a ton of activities for them to do, but they're usually stored somewhere inaccessible and stymied by the need to clear the dining room table first, and then clear it again before lunch.

Hopefully now that the paint is set up right next to the basement sink it can become a more regular event.

Wearable Blankets

When our thermometer suddenly jumped into the fall zone, I realized the babies did not have warm enough sleeping arrangements. Tucking in a blanket was not going to work with two in the bed. They make these, of course, but I wasn't about to spend $40 on those when I can hardly take a step without tripping on a pile of blankets. (We used to go to a church where all the old ladies crocheted. D1 received a lot of blankets. And then D2 got some more. Mostly they have been used for dress-up.)

Instead, I figured out how to convert two of their existing blankets and some fleece scraps into homemade sleep sacks. Deducting the time for figuring out what I was doing, hunting up thread, oiling the sewing machine (which hadn't been done in years and I hope machine oil is all the same because all I could find was the oil for the hair clippers), and making mistakes, it's probably about a ten minute project.

Materials:
One 36" square double-thickness cotton knit blanket
Two lengths of fleece, about 3" by 7". Make sure these are cut along the length of the fleece, so that the stretch is sideways--otherwise they'll stretch out of shape before you've got them on the baby. You might want to experiment to see how snug you want them to be.

Instructions:
Fold the blanket in half, right side out. Pin the right side of the fleece scraps to the wrong side of the blanket to form shoulder straps. Sew.

Turn the blanket inside out, and sew just up the side. The blanket is long enough and snug enough that they aren't able to kick out of it. (And D4 tries, oh, he tries.) But with the bottom open, you can slide it up to change the diaper if needed in the night.

To put it on the baby, just slide the baby in the top and slip the shoulder straps over their arms.

I put a zipper in the first model, and quickly realized it was completely unnecessary. If you do want a zipper, put the shoulder straps on either side of it so that it's down the middle where it might actually help.

We've been using these the rest of the week, and the babies have stayed nice and warm and sleepy.

Frugal Friday: Baby Carrier

This is the wrap we made with five yards of cotton jersey, on sale for $3 a yard. Do not take my example for how to wear it, though. This was the first time I tried it with both, and I clearly forgot to check positions in the mirror.

Go here for all kinds of ideas on inexpensive baby carriers. Or follow the directions at Moby Wrap with your own wrap. It works even better for one baby. With one baby you can still do housework. With two you can at least navigate stairs and doors safely.

The key thing about the cotton jersey is you don't have to hem it. It doesn't ravel. Even in the wash. Just cut it and wear it.

D3 is embarrassed by the silly pink hat. D4 looks like a little elf in his.

With the extra fabric, we cut five swaddling blankets. Stretch, it turns out, is the key to swaddling. That and leverage--you have to pin the TOPS of the arms, not the wrists. That and age. The nurses at the hospital only have to wrap sleepy brand-new babies, not determined, flailing 3-week-olds. However, if you catch them half asleep, it can help them stay settled.

All-Natural Hair Mousse

All-natural hair products are hard to find. Especially mousse for some reason. What can be found is outrageously expensive. We didn't think there was any hope of us making our own, though, when we can hardly get dinner on the table. Until we discovered this recipe for homemade mousse:

1/4 tsp. plain gelatin
1 cup boiling water

Mix together thoroughly (that's the important part, it can take a few minutes for the gelatin to completely dissolve), allow to cool, and use on your hair.

That's it. We stored it in an old hair gel bottle and it works great. You don't get that fun foamy white stuff out of it, but it does hold hair steady very nicely. You can adapt the amount of gelatin if you want a bit stiffer mixture; DOB likes 3/8 teaspoon per cup of water.

Find more frugal tips at Frugal Friday.

Frugal Friday: Sale Preparation

Last Friday night we went to the closest Mothers of Twins club sales. If you have or expect to have babies, live near a good-sized city, and have never checked these out--do. (Search for "mothers of multiples" as well.) There are about a dozen in different regions of our city, and most of them hold two sales a year, a portion of which is open to the public.

I've been going to these sales since before D1 was born, but this was the first year I qualified to go as a member (or pre-member--they didn't want to charge until the babies had arrived safely), so we went the night before and picked up a twin jogging stroller for about a third of the retail price. We also got a beautiful child's wooden rocking chair for $5, a few small toy items, and much of what I needed to round out the duckling's summer wardrobes.

I find the prices are usually comparable to yard sales, with the one downside being that it's hard to dicker when there are thirty sellers to track down across a junior high cafeteria. (I wouldn't bother, unless it was a large item I felt was really overpriced.) The big advantage is the selection, which is about as big as a large children's resale shop. I can rely on these sales to get everything I'm going to need for the new season at one stop, which saves me a huge amount of time and energy. (Like everywhere else, though, second-hand pickings get slimmer as the kids get older.)

Before I go, I look through the hand-me-downs and any old clothes I think will fit (when do kids stop growing into a new size every season?) and write out exactly what I think I still need in colors and sizes. This year I got even smarter and wrote down the duckling's actual measurements before I went, so I could measure the t-shirts and dresses and be sure they were long enough. I also traced their feet, so I could compare the cutouts to shoe soles and be sure they could accommodate D2's wide feet and leave enough room to grow. Much less stressful and I didn't bring home any mistakes.

More Frugal Friday here.