Clothing the Boys

I just made a discovery that changed my life for the better.

If you've read my blog before, you know that I have active young boys who love to play outside and who are very hard on my quilts. I'm sure you can imagine what they do to their clothes.

For years, I've been hearing stories of these moms who buy quality clothes on ebay or at the consignment shops and then resell them for the same amount once they're outgrown. I can't keep my own clothes that nice for six months or a year, let alone my children's clothes! (I'm also absolutely terrible at packing away outgrown clothes and then pulling back out at the right time.)  Clothes are the last thing I want to lose sleep over and pretty close to the last thing my sons care about.

We pick up stuff at the thrift shops when we can, but there isn't a lot out there in their age range. My theory is that I'm not the only one whose boys destroy their clothes before outgrowing them. My daughter, on the other hand, found all of the cute clothes all the time, for dirt cheap. She still does.

The other problem is that, new or used,  everything has a character on it. Thank God for Minecraft and Five Nights at Freddy's and zombies because my boys who don't care about clothes do have very strong opinions about Batman or Minions or whatever else is exciting everyone but them right now.

Now on to my fabulous discovery...

Did you know that the Dollar Tree sells t-shirts? 

They sell t-shirts that will fit my younger sons. For a dollar. Last month I went through and picked up half a dozen...and then tucked them away for those days when we're going out and need something that isn't ripped or stained or stretched out of shape. I'm using the Dollar Tree shirts as their "good" shirts. This means they can wear the shirts they like every day and when we go out to an event we don't have to worry about offending someone with zombie or video game themed shirts. Or getting a favorite shirt stolen from the locker room at Swim N Gym, which happened a couple of months ago. Shoes and pants and underwear and glasses are easier (even if they're more expensive) to replace than that favorite shirt from our last vacation.

As long as the shirts fit and are a decent color, the boys are happy. I've got the idea that we could try freezer or bleach stenciling on them, but that hasn't happened yet. And they might as well wear them until I get around to it.

Make Do and Mend

Fifty years ago, I'm sure this was a perfectly wonderful door. When we bought out place eight years ago, it was a decent door, just sturdy enough to keep an outbuilding securely locked up. Last summer, I started to warn the kids to be gentle with it. It was becoming more of a suggestion than an actual door.

Earlier this month it stopped being a door at all. I wasn't out there to see the fatal slam. The story is that the kid in question turned the knob to open it and it  just fell apart. There was no fixing it. It served its purpose for many, many years and now it's done.

And I was a little sick to my stomach, first at the thought of telling Hubby that we needed a new door when he's already got enough to deal with and also about what it would cost to replace it, especially when he couldn't do the job himself. There are some loose doors in the barn and back of the chicken coop, so the kids and I started measuring them. None came anywhere near the size we needed.

Wanna know what my replacement door cost? (For comparison, the last time we needed a door replaced and had to pay to have it done, it was something like $600. Which explains why I was so queasy at the thought of replacing this one!)

The new-to-us door from Habitat For Humanity Restore was four dollars. Hubby took the measurements, because I measure quilts not house parts. Teenage Daughter wrestled the remains of the old door off the hinges and got the new one up.  Teenage Son switched the doorknob from one to the other.

It's not the greatest door in the world, but it will do the job. I'm just happy that it's nondescript and not a strange color.  And that the hinges and knob went into place without any adjustments. That was dumb luck.

Have you been to your local Restore? They're a great resource for temporary fixes like this one. It's where we bought the door and windows for our enclosed porch, which are actually nice and not just a $4 fix.

I'm linking up to WFMW at We Are THAT Family.

Keeping Library Fines Under Control

Over the years, I've met several mothers who refused to take their children to the library because they had problems with the fines. These same moms were trying -- and failing -- to get their kids excited about books.

I don't get it. Maybe because I met my husband in a used bookstore and was tromping around the library's annual book sale when I was in labor with my second.

My four children all love books. I love books. Between the five of us, we've usually got more than a hundred books checked out at any one time. (I'd love to know how many books we borrow over the course of a year. It's definitely more than a  thousand.) And we manage to keep our fines and lost book fees down to almost nothing.

When I only had two kids, I would go through the entire house and search every drawer and closet and shelf to find every last book before it was due. I was terrified of library fines. These days, I have more kids and less energy and I just do my best. We lose a book or two a year and occasionally something is overdue. But my kids have all the reading material they could possibly want and I think that's a fair trade.

Here are my tips for keeping our library fines under control --

Know your library's policies on overdue fines and lost books. 

Our library is fairly easy to work with. As long as you pay overdue fines and the fees for lost books, they're happy. But cards are frozen if the rack up more than five dollars in fines (which can keep you from renewing other books, which leads to more fines) and accounts are automatically turned over to collections if there is more than forty dollars due. That could be one or two lost books, so I keep a close eye on our card balances and pay any fines immediately.

Keep track of what you have checked out and when it's due.  

The library gives us  printed receipts each time we check out books. Five people, five receipts. Sometimes a book that was reserved from a different library has an unexpected due date. Some books get renewed and others get returned before they're due. I don't even try to keep track of those little paper receipts.  Once a week, the day before our regularly scheduled library run, I log onto the library's website and pull up a list of every book we have checked out and sort by due date. Anything coming due before the next week gets returned or renewed. I try to return most books a week before the due date to give us a buffer in case we miss a week because someone is sick or the weather is bad.

Know how many times you can renew each item, and for how long.

Our library allows for three renewals, but my younger kids don't know that. I allow them to renew books twice. That third time is a safety cushion for me if a book goes missing.

Keep an eye on which books you return.

A handful of times a year, the library fails to check in one of our books properly.  Once, a book that I'd been searching for for months completely vanished from our library records, along with the associated fines, the day I went in to pay for it. I never did get an explanation for that one. It's easier to deal with when I've been watching titles as I slip them into the book drop and I know for a fact that a book was returned. (My kids realize by now that the library isn't perfect, and they've been known to blame the library for books they can't find at home.) If you're sure  you've returned a book, ask for a shelf check -- or check the shelf yourself. If you're not sure, check under your couch and the seats of your car. It's embarrassing to return a book after you've already insisted that you don't have it.

Try to prevent fines before they happen. 

With our library system, once a fine shows up in the computer system, there's no changing it. A friend who uses a different library has been able to work off fines by volunteering, but ours are set in stone.  When a book (or bag of books) has been temporarily lost and I've explained the situation, the librarian has been willing to override the system and give us an extra renewal. They can't do it for new books with holds on them, but in that kind of situation I'm happy for any break I can get. They've also been willing to extend renewals when an emergency kept us from getting to the library. As long as I ask before the books are overdue, I can usually get help, but I only ask for that help as a last resort.

Quick and Easy (and temporary!) Light Box Substitute

I don't do enough tracing to justify purchasing a light box, not when I've got perfectly good windows and a perfectly good table with a glass top. And now I've got this --

The table I usually use has a shallow drawer, so I turn my Kindle fire to the highest brightness setting and set the browser to a site with a white background and little text, put it in the drawer, and lay  what I'm tracing onto the glass.  If I'm tracing something detailed, I also set the screen timeout to longer than a couple of minutes. (At least I should. Usually I forget and wind up tapping the screen every time it dims.)

When it was time to chart the letter for Teenage Daughter's sweater, I wondered if the same trick would work with one of my clear storage boxes. It does -- with the added bonus that I don't have to keep the kids away  from the table until I'm done tracing, or sit on the floor next to the table!

This post is linked to Craft-O-Maniac, WFMW, Sumo's Sweet Stuff, Think Tank Thursday.

What's in your first aid kit?

I was absolutely tickled when I found this for $3.75 at the thrift shop a couple of weeks back: 

It's metal and extremely sturdy. There's a fold up piece at the top so I can hang it on a wall. And, except for some dust along the top, it was surprisingly clean. I scrubbed it myself anyway, but if it had been filthy I probably wouldn't have been so excited to bring it home to store our Band Aids in.

Now, I'm on a quest to put together the perfect first aid kit for our family. We've got a real one out in the van, and a less fancy version someplace in the bathroom cabinet, but neither ever has the things I actually need in them. Those five adhesive bandages and two alcohol wipes just aren't going to do much for a family of six. 

I've got a brand new tube of antibiotic ointment, tweezers, regular bandages, bigger bandages, gauze and tape (not that I've ever used those, but they seem like something I should have on hand in case of I-don't-know-what) and a brand new thermometer. For seven years, the most accurate on I've had in the house was the one they sent home with us from the NICU, which only gives the temperature in Celsius. For a while, I had "normal" memorized, but it was time to get a new one that would eliminate the late night math quizzes.

Now I'm wondering what I've missed, besides the extra bottle of Benadryl for bee strings. Honestly, when something big and bloody does happen at our house (like dropping the chef's knife onto my foot just about the time my blood thinners should have been really working), I dive for a clean dish towel and never even think about the first aid kit.

If I'm prepared and know exactly where everything is, maybe we'll have less opportunity to use it.

I'm linking up to WFMW over at We are THAT Family.

It's warm enough!

Yesterday was our first chance of the year to make it down to our favorite spot by the river.  Last year, between the new roof and whatever else was going on,  I think we only made it two or three times. 

The weather forecast and the thermometer in the van both said that it was too cold to play in the water, but you couldn't have convinced my kiddos that it wasn't warm enough to swim. (Of course I think the boys would try to swim in January, given the chance, but it really was a gorgeous day!)


Besides the obvious sunscreen and snacks and drinks, here are my favorite tips for a day at the river, with links to some previous posts --

I bring a fluffy utility quilt with thick polyester batting to spread over the rocks for a more comfortable place it sit. We bought this one at a yard sale for a buck.

I bring pool noodles and toys with our names on them, because sometimes things drift downstream a bit and need to be identified.

And I bring my  floppy hat so I can keep from burning my ears and nose.

What are your tips for a great day at the park with the kids?

This post is linked to WFMW at We Are THAT Family.

Do you make your own?

Some days I start to wonder if I'm the only stay at home mom who isn't making her own laundry detergent.  When I first read about the idea, it triggered the "you can do that?!" portion of my brain just long enough for me to track down and read the instructions, then I gave up on the idea. Even with as much laundry as I do, buying a big jug of detergent at Costco every few weeks isn't a big deal.

So when I saw that you could make your own foaming dish soap refills, I didn't pay much attention to the idea. I do a ton of dishes (think three meals a day for six people and no dishwasher) and I'm picky about my dish soap.  The foaming stuff lets me wash more dishes with less soap, and it rinses better so I'm using less water.

But I go through it fast. Everyone in the house uses it for washing hands, even when there's actual hand soap in a pump right beside it.  The grocery store doesn't always have it in stock. (They run out of the strangest stuff -- some days I think they're deliberately messing with me!) and some days I'm desperate and wind up settling for a bottle of the cheap stuff just so I can do the dishes until my next trip to the store.

That's how I wound up trying the DIY approach. I had an empty pump and was down to almost the last of the good stuff ,so I figured I had nothing to lose.  I poured about an inch of cheap dollar store dish soap into the empty pump, then gently filled it the rest of the way to the line with water. I swished it a bit to mix, then pumped.

It works! It's not as good as the brand name stuff (maybe I'd get better results if I wasn't using bargain detergent to make it with), but it's still nicer to use than the plain dish soap. And I've got a secret plan -- the good stuff goes under the sink for actual dish-doing, and the fake foaming soap goes on the counter for everything and everyone else.

Do you make your own laundry detergent or foaming dish soap? Bake from scratch? What's just too crazy for you to try making yourself?

I'm linking up to WFMW at We are THAT Family, Mop it Up Monday at I Should be Mopping the Floor. I Gotta Try That, Give Me the Goods, How To Tuesday,

the button with the little red dot

I've been driving our minivan for six  or seven years now. Hubby could tell you exactly what month we bought it in, but I'm just guessing based on the model year. Whatever the dates are, I spend an insane amount of time in the thing.

 

So why didn't I  ever notice this button with the little red dot?

 

I stopped by my grandparents' last week to pick up a book. The plan was for me to jump out and grab it and we'd be on our way....like my boys were actually going to stay in their seats when all four grandparents were in sight...

I should know better. Just like I should know that if there are that many witnesses something is going to happen. Like both automatic doors on the van refusing to work after I finally got my youngest two to stop hanging off of the handles.

The van was unlocked. We tried the inside handles, the outside handles, the buttons on the remote, and the buttons next to the steering wheel. The only thing that did work was to physically wrestle the doors open and closed -- and even then, they'd open just far enough to let a small child slip through. I was just figuring out how to even try to explain this one to their father when Teenage Son came to the rescue.

That button with the red dot? If you switch it to the "off" position, it kills the power to the sliding doors.  I sure wish I'd known that the day I took the kids to the coast by myself and spent half an hour in the parking lot of the aquarium trying to get one of those stupid doors to stop hanging up on an invisible piece of dust that was tripping the safety sensors!

Do you know what all of the buttons in your car do?

I'm linking up to WFMW at We are THAT Family and How to Tuesday.

wfmw -- is this cheating?

I've written before about whether not using spice packets counts as cooking from scratch, and whether or not it even matters if I'm cooking from scratch or not.

For a while, Safeway had breaded chicken fried steak at their meat counter. The kids and hubby and I love chicken fried steak, and sometimes it would be on just enough of a sale that I could justify it. I don't make chicken fried steak from scratch and hubby, who makes the best chicken fried steak ever, only does stuff like that on his day off.

They haven't had it at all for months. I've been making special trips to check.

What they did have on sale was cube steak. I can handle an egg wash and seasoned bread crumbs from a canister... now the teenager claims I'm cheating for using cube steak instead of pounding the heck out of it myself with the meat tenderizer and loosening the top of our dining room table. (Now that I think about that, maybe I should be pounding meat and kneading bread and dreaming up some other table weakening recipes...



I do need to find out how to make gravy from scratch instead of relying on hubby to do it for me. That would be worth the learning curve... anyone know a good tutorial?

they look like quilt blocks, don't they?

That design the middle is Broken Dishes...and I'm sure if I went through the rest of the game cards I'd find more patterns we could name. But these aren't quilt patterns. They're the cards for Q-bitz, a game I ordered for the family after Quinn played it with his speech therapist one day.

We've simplified the rules for the younger kids, and I just realized when I was looking at the company's website to get the details for this post that we've never played it quite as it was intended. In the third round, you look at the card for ten seconds and then re-create it from memory. That might strain my brain just a bit too much!

My two littlest ones have decided that it works best to lay the blocks directly onto the cards with difficult patterns. Either that, or they just ignore the cards and play with the blocks. It keeps them busy, and I can almost see the little brains working.

I do think quilters might have an unfair advantage at this game -- we're used to combining squares and triangles to get the shapes we need!



This post is linked to Works for me Wednesday at We are THAT Family.

more and more mysteries

I unearthed the bookmark while sorting through cross stitching supplies in the sewing room. I'd completely forgotten this one -- although now that I've got it back in my hand, I can remember buying the pattern and stitching it. I still can't decide whether the woman in the upstairs window is stealing a necklace or preparing to strangle an unsuspecting victim -- what do you think?

Now that I've found it again, I've started actually using it when I'm reading a book with actual pages.

I've already gushed about how much I loved Cut, Crop & Die. That book started me on a mystery reading binge. The Kindle version is still available for free. (If you don't have a Kindle, Amazon offers several free options for reading Kindle titles on your other devices.)

More free mysteries for your Kindle --


Design on a Crime (Deadly Décor Mysteries, Book 1)
Spying in High Heels (High Heels Mysteries)
Trouble in Mudbug (Ghost-in-Law Mystery/Romance Series)
Ms America and the Offing on Oahu (Beauty Queen Mysteries No. 1)
Killer Twist (A Ghostwriter Mystery)
Never Buried (Leigh Koslow Mystery Series)

Note -- All of these titles were listed as free when I wrote this post. The prices on Amazon change quickly, so please double-check the prices before you order them. You can find Amazon's currrent top 100 free mysteries here.

This post is linked to Works for Me Wednesday over at We are THAT Family.

Open the Windows

When I was growing up, the windows were never open. We had air-conditioning, and a programmable thermostat, and we didn't need to open them.

In my house as an adult, we've got the old fashioned kind of thermostat that doesn't make decisions for you. If we're going out for the day, we turn the heat down until we get back home. If it's warm enough, we turn the furnace off completely and open some windows.

I love having the windows open. I can hear the birds, sometimes a frog or two, and the kids playing. If I'm in the sewing room with the window open, I can hear every last "I'm gonna tell Mom if you don't...." drifting up from the yard.

One of these years, we'll have to replace our furnace and we might get a heat pump then, but we'll use it only when it's too hot to move around in the day or sleep at night. Which isn't more than a few weeks a year.



Open windows are a little more work. They mean checking that things are closed and locked up before leaving the house or going to bed for the night. I don't leave windows open when we're sleeping, no matter how hot it's been. Our new house is much safer than our last one (where someone stole the air conditioner out of our bedroom window while I was sleeping in with the babies after hubby had left for work one morning) but that's not something I'm willing to take chances with.

And I don't open upstairs windows if there are children around. Pretty easy around here, since the only upstairs windows are in my sewing room and the attic, where my youngest children don't go.

Opening our windows works for me. To see what works for other bloggers, head over to We are THAT Family.

just like in the books

My childhood was full of books, and the books I read when I was little were full of children who found cocoons and waited for the butterflies to emerge...or chased fireflies...or kept tadpoles in a jar to watch them turn into frogs.

I didn't get to do those things as a child.

There aren't any fireflies in Oregon. I did find a monarch caterpillar once as a kid, on the weeds between our house and the neighbor's, but I don't think I've seen one since. I never got to keep tadpoles in a jar.

Which is probably why I'm a little giddy about this --



See that clear bulgy thing in the middle? Hubby, who knows these things, tells me it's a frog mass. And it's in my very own yard!

The pond is full of frogs, which we hear but rarely see. (The only thing I liked about the old washing machine was that when it beeped that the load was done, a frog would sometimes answer it.)

I'm trying to decide whether to leave the frog mass where it is, or see if Alex wants to clean out her old aquarium and bring them inside. I'd like to let them be, but they're in a part of the yard that isn't supposed to have water, so if things start to dry out too much we'll probably move them or bring them in.

I love living in the country.

This post is linked to Works for me Wednesday at We are THAT family.

wfmw - too much hassle?

For Christmas 2010, we bought an amaryllis centerpiece at Costco -- three bulbs planted in a black ceramic rectangle. One of the selling points was supposed to be that the bulbs would bloom year after year. The box promised "after care" instructions.

The flowers bloomed, they died, and I went online to figure out what to do with them so they'd bloom again next year. There were no instructions.

I asked at the nursery where we buy our garden stuff. They have flyers for everything, so I figured they'd know. I did get a flyer, along with advice that it would be a lot easier to just buy new bulbs every year.

I didn't want to buy new bulbs. I didn't even really want the flowers. What I wanted was to see if I could get the ones I already had to flower again.

Christmas 2011 came and went and my bulbs just sat there in their planter. I started to think about getting rid of it and finding something new for the window sill. Then, a couple of weeks ago, little green shoots started peeking up from the tops of the bulbs.

Before too long, we had a jungle of leaves in the kitchen window.



And now we've got a flower.



I'm glad I didn't buy new bulbs and that I gave it a shot.

This post is linked to Works for me Wednesday at We are THAT family and Waste not Wednesday at Jo's Country Junction.

hoarding cheap pens

I used to buy expensive (meaning about a buck a piece) pens. I'd buy one pen and use it until the ink was gone and my big goal was to someday splurge on a box of a dozen of them, but somehow I never got around to it.

Now that I could buy a box of expensive pens if I wanted to, I've got kids. Every pen I own has been taken apart or hidden in the couch cushions and many days I'm lucky if I can find a broken yellow crayon to jot something down with.

I started buying pens by the dozen years ago, but they're the cheapest ones I can find. Those cheap pens leak. Sometimes they don't work at all. If they do work, they get taken apart.

About a month ago, I found the perfect pens. They're not the cheapest ones out there, but at $1.99 for a pack of ten, they're close. They come in a pack of ten different colors, so they're good for little boys who want to draw pictures. They don't require sharpening like colored pencils and they don't snap like crayons. They write without glopping and no one has figured out how to take them apart yet.

And they're good for sketching out pictures of quilt blocks with! This post is linked to Works for me Wednesday at We are THAT family and Waste not Wednesday at Jo's Country Junction.

wfmw -- finding free children's ebooks for the Kindle

Now that the kids have Kindles, the kids want lots and lots of books on their kindles. And they're not completely satisfied with the old classics. They want new stuff too. I don't want to spend seven or eight bucks on an ebook that the kid I buy it for is going to fly through in an hour or two. I'm mean that way.

Jo told me about this page, which lists the top 100 free ebooks for Kindle. I check it regularly to find books to add to my own reader. Now and then, there's a children's book or two listed, or a book that looks like it might be for children.

After digging around, I found another page, one that shows just the top 100 free children's ebooks for Kindle The books in the right hand column are free (but check before you click, because things change quickly). Use the categories in the left hand column to refine your search. Some categories may have only a couple of free books and some might not have any. These lists are constantly changing, and sometimes publishers will offer a book as free for only a day or two.

Please look over the titles yourself and make sure that they are actually children's books. Amazon's lists aren't perfect. Have a New Husband by Friday, which is #1 on the list as I type this, definitely doesn't sound like a children's book to me!

Some "books" are just previews of the first few chapters -- great if you want to let your kiddo try it out before spending money, but no fun at all if you aren't going to buy the rest of the book. Some books are self-published and just not that great.

Read the reviews. Skim the books yourself if you've got any doubts. I'm more cautious choosing books for my eleven-year-old than I am picking out titles that might interest my older teen.

There are some great free books for your kids out there -- it just takes a little searching to find them!

This post is linked to Works for me Wednesday at We are THAT family and Waste not Wednesday at Jo's Country Junction.

wfmw - It has a wrecking ball!

Last Christmas (not the one a month ago -- the one before that), my youngest son got a Disney Handy Manny Manny's Workshop and Construction Playset. I took one look at the box -- Over 70 Pieces! -- and decided to tuck it away for a while so those 70 pieces didn't get mixed in with the pieces of every other Christmas present the boys had received. And I might have sort of accidentally-on-purpose forgotten about it for the next twelve months.

Did I mention that it has over 70 pieces? And that my boys have lost just about all of the pieces of everything they have ever owned -- usually within the first hour of owning it? Unless it's a coconut.

I might have been wrong with this one. Or maybe they needed a year to grow into it. I think that's the story I'll stick to. But for the past couple of weeks, they have been putting most of those pieces carefully back into the box they came in. They've been working together, using the pictures on the front of the box as a guide for assembling a clock tower with cinder blocks and a garbage chute. And using the wrecking ball to knock it down so they could build it again.



As far as I know, they haven't even watched Handy Manny once. It's definitely not the television show that's the appeal here. And it's not the first building toy they've had. I think that smiling wrecking ball might be the secret to the success of this toy.

This post is linked to Works for me Wednesday at We are THAT family.

wfmw - What counts as cooking?

While I was making dinner a couple of weeks ago, my teenage daughter wandered through the kitchen and asked if whatever I was doing counted as cooking from scratch. I can't remember exactly what I was making -- I think it might've been beef stew or something like that. I'd opened a few cans of vegetables, but I wasn't using any packets or mixes.

Is that cooking from scratch? Or is it cheating? What if I was using frozen veggies instead of canned? I've got a good friend who butchered her own cow a while back and wants to render her own lard someday. She definitely cooks from scratch!

When I was growing up, we ate dinner at home most night, but dinner usually involved a box or seasoning packet. (Sorry, Mom, if my memory is distorting things.)

When I got married, if I cooked if was from boxes and seasoning packets. And whatever category frozen fish sticks and french fries fall into. No matter how hard I try, I am not good at cooking. I can bake and usually have predictablly decent results, but dinner? That's a nightly gamble.

Two or three years ago, my husband said he'd be happy if we never had Hamburger Helper again. I never actually asked him if that meant the particilar variety we were having that night, or if it means all of the "dinner that starts with a box" options. I didn't want to know the answer.

What counts as "cooking dinner?" I've been trying to figure that out for a long time now. Buying a pizza from the take and bake place doesn't count....but a frozen lasagna from Safeway somehow sort of does. I can buy two rotisserie chickens from Costco for less than the sale price I saw for whole chickens at the grocery store yesterday. But then I'd lose points in my own head for not cooking.

And what about those seasoning packets?



This Swedish Meatball mix from McCormick is my new favorite dinner. They taste way better than the frozen meatballs we used to get now and then. And I get to at least pretend I'm cooking.

Tuesday afternoon, we stopped at Safeway to get celery and pie crust for the dinner I had planned. Because I can't make my own pie crust and my daughter, who can make good pie crust, isn't here tonight. When I'm there, I always check their meat sales and if there are good deals I'll plan the week's dinners around them.

This time they had chicken fried steak (with a sell-by date of today) on clearance for half off the sale price, making it something like two dollars a pound. We love chicken fried steak and fight over the left overs. So that'll be what we're having for dinner. The rustic pot pies can wait for later this week.

Is that cooking dinner? Or cheating?

And while we're talking about food, I wanted to share a free book I found while browsing Amazon for stuff to download to our Kindles. The free titles sometimes don't stay free, so please make sure you check the price before you order. I know, it's the August issue and this is February, but it'll help us plan ahead. There's an article about drying food in your car and another on clothes lines. I really want a clothes line next summer.



You might also be interested in checking out Craft Business Heroes - 30 Creative Entrepreneurs Share The Secrets Of Their Success.

This post is linked to Works for me Wednesday at We are THAT Family and Waste Not Wednesdays at Jo's Country Junction.

you ARE going to do that!

One of the 87 million things on Pinterest my teenage daughter has called me over to look at was a supposed-to-be-cute quote about how it's a wonderful place to plan things you're never going to actually do. I've seen the same thing said about Ravelry queues.

It bugs me.

It bugs me the same way that it bugged me when someone at my baby shower was carefully folding wrapping paper so I could use it to line the baby's dresser drawers and someone else piped up with "Not that she'll ever get around to doing it."

It was a mean thing to say. I never claimed that I wanted to line my dresser drawers with wrapping paper. The woman who said it did not know me well at all and had no clue what I might or might not ever get around to doing.

As far as I'm concerned, we get to carry as many plans and crafty dreams as we want inside our heads. Until we go out and spend money on patterns and supplies, we're not the slightest bit committed. If those supplies can be used for other projects, we're still not committed. And if now and then our plans change and a kit or pattern doesn't get used -- so what? We could've wasted that same money on a dress we never wore.

This week, I actually followed through on some of my plans. We made erupting soap. It's an actual science project because the moisture and air in the soap expand like the moisture in popcorn. But in addition to that, its really fun and, whether you have little kids or not, I think you should get a bar of Ivory soap and try it out yourself.

I also ran my nasty shower curtain through the washing machine with a cup of baking soda. It's white again. I can't tell you how shocked I am that it's white again.

This morning, I tried Jo's Easiest Egg Bake. It's been on my mental list of things I want to do for months. It really is the easiest egg recipie ever. I popped it into the oven before my shower and it was ready to be eaten when the kids were ready for breakfast. And, unlike the baked oatmeal we loved so much, there's no actual recipie to remember.



How about you? What have you been meaning to do? Are there a couple of quick things on your list that you could just do this week?

how many eggs to mix up for the french toast

The kiddos really like french toast and pancakes. Or it might just be that they like anything they can eat with syrup.

I'd rather make french toast than pancakes because it seems like I have more luck with it. It's easier to make extra when suddenly a kid who usually eats two pieces is hungry enough for six. Instead of getting the box of pancake mix back out and starting over from scratch, I just crack a few more eggs into the bowl and add a splash more milk.

One thing I've started to do is to leave the cinnamon and nutmeg out of the egg mixture and sprinkle them onto the individual pieces while they're cooking. That way they all get some of the yummy spices and when the kids are stuffed, I can make myself a couple of pieces and scramble whatever eggs are left in the bowl. It might not be a full serving, but it's better than tossing the extra.

For more tips, check out Works for me Wednesday at We are THAT Family and Waste Not Wednesdays at Jo's Country Junction.