May OAMC Big Day Re-cap

May Big Cooking Day Highlights & Tips:

Oh, if I only knew what I was getting myself into... My friend Tricia hosts a website called "Once a Month Mom" in which she documents her once a month cooking adventures for her readers... and she also goes a step - okay a leap forward by providing everyone with monthly menus, grocery lists, instructions, recipes, labels, and even an instructional podcast! This makes it insanely easy for those who are interested in doing once a month cooking but are extremely intimidated by the amount of time and brain power that goes into organizing the Big Cooking Day. Tricia has been wanting me to participate in this for awhile (I secretly think she wants to prove to the world that a working mom can survive one day of cooking an entire month's worth of food...) and she had finally won me over when she sent a OAMC meal home with me one day and I was able to experience the ease of just popping a meal in the oven. So, I called up my sister - who by the way is a much better cook than I am - and asked if she would be willing to try out this new hobby with me... and she was very excited. I'll take a minute to explain why two working moms would want to spend an entire day cooking food for the month: 1) it saves a lot of time and energy not having to make dinner after coming home from work every night of the week and it gives us more time to spend with our family because of that and 2) we will save at least $400 a piece per month on our grocery expenses!

Here is a re-cap of how our Big Cooking Day went this month as well as lots of tips and suggestions:

We decided to have our Big Cooking Day on a Monday (June 1st) - this worked best for Hollie's (sis) schedule as she works third shift in a sleep lab and has Sunday and Monday nights off. After reflecting on taking a vacation day off from work for our Big Cooking Day, I think I wish I would have given myself another day off to recover! Anyway, we did all of our grocery shopping for the ingredients we needed the day before (so on Sunday) and went together in order to split the cost effectively. We had an issue with the flank steaks at the store - there wasn't enough in stock! Thankfully, a worker came to my rescue and offered to cut us the amount we needed right then and there. 10.5 lbs of steak is a LOT OF STEAK! In the end, we spent approximately $186.00 on groceries per person. I believe the cost was a little high due to: 1) myself forgetting ALL of my coupons - Doh! and 2) the expensive meats on this month's menu. No matter what, we will still SAVE on our monthly grocery budget, so no worries there!


On Monday morning at 8:30 sharp, I headed to Hollie's with my crock pot full of cooked chicken from the night before and kitchen odds and ends that we needed extras of. I also brought an extra table for the crock pots (thank you Misty for the hint!) We took all of the groceries that we had purchased straight to her house the night before, and that really helped lighten my load on Monday morning. When I arrived, Hollie had already organized most of the food items on one table and had placed cutting boards and appliances on the countertop. I cannot stress enough the importance of having everything already laid out before beginning your cooking endeavor.


Hollie decided the night before that she would be "Person A" in the instructional list and I would be "Person B" - thank you, Hollie for letting me know this ahead of time :P - her reasoning: she cannot bake and person B was assigned all of the baking. So, I got started chopping and dicing a million and one ingredients and she got started on well, whatever she was supposed to be working on at the time - I'm not joking when I say that you end up in your own little "cooking world" oblivious to whatever the other person is doing... Anyway, I chose to hand chop all of the ingredients because I thought it would save time over using a food processor and having to clean it out constantly, etc.... let me tell you that I highly do not recommend this! It took me almost two and a half hours just to chop everything and I developed a few nasty blisters because of it! This seriously ate up my time and I fell way behind Hollie during our morning tasks... I do recommend having a sink full of soapy water at all times for cleaning dishes and utensils, this really helped keep the kitchen somewhat-tidy.

Without going into too much detail about the rest of our day - here is a list of other tips and suggestions when participating in once a month cooking:

- Be sure to double check ALL of the ingredients and match the amounts from the menus to the grocery list. Hollie and I put all of our faith into Tricia's organizational handy-work and did not do this = big FAIL on the amounts that we had (or didn't have) of some of our ingredients. This was totally our fault and we should have taken the time to double check for typos. Tricia may be uber-organized but she is after all, human... I think. ;)

- DO wear comfortable clothes and shoes! Tricia (always my angel) talked me into Crocs while we were in Baltimore - so so glad I wore these shoes while cooking yesterday! And no, they're not ugly at all! Take a look for yourselves here. I was surprised at how affordable they were too. I wore a comfy pair of my Old Navy walking shorts and I brought Alan's (hubby) apron over but never used it - it probably would have come in handy when I was trying to portion out the meatballs = mess!

- Chop the ingredients the night before OR use a food processor the day of to chop, mince, and dice veggies and fruits. Another option is to have a third person there just to chop and wash dishes. A husband would be great for this LOL.

- Be sure to cook in a large, open kitchen if you are able. I am so glad that we decided to cook at Hollie's house - even though her appliances are little more dated than mine, her kitchen is much more spacious and it eliminated a lot of unecessary run-ins with eachother! Plus we were able to pick out our own cooking spaces and stay there for the majority of the day.

- DO clean out your freezer and refrigerator. Hollie did this the day before and it was a HUGE help - we ended up needing to utilize BOTH on our Big Cooking Day.

- Wear plastic disposable gloves if you are going to be chopping ingredients or working with most of the raw meat. I should have listened to my wise, intuitive hubby and taken his advice on this one. Even though I trimmed my fingernails, I'm still finding yucky pieces of food under them and my hands smell like they will forever be tainted with the stench of onions!

- Be sure to use VERY LARGE mixing bowls, pans, stockpots, etc. We underestimated just how big our mixing bowls needed to be and thus had to halve some of the recipes and make them one at a time. This put us a little behind schedule - we will definitely invest in larger bowls next time, or hunt some down to borrow!

- Keep any ingredients that you have left over that are already cooked. I'm not sure how it happened, but we ended up with an entire extra box of spaghetti, two bowls of extra cooked chicken, and two bowls full of various extra "stuffing" for some of the recipes. Instead of wasting all of that energy and $, we threw the extras into freezer bags and divided it between the two of us. We plan on making shredded chicken sandwiches out of the chicken at least.

- Make sure the kids are with the daddies and not in your work area. My niece Hope wanted to sample I think, well, pretty much everything we were working on and when we weren't looking she decided to stir all of the spices and herbs for the BBQ sauce together = big mess all over the stovetop! Of course, if we would have been able to finish at a decent time this wouldn't have happened as I would have been gone before she arrived home. :P

- Have a bottle of wine handy, but if you're going to partake in that kind of refreshment, make yourself eat something during the course of the day. Which brings me to....

- EAT SOMETHING! I'm very finicky about eating while I'm cooking. If I have been around food for most of the day I usually do not have much of an appetite to speak of. And so during our big cooking day I hardly ate anything - this led to feeling like a Mac Truck had run me over by the end of the night. Even if you have to force yourself, make sure you are eating and drinking all day long to keep your energy up.

- Keep the music playing! This helped us get through our sluggish time, around 4-5:00pm when we knew we weren't going to finish by 6pm and we still had so much left to do!

- Start SUPER EARLY if you are participating in your first Big Cooking Day - or be prepared to work from sun up to sun down. We totally underestimated how long it would take us to cook. I had a target end time set for 6pm and that was allowing for extra time because we were "newbies." However, before we "new" it, it was time for the hubbies to pick up the kiddos from the sitter and then it was dinnertime.... and then it was bedtime! Yes, we did not finish until almost 10:00pm. Talk about a major time management malfunction, and I'm not sure how that happened either. Neither one of us took a break that was longer than 5 minutes and we may have only taken two of those during the entire course of the day! I'm going to chalk it up to inexperience.... at least that's what I'm hoping!

All in all, I truly do feel that all 13 hrs of hard work, smelly hands, sore feet, back aches, and mental drain was worth it... we will be able to come home at night, pop some food in the oven or microwave and just relax. The pocketbook savings won't hurt either. :)






Us hard at work.














About 1/3 of the food we made. Don't let that empty space in the freezer fool you! I was too tired to think of taking a picture after we made everything....




If you would like more information on Once A Month Cooking, stop by Tricia's blog to see the new June menu which just premiered yesterday. Or, check out the May menu to see the recipes that Hollie and I made to eat throughout the month of June. I am looking sooooo forward to chowing down on the homeade granola bars and fresh strawberry muffins.... and the chipotle chicken corn chowder... and the shakes....I could go on.....!

How to Survive a Seven-Hour Baseball Game... with Kids in Tow

Hubby and I had been planning a special trip to watch our beloved Cincinnati Reds for quite some time... and Monday (Memorial Day) was THE big day! The forecast called for a "chance" of a pop-up thunderstorm, which in Ohio weather-language means "85% chance nothing will happen" so we took the bet and carted both of the kiddos down to Cincy. Neither of us had a clue, mind you, as to how the kids might act and/or if they would both make it until the end of the game. Jake is typically pretty laid back - however - the starting time for the game was 1:10 = 10 minutes AFTER Jake usually goes down for a nap. So we were going to go with the flow and hope that he didn't turn into a sleep-deprived monster by the sixth inning!

Without boring any anti-sports fans out there, I will say that the first inning was very exciting! The Reds scored 5 unearned runs by the end of it - pretty impressive if you ask me - and we were there to witness it! Our seats weren't bad either... which proved to be a blessing when the sky above us darkened in the fifth inning and rain started coming down (we were under the overhang.) Drats! Blah! Ugh! Now what do we do with two figgity kids who have missed their nap? Jake was already getting to the "slap-happy" point (as we like to call it in our household) - you know, the point when you are past exhaustion and don't actually know what you're doing? He was there - big time. The dude behind us knows this all too well after having his knee angrily slapped multiple times by our Jakey boy. Our sweet, innocent little boy began wailing on any vulnerable victim in his sight... the men in front of him, beside him, and of course, behind him. So with the threat of a long rain delay looming and still 4 1/2 innings of baseball left in the game, Al and I had to switch to survival mode. Here is how we (and our little troopers) made it to the end of the game without sacrificing our sanity:

We headed straight for the food - after the lines died down. The Great American Ball Park now has $1 concession stands - would have been the BEST THING EVER if Marissa wouldn't have begged for cotton candy ($4.50) and a soft pretzel (also $4.50) which when combined cost more than all of our other food - Ugh. At any rate - eating kept the kids occupied for almost 45 minutes - SCORE!

I then spotted a slew of gumball and other toy machines. Which, at first thought, might seem like a bad idea to go stand by, but actually it was quite the opposite! Marissa was allowed to pick out one toy machine to put her quarters in - the small little bauble that came out kept her occupied for another 20 minutes or so while Jake tried like crazy to figure out how people were getting the gumballs out of the gumball machine - it was too cute to watch!

We spent the rest of the two-hour rain delay walking around the stadium and checking out different views of the baseball field. Jake loved this - but Marissa could have cared less. She may have asked "Can we go home now?" about 10 times by that point.

Once the rain let up a bit, we made our way back to our seats (which thankfully, were still pretty dry) and watched the field crew roll up the tarp. I tell you what, I never thought that it would elicit such joy and excitement from Marissa! Holy cow did she think that was fun to watch. We were relieved when the game started 20 minutes later - but we still had all of those innings to get through and by this time - well, it was almost din-din time for the kids. But Al and I made sure we kept the kids involved and interested in the game by doing what parents do best and exaggerated everything. We danced everytime a song came on, we roared "Charge!" everytime we were cued to, we pointed out our favorite players to the kids (Adam, we love you man!) and we let Marissa run down to the Reds' dugout to try and catch a ball at the end of every inning.

By the time the game was finally over, the kiddos had made it through a two-hour car ride, five hours of baseball and 2 hours worth of a rain delay and were to say the least, POOPED! Jake fell asleep 5 minutes after he was buckled in. Marissa, being the stubborn mule that she is, kept herself awake by playing her Leapster the entire way home.






I guess when all is said and done, it pays to get creative to pass the time and to let your kids know that you are there to have fun with them - even if the game doesn't go quite as planned. If you learn to "go with the flow" your kids will be likely to adapt right along with you... :)















Jake, a born & bred Reds fan couldn't take his eyes off of the game!
















Family Photo by the dugout.

Getting Rid of the Guilt - Week 2 + Binky Update

Binky Update
This past week, Al and I have been on a mission to begin weaning Jakey from his obsessive need for his "bink-bink." We started slowly by asking Jake to please pull his "binky out" in the event that he still had it in his mouth when he woke up in the a.m. Then, we hid it out of plain view until naptime. He was allowed to have it for naptime, car rides, and bedtime over the weekend. Then, while I was gone during the week (awesome conference I will blog about here later...) Alan took it up a notch and eliminated "binky-time" during car rides. So when I picked the kiddos up from the sitter's house yesterday, I expected Jakey to sit still in his car seat while I buckled him in, just like a perfect little angel, without so much as one request for his binky... but no.... I was mistaken. I couldn't even make it INTO the sitter's front door before he was frantically searching in his diaper bag for the stupid thing! ugh. Two steps forward, one step back I suppose. Of course, if Al had picked him up, the turn of events would probably have been different, but oh well. We'll keep working on it, and of course I will post some updates as we try to make some progress!

Getting Rid of the Guilt - Week 2
While I was out of town at the CYFAR (Children Youth and Families at Risk) Conference with colleague and friend Tricia, who is one of the most intuitive people I know by the way, we took a lovely Water Taxi ride across Baltimore's Inner Harbor. Of course, being the mommy that I am, I made the comment to her about how selfish and guilty I sometimes felt doing things without Jake and Marissa. To add insult to injury, this trip was a business trip - Tricia and I were presenting a workshop at the conference and here I was, away from my entire family and enjoying Baltimore without them... and.... gasp..... Having Fun Without Them due to work! Tricia just smiled at me and said "No, you just think that it might be more fun if they were here." So true! And yet, I still feel guilty whenever I have fun without the kiddos. My totally unscientific theory is that this stems from all of us parents wanting our children to experience the things we couldn't experience when we were younger. (Case in point - I never traveled further east of Indianapolis until I was 20 years old.) We want them to see all that there is to see of the world and experience it's many fascinating differences, to revel in all that the world and it's people have to offer. I can not wait until the day Alan and I can pack up the kids in our minivan and drive cross country - out to the Grand Canyon, Rocky Mountains, the great Mississippi and more! Isn't that what it is what it is all about, after all? .... exploring the unknown with your family by your side? But that was not the case on this trip, and I think I've come to terms with that. Our children need to understand that while family time is what binds us all together, the time that we spend apart also plays an important role in shaping us as individuals and enriching our lives. I couldn't help but think after I returned home last night that Marissa would not have been old enough to appreciate the beautiful small-town charm of Baltimore and Jake wouldn't have even remembered a bit of the trip anyway. So after putting everything into perspective - no more travel-apart guilt for me. No, sir. It's honestly okay for me to have fun without the family, they will all have plenty of their own traveling adventures in the years ahead. :)

Getting Rid of the Guilt - Week 1

As a working mommy, I often find myself being a little well, lax, on certain issues the pop up with our kiddos from time to time. Why do I find myself giving in to things a little too often? Probably because 1) I am physically, emotionally, and intellectually exhausted each day after I come home from work, 2) I honestly find it hard to concentrate on the kiddos' various issues long enough to efficiently deal with them! and 3) I feel a twinge of guilt everything I look into my children's faces, knowing that I choose to be away from them at least eight hours out of each day Monday - Friday. It is because of the latter reason that I am now on a personal mission to "get rid of the guilt" over the next few weeks.

This week, I'm going to break down and force myself to come to terms with the fact that my Jakey boy is no longer the infant he used to be and must.... I mean MUST be broken of the needy relationship he has with his pacifier. I recently browsed through some of our latest photos on the 'puter and he has that darn red binky in his mouth in almost every single one. I never had this issue with my daughter - she refused a pacifier even at a very early age. And so I would catch myself thinking snide things about parents who carted their older children around with binkies protruding from their mouths. And now I find myself being that parent!... and feeling like a complete hypocrit in the process. But this weaning thing needs to be done in baby steps... for mommy AND Jakey's sake. :( He has an extreme tendency to become very attached to many things that he comes across... I mean, the child sleeps with THREE blankies, THREE stuffed animals, and his binky for goodness sake!!! So.... this weekend will be the dawn of a new "day" for us and Jakey will be starting the weaning process from his beloved "bink-bink."


Wish us both some luck!!








One of the few recent photos of Jakey without his "bink-bink."

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