When Dad's Away the Girls Will Play

Vince is in Las Vegas for a "continuing education in law" thing which makes for a boring weekend for us. But like I always tell people, when your husband is gone don't sit and mope about it, turn it into an opportunity for some fun! So Eleanor and I had a girls' night tonight! Here is the proof:

We started the night by putting on Tangled. Eleanor hadn't seen it yet (and because Zachery Levi is my Vince replacement). So, of course, we had to have some  movie snacks. My favorite: popcorn and peanut M&Ms. And for Eleanor: Cheerios and yogurt dots (her favorite "junk" food):

She loved the snacks. She picked all the yogurt dots out first. She ended up watching the movie for all of 10 minutes :)

After snacks we painted toenails. I figured the best way I could accomplish this was if Eleanor was in her high chair. So I distracted her with green beans while I painted her toes...I mean toenails....ok, mostly toes. But the left overs will wash off. I got some off with polish remover, but it's hard to do anything with these wiggly feet!

Then it was dessert time! Banana splits!! (Eleanor's is blueberry yogurt instead of ice cream, poor kid). She loved it though! She ate the entire thing! in true girls' night fashion :)

 Then we just had fun rolling around on the floor with pillows and blankets:

Can you tell she was having fun? Haha:

She really did think it was fun having all the pillows on the ground. 

This is one of her favorite toys. I call him Snuggle Puppy, she likes to attack his face and snuggle into him on the ground. He had to come out for the movie night.

I got some snuggles too. Mostly she was just attacking my face.

So I got her back.

We still miss Daddy, but we had a fun girls' night together! The first of many I hope. It'll be even more fun when she can have fun watching the movie with me :) I love my girl!

The Cabin - A Virtual Tour

     Our family cabin is a sacred place where few people are ever invited to come. (Partly because there's not enough space). So this is a rare virtual tour of my favorite place on Earth. When my dad was a kid his dad got this "99 year lease" (or something like that) from the national forest to build a cabin on. So my grandma and grandpa and dad and uncles would go up in the summers and work on the cabin. The first summer they built the foundation. My grandpa always says that Grandma Dangerfield worked her fingerprints off by digging around in all the dirt and rocks up there. The second summer was building the framework and actual cabin. Years and years later they added onto it which I'll show later in the tour. So the above shot is all you can see from the road below. It's the closest cabin to the gate so we feel lucky to have this spot. There are only so many gate keys so if you're having multiple cars coming there's usually someone at the cabin with the key, the people coming in their car have to park at the gate and walk up to the cabin for the key and all the way back to drive their car in. I guess people in farther away cabins just have to plan better :) On all the lower steps you can see in the picture, all the names of the kids in my family (and 2 of my cousins) are etched into concrete at the top of the stone. They're usually so covered in dirt and leaves that you can't really tell though. So then you start walking up the steps and see the cabin, and maybe even my dad carrying logs from the woodpile into the cabin:

When you get around to the front of the cabin it looks like this:

Walk in the front door and you'll see the main living area:

Straight ahead you see into the kitchen (notice the super old ice chest that we use just as a cupboard now, but it's a cool little piece of history. Before they actually got electricity up here they actually had to use it!):

 Turn to the left and you see the living room (and my Dad eating snacks, probably Oreos):

Take a step towards my dad and look to the right and you see down the hallway. Lining the hallway are four twin sized beds (bunkbed style). When I was a kid my assigned bed was the one on the top right. Steve was top left. Adam was bottom left and Jack was bottom right (I could be wrong, I always got the boys' confused). Steve and I used to play up on top all the time and throw pillows over the wall at people sitting in the living room (the walls don't go all the way to the ceiling in this part of the cabin.) The wall with the door you see below used to be the end of the cabin. Then they added the back room on. You'll see it later.  Also notice the picture on the wall to the left, those are drawings of animals at the cabin my dad drew when he was young:

  

Before we go into the next room take a look over your right shoulder and you can see where we were before. That's the dining area (and my mom and brother, Steve) and on the right side of the picture is the front door.  Are you seeing how small this place is? But we love it! :

 

Ok, moving down the hall and opening the door we see this. A queen sized bunk bed. Oh yeah. The one on top is like sleeping in a taco. You better like the person you're bunking with because you're going to be cuddling all night. This is where my older sisters Annie and Jess slept. My parents slept on the lower bunk. That is the only decent mattress in the whole place because it's been replaced. The others all sound like crusty, rusted springs every time you move. Ha:

 From the bedroom you take a right and here's the bathroom. It's only a little scary showering in the aluminum box during a lightning storm....Ok I've feared for my life in this shower. But you get used to it :) I'm just grateful the made the addition of the back bedroom and the bathroom and that we have running water up there now! Some cabins don't and I don't know how they do it! So we love this bathroom even if it does look a little....sketchy. The end. That's the whole cabin! Now you know why we don't bring a lot of people up. We fill it up all by ourselves! And even though the quarters are a little tight (especially now that we're all grown up with spouses and kids to bring up) I love it more than any place on earth! Here are some memories from our last cabin trip.

 So my sister Jess bought this pool for playing up in Utah. Cole was sick for a few days but being in the pool was one of the few things he was ok doing so I busted out Eleanor's swimming suit so she could get in on the action. She actually had fun in it and was splashing a little! Then Cole started splashing and the picture below perfectly captures Eleanor's thoughts on that:

 (Hanging on for dear life until the splashing stopped. Haha.)

Wood chopping is a regular activity at the cabin and we round up all the men in the house and send them out back for Feats of Strength. We all love to watch :)

Big brother, Steve, choppin' them logs:

Vince's turn:

Cole naturally stepped up to be a part of the manly action:

He's a real man child:

Vince tried to man Eleanor up too. Can you see her reaction? "I don't wanna touch it" what a girl :)

Uncle Steve helping her figure it out. "Oh I see now. With the mouth....for eating."

Poor sick Cole hanging out with Grandpa and watching the action

Among the new experiences had at the cabin Eleanor got her first taste of goldfish and loved them!

Loved them so much she wouldn't swallow them....

And started laughing at us laughing at her.  When I cleaned them all out it was about 6 goldfish.

Cabin tradition is that babies have to get a bath in the sink. We have pictures of my and my brother in either side of the sink bathing at the same time. It's a big deal ya know.

She loved it! And I learned the beauties of sink baths. I do it all the time at home now. SO much easier than the bathtub! It's way more contained and a lot easier on my back! Plus it's so cute:

The bunk beds were a fun playground for kiddos. We have a 5 Little Monkeys [jumping on the bed] book that Cole liked so we started saying it when the kids were on the bed. Cole learned how to say "No more monkeys jumping on the bed" too and it was adorable. This picture they're letting Grandpa in on the fun:

Of course the biggest cabin tradition is nightly card games! We used to always play hearts until we all got sick of Dad shooting the moon. Now we play Vince's family favorite, Arthritis. I must also mention that the next biggest cabin tradition is not showering, wearing make up, doing hair, shaving, etc.:

You can see why I made the above disclaimer now (Vince and me):

 Dad and Steve

Mom and Dad:

The cards. Just looking at a pile of cards like this gets me in the mood for a game!:

Yahtzee is the other big game we play. My Grandma Dangerfield always had the best luck and we still have some of her score cards with the big wins on it. This is Steve and his Yahtzee smile:

I got a Yahtzee too!:

Uncle Steve reading comic books to Cole on the bunk beds. What a boy thing to do:

Since Cole was sick we let him watch a lot of Aristocats (which he calls Meow) and Finding Nemo (Fishies). Eleanor really liked it too. I think we need to get an iPad now:

Next big cabin tradition is the tire swing! It's actually the neighbor's swing but most of the time they're not there and they said we could use it when they're gone. When we were kids it was THE favorite activity. It's an old tire on a LONG leather strap around a tree branch. My dad would give us "Moon Shots" by running and throwing us up in the air. We probably got 50 feet off the ground (at least that's how high it seemed when we were kids. It was probably like...I dunno Vince says 7 feet but I still think it was higher):

Eleanor mostly liked watching Cole run into people. Cole had a blast though, even though he was sick:

Eleanor did better in the swing with Daddy:

So the other big tradition of the cabin is over-eating. Which needs to be countered by another cabin less observed tradition of hiking. We went on a few hikes while we were there since I am still trying to lose baby weight (and other weight). We got to take Eleanor with us! She got impatient sometimes, but with enough Cheerios she made it through and we got some exercise:

Even though this doesn't do justice to the magic of the cabin, now you have some idea of where we disappear to every summer. It really is my favorite place in the world. It might have something to do with leaving responsibility (including TV, internet, computers, etc.) behind. Or the fact that family is priority up there (since it's the only thing to entertain you). Or maybe it's the smell of smoke, pine trees, and maple syrup. I don't know what it is, I just love the cabin! I hope we can keep going back as our kids grow up so they can experience it too.

Cooking for One (Baby)

I have ventured into the task of making my own baby food. I don't go organic and I don't do it because I think it's better for my baby and I don't do it because it seems like more fun than buying it from the grocery store shelves. I do it to save money. Plain and simple. So here is a documentation of the process and the calculation of savings. Maybe it will inspire someone else to do the same! In fact, the only reason I thought I could make my own baby food was because I saw pictures of someone else doing it and they made it seem like a good idea. And it is!

It all started by going to Sprouts, the cheap produce store. I bought:

1 lb bag carrots $0.77

Bunch Spinach (about a pound) $0.99

Green Beans .69 lb $1.17

Red Yams (Eleanor's favorite) 2.7 lb $2.67

Golden Delicious Apples 2.75 lb $2.67

Total $8.27

(tax not included)

Then I started washing, peeling, steaming and blending thanks to this little guy:

He did such a good job I named him Eddy. I know, it's a clever name. That's why I told Vince about it. He didn't get it, so I explained it to him. When you turn on a blender it looks like a whirlpool. A little whirlpool in a river is, ready for it? an Eddy. So there you go.

To be time efficient I started by putting the sweet potatoes in the oven at 400 for a full hour and while they were getting nice and soft I started steaming the other veggies and while I was blending one batch I'd start steaming the next. It's like playing Cake Mania veggie style. I felt like a little baby food factory (which is nothing new. Once you start breastfeeding that's basically your default mode of operation). So anyway, I've been saving and washing the baby food containers from the hand-me-downs that my sister gave me (yup, still getting hand-me-downs) and from the baby food I had bought to get started. I like that they're already the right portions of baby food. So when I got everything poured out I got this:

Eleanor's favorites: Sweet potatoes and Mixed veggie (which in this case is green beans, carrots, and spinach, and some are just carrots and spinach. Note to self, more green beans next time). I like the mixed veggies because they get all swirly when you mix them. See?

So it was a total of 29 containers of vegetable baby food. That's enough for roughly two weeks of eating. A few days later I started the fruit!

The golden delicious apples were on sale for $0.97/lb so that's why I got them. They weren't as ripe as they probably should have been, but I haven't had any complaints yet. To do this job I was very grateful for this contraption:

I haven't named him but maybe I should. He was a nostalgic buy right after I got married and thought I had money for this kind of thing. It might be the second time I've ever used it, but boy was I grateful to have it on baby food making day! It peels, cores, and slices your apples into those cool curly-cue apples in the background. When I was my kid I would help my mom do this for making canned apple pie filling. I would love to eat the long curly apple peels like spaghetti.  Back to the process: I boiled the apples and sent them through my trusty side-kick, Eddy. Then it was into the jars (which I had also saved from store-bought baby food):

I tried to be all clever and reseal the jars by putting them in a hot water bath. They didn't seal. I guess they're not made for that. If anyone has done this successfully let me know your trick! So I just tossed them in the freezer instead. But that was 7 1/2 jars of applesauce/baby food. So here are the stats:

29 containers of baby food usually comes 2 to a pack and at the store the day I bought all my produce they were on sale for 9/$10.00. So 29 (or 14 1/2 packages) would have cost $13.05.
The fruit jars were on sale 10/$10.00 so it would have cost me $7.50

Total $20.55

Subtract my actual cost $8.27

For a total Savings of $12.28

That's a 60% savings!! Even though it's more work than picking out a few flavors from the store shelves it gives me such a sense of accomplishment! Look, world! I can cook food for my baby AND save money doing it! It's also kind of a fun way to spend the evening when Vince is working late. And guess what else? She likes it!

Mission Accomplished.