When Crayons Don't Cut It

Pin It Plane, Train, Automobile, Restaurants, Waiting In Line...

I still have at least half a dozen Disney posts just sitting in draft form, waiting for me to wrap them up  in one way or another. Part of the problem is that I bought myself a Kindle Paperwhite and the Raven Boys Cycle is eating my brain. Find me on Goodreads!

But in honor of the summer, I'm reworking some of this post to include all travel and wait time with kids, not just Disney lines. Because, honestly, we used these in every step of our trip and continue to use them at restaurants, in the car, when one kid has to wait for another. The list goes on, and kids get tired of the same old crayons and coloring books. So toss some of these into your Go Bag.

First up, dry-erase activity... things.

If you are still reading this in 2016 and have children, there's a good chance you've been invited to one or two or 98 Usborne Book parties. I have not been asked for or compensated for my honest opinion by Usborne or any of their consultants, so you know what you get here is just my honesty. Usborne has some quality activities that use dry-erase markers. We brought the Doodle Tin to Disney to use while waiting anywhere. We entertained our children and many kids around us. Every morning I just grabbed a fresh stack to toss in my bag with a few markers so we weren't carrying the whole tin. I'm ordering a few more tins for our summer bag as well as the wrap-ups for my numbers-obsessed daughter.

Here is the link to the Usborne Activities page for ideas. It is not affiliated with any representative or party, but you can easily find a party, I'm sure.






Second, Mixels.

Legos for under $5 that take more than two steps and half as many seconds to piece together? Yes, please. I save these for lines and restaurants, planes, or anything I'm not driving and can help pick up an escape piece. Mixels can also be combine with like Mixels to create a Super Mixel. Lego's website has the step-by-step directions for each series!

Third, bubbles. Everybody loves bubbles. Bonus if you are at Disney because all the parents in line will love you for keeping kids happy and bubbles make for super cute photos. Bubbles also work in the rain. Just be sure if you are tossing bubbles in your purse that the bottle won't leak. If I'm carrying a diaper bag, I put them in the defunct bottle pocket. 

Fourth, Party Play Doh. Not only are these great for Halloween or birthdays, but having a few for long waits, especially when there is a table to be had, can make for hours of fun. 

By time you make it through that list, crayons and coloring books will look new again! May the odds be ever in your favor. 

Gift Wrapping Life Hack

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Things come in awkward-shaped containers, and sometimes a gift bag is not an option. (We ship a fair amount of gifts.)

Martha Stewart has a decent amount of ideas on this subject, but I've found a way that she hasn't honed in on yet. I also think it is adorable. 

You will need:

gift wrap

so much tape

gift

a cute kid, who is young enough to make a hot mess charming

Step 1: Cut the paper to an understandable size for the gift.

Step 2: Cut twice the amount of tape you would normally use.

Step 3: Give the child all the materials and wish them luck. 

Voila! 

Level Up: Have a roll of butcher paper or white easel paper on hand at all times for crafts and emergency gift wrapping. Combine the two by giving your kid crayons before wrapping. 

Real Moms Get Sick. Like Bosses.

Pin It "Moms don't get sick days!" is something you hear all the time from the moment you sneeze your first postpartum sneeze. (And if this is the first time you just sneezed postpartum, you probably care more about your lack of bladder control than a sick day. It gets better.) It is true.

I was fortunate. My tonsils started to ache around 1pm on a Friday. I changed the dinner plan slightly, having the girls set it up early (Raddish Kids apple curry! WIN, post to come.) and tossing it in the crockpot  By 3pm, I had changed into sweats, hit "play all" on Doc McStuffins, and settled into my corner of the couch with some tea, attempting to rest to the dulcet sounds of a contractor and plumber ripping apart the bathroom piping. By 5pm my husband had come home to take over, so I could be properly sick, or at least as sick as I can with two kids and a household to run. Maybe I'd be better by Monday, because really, what choice do I have?

Every day, I miss teaching. I miss being in a classroom, watching kids figure out why math works, discussing the intricacies of language acquisition with specialists, sharing silly stories with coworkers at lunch. But the only time I wish I was working and my kids were daycare goers is on a sick day. I'd love to be able to drop my kids off somewhere and curl up on the couch to hack up a lung in relative peace for a few hours. Can you imagine?

I've learned, in my almost-five-years as a stay-at-home parent, that you need to have systems in order for when you do get sick. I'm awful at maintaining systems, but not this one. The stakes are too high.

Step 1: Have a drawer full of various teas.

When I'm sick, I want Traditional Medicinal's Seasonal Sampler. This stuff is voodoo herbal ancient magic at its finest. I kept it in my desk, too, and would start drinking the Echinacea Plus tea the moment a kid came in with faucet nose. Throat Coat will bring back your voice long enough to make it through a lesson comfortably. And whatever is in the Gypsy Cold Care is delicious and alleviates that foggy head cold feeling. I'm not paid to say any of this. In fact, I spend a good deal of money on this tea every year, the way I chug it. (The way I chug it is out of my biggest mug, with honey, after it has brewed and then cooled for 5 minutes.)

Step 2: Have bones in the freezer.

I start to feel sick, I put this in the crockpot, generally in this order:

Whatever chicken frames I have in the freezer
A few carrots, broken into thirds
1 TBSP apple cider vinegar
a large onion, unpeeled and quartered
about 5 cloves of garlic, unpeeled, chopped in half (you can just chop a whole head in half if you like garlic. Five makes the garlic a nice background note, not a really discernible thing.)
a few stalks of celery, rough chopped
a bay leaf
Water, to cover all the ingredients

I generally always have chicken frames frozen. When you roast a chicken, or have a rotisserie chicken, put all the bones, the neck, and any pan drippings into a bag and freeze it. You can thank me when you feel better.

If I don't have chicken in the freezer (What?! But you just said...) I will drag my starting-to-get-sick self to the grocery store and grab a rotisserie chicken (dinner, done.) or some cheap bone-in chicken pieces (drumsticks work well for this) so that I have some. Ideally you want two frames, but whatever you have is fine. This time, I had one roasted frame and a few uncooked wings and necks. In they go.

Set it on low and leave it. Ideally, you need at least 10 hours so that the nutrients can be sucked out of the bones. You can't overcook this, so even two days is fine. Shabbat Shalom, my cold-hearty people.

I started this after dinner last night and had some for lunch, over white rice, with a squeeze of lemon. I strained out what I needed in the separator and left the rest, still cooking. My bones hurt. I'm not going to futz around with it more than I need to.

If you have turkey bones on hand, those work nicely, too. 

If you want a vegetable broth with this sort of ease, throw this into your crock pot for hours on end:

Two onions, unpeeled and quartered

A head of garlic, unpeeled and cut in half

A bulb of fennel, with fronds, rough chopped

1 pound of carrots, rough chopped

A small bunch of celery, rough chopped

Bay leaf

I like to add ginger to my soup broths (chicken and vegetable) but ginger is strong and specific. If you are just going to drink this or have it with rice, I recommend a nickel-sized slice of fresh ginger. If you are going to use this as a base for dishes, you may want to omit ginger and just add it to the dishes (or stick some in your soup mug to steep) later.

Strain your broth and separate out the fat if you used bones. Freeze any unused portions.

I don't add salt until consumption for the same reason that I hold back on ginger. If you pull out a cup of this later to put in a dish that is already salty (Use broth to make your rice pilaf or couscous. Really.) you'll be disappointed. I also tend to use chicken frames and pan drippings from well-seasoned birds. 

Step 3: Books. If you are like me, your body gets sick, your brain won't shut off, and you end up driving yourself mad overthinking what needs to be done in relation to your physical inability to do anything worthwhile. Expect more posts today. 

The Kid Who Cried Poop

Pin It Here at the A Family Home, every day is National Coffee Day. But, for those of you who don't require a cup of coffee to jumpstart your brain every single morning, instead enjoying coffee as a treat or occasional thing you do, I will never understand how you exist Happy Coffee Day!

Today was a productive day. I (with some help) baked bread, baked cookies, ran errands, cut and sewed two capes, kept everyone fed, only yelled once when a child jumped into (literally, into) my face, and set the chickens up for a stormy few days, cleaned up all the messes from all the baking and eating, all around the PK pick-up, drop-off schedule. I even drank hot coffee and showered. Some days I win.

But on these days where my normal chaos almost seems like a beautiful, intentional flow of projects (Let's not kid ourselves. I have no time management skills.), my kids seem to kick it into overdrive. For example, in the 5 minutes I carved out to shower, Toddler Raptor came out to play. She figured out how to open the doors (two) from the house to the garage and found an old bag of theater popcorn (like, at least a month old) sitting atop a giant construction garbage bag my forgetful husband has not yet put a sticker on and tossed to the curb. Well, a toddler does not care that the popcorn is old, had been picked up off the car floor and driveway, or that it is the top layer in a bag of junk. When I realized about 4 minutes into my shower that it was all too quiet and flew out of the shower, she showed me her fistful of popcorn and offered to share. How kind. I took the popcorn away.

This was maybe 7:45am. 

For about a month, I lived in a world of that crazy anxiety where you are thinking of having more kids and trying to figure out if it is a fantastic idea or the worst idea ever. Even though it wasn't something we were even considering for months at the earliest, my rash of pregnant friends (three of which gave birth in the past week, and three more of which will in the next 10 days!) collided with a visit to my doctor, and so there it was, annoying the heck out of me. The moment V. was born we knew she needed a sibling. She needed someone close in this world besides us. At just shy of 2.5 years apart, these girls are best friends. Even though when you have two, somehow time is divided by six and the stuff you need to carry triples (we flew across the country with both girls once. Only for my BFF would I do that again while they still need carseats or diapers or anything that isn't a hand to hold) and good luck trying to just leave your kid with someone for the night without bargaining away your life.  Despite all that, two-under-three was the best decision we have made so far. They are so close and have so much in common. My day is liberally sprinkled with moments like this:

Seriously, how could you not want more of that? In the end, we decided we all needed at the very least another year before thinking about adding more members to our awesome family, if anything so that the girls really have a chance to solidify their relationship and J. has a chance to go to school and become herself outside the home. And although I was at peace with this decision, it was a bit sad.

Until today.

Today I realized why we need more time to reevaluate if we want a third. Because today I was considering figuring out a time-share situation with anyone willing so that my kids wouldn't cross paths for at least a month. Probably longer.

Here are just a few of the things my kids said to each other today, with the sole purpose of making their sister scream like she is on fire:


"I'm taking all the crayons and throwing them in the toilet and flush them down and then you will never color again, EVER."

"I put you in the toilet and FL-USH! Bye-bye!"

"If you sniff those cookies, they will get stuck in your nose and you will have to go to the hospital."

"I take all the squares (magformers) and hide them and you have no cubes!"

"Yeah, well, you're a cube. And your face and your butt is a cube, too."

"That MY Mommy. You have Daddy."

"I not looking at you."

"I'm a dragon and I'm going to eat your bones. I got all your bones out and I'm grinding them up for soup. Now your bones are powder. Now I ate them."

"I going to have gas on your batgirl mask!"


No child their dinner, so I was the only one rewarded with a cookie. (Hubsy is at a meeting. He brought a plate of cookies, so he gets one, too. He also ate his dinner.) Because I'm not a short-order cook, dinner went into the refrigerator and there was much crying when graham crackers weren't provided. V. has come out of her room four times to tell me about her bug bites. J. spent a good 15 minutes yelling every excuse in the book to get out of her room, which she thinks leads to cookies, including "I licking books!" and "I have poop for you!"

This is all to say that today I ruled the Stay At Home Mom world, including a trip to Target that cost under $15. But, I also had to tell my preschooler at least four times that her sister was just trying to get her to screech, so she should not react that way while telling her that threatening to tickle or chase or force her sister into the roll of baby or Anna or a cat when she didn't want to be was disrespectful. I'm going to record this next time, so that I can save my breath. It'll happen before school drop-off tomorrow.

And that is parenting more than one. So in moments like right now, listening to J shoving diapers under her door and V rearranging the furniture in her room, I choose to remember those moments that shone today, despite the trash popcorn and the threats of mask-farting. Even those will be funny tomorrow. Eating gooey, warm, amazing chocolate chip oatmeal cookies helps tint the glasses to rose, too.

Every Living Thing

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Just yesterday, I heard about Finish The Sentence Fridays. Every week, bloggers are given a different writing prompt, a sentence to complete in their post. I thought maybe this would give me more inspiration to write regularly.

But I have kids, and when you think something like this, they can read it on your face and are willing to provide their own prompts. Without warning.

Tomorrow is Yom Kippur. This is the first time I'll be fasting in six years, so I took this opportunity to finish up the buffalo wings for lunch. I didn't want to have to think about them tomorrow. Just as I sunk my teeth into my first delicious wing, my preschooler looked at me with serious concern on her face.

"So two people can get married and decide they want a baby because they are really responsible and want kids. Then a baby grows in a mom's stomach. But how does the baby get there?"

Now. Hubsy and I have discussed at length how we will be honest with our children without over explaining. I'm sure if you are a parent of a kid under 10 and have internet access, you too have waded through the myriad of parenting articles on how to address this specific question. I'm not here to add to the pile. I am here to tell you that despite having a definite stance on addressing questions in childhood, having fielded questions from students about everything under the sun, and having even taught gender, puberty and reproductive education to children, at that moment, hunched over my wings, I froze. Maybe if I don't move she won't see me. 

"Well, a baby develops from an egg so small that you need a microscope to see it. Then it grows until it is a baby that can survive outside a mom's uterus, not stomach. Until then, the baby needs to stay inside so that its body can develop organs like the baby's lungs, heart, and brain." Good job. Eat your wings faster.

"I know, but how does the egg get there?"

"Women are born with many, many eggs. They are always there."

"So I have eggs? All girls have eggs? Then why do I look like Daddy?"

This is why some people drink wine at lunch. I get it now. 

This conversation went on, with talks of seeds and family structure and genetics, turning into how every living thing has a form of a seed, so that it can make more of its kind, like the apples she studied at school today. Don't you want to talk about apple day?! She sat there and stared at me with the same intensity she took to the two 100-piece puzzles she completed this weekend, both within an hour and both completely independently. She knows I'm sitting on the missing piece. She can see where it fits, but she doesn't know what it is, so she can't quite shape the questions to get it.

And now I'm stuck in this odd place where I'm relieved I could have this honest conversation with my child without telling her how sex plays into reproduction, and proud that I have a child who thinks of these kinds of obscure questions along with the fear that maybe she could sense my hesitation or that she'll start searching for avocado pits and apple pips because she is tired of me eschewing her pleas for another sibling and has some crazy idea of seeds from a talk that may have derailed a bit.

In the end, I'm glad she thinks this is normal table conversation and that she should ask us her questions, because kids will ask questions to anyone who will listen. I much prefer they hear it from me.

Disclaimer: If you read this and hoped the conversation was spurred because of recent household events, I'm sorry to disappoint. I discovered the aforementioned writing prompt idea while waiting to decline my invite to what my doctor cutely referred to as "the baby race." Let someone else win while I figure out if I can handle these questions a second time, let alone a third go-around. No, no. These are the thoughts my kids pull out of the blue.