MM: She’s Growing Up
December 31, 2007 | Leave a Comment
I had to share a moment rom my house earlier today. Amost 2 1/2 year old Sadie is standing in a chair at the table painting with her sister. She accidentally knocks over her 9 year old brother’s favorite mug. Uh-Oh.
Big bro runs out of the room to do his deep breathing (LOL!) so as not to yell at the baby. When she realizes what happened, Sadie runs up to me with her big round eyes and her finger up in the air as if to say, “By George I’ve got it!”.
She says to me: “I say sorry”.
So she runs off her in little fuzzy Dora slippers to the next room to apologize to her big brother, her arms up in the air to get/give a big hug.
Sniff. Sniff. She’s a baby no more.
What are your goals for next year?
December 27, 2007 | Leave a Comment
As the year draws to a close, many people become introspective about their lives. We think about how quickly the year has flown by, experiences we’ve had and lessons we’ve learned. This seems to be a common time for people to set goals.
Have you set any goals for 2008?
Would you mind sharing them? It will only take a second, and I have a free gift for someone who fills out this short survey.
Natural Moms Podcast #70
December 25, 2007 | Leave a Comment
This week on the show we are joined by Cindy Kirchhoff of Living in Rhyme. Cindy is a life coach and is here to tell us about Just Be Kind Day.
Download the mp3 or listen on the site.
Lowering Your Grocery Budget
December 22, 2007 | 12 Comments
Last week a mom started a thread at the forum asking whats your grocery budget like?
I thought I would share some of my tips for lowering the grocery budget here, and ask you to add some of your own. Personally, no matter what my food budget is looking like, I like to practice frugality in the kitchen to avoid waste and because being cheap makes me feel like I’m getting one over on the man. 
Here goes.
- Learn to love beans and rice, both of which are among the cheapest sources of good nutrition available, period. You can use your imagination to make this combo tastier, like cooking your rice with some coconut milk to make it sweet and yummy, or adding a little vegetable or chicken broth to your water, or using curry or other spices with the beans. Even if you’re not vegetarian, check out vegetarion cookbooks from the library for inspiration and recipes.
- Eat less meat, period. But remember that some veggies are expensive, like red sweet or yellow peppers which cost more than meat per pound! Variety is important in your diet but you can get those same nutrients from other, cheaper vegetables. Use lots of carrots, potatoes, onions, sweet potatoes and celery in your cooking, they’re the cheapest veggies and have tons of fiber to fill you up.
- Practice loss leader shopping. I know it’s a pitb to shop at more than one store, but if you stick to the loss leaders in the sales circulars you can save a boatload of money by going to more than one store (easier if you shop without the kids). If shopping at more than one store is too much for you because of multiple kids or being tired due to pregnancy (been there, done that, got the T shirt and the scarf), then ask hubby to stop by the store on his way home and make sure he has a detailed list of what to buy including name brands. The point is to buy the loss leaders ONLY from each local grocery store, and plan your menu around those cheap foods. You know the food manufacturers are in cahoots with the grocery stores and often send out their coupons in the newspaper when the stores are featuring their products on sale, so combine loss leaders with coupons and save more. It’s all marketing, so you might as well use the “system” to your advantage!
- Put together a price book so you know what’s really a great deal and buy more to save you money (great for stuff that saves like peanut butter, beans etc). You can do this the lazy way by simply keeping your receipts and jotting down in a notebook what you’re paying for stuff you routinely buy. Then you know if that buy one get one free deal is really cheaper, or if the store has jacked the price way UP in order to stick it to you (sad but true!). More on pricebooks.
- Cook stuff like chili, soups/stews and casseroles that stretch the protein.
- Do bulk if you can. You can buy 20 pound bags of rice at most grocery stores and eat that for pennies a serving, but it’s white rice. You can get bulk brown rice at Whole Foods or other larger health food stores. You might have to spend more than your weekly budget for the first two weeks of the month in order to take advantage of bulk savings, then spend less the last two weeks. - Cheap dinner ideas. Baked potatoes with melted cheese, a little diced bacon, green onions or broccoli etc on top is cheap.
Here is another: Slice sweet potatoes and sprinkle with salt, then douse with a little olive oil and then sprinkle garlic powder on top. Bake at 375 on a baking sheet. When soft, top with barbeque sauce and black beans. This is delicious and really cheap.
Another cheap dish that’s healthy is fried rice. I heat some oil in a large saute pan and cook some chopped onion until soft, add an egg or two (scramble). Then add garlic, peas, carrots, sugar snap peas, whatever veggies you guys like. Stir in leftover rice and top with a little soy sauce or teriyaki sauce for flavor. Protein, fiber, nutrients and super cheap!
Books like the Tightwad Gazette are great sources of cheap cooking ideas.
- Avoid lunch meats, boxed cereals, instant oatmeal and convenience foods like the plague. Not only does this stuff cost too much but it makes your blood sugar crash which makes you hungrier later …. and remember the food additives and multiple hidden flavors the manufacturers add to make you eat more! Proof that this is true: Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think
- You Pick It. In the spring and summer, do pick your own at berry farms and local farms (also organic). Search localharvest.org for local farms.
- Practice extreme rubber chicken. Never buy chicken unless it’s a whole one and on sale for .49 a pound, then buy two. Cook them both first (roast them in the oven with an orange peel or whole lemon cut up inside the skin, plus garlic and rosemary or whatever herbs you have, butter, pepper etc), eat chicken for dinner the first night.Then cut all meat off carcasses, freeze for casseroles/chicken salad sandwiches/chicken soup/etc. Then boil carcasses for chicken stock (adding onion, celery, spices etc for flavor).
- Refrigerator Stew. Keep a container in your freezer for small amounts of leftover vegetables, grains, meat and beans. When the container becomes full, you have the makings of a great soup. Growing up, my mom always made the best soups with everything but the kitchen sink. As long as you start with a base of onions sauteed in butter, it’s hard to go wrong.
- Don’t waste. Never toss out stale bread or the ends that no one seems to ever want to eat. Make it into home made bread crumbs or croutons instead. Throw bread into the blender and pulse until you have crumbs, and use to top casseroles or wherever bread crumbs are called for in recipes. If you have fruit that is over ripe, but not moldy, mash it up and bake it in muffins and breads or use in smoothies.
For health and to save money (and eat less), drink more water and drink a glass before meals. Teach your kids that beverages with flavor (juice, tea, etc) are treats and that we quench our thirst with water. They’ll learn to crave it.
There you have it. So what are your tips for lowering your grocery budget?
Frugal Friday: Free Money. Yes, I Mean It!
December 22, 2007 | 2 Comments
This week’s Frugal Friday beats all because below is an offer for at least $25 free, but actually much more, depending on you and your habits. You can’t really top free money, can you? Read on:
I opened a Bank of America checking account a year ago and signed up for their “Keep the Change” program. Basically it works like this: Each time you use your debit card, they “round up” the amount you spent to the next dollar. Then, they automatically deposit that amount of change into your savings account. That means if you pump $19.01 in your gas tank, they debit your account $20 and put the .99 in your savings account. I saved a lot of extra money last year quite mindless and painlessly, and what’s more, it made balancing my checkbook easier since I always entered whole dollar amounts into my checkbook. LOL!
Then BoA MATCHED my “change” amount penny for penny! They are putting that extra money into my savings account on the 22nd of this month. How cool is that? Free money. Once the first three months is over, they keep matching the change savings, at a lower rate. But still!
Oh, I forgot to mention that they gave me $25 for no reason at all other than opening the checking account. And there are no checking fees as long as you have direct deposit (and since I work from home, they DO count stuff like my Google AdSense earnings. Yea!).Anyway, they have a special deal now where you get $25 for opening an account… I can send you a link and you can open your account online. Let me know if you want me to send you an email invite because I will also get $25.
So, to recap. You open a Bank of America checking account. You get $25. Then you get however much you managed to save by using your debit card. Plus your friend Carrie Lauth here gets $25.
See what I mean? Free money.
p.s. I am really enjoying Bank of America. The tellers have all been super friendly so far, they give me deposit slips IN THE DriveThru. Every Time. Because I always forget. And don’t want to drag 4 kids into the bank. I even opened up two savings accounts there. So email me at carrie at carrielauth dot com and get your email invite, ok?
Cute Nursing Shirts
December 21, 2007 | Leave a Comment
I never wear nursing shirts anymore since my youngest almost never needs to nurse in public, but oh my goodness when I browse the cute styles available nowadays I almost want to buy some!
These are so cute you could totally wear them whether you were breastfeeding or not. Enter:
This looks like something Gwyneth Paltrow would wear.
And this one is simply dreamy with its filmy look.
I love that the new styles aren’t cut for maternity - duh - like we want to look pregnant once the baby’s out! More pretty nursing shirts
Get Cash for Your Used Books
December 20, 2007 | 1 Comment
Lately I’ve had little success selling my old books on eBay or Amazon. It’s frustrating because I don’t want to throw them away, but can’t lose money by relisting them (with eBay and Paypal fees to boot!). There are a few used books stores in the metro area, but most of them are a long drive, and to burn gas and spend all that time just to have most of the books rejected doesn’t excite me… plus I would end up blowing my budget shopping while I was there. 
So I searched around for another option and here’s what I found. Online book swaps and sales sites.
This is just as it sounds - they pay cash for your gently used books. The process was super easy. I simply entered the ISBN of some of my books and voila, they offered me a payment for one of them. You just print out their postage paid label (nice!) and packing slip and you’re all set. Love that.
This one doesn’t pay you cash, but you earn credits which can be used to get new (used) books to feed your bibliophile self. I haven’t tried this one yet but when I do I’ll come back and let you know my experience. Tell them Carrie Lauth sent you please if you sign up - I’ll earn points, and you can earn points referring friends too.
These are two great ways (other than Amazon and eBay) of keeping books out of landfills.
Update: Well that was fast! I had just listed a bunch of books on PaperBackSwap and minutes later I had a request to send one! I’m stoked. Now I get to ask for a free book from another PaperBackSwap user.
PaperBackSwap gives you a “wrap” to print out with the address of the recipient and your return address all filled in. They even tell you how much postage to put on the package based on the weight of the book (this information they already know since you entered the ISBN to list the book - VERY convenient!). The “wrapper” is the package so you don’t even have to hunt for an envelope to ship the book in. The whole process was super quick and easy.
ecoWednesday: Eco Friendly Trash Bags
December 19, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Eco Friendly trash bags seems a bit oxymoronic. Although the point is to create as little trash as possible (with reducing, reusing, recycling, composting, etc) we still make some trash.
But what do we put it in? I have to admit that I had not really thought about this much. Then I discovered recycled trash bags: Seventh Generation
Amazon has a really cool new autoship kind of feature so you can have these sent to you automatically every few months. Cool!
Interview With League of Maternal Justice’s Kristen Chase
December 17, 2007 | 1 Comment
Carrie: Kristen your website that we’re going to talk about today is http://www.leagueofmaternaljustice.com. I have been seeing these little buttons all over the internet especially on some of the blogs that I visit. I checked it out and thought how fun and interesting!
You were on Mom’s Morning Show talking with Kelly McCausey the other morning. I’m on that pretty regularly and I helped her co-host it yesterday. I thought oh, I really need to have her on the show because we obviously have a lot of pet topics in common. So tell us what LoMJ is and how it came about.
Kristen: It’s basically a mom activist group. If you go to the website you’ll see our two superhero figures. We’ve got a mom holding a breast pump, she’s dressed up with a mask on and we’ve got a pregnant mom holding a chicken drumstick, just to give people an idea that what we’re trying to do is take mom activism and make it a little more accessible. And put some fun into it! And I think…not to make light of the issues that we’re trying to highlight, but as a way to get people more involved.
And so my friend Catherine who blogs at herbadmother.com and I decided to start something the whole Facebook debacle; when they had banned the breastfeeding pictures. We just thought it was ridiculous and we wanted to say something about it. So we put this together, it’s just another way to use the powerful online mom community, to spread the word and hopefully make some change.
C: That’s so interesting to me. I haven’t gotten really involved in the controversy about the YouTube and Facebook issues, but I’ve certainly been keeping up with what other people are saying about it. I’ve talked about this before on the show, how ridiculous it is to me that a mother feeding her infant is somehow pornographic, but you can’t drive down the road without seeing huge billboards with adult entertainment with women coming out of their bikini tops…
K: …when you go to the grocery store with the magazines. The whole thing is so ironic. I think that’s why so many people are outraged. We’re not, Catherine and I, we don’t consider ourselves to be anti boobs in terms of them not being used for advertising. We see women in a bikini, it doesn’t offend us. What it comes down to, these sites… you flip through, you see not only pictures of women in bikinis in sexual positions, but you’ve got these pro anorexic sites and groups, and you’ve also got women and men who engage in self mutilation and that kind of stuff. You can find those in two seconds. The whole thing with YouTube is… I clicked breast and you wouldn’t believe what came up! And yet here is this breastfeeding video, totally harmless, you can barely see anything because the pictures are fuzzy, and it’s banned. It makes absolutely no sense.
C: You really have to wonder about the agenda of these decision makers. What is their deal? I mean really!
K: The problem is, they have the community, at least on YouTube, community policing the site. I think that is a huge mistake. Because you get some hothead…Our video, as opposed to the other breastfeeding videos on there, we had tagged “news and politics”. We also tagged it under “Bill Maher”. And what happened was, we had a lot of those types of folks meaning not breastfeeding moms, searching for it. We had a lot of political folks. If you had seen the video, it had over 90,000 views, but our comments were crazy. People were comparing breastfeeding to urination, comparing it like Bill Maher did to public masturbation. What’s happening is, it annoyed someone so much that they probably flagged it. And what YouTube did, they said “inappropriate content” and they banned it.
There’s no grey area. It’s black or white. “Oops! There’s boobs. I see nipple, I’m banning it”. That’s what’s so frustrating to us. Lets stop with this whole “breastfeeding equals sexual explicitness” thing that is being perpetuated.
C: It really doesn’t make sense because I had a similar experience looking at a breastfeeding video or maybe a home birth video with breastfeeding in it. On the related videos link, I clicked on it and it took me to several. One of them was some kind of training video for the cosmetic surgery industry. It had this woman standing there, you couldn’t see her head, just her from the throat to the waist. Completely nude, with this guy drawing marks all over her where they’re going to cut, where they’re going to do this or that. It’s just so interesting how that is somehow ok.
So how does a mom get involved … an ordinary bogging mom or a mom with a website, how does she get involved?
K: Well she just has to get annoyed, a little bit annoyed! The other thing too is we focus so strongly on the breastfeeding but there are moms out there that perhaps it’s something they’re done with… or it’s not a huge issue in their mind. The other thing we’re focusing on is the toy recalls too, if people have that on the forefront of their minds. People can go to the website and snag one of our buttons and put that up on your blog. We also have a Cafemom group, where we try to keep the discussion going and that’s great for moms who don’t blog. I know there are moms out there. I don’t know too many… but there are moms that don’t have a blog.
C: How can they do that? How can they survive motherhood without blogging?!
K: Yes I know! So they can go to Cafemom and join us and we try to update the blog LoMJ at least two or three times a week. I know there’s some really exciting things going on now with the toy recalls, also with the whole plastics. The BPA leaching into the bottles… that’s a huge issue for moms right now, even breastfeeding moms who have to pump or exclusively pump. It’s still something that is important to them. So we’ve got a couple exciting things like that. So really it’s just sticking us into your feed reader, if you use Google or Bloglines. Also visiting the site and commenting. And writing posts yourself. We’re not petition signers, momsrising.org is great for that aspect of the activism. What we’re about is allowing moms to use their voice by putting the button up on their blog.
C: So Kristen tell us about your other website, cool mom picks.
K: Sure, for bloggers we call it a blog, for non bloggers we call it a website. It’s a shopping blog and basically through the holidays we’re posting three times a day. We feature products and services with a kid focus. Of course, they’re for moms and the people that love them. Our focus is specifically hand made or artisan mom business small business, as well as a lot of items that are made or invented by moms themselves. We write cheeky editorials, so it’s fun to read as well as some of the products are very unique. It’s not stuff you’re gonna find at Target, which of course is great right now when you’re thinking about toys. We have a safer toy guide as well as a holiday guide. My partner is in Brooklyn, and she is my partner in crime, searching the web for really cool stuff.
C: Awesome. When you were talking about what individual moms can do to get involved with LoMJ, something popped into my head. I’m not sure if you’ve kept up with this or if you read her blog, but have you ever visited Jennifer Laycock aka the Lactivist’s blog?
K: Yes absolutely. She had been emailing us regarding the whole YouTube thing. There was a question as to whether… we had Christina Aguilera’s song Beautiful, and there was some question as to whether it was a copyright issue. But the email we got said “inappropriate nature and inappropriate content.” They have a flag specific to copyright. So we actually reloaded the video without the song in case that was the issue.
C: I wasn’t even going to talk about that specifically but what I was going to bring up was the fact that she is getting negative comments from other breastfeeding moms because she is attempting to wean her 2 year old. And I had the thought… and I have a blog post on the natural moms talk radio blog about that, it’s entitled “I’m for Breastfeeding, Not Nitpicking”. I think that one thing that we can do is avoid… to suspend judgment of other mothers, and other breastfeeding mothers. Because if we can’t honor each other… in my book, 2 years of breastfeeding is a pretty darn good accomplishment!
K: That is a champion breastfeeder there…seriously.
C: It really bothers me that she has people out there criticizing her, they want to strip her of her Lactivist title…
K: Well the thing is, what is a Lactivist? When I started this site, I didn’t really consider myself to be a Lactivist. It’s become in a way related to feminism. It’s like a lot of women don’t consider themselves to be feminist. But there are feminists that burn their bras, and there are those that write posts and speak out, and there are feminists that don’t say anything but just live according to making choices. I think it’s the same with breastfeeding. I think you have to do what is right for you. In some situations, breastfeeding for two years is almost impossible if you have to go back to work. There’s no way, if I had to work full time and pump - holy moly! I give a lot of people credit. I think you have to consider the person’s situation and know that and be supportive.
I think that is what it comes down to. You know the whole government PSAs that they ran, they did all those commercials and its like “Yea! Breastfeeding, you should breastfeed!” But ten they’re like, good luck to ya! Don’t post pictures on Facebook of you breastfeeding, cause they’ll get banned. But you should breastfeed.
So there’s no support and there’s none of this yea to you for doing it for two years. It’s not for me, maybe I only did it for six months. Or maybe I am going to do it until my id can spell breastfeeding. But people just need to be supportive.
C: Yeah they really do. We have to as a group, support each other so that this kind of stuff is less likely to happen. It really is silly.
K: Divisive, it’s what it comes down to.
C: You know we hear so much negative stuff about celebrities that say stuff. Like the whole Bill Maher thing, oh he made himself sound like a total idiot! But there are other celebrities who are doing something to encourage attachment parenting and breastfeeding, like Noah Wyle is very outspoken. But you hardly ever see anything about that. I remember one day I was trying to get more information about what he was doing, because I read something about him on a website somewhere about a video he did that was published on a Doctor’s website. I think it was Dr. Jay Gordon. Yeah, it was on his website. I watched it and I thought man, I’ve never even heard about all that he’s doing, him and his wife. I Googled it and there was like, nothing. I had the hardest time scraping together some information about what he was doing to promote attachment parenting. But, you know bad news sells. That’s just the way it goes. And, it gets around …
In terms of women doing what they can, I had a good friend who, a couple of years ago she told me her story about breastfeeding her daughters. She was unable to get either one of them to latch on to the breast after weeks and weeks of trying everything. It turns out they had an anatomical anomaly. They had a very misshapen palate, a very arched palate. She tried everything. She ended up pumping for a year for each of these girls. They had exclusive breast milk feeding for one year! As she was telling me this story I could just feel her pain and guilt. And I thought, oh I admire you! I don’t know many women who would have committed that much. And I had never had that much challenge, that much difficulty. So I’m not even sure how I would have reacted to that situation. But we really have to give ourselves some credit and give other moms some credit for where they’re at and what they’re able to do.
K: Absolutely. I agree with you 100%. That attitude, at least in the circle of blogs that I read. I know that a lot of moms that I read have a lot of guilt about either not being able to breastfeed, willingly trying it and doing the best they could, but were unable to do so and therefore for them to have the support of having other people saying: “It’s ok, it’s alright if you did it and weren’t able to, you’re still a good mother”. I think we need to have more of that support.
C: Thanks for joining us and telling us about LoMJ and http://www.coolmompicks.com
K: Absolutely. And we feature a lot of breastfeeding products and also through the holidays, toys are huge. I know people are searching for toys during the holiday season and we have a lot out there that are safe and still really cute. Always important! Thanks for having me.
Natural Moms Podcast #69
December 17, 2007 | Leave a Comment
This week we are joined by Kristen 
Chase of League of Maternal Justice, a fun (and sometimes irreverent!) site for armchair activist Moms.