Lately I've realized that I'm generally really tired by the end of the day. Maybe it's being pregnant, maybe it's chasing an active toddler or not getting enough sleep. It is probably a combination of all of these things. However, no matter the cause, the effects are getting bothersome. I haven't had the energy for blogging and even if I did I haven't had a lot of energy for doing neat things to blog about. The biggest effect though has been on dinner. I'm sure that any of you with young kids know how hard it can be to make dinner quickly with a toddler trying to get your attention or even when said toddler is "helping". My old solution was to either do some prep while A. was napping, or more often to just wait until DH got home and whip up dinner while he played with A. Since the two of them love spending time together this worked really well for a long time. However, now by the time DH is home from work I'm tired and just want to sit down and rest for a bit so we were eating more convenience foods or opting to eat out more often. On the surface these options are okay and they certainly still get us fed. However, they aren't great for the pocket book and it gets increasingly hard to combine eating out with eating healthy. This has been really bothering me lately because I feel like in some ways I am failing my family (gotta love that mommy guilt). Thankfully, I am working on some solutions. Since I figure I'm not the only one to run into this problem when life gets crazy I thought I'd share what I'm doing right now and ask for suggestions for improvement.
The first thing I'm working on is planning ahead. When I'm tired thinking comes harder for me so I tend to put it off hoping that it will be easier later. Unfortunately, before long I find that I'm in the 6pm time crunch and still don't know what to make and have to figure something out
now because A. has to get to bed. In the past I've tried to plan a weekly meal plan, but something always comes up and throws off the schedule. I'm hoping to get to the point where I can have a weekly plan with enough
flexibility to really work, but in the meantime I am focusing on having a plan before bed the night before. This goal is smaller and thus more obtainable which means I'm not failing at it nearly as often. DH and I will take a couple of minutes after A. goes to bed each night to look at what we have in the fridge and what needs to be used. Then I come up with a meal plan for the next day based on a combination of that and what the schedule is looking like. If I'm not sure of the next day I try to come up with a back-up plan too just in case and then pull anything I'll need that is currently frozen up into the fridge to start thawing.
The second thing I'm doing is to take advantage of A's nap to get dinner started. I don't have to have everything done, but if I have dinner started or even just have prepped ingredients by 4pm the whole evening seems to go smoother. I got this idea from
this blog. It has a ton of tasty recipes that can be done in bits and pieces through out the day. Before I found it I had never thought of prepping a casserole in the morning when I had energy and sticking it in the fridge so that I could just pop it in the oven 40 minutes before dinner instead of trying to push through the end of day exhaustion.
Right now these are the two things I'm focusing on. An example of how it works would what we are doing tonight. Yesterday when I was digging through the freezer to grab out some frozen veggies to go with dinner I
accidentally ripped the plastic on some ground beef. This made the dinner decision a little easier because I knew that if I left it in the freezer it would get freezer burn so I pulled up the meat. I realized that I had been craving Swedish meatballs for a while, but hadn't made them because they require you to have thawed ground beef (mine was always frozen) and the time to mix and shape the meatballs, brown them, make gravy and then simmer them. We've been on the go a lot and when you are getting home from a
play date 30 minutes before dinner there just isn't time for that. Today we didn't have any plans, but I also finally realized I could use a small
crock pot. This meant that after lunch I put A. down for her nap and then grabbed the (now thawed) meat from the fridge. I mixed and shaped the meatballs and then browned them in a skillet. Once they were brown I put them in the crock pot and then made gravy with the pan drippings, beef broth and some
Marsala wine. I let it boil long enough to cook off the alcohol and then poured it over the meatballs in the
crock pot. I set the already hot meatball mixture to low and it is now simmering away making the house smell nice. At that point I realized I really needed to sit down because my stupid ankles were starting to swell (this happened when I was pregnant with A. too, no amount of water, rest, salt, etc. ever helped much, but my blood pressure was always really low so no worries). While A. is playing this afternoon I'll wash and chop up some broccoli and throw it in the top of the steamer and put the whole thing in the fridge. That way, when DH is home we can hang out as a family for a little bit and then I can slip away to the kitchen to start some rice and boil water to steam the broccoli while he plays with A. If I'm really on top if it I'll have the water and rice measured and the pots on the stove so I just have to turn on burners, but we'll see. Worst case, if I do nothing else today, I can start some rice and put the last of the giant bin of salad on the table and call it good. We'll have a balanced, tasty meal and I don't have to feel bad for collapsing on the couch as soon as DH walks in the door because dinner will be busy making itself.
These are helping most days, but I'm still not getting a "good" dinner on the table every single night. I'd love to hear suggestions on how to improve this plan or any other tips for getting a healthy, tasty dinner on the table when you are exhausted at the end of the day. Please share.
Now, you are probably thinking "that's great to know, but why would you volunteer for something like that when you have a perfectly good washing machine in your home?" I have two reasons, the first is that I got sick of people telling me that they couldn't afford the "luxury" of cloth diapers so they would be "forced" to use disposables. I wanted to prove to myself that it was possible to do this affordably in spite of excuses. My second reason is basic preparedness. While if something were to happen such that we couldn't use our washing machine for cloth diapers (either it broke or we were traveling/camping) we could always just buy disposables, I have yet to find any brand that doesn't give A. a nasty rash after a few days. I wanted to see if it would be doable to still use cloth diapers to spare her the rash if we didn't have access to our washing machine. With this in mind I talked to DH to see if he would be on board or if this challenge would mean I had to change every diaper for a week. He agreed to humor me and I did my best to make it easy on him by prefolding the diapers to make the diaper changes easier...
So how'd it go? Honestly, it wasn't what either of us expected. A. decided to start the challenge out with a bang and I got a "dirty" (as opposed to just wet) diaper for my very first one. I rolled my eyes and dumped the solids and continued to have an easy day. That night I washed the diapers and was shocked at how fast I was done (it took maybe 20ish minutes to wash everything). I hung the clean diapers up in the bathroom and went to bed feeling like I was on a roll. What I hadn't counted on was the lack of air circulation in the bathroom, half the diapers were still damp in the morning. I moved the drying rack into my sewing room and packed up the diapers that were dry for a daytrip of shopping, visiting family/friends and fruit picking a couple of hours away. The trip went well and we had a great time, the flats really aren't much harder than prefolds when you are on the go and that's something we've done for a while. That night I washed the diapers while DH was putting A. to bed and then moved the drying rack from the bathtub to my sewing room right before I went to bed which meant that they were pretty much dry by morning. Wednesday was a great day until my wrist started hurting so after a quick count of what was clean I decided to wait until morning and bite just bite the bullet and wash while A. was awake. Turns out that she was more than happy to play or watch while I was washing the diapers and since it was daylight I was able to hang the diapers up outside. Outside the diapers dried in less than two hours and the breeze helped make them softer, I was an immediate convert to washing during the day and the challenge seemed easy from there until Friday night when DH came home with the stomach flu...By Saturday we were all sick and Sunday morning was spent washing diapers while feeling really crummy. I have to admit it was really tempting to just throw everything in the washing machine when I went into the laundry room to get the detergent, but my stubbornness wouldn't let me. Instead I sucked it up and washed everything with the hottest water I could and some oxiclean just in case and then hung it on the line in the sun to help kill any germs that might have survived. It was a lovely, sunny, windy day and after a few hours the diapers were clean, soft, dry and all together lovely and we only had to make it through until morning to be able to say we'd done it. Comparatively the remainder was a breeze and DH actually kept using the flats after the challenge was over, though he threw them in the pail to be washed in the machine. He summed both our thoughts up pretty well when on Sunday night he said the challenge "really isn't that bad". Would we do it everyday? Probably not, unless there was a real reason not to use the washer. However, the flat diapers we were using are super cute and work really well. Handwashing, while not something I would choose, is doable in a pinch and we will definitely be keeping this in mind next time we want to go camping or travel somewhere that a washing machine isn't available. It's also nice to know that if the washing machine breaks I don't have to worry about A. getting a nasty rash in disposable diapers if it takes a week and a half for the parts to come in...I just have to budget a little extra time for washing stuff by hand.
How about you, do you think this is totally crazy or worth trying? If you have a baby (or are expecting one) would you consider flats if money was really tight? Would you consider cloth in general for that matter if you had easy access to a washing machine, but money was tight? Would the cuteness win you over even if money wasn't tight? (Just idle curiosity on that last one :)
