Erin and Orren update

So Orren is now off commercial baby food. He used to get just the Earth's Best Organics and sometimes Gerber Organic, but seriously, when you factor in 3 meals, and stage 3 food, it was costing us over $100 a month in food alone. Then you add in formula (they discontinued our kind, so we switched to Similac Organic) which is another $200 a month (and hence, I kick Thak in the ass for being so insistent that I quit breastfeeding when I did). So $300 a month for the boy. Oh my... It definitely adds up! Thankfully we only have a little under 3 1/2 months left of formula feeding.

What we've done instead of commercial baby food is actually began using the food grinder that I've used for nothing besides bread crumbs for the past five years, and given him what we're eating, with slight consideration to sodium content, gassy ingredients, and the like. Today for lunch, for example, he had leftover chicken cacciatore which is the same thing Thak and I had.

Ingredients:
Whole wheat spaghetti
onions
bell peppers
garlic
tomatoes
red wine
chicken
basil
oregano
black pepper
capers
just a small touch of salt (half a teaspoon for a whole pan)

HE LOVED IT!! Tonight for dinner, we're having beef tips and rice, which is not a low-sodium dish since it has bullion in it, but to compensate for that, we'll go ahead and pull out a couple pieces of beef and onions before we add the bullion, throw it into the food grinder with some brown rice and zucchini, and that'll be perfect for him.

Now he still likes finger food, and he eats some finger food at every meal, but he doesn't get full off of that, so we have to help him along a little, and this is the way we do that. At least it doesn't cost $100 a month!!



Erin is doing great at homeschooling. We're going to have to get her a second grade math book soon. I've found that bribing her on sight words is pretty much the most effective way. If she reads them all correctly 10 times, she gets a candy bar. Oh well. Could be worse. At least she's reading them!

We're going to be looking for more homeschooling materials this week because we're running through ours so fast. What we got was good for getting us started, and we're now just burning through it so fast that we need things far more substantial. It's not a bad thing, not by a long shot.



I find that many of my friends don't quite understand how busy I am lately. I'm running a business and I'm homeschooling Erin. That alone is a lot. Beyond that, I have an 8-month-old, and Thak's schedule of school and work never gets any easier, so I have to do all this myself. I don't think many of my friends really get it. They would get it if I worked a 9-5 job, and they would get it if I had just one of the above things, but they do not get this:

Wake up, feed kids breakfast, sew, begin homeschool lessons, clean up, feed Thak lunch, finish homeschool lessons, sew, clean up some more, prep dinner so it's on the table at 5, eat, spend half an hour with Thak before he goes off to school, see him off to school, get kids bathed, rooms cleaned, and ready for bed, put kids down, sew, clean up, sew, spend maybe an hour with Thak after he gets home from school, go to bed, wake up and do it all over again.

I don't think people quite get it when I say I can't come to coffee if it means I won't be able to get dinner on in time.

And with that, I have to go finish today's homeschooling lessons, and then hang two loads of diapers on the clothes line. As for dinner, I'm ahead of the game this time... the stuff's not in the freezer at least!!