Author: Wendy

Simplicity: Potty Training with a (Truly) Minimalist Wardrobe

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potty training

It’s no secret that our family has fewer clothes than an average family. Much fewer. It’s not because we can’t afford more; we just choose not to have as many. This has its benefits and drawbacks. A benefit is that we have fewer clothes to wash, and therefore less laundry to do. A drawback is that we have to wash our clothes more often, so there’s more laundry. I know, I know, completely contradictory. We have more loads of laundry to do, but each one is smaller. It’s a trade off. Since putting the laundry away is the part of the chore that I hate the most, I’ll take more loads with fewer items in them.

But that’s not the point of today’s post. Today I want to address something that was asked of me during my last wardrobe post: How do you potty train a toddler if you don’t have a lot of clothes to change him into? The answer is very simple. During toilet training sessions, I don’t put any clothes on him at all. This doesn’t work when you go out, obviously, but at home, it works swimmingly. And honestly, I’ve found that it’s too stressful for the child to go more than a few hours at a time when they’re learning anyway. [Read more…]

Weekly Menu: February 15

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Weekly Meal Plan with recipe links | Ladybug Daydreams

As a way to help keep me on track with my weekly shopping instead of daily shopping, I’m going to post our weekly menus for a while. Maybe it’ll give you some new recipes to try; I would love if these posts helped you guys out in some way instead of working solely as something selfish for me. If one of the recipes doesn’t have a link to a recipe and you’re interested in how to make it, let me know in the comments, and I’ll post a recipe later in the week. The other reason I’m posting this is because last week, I made a menu plan and corresponding grocery list, bought all the groceries for those meals, and then misplaced the list. So I ended up having to try to remember what I’d planned or, more often, just reverting to my old habit (from when we shopped daily) of cooking whatever sounded good that day. By posting our meal plan here on the blog, I’m not going to have to do that again.

As a rule, we just eat cereal for breakfast, so I don’t plan those outside of making sure we have cereal in the house. We have fruit (usually apples, bananas, or oranges) for snacks, so I don’t plan those, either. I do plan lunches, though, whereas a lot of these kinds of posts (that I read) on other blogs only cover weeknight dinners. A fair number of the days, Will is here with us and he doesn’t like a regular cold sandwich, so I have to have something “more” planned for lunch. If I know in advance that it’ll just be the kids and me, we’ll usually just have grilled cheese sandwiches. [Read more…]

Picture of the Week: The Audubon Society

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audubon trip collage

These pictures, in case you can’t tell by looking at my children in them, are quite old. Way back before Small Fry was born, we took the boys to the Audubon Society in Portland and enjoyed a couple of hours of walking the trails and viewing some of the natural wildlife. It was really neat, and the kids loved it. I think they’d actually forgotten about it (even though they loved it at the time), but when I was pulling photos off of the camera this week, I found these. They’d somehow ended up on the actual camera rather than on the memory card, so they didn’t get moved during the multiple times I’ve moved pictures in the intervening years. It’s always fun to see what they looked like so long ago :).

Have a great weekend!

Blessings,

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Book Review: Supermarket Healthy by Melissa d’Arabian

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supermarket healthy collage

Last year, I wrote about how I was going to try to plan a weekly menu instead of shopping daily. Back then, the plan lasted all of one week. That’s right: we couldn’t even make it work once. So I just kind of accepted it, and we went back to daily shopping. Fast forward to two weeks ago, and I decided it was time to try weekly planning and shopping again. This corresponded perfectly with the arrival of a book for review I requested from Blogging for Books: Supermarket Healthy by Melissa D’Arabian. The premise: It really is possible to make wholesome, healthy meals using whole-food ingredients found in a regular grocery store.

The book, like any standard cookbook, is divided into types of meals: snacks, breakfast, pasta, sandwiches, poultry, beef, soups, etc. We haven’t tried recipes from every category, but we have from several of them. Some of the ingredients aren’t as readily available as I hoped, at least in my area, so I’ve had to make a few substitutions (kale instead of Swiss chard in a soup, for example). But despite that, I have definitely found that the recipes in this book are absolutely amazing. And doable with “normal” ingredients. Out of the 15 or 20 that we’ve tried so far, all but two have gone onto a list for regular rotation. To have found at least a dozen new recipes that we all love is a wonderful thing.

My main complaint of this book is that it’s a trade paperback. I think cookbooks should always be printed with spiral binding so that it will stay open to make following the recipes easier. Additionally, I would like to see a photo of every recipe. I know this isn’t always feasible, but it’s very helpful in making sure you’re building everything correctly. These criticisms are minor in the long run, though. The book is so full of amazing recipes that I’m happy to overlook the problems.

So, what have our favorites been? I can think of three offhand that were exceptional. First, the sausage-lentil soup with chard (we used kale). The soup was very flavorful and hearty, and making it with brown-n-serve turkey sausage made it easy and healthy. We were all kind of sad when the pot ran empty. Next, the garlic chicken with potatoes. Oh, my goodness, that was amazing. Start by roasting some potatoes (whatever kind you like – we used slices of Yukon gold) and (a lot of) garlic in a roasting dish (I used my deep dish 9×13 baking pan) with a little bit of olive oil. [Read more…]

Crochet Scribble Hat

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Scribble Hat 1

 

After spending much of the month of December crocheting hats using patterns from Repeat Crafter Me, I wanted to make something that was “mine.” But even though I can create things, I’m not typically very creative. I always need some sort of inspiration. A nudge. When I went to JoAnn the other day, I decided to look at their buttons to see if I could get the push I craved in order to make my own item. I lucked out and found several different shapes of buttons for a great price, and I picked up three packets. The first project I tackled was using these crayon buttons, and I’m very pleased with the result. [Read more…]

Picture of the Week: Football!

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PITW football

 

In honor of the Super Bowl this week, the kids decided to dress up in football “uniforms” and play outside for a little while. I have no doubt that Seahawk was the mastermind behind this, since he’s the biggest football fan in the family. He had some birthday money a few months ago, and he used it to buy the Seahawks jersey and helmet (which he then wore for Halloween). Munchkin’s helmet is technically a softball helmet that we bought from Goodwill for Halloween 2013 – Seahawk went as a football player that year, too. When he bought his official helmet, he passed the other one down. Munchkin is actually a Baltimore Ravens fan (no idea where that came from considering we don’t live near – or have ever traveled to – Baltimore), so to make the softball helmet “his,” he drew his interpretation of the Ravens logo on paper and taped it onto the helmet. (He’s currently saving his allowance for a Ravens version of the set Seahawk has.) Small Fry’s helmet is a knight helmet that my dad bought him from the Dollar Tree. [Read more…]

Book Review: Love at Mistletoe Inn by Cindy Kirk

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Love at Mistletoe Inn by Cindy Kirk

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No, my blog is not going to become just a book review site ;). I’ve just really been enjoying the books I’ve been getting from Book Look Bloggers and devouring them. I want to get the reviews up quickly so that I can get new books. Today’s book is called Love at Mistletoe Inn and is written by Cindy Kirk.

Hope and John made a huge decision when they were just 18: they skipped their senior prom and went to get married instead. Immediately upon being pronounced man and wife, Hope regrets the mistake. The “minister,” a college student ordained online for the sole purpose of performing weddings, assures her that if he doesn’t send in the paperwork to the state, it will be as if the marriage happened. Not legal. She feels better armed with that information. [Read more…]

Super Bowl XLIX

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Super Bowl XLIX

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Let me preface this post by saying that I am not a football fan. I barely understand the rules of the game. (Outside of “each team gets four downs – or tries – to make it ten yards at which point they get another four downs, and a touchdown is worth six points” I don’t really know anything.) That said, I was kind of excited to learn that the Seattle Seahawks were going to the Bowl again (they won in 2014). Because we don’t have a pro football team here in Portland, the Seahawks are are our “local” team. Combine that with the fact that they, until recently, have been notoriously bad, and now things are pretty exciting in the NFL around here. [Read more…]

Our Reading List: February

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What We're Reading in February | Ladybug Daydreams

So. Reading lists. We didn’t do so well last month, I’m afraid. Actually, I suppose that’s not entirely fair. I didn’t do so well. The children did wonderfully. Allow me to elaborate. And explain.

First, our read-aloud didn’t happen. Don’t get me wrong; I tried to read it to the kids. But Elijah of Buxton wasn’t a very good book. (My apologies to Christopher Paul Curtis.) It was one of those books that is written from the point of view of someone with bad English, and so the book itself was riddled with bad grammar and pronunciation (afore instead of before, for example). I just have a hard time respecting books like that. I don’t have a problem with the authors – unless the book is badly written due to incompetence. Just the books. The point behind reading is to help the kids learn to read, write, and express themselves properly, and when authors write bad books on purpose, they don’t accomplish any of those things. So, even for book club, I wasn’t going to endorse that book. And for the record, the kids didn’t go to book club in January, either. I have a rule that if they don’t read the book, they don’t go to book club. Even if it wasn’t their fault this time, we still didn’t send them. (Not all of the parents have this rule. Munchkin says that any given month, only about half or less of the students have read the book.) [Read more…]

Book Review: The Bracelet by Dorothy Love

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The Bracelet by Dorothy Love | Review at Ladybug Daydreams

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I recently joined BookLook Bloggers, and I must say: if all the books are as good as the one I just finished, this will be a match made in Heaven!

I’ve had a couple of people ask me what I was reading recently (I read this book on my Kindle), and the simplest way to explain it is what I told them: a historical romance set over the backdrop of a murder mystery. [Read more…]