Three Plus Two

February in Mississippi

February in the South is a different animal than February in the North.  For years I have hated February and have spent long hours figuring out how to wage war on it.  In upstate New York February is midwinter.  The snow is not going to melt until April, so you had better figure out how to deal with it.

In Mississippi...

New York kids expect snow and ice in February...

(maybe it looks a little odd on the magnolias)

(Or hanging from the crepe myrtles)

But what they don't expect is...

SPRING!!!

Everybody keeps telling us that this streak of good weather is probably going to end and then the weather will turn bad (rainy) and cold (chilly) again, but, I'm sorry, everybody, YOU HAVE NO IDEA.  71 degrees?  That's like, what, JUNE in upstate New York???  Do you know how LONG it takes 4 feet of snow to melt???

So what if it turns into 50 degrees again!

I may even have to negotiate a ceasefire with February.

Seven Quick Takes Saturday

 

One

So... Rocky Road is really nutty, isn't it, not nitty?  Would you believe that every time I woke up last night I was thinking about that?  Sheesh.

Two

I must get some cheesecloth.  I have a couple of dairy cookbooks, but how did I miss that ricotta was this easy ?  I think I am still hung up on the idea of making yogurt so I haven't yet graduated to thinking about cheese.  (I haven't yet attempted yogurt, by the way.  It's the incubation that requires too much planning for my disorganized brain.  Well, that and the fact that we are always about to run out of milk.)

Three

Over the past several months I have become addicted to grocery blogs, the kind where the blogger takes a picture of her insanely cheap grocery haul and posts all about how many coupons she used and what everything cost.  I notice that most of these women do not have large families, which is probably why they can get away with buying in quantities like, "3 apples."  I thought about this quite a lot a couple of weeks ago when I found ripe bananas marked down to $.39/lb.  I bought 14 lbs of bananas, and they were gone in 3 days.  I did not cut them up and freeze them.  I used 3 ( not lbs, bananas) to make banana bread.  The rest were gobbled up mainly by the little boys.  Adjusted for family size, time constraints, and organic/unprocessed eating (which means fewer coupons), though, I have found many of these blogs to be quite helpful, which is probably why I have become addicted to them.  (The other reason is that I am constantly in need of a challenge.  If I don't actively have a problem to work on, I start making them up.) 

Four

I actually took all the kids with me grocery shopping this past week, which is something I do NOT do frequently.  Most of my kids are little and although the little car carts are definitely an improvement over no car carts, 3 or 4 kids can NOT fit into them, no matter how hard they try. (And no, Pop, you are NOT allowed to ride on the roof!)  But Andy was in Arkansas for the day and there was a Mom's Night Out I wanted to attend later that night, so a morning grocery trip it was.  In order to combat some of the chaos, this is what I did:

• Made a super structured grocery list, including quantities and brands, based on the sales flyer and what we normally buy.  Katydid was in charge of the list.
• Gareth pushed the second cart.  The three year old got to drive the "car".  5 year old twins and 7 year old were designated as helpers to pull things off the shelves for me.  4 month old baby blessedly slept through most of the store.  That was nothing to do with me; that was divine intervention.
• Went as fast as we could, do not stop to read labels, do not wonder if you should buy the fish on sale, do not pass Go, head directly to the checkout.  We made it out of the store in 45 minutes.  I did buy a few extras (like Kozy Shack pudding) that were marked down for quick sale, but otherwise I think I actually spent less than I would have had I gone alone and been able to linger a while.

Five

A few of the grocery-related blogs I've been browsing lately (and note that these are all American):

Mama Says Food Stamp Challenge -- Big, Catholic family, very low budget.  This year  she's written a real food manifesto and changed the way her family eats somewhat.  Her manifesto is a useful guide to the compromises many of us must make in order to eat real food on a real budget.

Money Saving Mom -- not just about groceries, but she posts natural and organic deals and has a helpful series about lowering your grocery budget.  She hosts a Super Savings Saturday where people can link all the gory details of their latest shopping trips.  I think it says something about me that I enjoy looking at pictures of groceries, but I'm not sure what.  I thought about taking a picture of our groceries when we came home, but everything got put away too quickly, and anyway, it wasn't that amazing.

100 Days of Real Food on a Budget -- just found this one.  She's trying to feed a family of 4 "real food" on a budget of $125 a week.  Apparently this is less than what she would get with food stamps (and interestingly enough according to the data she links to, a family of 9 would be eligible for as much as $1350 a month.  We've been trying to keep ours around $1000 a month, including paper products, diapers, etc, and while I don't think we've come in at exactly $1000 yet, we're still way below $1350!)

Grocery Cart Challenge -- when I was sitting on the couch this summer trying to get my C-section incision to heal, I spent a while reading through her archives on my iTouch.  After we moved, I tried her system of just buying what we needed every week without trying to stock up on anything, but I found that our lives are just too unpredictable and I was far more likely to go out when there was only a meager amount of "emergency food" around.   So our budgets have been a little higher from time to time as I try to build up our freezer and pantry after moving. 

Healthy Life Deals -- She posts coupon match-ups to Whole Foods.

Six

When I was in the middle of writing Quick Take #4, I received a call from a new friend of mine.  They were going to be in our area for most of the day but they had a gap of a few hours before they had to drop off a couple of their boys for Scouts.  (My Boy Scout did not need dropped off because he decided he would rather go to a Civil War re-enactment than hike in the rain.  If you knew him, you would have been able to see that coming.)  The night before my husband mentioned that they ought to hang out at our house.  Could they hang out at our house?  Of course!  The kids and I spent the morning trying to make the house presentable and baking pumpkin bread, and we spent the afternoon talking and playing with our new friends.  One of the boys, about Farmerboy's age, likes rocks.  Once they discovered that (and our rock hammers), it was a match made in heaven.

So that is why I am now finishing up Seven Quick Takes Saturday.

Seven

Because I fell into bed quite early Friday night (after all the scurrying, talking, etc.), I woke up before 6 this morning.  It's amazing what you can see in the quiet morning if you're willing to be quiet, too.  The daddy longlegs have been invading my house recently.  This morning I saw one inside a jar of tempera paint I had mixed and left on the window sill.  I mixed it from powder, and the powder had all settled on the bottom, leaving a skim of water at the top.  The daddy longlegs clung to the rim of the jar with two of its long legs and lowered itself slowly to the surface of the water where it stuck out its mandibles to drink.  Once, twice, three times it drank, and then slowly, carefully, testing every step before it took one, it backed up and out of the jar.  The whole process took longer than it took me to write it, and certainly longer than it takes to read about it.  In order to watch, I had to slow down, too.

Then I came into the computer room and sat down at the computer.  I looked up "Costco shopping trip" because my new friend and I had been talking about Costco, and since I just spent 5 years in the frozen wilds of upstate New York, far away from any Costco's, I had to restrain myself from asking her too many questions.  Then I looked up from the computer screen and saw that the whole outside was pink.  Not just "tinged a rosy pink with dawn", but actually, really pink.  I got up to take a better look.  The eastern sky was clear and the sun was up.  But from the west, a front had set up a wall of gray and white cloud.  The sun reflected pink off the clouds, caught the glow from the yellow and crimson autumn trees, and colored the whole world.

Now it is almost 7 AM and I can hear the boys talking in their room.  The clouds have come in and the world has settled down to gray sky and the sound of the bathroom door slamming.  But I'll carry the early morning slowness, the pinkness, into my day.

 

My Kitchen Window

1 tomato from the produce stand, 3 Fuyu persimmons from the neighbor's tree, Madonna and Child.

Because I wanted to remember it.

Where Do I Start? Daybook

Outside my window: Sunrise.  I'm facing west and looking at the trees in my pasture, the small sycamore in the "back yard" area, the floodlight pole.  The windows on the back of the house are of the 1980 variety of just not quite big enough.  I miss my big dining room picture window.  In fact, I miss quite a few things about my old house, but at least this house does not make me wheeze.  Being able to breathe trumps picture windows.

Weather for today:  Ridiculously warm and sunny.  Back into the upper 80's and low 90's again. Temperatures dropped down into the upper 60's this past weekend.  We saw people wearing toboggans and laughed.  The weather has been a little beautiful, though... the land is parched and so in need of rain.  Leaves and grass crunch underfoot.  It looks like they are trying to predict a "few showers" for Gareth's birthday next week, so we can hope!

In my yard: The beginnings of a potager ... some unidentified red flowers (from bulbs) that have pushed up through the soil in  Azaela Garden ... pecans and persimmons falling... a mockingbird that sits in the magnolia tree in the paddock and sings to us in the morning.

In my kitchen: Oh my, the kitchen.  Where do I start?  The kitchen has been my focus in one way or another since we've been here.  First it was just trying to set things up so we could eat decent food instead of the fast food and convenience food we'd been eating since June.  It felt good to cook fresh hulled black-eyed peas bought at a local farm stand on rice, even if most of my kids turned up their noses and only ate the bacon and rice.  It felt good to find a farmer's market and eggplant and tomatoes and make ratatouille.  It felt good to discover that Hot Chow Chow is one of the more addictive foods on the planet, and a little mournful to realize that the lady you bought it from had just sold out her stock.  Cooking, though, has also become a little bit of something else for me in the time that we've been here.  It's the one thing I can almost sometimes control.

Here is where I have to begin again, and it won't be anything about the kitchen, except that it all links up in the end.  This is where I have to write down what has been ordering our lives -- or disordering them -- for the past two months, and it's not boxes.  On the day before we arrived in town, my father-in-law had a heart attack.  He did not go to the emergency room.  He drove to meet us at our new home the next day to give us the keys.  It was 103 degrees and about as humid as a steam room.  Andy's mom said that he was having chest pain and his shoulders hurt so he would not be wandering around our new house with us but sitting somewhere in the air conditioning.  That Monday, he went to the doctor and discovered he'd had a heart attack. 

Then began a month of tests, culminating in bypass surgery, 9 days in the hospital, a few days at home, then 4 more days in the hospital, and -- thank God -- now he seems to be recovering.  Andy has spent a lot of time with his dad.  I have spent a lot of time taking care of kids late at night.  And feeding them.  And trying to feed Andy, when he's here.  And sometimes making food for my inlaws.  And talking to Andy about diet.  And reading about food.  And thinking about food.

It's situations like this that make it clear how important the cook's role is in a family.  My husband (to some extent) and kids don't choose what they eat too much.  They depend on what I cook, what I buy.  Am I feeding them the right things?  Or is what I'm cooking going to contribute to heart disease down the road, to 13 days in the hospital and many weeks of recovery at home?

All my reading has convinced me that real food, real meat, real fat is best.  I feel better when I eat it.  My husband feels better.  My kids calm down.  (Give them a slice of commercial birthday cake and watch them zoom into the upper stratosphere.) 

But it's hard to ignore all the conventional, "expert" advice about saturated fat.  Hard to believe that all the experts are wrong in their touting of a low-fat diet, high carbohydrate diet, but then again, I do a lot of head scratching when I look at the data and wonder why all the "experts" seem to be ignoring it, too.  Gosh, it feels like deciding to homeschool all over again.

It leads to a lot of frustration at the grocery store.  We're trying to make two house payments right now (and don't even get me started on the situation with the other house).  We have some padding in the form of a savings account, but we want to keep the padding, so we're trying to be very frugal.  But how frugal do you get when it comes to food?  (I've been reading all the saving-money-on-groceries blogs, which usually just make me feel inadequate in completely new ways.)  Do you buy the cheap milk that says it contains skim milk even though it's sold as "whole milk"?  That has to mean it contains powdered milk.  So -- no -- I go out of my way to find better milk. (Note I'm not talking raw milk here or even organic milk, just milk that doesn't have "skim milk" or hormones added to it and isn't ultra-pasteurized.)  Do you buy the $.49/lb chicken leg quarters in the 10 lb bag?  I tried.  I couldn't.  They looked horrible.  Maybe I'll buy the $1.78/lb chicken breasts, although I stand there at the meat cases and think about conditions on industrial farms and food-borne diseases.  When we first moved in, we bought some "all natural" hamburger -- not grass-fed, but we had to eat.  The fat that came off that meat turned into an orange sludge.  Now I am never tempted to buy cheap hamburger. I often wonder if we shouldn't just be vegetarian for a while, but then I'm nursing a 3 1/2 month old linebacker and there are times when I really crave meat.

Fortunately we have found a nearby farm that sells grass-fed beef and lamb and pastured pork by the quarter, side, and whole.  If we can make it to January, we'll have some decent meat in the freezer for less than the price per pound of Whole Foods' grass-fed hamburger (including cuts like Porterhouse steak and all sorts of roasts.)  The moral of this story is: support your local farmers!

Coaxing order from chaos: Moving on... down from the soapbox... after a bit of a down point this week as I sniffled through a cold and we had to run Gareth to urgent care and I contemplated all the business trips Andy has planned... I've concluded that the best way for me to cope with the house at this point is to close the remaining book boxes and move them back into the garage.  We had to leave our two biggest bookcases in New York because nobody could figure out how to get them out of the hallway.  (They were moved into that hallway, but neither I nor Andy could remember exactly how.)  We were already pressed for shelf space, although I donated boxes and boxes of books before we left (including a few books I now wish I'd kept!)  So now I'm being even more ruthless and donating more boxes.  Hopefully at some point we will become proud owners of some new Ikea bookcases.

Are they learning anything?: Well, gee, I hope so.  I've been a little frustrated at my inability to keep the little boys to a decent schedule, but then I remind myself that I have a 3 month old baby.  He sleeps at night pretty well and with all the other stuff that's been going on, sometimes I forget how little he is.  But even happy, peaceful, good-sleeping babies need to be held and nursed and walked and played with and enjoyed.  So at those moments when I am frustrated that I am not accomplishing enough, I stop and take a deep breath and remind myself to be patient.  We've been saying our prayers every day, and the big kids are reasonably independent with their baskets and shelves of books.  For the twins and Farmerboy, I am focusing on reading lessons out of Phonics Pathways.  If I pray with them and work on reading, I know I've done the most important things.

A picture:

We have managed to set up some rudimentary art shelves.  The kids were happy to find the watercolors.

 

 

 

 

Month in Review: August into September

What we did was mostly move 1000 miles. 

In a van that looked like this.

From this place...

To this place...

(Some of us are getting back to normal.  As you can see.)

Unpacking has taken up the bulk of the past few weeks.  But we've also been painting...

(When I say "we", I mean Andy, Katydid, Gareth, and Grandma.  My only contribution was to make friends at the Sherwin Williams store.)

Katydid also painted two small bookcases, all by herself.  One of them moved into the bay window in the dining area, otherwise known as "where we do school".  (Since we also eat there AND since it's part  of the kitchen, it really can't be called a school room.)

Here's a before picture:

(No Photoshop on this computer and the powercord to my laptop remains MIA, so I have to apologize for the lack of editing here.)

This space is considerably fuller now, but still not organized enough to merit an "after" picture.  More like a "middle" picture.  We've had to rethink our plans for several of the spaces in the house, actually.  First there was the problem of where to put everybody to sleep.  (Thought we had that one solved, but one of the kids who was upstairs has migrated downstairs again and is sleeping on a sleeping bag.)  Then we had to figure out what to do with the giant room upstairs in the finished attic.  Should we make it a school room or a play room?  Since it was off the beaten path and the twins need somewhere to run and around like lunatics roughly thirty seconds after they open their eyes in the morning, we opted for play room.  Thus, the school/dining area you see in the "before" picture.

Really, what I had wanted to do was make our front room (the room being painted yellow in the picture toward the top) into a school room.  But several people gave me odd looks when I voiced this opinion, as it is supposed to be our living room.  But then we discovered that we couldn't hook up satellite to a TV downstairs because whoever the drunk insane handy person was who designed my kitchen also put all the wires upstairs underneath the floor, so the old cable wires (of which we must 500, considering the number of cable outlets in EVERY SINGLE ROOM) could not be changed for new ones without tearing up the floor.  Therefore, the TV went upstairs in the playroom, and the front room was (or is being) turned into a "library".

This still leaves me with the problem that all the Legos are upstairs to get them away from the baby, but now so is the TV, so where do we put the Legos? 

(If you have many boys, you will recognize this as a SERIOUS problem.)

Anyway, it looks like a box factory exploded downstairs and I still haven't figured out my email address or memorized my phone number, but we have started school again after a fashion (mostly in self-defense, as the twins were driving me nutty), and I will be doing a wrap-up of our first two weeks the next time I am allowed 15 minutes on the computer.  For now I just want to post some of Katydid's bird pictures, as figuring out our bird population was a major part of our first weeks here.

We had a pair of Mississippi kites, but I think they have migrated away now.

We have had many hummingbirds migrate through, too, including one Katydid couldn't identify.  But I don't think I've downloaded that picture yet.

And we had a pair of bluebirds nesting in our mailbox.  Their three babies have fledged now.

(We couldn't get a good picture of the babies because we didn't want to scare them with the flash.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

We're Here!

There should be a lovely picture of us standing in front of our new home inserted here, but the USB cable for my camera was somehow (somehow) crushed in the van on the way down, and so I cannot yet download pictures.  But Katydid has been busy taking them,  so... soon.

We arrived not quite two weeks ago after a long, 3-day drive in a thoroughly stuffed van.   Packing up the house on the New York end did not quite go as planned, since the movers we had hired to help canceled two weeks before our move date but never called to let us know.   Andy found out the morning they were supposed to arrive when no one showed up.  This could have been a disaster, but fortunately nearly all the men from Andy's office came by that afternoon to help load furniture into our two shipping containers.   The second day of packing we were mostly on our own (with my mom and dad's help), but somehow, after an almost day-long, drenching rain, we stuffed the last "miscellaneous" items in our two vans and headed to the hotel for the night.

Happily, the Mississippi side of things has been easier.  We were afraid to expect it, but honestly?  Life in New York is difficult if people don't know you.  Within a week of our arrival, we already had met more neighbors than we ever knew in New York.  In fact, within a week, we'd already been gifted with several pounds of okra from a neighbor's garden, a gigantic box of pears from a neighbor's tree, a box of chocolate chip cookies, an invitation to a parish youth group attended by several homeschoolers, and the acquaintance of at least two Catholic homeschooling families who live within five minutes of us.  And the movers didn't cancel either.

God is good.

Now we are involved in the long process of attempting to bring order from the chaos of a house filled with boxes, getting to know our 5 acres, and figuring out which lane we need to get into if we want to go to the grocery store... or to pick up a new USB cable for the camera!