Fresh Squeeze the First May 22, 2011

I couldn’t come up with a good title for my first installment of Fresh Squeeze, because the topic this week is a bit scatalogical and I didn’t want to scare all of y’all high-minded folks away at the word go.

Just so you know this is a new Monday morning feature about creative projects, ideas and crafts to help make living a little bit more organized, nicer, prettier, and fresher in our tight little space we call home. Hence the name Fresh Squeeze. Hope you like it. If not, tough noogies.

I wanted to name today’s featured project The Great Turd Polish. You may thank me later for not naming it that. But that is more or less what I’ve done.

If, like me, you are a cat owner, you know about the Tidy Cats buckets. They are awesome, are they not? They might be one of the most usefully reusable product packages out there. We use them for everything: Diaper pails; dog food and treats; as a tote for traveling in the car. I am the first to sing the praises of reusing these buckets for diapers. Throw that Diaper Genie away, people. Those things use way too much plastic, and they don’t, and I mean DO NOT, hold in the stank. I’ve been in a number of households that use Diaper Genies, and I can tell almost as soon as I walk in the door if this is a Diaper Genie household. They do not work.

Tidy Cats buckets on the other hand, oh yes ma’am. You would not believe how good they work. My mother, who is a neat freak and not afraid of hurting my feelings, says she can’t smell the diapers in my son’s nursery. On top of that, she and dad regularly spend the night in the guest bed in the nursery, and she’s never once complained about any odor coming from those buckets. So, I swear by them.

Only one problem. They’re school bus yellow and have ugly logos all over them. In the context of my Little Dude’s robot and spaceship bedroom, the effect is jarring. The two buckets sitting next to the changing table just sit there like … well, like cat litter buckets. I decided it was high time for function to meet form.

So I started with some sprocket-themed scrapbook paper from Michael’s, and glued it on.

Yes, I see the wrinkles too. Let me just point out this is my first attempt. And might I remind you that this a bucket of shit?

By the way, I used Mod Podge for this project. I cannot stop raving about Mod Podge, and I can’t believe I never used it before.

I used sponge brushes because those work best for me, but you can use regular paint brushes, too.

Next, I printed some robot and spaceship images from the internet and podged those on top of the base.

God bless the Hubs. He went with me on my frantic “I’m so sick of these ugly buckets” run to Michael’s, and he found a bunch of these adorable foam stickers.

I think they add a great deal of depth, don’t you?

Here’s the finished product:

I know, I know. It seems like a lot of effort for a bucket of poo. But really, it was super easy. The Mod Podge cleans up great and is non-toxic. Hours later, when I discovered some of the gunk on my fingertips, it peeled off as easily as the Elmer’s Glue I used to use in elementary school. So I had a nice memory flashback, too!

We’re thinking as soon as the Little Dude is out of diapers, we’ll bleach these suckers out and use them for toys. Don’t you think they’ll make awesome containers for Legos? I certainly do.

All I can say is, this kid better be good to me when I’m old.

Crabby Pantry Diaries, Week 12 May 18, 2011

So I was trying to think of why I’ve been so intolerably crabby in the last couple of weeks. I was sure the sickness — heading into week 2 of coughs and colds around here — was just a part of it. Although it definitely adds to my daily stress level, I knew there was something else going on.

I thought it might have something to do with my recent habit of visiting too many crafty websites. My cousin introduced me to a new social network called Pinterest. Instead of sharing personal information, you share your interests via photos of things you’ve created or want to try to create. You install the “Pin It” application to your bookmarks bar on your browser. Then, as you are surfing the web, and you see something you like, such as a recipe or a color scheme or a bookcase, you hit your Pin It button and it pins it to your Pinterest boards. This lets you refer back to it later, like a file of ideas you don’t want to forget. It also lets us crafty girls share ideas and get ideas. It’s non-linear, right-brained and wonderfully impersonal — refreshingly opposite of Facebook.

However, a major side effect of my new infatuation with Pinterest is I’ve been discovering WAY too many other mommy bloggers who craft. All of them wonderful, creative and original, and all of them have fancy, multi-layered websites that go beyond the wordpress template that I’m using here. I used to let Martha Stewart make me feel inadequate because I don’t shear my own sheep to make the yarn which with I knit. Today, I’m like, “Martha Who?” Seriously, there are so many amazing women out there who seem to be able to transform an entire living room just by angling a chair a certain way. You would think this would make me feel empowered. In the post-feminist, post-Martha environment, we are ALL Marthas. In my case, it only made me look around at my home and realize there are a million things I’d like to do but I haven’t done, and these women all have done.

So I decided to make a list of all the things around me that were bugging me — all things in need of organization and a little crafting up. It is a LONG list, people. And that list? Just made me feel much, much worse.

Just to make things better, I got on the scale this morning and I gained 2.5 pounds, since the last time I weighed in. That was um, maybe three weeks ago?

Anyway, so I’ve got some back-on-the-horse getting to do this week.

And, I’ve got some cute-ifying to do around here. Much like my Wednesday diet blog, I’m going to inspire myself to bring on the cute around here by adding a new regular feature to the blog. Check back Monday, May 23 for the first installment.

In the meantime, as I  burn some calories getting my head out of this crafty rut, hopefully this will result in less time to think about what to eat when I sick, stressed out and annoyed at my surroundings. Deep breath:

Best Day: Tuesday, May 17

(Prepared to be unimpressed)

Breakfast: one serving oatmeal, one serving half & half with coffee

Lunch: two servings salt & vinegar pop chips, two glasses orange juice.

Dinner: two servings Pho meatball noodle soup.

Worst Day: Friday, May 13

Breakfast: 2 eggs on toast, one serving string cheese, one Cadbury Creme Egg

Lunch: One cup tuna salad.

Snack: two rice cakes, one serving peanut butter

Dinner: three fish tacos, one pint of Blue Moon

Dessert: One Skinny Cow peppermint ice cream sandwich, two glasses red wine.

Crabby Pantry Diaries, Week 11: let me hear your potty talk May 11, 2011

hi there. i’m in lower case letters today because i’m feeling a bit puny. all of us here are recovering from yuck nose. little dude ended up with an ear infection.

I won’t insult you by pretending this week’s installment of the Crabby Pantry Diaries is about dieting in the smallest way, so let’s cut the crap and get right to it.

Best Day, Thursday, May 5:

Breakfast: One serving oatmeal with one half serving rice milk, one serving Cadbury Creme Egg (no, The Hubs hasn’t run out of them yet. He may secretly be a hoarder, we’re looking into it.)

Lunch: Egg sandwich with light string cheese on rice cakes.

Dinner: One serving Chicken Noodle Pho.

Worst Day: Friday, May 6

Breakfast: One serving cowboy mush (I think this is just cooked cornmeal that the Hubs’s grandma named “cowboy mush” to get kids to eat it.)

Snack: One Nutri-Grain Bar, one sweet & salty granola bar, one serving mixed nuts, zero calorie Vitamin Water. (Road food)

Lunch: (mom’s house) Two jalapeno wraps with chicken salad, one serving of abominable store-brand chips from Aldi, shaped and packaged to make you think it’s Sun Chips, but are actually fried and not baked (like the real Sun Chips), and which taste like Bugles. So, not bad for Bugles.

Dinner: Veggie burger and pretty decent french fries from the weirdest, stickiest restaurant in Chicago, Trader Todd’s. This was served alongside a special “cocktail” comprised of orange-flavored Monster energy drink with vodka. Or something.

Dessert: three bites of chocolate bread pudding that my friend ordered at Schuba’s Harmony Grill, followed by one large gin & tonic and one 16-oz. cup of cranberry vodka that had to be watered down because I totally forgot there was alcohol in it the second the straw was in my mouth, causing me to adios the entire shebang in about two minutes. Seriously, it tasted like $5 juice, and I was tired and dehydrated from spending the evening walking all over Lakeview, and from being intimidated by all the extremely attractive, young and stylish hipster ladies from the neighborhood, and from feeling guilty over leaving the Hubs home alone with a sick baby so I could go to Chicago to see Too Beautiful to Live.

Do not even ask me what I weigh this week.

May I ask, does an infant ever NOT get an ear infection when they’re fighting a cold virus? They can’t blow their noses, except by accident. Seems like an ear infection is inevitable. Which means a trip to the doctor for the common cold, and then a round of amoxicillin. Taking the meds isn’t so bad. Even squoojing out the mucus from the tiny angry nose isn’t so bad. Yes, that’s right, I said squoojing. You try it and then tell me what it sounds like. The worst part is the effect of the antibiotics on the diaper. That is to say, not only do we all have sloshy noses, sloshy heads, and sloshy tummies from drinking so many fluids, but Little Dude has got particularly slosh-a-riffic diapers because the meds give him the bubble guts. You may recall Little Dude’s previous struggles with this situation.

This particular bout of colds has been extra challenging. He’s much bigger now than he was last December. So, it turns out, the good old fashioned Pampers don’t hold much in when stuff wants to run South of the Border. The child has soiled two pairs of Daddy’s pants in two days, and he’s burned through all of his own pants in less than four days. That’s saying something. Once again, the universe is reminding me that switching to disposable diapers when you are stressed out does not serve you well. The universe summarily smited me on Monday morning.

Here’s how it went, and I’ll use present-tense just so you can share my existential panic: The Little Dude wakes me up, I put him in a disposable, plop him in the high chair and fix his breakfast. I first feed him his medicine with his formula, then his cereal. I clean him up, check his diaper and all is clear. So I set him down in his Elmo walker and turn on Super Why so I can have a few precious minutes of peace to make my breakfast and coffee. Everything is going smoothly, and I’m able to sit down, eat my oatmeal and drink my coffee all the way through without interruption. Then I smell it.

“Time to change that butt!” I pick him up out of the Elmo and realize something is wrong. I take a peak inside and the poo has tumbled down his leg and is precariously caught in the folds of his pants. So I carry him upside down to the changing table to keep the turdishness from spilling out. Here is where it gets really disgusting. I peel off his pants, so of course the poo goes all over both of his legs. I cannot manage to smile and sing to him while I’m unsticking this biohazard of a diaper off of him, so of course Little Dude starts to squirm and whine, which makes poo smear in other places. I pull off the diaper and now his shirt is a mess. He needs a bath, and now the changing table does, too. I clean him up superficially with baby wipes and set him on the floor, naked. What’s the point of putting a diaper on him when I’m just about to run a bath? I throw the diaper mess in the diaper bucket, then take his pants and shirt to the bathroom to spray them off in the toilet before dousing them with baking soda and filing them away in the soiled laundry bucket. I run the bath. I go back to his room and he’s sitting on the floor playing with his xylophone, looking very proud of the pee puddle in front of him. On the carpet.

These are the moments for which fainting couches were made. I just want to take to my bed and start over. But I don’t. I never do. There does not exist a brilliant enough Super Why episode to keep Little Dude distracted enough for me to call the kind of time out that I need right now. So I muddle through. I ask myself what my next three steps are. Bath, get dressed, clean up the pee. In moments like this, chanting my three next steps gets me through whatever moment I feel like I’m stuck in. I don’t know why it works, but it does. Maybe I’m slightly ADD. Like right now for instance: Stop blogging, rescue the baby from under the Ikea rocking chair, brush teeth.

I know most of you can sympathize. But some people take a dim view of my parenting strategies. Take this commenter, who I believe represents a firm best known for its attempts to sell me some embiggening products for male nether regions (misspellings and lack of apostrophes are the writer’s mistakes, not mine).

“I must say, as very much as I enjoyed reading what you had to say, I couldnt help but lose interest after a while. Its as if you had a fantastic grasp around the subject matter, but you forgot to include your readers. Perhaps you should think about this from much more than one angle. Or maybe you shouldnt generalise so a lot. Its better if you think about what others may have to say instead of just going for a gut reaction to the topic. Think about adjusting your personal believed process and giving others who may read this the benefit of the doubt.”

I’m always thrilled to get comments on my blog, even from people whose first language is not English. I have to give him or her credit for composing a vague enough comment that some people — but probably not the average smarty-pants blogger — would be duped into approving the comment and inadvertently including a link to the above-mentioned nethers-embiggening products.

Anyone else — aside from the penile enlargement community — think I don’t have a grasp around the subject matter? Do I really generalize so a lot? Maybe I should adjust my personal believed process and next week’s post will be better.

The Crabby Pantry Diaries, Week 10 May 4, 2011

Warning: do not embark on a date night without a plan. One of you will make the other partner feel like crap on a biscuit and then Mrs. Crap Biscuit will blow her diet for the next several days.

I fell so hard off the end of my little crabby red wagon this week. My Grandma’s 87th birthday meant I was visiting my parents for the weekend, which means I had no control over the amount of baked goods around me.

For reasons I can’t fathom, our arrival was greeted by a strawberry rhubarb pie and a plate full of homemade almond joy. That’s not true, I can fathom it. It is just the way it is. I avoided the pie, mostly out of protest. But somehow I found myself hitting those almond joys pretty hard, and I don’t even like coconut all that much.

Sunday was party day, and I went from coffee and cookies at my aunt’s house to the birthday lunch with seven different kinds of lasagna. In case you did not know it, I am not, in fact, a striped orange cat who hates Mondays. I am not helpless in the face of a good pasta dish. So why did I eat three pieces of it plus dessert?

It may have had something to do with the night before. Mom and dad offered to babysit. Offered is not the right word. I think the word I am searching for is demanded. They shoved me and the Hubs out the door and told us to have a fun date night, even though we had no plans and the Hubs was feeling crabby. I don’t really know why he was feeling crabby, as I can tell you that he is definitely not dieting.

Anyhoo. So the half-crabby couple heads to beautiful downtown Crown Point and arrives at a little Italian restaurant that came recommended at the last minute. I order a Bellini and eggplant parm. Like a good girl, I eat only half.

Then, like a person demonstrating the worst date behavior known to man, the Hubs gets the bill and has a silent freak out. Yes, that’s write, my love. I am writing about that. You knew I was a writer when you married me, so suck it up. He gets a look on his face that says, “I Can’t Believe She Made Me Eat Here” combined with “Maybe If I Vomit Right Here I Can Claim Food Poisoning and They’ll Waive My Half of the Bill.”

All conversation between us stops and I wish I was elsewhere other than in public with a dude acting like an angry cave troll. If it had been a first date, I would have been pissed off enough to end the date right there. But oh no, we’ve got those wedding band things on.

So, I try to make the best of it and suggest we walk around the square and take the long way back to the car. It’s a beautiful night and I’m going to have a good time. We walk to the corner and he wonders why I want to cross to the other side of the street, where the shops are, instead of crossing directly to the courthouse, where our car is parked. I tell him I thought we could take our time and just walk. I actually say out loud that I’m trying to salvage what’s left or our date. More or less, I get a “whatever” kind of shrug in response.

We complete our Death March to the car, and there on the asphalt on the passenger side is a broken beer bottle. It reminds me of the scene in Say Anything, when Lloyd Dobbler points out some broken glass on the ground, so Diane can step around it. I realize that this is not going to happen to me tonight because my Lloyd Dobbler is not going to see the broken glass on the ground because he is not here to open my door.

But he’s not Lloyd Dobbler and I’m not Diane. We’re an old married couple who just had a shit show of an evening and who will now not speak a civil word to each other the rest of the night.

As we’re stuck together for the weekend as visitors, we drive back early to my parents’ house and it is the worst. I spend the rest of my evening sulking behind my headphones, alternating between feeling like a jackass for picking an overpriced restaurant, and — more correctly — feeling indignant and angry that the Husband doesn’t even know he’s just sent me the message that not only am I not worth an unexpected $20 eggplant parm, but I’m so not worth it that he’s going to take it out on me by not trying to make me feel better even after I apologize for picking a dud restaurant.

And the point of all that, dear readers, is to give you some kind of accounting for why I haven’t kept my food journal up to date since last week Saturday, and to explain why I ate too much lasagna on Sunday and some weird homemade candy that I didn’t even like.

Honestly, I still have not quite recovered. I have yet to open my food calorie counter thingy, and you are grossly mistaken if you think I am going to weigh myself this week.

But I am going to start journaling again TODAY, because I feel a little bit better now that I have all that off my chest. Only a little. All I know is, my first Mother’s Day had better be nicer than that.