Been a little quiet on here

I’ve been caught up and busy with stuff around the house.

Some people go shopping at the grocery store.  To make some meals for my midwife, I just went puttering downstairs with one of my sturdy bags.

Made some freezer meals for my midwife.  She’s off catching babies around the world for a bit, so she put out a call for helping out her family while she’s gone.  My midwife is such a sweetheart.  🙂

Tomato sauce I boiled down.  The pot doesn’t really look huge here.  But I can stick a baby in that pot, no joke.

The 3.5yo helped me Squeezo the last of the tomatoes.  And see the giant pot?  I could probably squish the 3yo in there if I had to.

That’s right.  Making tomato sauce is hard work.

Buttermilk and butter the other day.  After which I promptly cultured the buttermilk, and need to make waffles or just freeze the stuff.  Sidenote, check out those little square containers!  A local salsa company has their salsa in these at the grocery store.  So, when I came across them one day at the farmer’s market, I asked the guy if I could buy some of his empty containers off  him.  Hey, it never hurts to ask, right?  And voila, he let me buy two dozen from him.  I think I need to see if I can get a few more.  I’m thinking they’re a perfect size for [freezer] jam anymore, plus squares are easier to stack than those goofy plastic Ball freezer jars.

Then there was a day of muffins.  A 7x batch of banana muffins, a double or triple batch of chocolate zucchini muffins.  Muffins, muffins, everywhere.

When you’re in the kitchen so much, this tends to happen.

First day of co-op is in the books.  Packing lunches stresses me out.  Takes more planning than just reheating leftovers from the fridge, you know?  And making it easy to eat since the kids lose interest in eating after about 10 minutes and want to go play with their friends.  I know there’s worse things, but darnit, they *need* to eat on those days.

Zucchini.  This is only from like three baseball-bat sized zucchini.  Something like 8-9 packages of 2.5 cups of shredded zucchini.  For my famous Chocolate Zucchini Muffins.  I still have a few more zucchini I need to take care of, they’ve been adding to the ambiance in my messy dining room.

We got a new-to-us freezer, from the rockin’ year of 1984.  Vintage is awesome sometimes.   It’s *so* much bigger than the little chest freezer in front of us.  The best part?  It’s totally a manual defrost, so it won’t try to kill the food.  And it’s huge.  I need to unload the laundry room freezer into this, defrost the laundry room freezer, then re-sort everything so we can sell the little chest freezer and be ready for the cow I’m expecting in about two weeks.  And see above the fridge/freezer there?  Hubby yanked down those horrible, awful, avocado/harvest gold blend cabinets (that you can sorta see in the foreground).  Yay!  We’re going to be putting in a shelf above the appliances.  Well, hubby will be, I just have plans.

Speaking of, these are my plans for this particular venture.  I’m sure hubby’ll tweak it some, but whatever.  He’s the one building it, he gets final say.  I just need to give him a starting point to jump off from, he does the magic.  And no, it’s not to scale.  I don’t have graph paper in my planner, I was just winging the whole deal here.  It’s close-ish.

While we (okay, the hubby) were messing around in the garage, our driveway looked all crazy.  Hubby and his magical craigslist juju has already sold that dresser and those crappy KidKraft things.  Next up, the chest freezer and a few other things as we get stuff cleaned out.  Yeehaw!

Then we had consignment sales.
First up, was half-off day at a nearby consignment sale.  Not too bad a total for 63 items.  Most of which were size 8-10 and bigger.  Once you get out of toddler clothes, things just flat out cost more, gone are the days of finding a Gymboree outfit for a buck or two.  I ended up with two pajama pants, 2 pajama sets, 6 sweatshirts, 21 short sleeved shirts, 10 long-sleeved shirts, 7 jeans, 1 pair of shorts, 1 skirt, 3 sweaters, 1 pair ballet slippers, 7 pairs shoes, 1 set full/double sheets, 2 books.  Sure, I look funny there with my list of what I still need in each size, but hey, you gotta try and stay on top of things somehow.

Tonight was a $10 bag sale.  So yes, all this for $10.  5 pairs of jeans, 1 pair of khaki cords, 2 khaki skirts, 2 pairs shorts, 1 swim coverup/towel, 3 short sleeved shirts, 1 dress, 1 long sleeved shirt, 2 tank tops, and a pair of dolly/newborn bloomers.  Didn’t find a *ton* (I had no use for bringing home stuff we wouldn’t actually wear/use like it seems other folks were doing, but whatever), but enough that the hour’s effort was worth it.

So yes, I’ve been a little busy around here.  With plenty more projects on the horizon.