Blogging is a Girl's Best Friend

Thank you all so much for all your well-wishes during my vacation! I'm so happy to be back, we had quite a harrowing experience on the drive in, we ran into both a torrential downpour near Provo, Utah; which when combined with some road work delayed us a bit, and an actual blizzard, which threatened to derail the whole trip! I was driving from outside Salt Lake City, when the rain began to pour. Strangely, there was tons of traffic; couldn't figure out why, because it was 8 pm on a Saturday night! Finally, after white-knuckling the steering wheel for a few hours, the rain became so heavy I couldn't see which lane I was in! I pulled over and switched with James; thank goodness! Shortly thereafter, the rain turned into snow! Semi trucks were creeping along, and we saw lots of cars pulled over and even a huge accident. It was terrifying! We made it safe and sound; albeit with snow covering the bins of clothes on our luggage rack! I didn't get to sleep until 5 am, but James let me sleep late, so I'm reciprocating by letting him snooze for a bit right now.

I feel like I've gained a lot of perspective while I was gone. Although I love my etsy shop and plan to be successful, it's not the be-all and end-all of my life, nor even of my soap career. I think I spent too much time obsessing over it, and feeling like a failure when I didn't perform to my own expectations. I was surprised to find that when I was separated from my computer; what I missed the most was blogging, which I do strictly for my own pleasure; and I hope the enjoyment of others! I was able to do some soul-searching as well, and some of you wonderful followers may have sensed there's more to me than the proud mother and wife I am now. After a lot of considering and thinking, taking into account possible ethical and legal ramifications, I've decided to start another blog; anonymously; which tackles some tough subjects. It will be both darker and more inspirational that this blog, which I love and will continue to do. I felt the need to have it anonymous, in order to avoid either embarrassing or libeling people involved; I still have to consider how best to promote it without connecting it to this blog, or to me personally. Any ideas would be welcome!

I'm now on to working through my huge bins of dirty laundry, and grocery shopping, and I hope; making a nice dinner for my boys and men after so many days of restaurant food! I also lost a crucial part to my sewing machine in the days leading up to our trip, so I have to go about replacing it before I can begin on my new projects, of which I have many! Including, by the way, a wedding dress for my mother, who announced her upcoming marriage in May; and asked me to make her a wedding dress that is not too formal for the beach, and both stylish and age-appropriate. I found a wonderful champagne-colored silk/satin; which will look great with her complexion; and honestly; her figure is more youthful than mine! We even joked that I should pass on my size 4 wedding dress to her; since I have no doubt it would fit her!

Happy Sunday, I hope you all have had a great weekend!

If there's a cure for laundry; I ain't found it!

Happy Friday! I know on this blog I've bemoaned the constancy and volume of the laundry in my busy house, so I decided to make it an actual topic,  rather than just a complaint, and share some tips I've learned over the years and mountains of laundry. Just to give you an idea of the vast scope of the laundry that is done in this house, I've posted the picture below, which is clean laundry waiting to be folded. This is not the biggest mountain I've ever had, this is my normal laundry pile that is produced ever other day!

Just to keep up, I wash and dry at least two loads on the "off" day, as well as about five loads on the days I plan to fold. And don't get me started on the sheets! My problem with laundry started when I was quite young. We had a large family growing up, and I often folded laundry with my sister. Actually, my sister folded, and I sat and cried because I hated laundry so much. So, the joke's on me, because I got married and had five little boys, and there is nearly as much laundry now as when I was a little girl, crying because I had to fold part of it!

And unfortunately, I have looked far and wide for a cure, and have found none! The only way around laundry is through it! In order to reduce the cost of doing laundry, at the very least, I found a way to make my own laundry detergent that costs only .03 per load, instead of the 15 or more cents per load using the Costco size natural laundry detergent. It's easy to do, with ingredients that are readily available, and it works; it really does! So here is the "recipe" I use:

For 1.5 gallons (the size of the empty laundry detergent jug I have)

4 oz Fels Naptha Soap, grated
1 Cup Borax (my fave)
1 Cup Washing Soda (like Baking soda, but in the laundry aisle under that name)
Water (preferably distilled, but I use tap water all the time)
A few drops of the essential oil of your choice (lavender, lemongrass, lemon, are all nice)

Melt the grated soap in a saucepan with 2 cups water. Warm up more water and add about 3/4 of a gallon to the laundry jug with a funnel. After the soap is melted, add the borax, washing soda, and essential oil, until they are all combined and dissolved. Add mixture to the jug, then fill with more warm water to the top. Shake often as the mixture cools, and before each use. Use 1/2 cup per load; warm water cleans the best with this; as most detergent.

So I may not have found a cure; at least not easily obtainable (think delivery laundry service....) but at least you can save a little money, as well as use something that is not petroleum based and is free of surfactants. I will post later about my folding system; and I will keep dreaming about that cure!

Check out my new feature; tips from a 1951 cookbook on thriftiness and homemaking, I will be posting a new tip every day!

The greatest thing since...

I've recently been trying to find ways to stretch my grocery budget even further. I've always been very thrifty, but because of the state of the economy in the last few years, I've had a need to keep my grocery budget the same, while at the same time joyfully expanding our family...twice! It was this need to keep costs down that led me to learn the art of soap making; and we all know how that turned out! I also cloth diaper and use cloth wipes, make my own soap (obviously) as well as laundry detergent, buy in bulk, make everything from scratch, and pretty much do everything humanly possible to get the most out of my grocery budget while still providing my family with hearty and (I hope) yummy meals day in and day out. Recently, Elvis began to eat solids, and this has put additional strain on my poor little budget, especially since he absolutely refuses to eat the homemade baby food that I intended  to be his only food, and I'm still working on getting him to eat "regular" food, since I don't believe in giving children purees for any longer than necessary. Because at the moment I am spending something like, eeek! 10 to 20 dollars a week on baby food, I decided to start making all the bread we eat with my own little hands! I've always been an avid baker, making bread to have with dinner several times a week, but I've never felt equal to the task of providing the bread for toast and sandwiches, not to mention the bagels, hamburger buns and hot dog buns that our family uses every week. We can easily go through a loaf of sliced bread a day, and although I shop at a bread "thrift" store, at an extremely reduced cost, it is still triple the cost of homemade bread, and of course, not nearly as delicious. My favorite recipe only uses one pound of flour, and a nominal amount of yeast and salt; costing only 25 cents per loaf, a far cry from the price of bread in stores. It will take some getting used to, since we are all used to eating sandwiches on uniformly sliced, abnormally soft-crusted commercial bread, which as a bonus is filled with sugar or high-fructose corn syrup, dough conditioners and preservatives, and a huge amount of sodium compared to homemade. Before they "invented" pre-sliced bread, people were used to eating toast or a sandwich on a thick, rugged slice of bread, and thought nothing of it. I hope that in my family at least, we can go back to blithely eating a hunk of bread without complaint!

My high point of the week....

http://www.cottonbabies.com/product_info.php?cPath=37&products_id=1853
I am a reformed disposable diaper user; after years of scoffing openly at those who chose cloth (sorry, guys!) and went into the cloth diapering gung-ho and determined to not use so much as a diaper wipe. I've stuck to that, using "reusable" wipes and only using one disposable diaper a day (for nighttime, and even then using only chlorine-free disposables). I got into a great routine of washing/folding/washing/folding and all was well. Until a few weeks ago, when our baby E was introduced to solids. EEEEWW. My sweet little Elvish One turned quite messy and stinky! Then I remembered way back when I was a hormonal pregnant lady, frantically researching and buying the best possible items for my precious baby-to-be; I found out about the product above; a flushable liner to lay into the cloth diaper that allows you to easier remove the...uh, soil and flush all your cares away! I ordered two rolls from Cotton Babies (a great shop), one roll for our bedroom where we change the majority of diapers and the other for the living room, where we often are for first and last changes of the day. They are awesome! Makes a cloth diapering mama's life much, much easier!