Dinner's in the Freezer

As we were getting ready this summer for Jason to start PA school, I really wanted to figure out some kind of meal plan for our family. In California, we were just kind of winging it on a daily basis. We'd look around our kitchen at dinnertime, pick something to cook, and make it. It meant that we had a lot of the same stuff over and over and over, because we just had to work with what we had and it was hard thinking up new stuff on the spot.

Now, we're having different, good food every night. Our current plan is based off two principles: theme nights, and freezer meals.

The theme idea comes from "The Food Nanny." Her blog is down right now, so I can't link to it, but basically she says that each night of the week should have a set theme. Some of her ideas are "Comfort Food Night," "Mexican Night," "Pizza Night," etc. Our theme nights are:

Sunday: Beef or Pork Night
Monday: Chicken Night
Tuesday: Pasta Night
Wednesday: Fish Night
Thursday: Mexican Night
Friday: Chicken Night
Saturday: Soup Night

(Also, you know have you say a word over and over and over it starts not to seem like a real word? Well, all the sudden "night" doesn't look like a real word to me. It's a real word, right?)

The freezer meal part of our plan comes from a conversation I had with my sister Alyse. A little while ago we were talking on the phone, and she mentioned that she'd tried out a cookbook called "Once a Month Cooking." The idea is that you buy all the groceries for a month's worth of dinners all at one time, cook up all the dinners at the same time, freeze them into daily-sized portions in your freezer, and then pull them out when needed. She'd tried it out with two week's worth of meals, and she liked it.

I really liked the sound of that, so I looked up the book on Amazon. The reviews were just okay, so I looked around on Amazon some more, and found "Don't Panic - Dinner's in the Freezer." It was based on the same idea, and had hundreds of great reviews. I really wanted to try it, so I bought it (and as much as I love books, I rarely buy them - I usually get them from the library, or as gifts. If I bought as many books as I read, I'd go broke!) and that's saying something! It came in just a couple days.

As soon as it arrived, I went through it with Jason and we marked all the recipes we thought sounded good. I read the first couple chapters that explain the benefits to freezing meals ahead of time, how to plan multiple meals at once, how to shop, what to do on the "cooking day," how to freeze everything, and what to do on the "serving day."

I've done three (I think?) cooking days since then, and made about two months of dinners in those three cooking sessions. They're all frozen and stored away, in one-dinner-sized portions. Our dinners are now written out and planned until the end of September, based on our theme nights, and all in our freezer ready to go. All we have to do is pull them out of the freezer the night before and put them in our fridge, and then put them in the oven or on the george foreman when it's time to eat!

I really really like how it's working. We've been eating our frozen dinners for weeks now, and they're really yummy and so easy to prepare on the day of. This is a great system, and I'd highly recommend the book "Don't Panic - Dinner's in the Freezer" to anyone who'd want to try the same idea.

Some Books I've read Lately

Books. I miss books. I feel like I haven't been reading as many as I used to, and I miss having the feeling that I'm on top of all the new books coming out. I haven't felt like that in a while; I feel like I'm behind in all the books that have come out in the last couple years. And when I say "all the books," I pretty much mean children's books. Because those are the ones I like the most.

I have read a couple lately, though. We went to our new library a couple weeks ago, and it's great. It's a lot smaller than the one we had in California, but it has a really nice children's section with puzzles, hand puppets, a big storytelling area, and of course, tons of books. The adult section's not bad, either.

Here are a couple books that I've read lately:

First off - Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, by Susannah Cahalan. I already talked about this book in this Captain's Log post, so I won't say too much more about it, other than that it was good. In a nutshell: True story, written by the woman who it happened to. Her body attacked her brain, and she went crazy. Her family took her to the hospital and none of the doctors (some of the best in the nation) could figure out what was happening to her. Then one did. It's really gripping; once I started it I couldn't put it down.

Second - David and Goliath, by Malcolm Gladwell. This is my fifth Malcolm Gladwell book I've read. I did like it, but I like his others better. I felt like as this book went on, he was kind of stretching to fit his examples in his main point. But, it was still really interesting and I particularly enjoyed the chapter on David and Goliath themselves, the chapter on basketball, and the chapter on universities.

Third, and this is probably my favorite of the lot - Mindless Eating, by Brian Wansink, Ph.D. This book was so cool! It's not a diet book, so don't start with that impression of it (although if you apply the principles you learn from it, it can definitely help you eat less). This book is all about the pyschology of eating, written by the guy who's done probably more studies on it than anybody else. It's so cool! He talks about all the different studies they've done, from putting secretaries' candy in a clear bowl vs an opaque bowl, or calling the same food items different names at their fake restaurant, or serving food in bigger containers or smaller containers or more bowls or fewer bowls or with fast music or slow music or all sorts of stuff. It's just really cool, really interesting, and I love the way the book is written. It's written in a totally down-to-earth, funny style. And I love that the person writing it actually knows what he's talking about; he's the one who's done all the studies, for years and years and years! Anyway, I highly recommend this book. It was a really enjoyable and interesting read to me.

So those are the new books I've read this month. I've also started re-reading the Harry Potter series; I just finished the third one last night, so I'm on one of my favorites - the fourth book. I also had an idea today, that I'm going to make a big list of all the kids books that have come out the last couple years that I want to catch up on, and then try to read them all this year. I doubt our little library will have all of them, so it might require some creativity, but I really want to feel on top of my book reading again. If you have any recommendations for recent-ish (like last five years) kids' books, please tell me!

Finished Bookshelf

Do you remember the pictures last week of Jason building a bookshelf? Here's a reminder:

Well, it's all done and painted and filled with books. Here's the finished product!

I loooove it! If you follow me on Pinterest, you've probably seen on my "Playroom" board where I've pinned a million pictures of rain-gutter bookshelves or flat display bookshelves. I really like how they make it so the kids can see the front of the books. It makes it way easier for the books to catch their interest and for them to choose one to read.

Jason did such a good job building this bookshelf and I love the way it fits into our playroom. We used these free plans from Ana White, slightly modifying them for our space. In addition to the natural lean built into the bookshelf, we secured it to a stud in the wall.

I plan to change out the books almost every day, with books from the bookshelf in their room and the bookshelves in the office. Also, we decided that this is a really good place to keep the girls' library books, because it keeps them all in one place and they'll be able to access and read them easily.

And that's our new, home-built bookshelf!

York Photo Photobook Review

Hi everyone! It's been a while since I did a review of a photo book company, but I've got a couple lined up that I want to do - MyPublisher, York Photo, Blurb - so let's just get started!

Last autumn I saw a deal for the company York Photo. I'd never used them before, but Christmas was coming up and they had some cute themes for their photo books, including an Instagram theme. My stepsister MaCall posts lots of cute pictures on Instagram, and when I saw the Instagram theme I instantly thought of her and knew that's what I wanted to do for her and her husband Aaron for Christmas.

I picked a time frame for the book so that I could choose the right amount of pictures (I chose "Fall 2012"), saved all the pictures on my computer, and then uploaded them into York Photo's software (which is all online through their site), and put the book together over a couple days.

Here are a couple pictures of the cover, some of the inside pages, and the binding:

I was really pleased with how it turned out. Having never used York Photo before, I didn't know what to expect. Also, it was a softcover, and I usually only do hardcovers, so I was wondering how that would turn out too. But it was really good! Good quality paper, cover, binding, and printing.

The one downside of York Photo was that I found the software somewhat hard to work with. Sometimes it would run very, very slow. Additionally, the backgrounds were sorted into kind of weird categories and you couldn't search for one type of backgrounds - all the blue ones, for example, or stripes, or whatever. You just kind of had to browse through everything to find what you wanted. But, I did make the book almost a year ago now, and they might have improved their software since then.

So that was my experience with York Photo in a nutshell. The software was somewhat hard to work with, but the book turned out nicely.

To see my other photo book reviews, check out the posts below:

Shutterfly Photo Book Review
Shutterfly Premium Leather Layflat Photo Book Review
Shutterfly Calendar Review
MyPublisher Photo Book Review
AdoramaPix Photo Book Review
Collage.com Photo Book Review
Photo Book Comparisons

Nephew's Quiet Book

I'm posting this over on my Quiet Book Blog today, so I thought I should share it here, too!

Back in April and May when my brother Banks and my sister Alyse and their families were visiting California, my nephew had his first birthday! For his birthday present, I made him a quiet book.

Something I did with this quiet book - and I really really love how it turned out - is I sewed it a cover. I cut a big piece of fabric out of a soft, old t-shirt, then sewed the first and last pages directly on to that fabric (turning in the edges so that it's a nice clean line). I sewed the two middle pages back to back, then sewed the edge of that back-to-back page to the middle of the inside of the cover. So, the whole book is all connected and one piece, and the cover is nice and soft!

Anyway, I'll quiet rambling. Here's Nephew's quiet book!

The individual pages:

The binding and cover:

If you'd like to see my other quiet books, you can click here: The Quiet Book Round-up!, the Butterfly Book, and Two New Quiet Book Pages.

My other nephew's birthday is this week, too...I guess I have to get busy, haha! ;)

Small Bathroom Redo

Okay, so  you know all those pictures of the house I've been promising? Well, they're finally coming. I took them yesterday, and they'll be posting today and tomorrow. So you can finally see our new house. :)

The first thing I wanted to show you, before the whole rest of the house (which will be in one post tomorrow) is the bathroom that we repainted when we moved in. This is that bathroom on move-in day:

It's the girls' bathroom, and it's across from their bedroom.

The walls were yellow, just like the rest of the house. But whereas in the rest of the house the yellow is pretty and nice, in this bathroom it just looked kind of sickly. (Also, the shower curtain in the picture was left by the previous homeowner, and isn't our style.)

Additionally, the bathroom had this cheapy particle-board cabinet above the toilet, which I hated. It doesn't look too bad in the picture, but it made the room feel really small by sticking out of the wall so far, and it just looked really cheap. The part in between its bottom shelf and its cupboards was backed by this cardboard-type stuff that had a line across it, and the doors didn't close all the way, and I just hated the whole thing.

After debating with myself for a little bit, I decided to take the cabinet down. I knew that if I did, we would have to repaint (you could tell just by looking at it that they didn't paint behind the cabinet). And I am so glad we took it down and repainted. This is the bathroom now:

It's so much better!!! I love it. It makes me happy every time I walk into it.

I chose the color for the room by going on my pinterest "House Idea" board to see what kind of bathrooms I liked. It might sound silly, but my pinterest boards know my style better than I know my style. Whenever I see something on pinterest I like, I pin it on one of my boards. Then, later, if I need to figure out what I like, I go to that board and see if there's a pattern. That's how I figured out I like white kitchens - I was looking at my board one day, and realized that every single kitchen I had pinned had white cupboards. And this time, when I looked at the bathrooms I had pinned, I saw a pattern too - fresh blue or teal walls. Several of the bathrooms (and laundry rooms) I had pinned had lovely, fresh blue walls.

So now that I knew I wanted some type of blue or teal, I put the shower curtain up (it's one that we've since we got married, but never got to use until now because we had two and used the other one), saw that it had blue in it, and got a ton of paint chips from Home Depot that I thought might match. By comparing them to the shower curtain once we got home, I narrowed it down to just a couple colors that went really well with it, and Jason and I together decided on Behr color #510A-2 "Salty Tear." (And now that it's up, I looove how the color looks in the bathroom.)

After another trip to Home Depot to get the paint and all supplies we needed, my mom and I prepped the room and painted it the next day. My mom was incredibly helpful - she's painted so many rooms in her life she's pretty much a professional, and she knew everything we needed and what to do. Thank you Mom! :D

Here's another before and after:

So that's the glamour shot. Here's what it looks like as a functional bathroom for a toddler and a baby:

This is our bath toy set-up:

I got the idea from here. It was really convenient because our bathtub already had a bar in it, and we had extra shower rings and a little tub for the toys. We already had everything we needed, and just put it together. It works great!

And here's Toddler's potty:

She's been potty trained for a while, but everything got thrown off with the road trip and the move, so these last couple weeks have kind of been re-potty training for her. Jason printed off and colored this awesome "Potty Progress" chart for her:

and she loves it. She gets a sticker every time she goes potty in her toilet or the big toilet. There are little boxes for the stickers to go in, and I think you're supposed to line them up, but she started putting them in boxes all over the chart and if it makes her happy then that's what we'll do.

Another thing we did, that's not visible in the before or after pictures but really makes a difference, is replace the cover to the bathroom vent fan on the ceiling.

This is the new one. The old vent cover was really yellowed with age, and looked very dated. We got this new cover for like $8, swapped it out, and now everything looks new and up to date. We switched out the old gunky metal doorstop for a clean new white one as well.

Oh yeah! One last thing. We put a new toilet seat on. The old one was so cheap and flimsy - it was made of this floppy plastic. If you sat down on it when the lid was closed, it would bend underneath you. It was so cheap they don't even sell that kind at Home Depot or Lowes as the "cheap" lid. I have no idea where the previous homeowners got it.

Anyway, we bought a new one of Amazon for like $15 and switched the old one out for the new one. And it's so much better. Way sturdier and looks nice.

So those are all the things we did to our bathroom!

How we prepared for our Cross-Country Road Trip

Well, we are currently on our way across the country to reach our new house! Today was both long and fun and hard, and I'm posting a recap of it tomorrow. But what I want to talk to you about right now is how we prepared for this road trip!

So, in getting ready for this trip we were preparing for both 1. moving all of our stuff across the country and 2. getting ourselves and the girls across the country. And we wanted to do it for the cheapest way possible.

We looked into all our options for moving our stuff - hiring professional movers, doing moving pods, or renting a self-moving truck - and figured out that renting and driving a truck ourselves was by far the cheapest option (by several thousand dollars). Jason's parents (amazingly)(seriously, they are awesome) volunteered to drive across country for us, and that settled it. We'd do the self-moving truck.

We then had to figure out about our car - did we rent a tow on the moving truck and tow it? Ship it? Or drive it ourselves? Well, it turns out that shipping it and driving it ourselves would cost about the same amount of money. And the stuff we read about shipping cars - cars being damaged, cars showing up weeks after they were supposed to - made us really leery about shipping it. So it was between driving it ourselves and renting a tow bed from the moving truck company and towing it behind the moving truck.

Well, there were two big moving truck companies to choose between - Uhaul and Penske. And Penske didn't have a big enough tow for our car. But Uhaul was a lot (like $1000) more expensive, even before you added the tow cost. And if we towed it, you'd have to add airfare costs for me and the girls as well. So, it was lot cheaper to rent a Penske moving truck and drive our car ourselves. So that was how we decided ended up doing what we're doing.

Now, here's how we saved on the Penske truck. Just by reserving the truck online, Penske gives you an automatic "discount" of a couple hundred dollars. (Does it really count as a discount if everyone gets it automatically?) But how we really saved money was by buying a AAA membership. If you had a AAA membership, you got a big discount on the truck. We made our truck reservation, and then a couple days later purchased a AAA membership online. The AAA membership was going to be $59, but we did a quick google search for promo codes and found a discount for $34.50. So the AAA membership only ended up costing us $24.50.

So, now that we had our $24.50 AAA membership, we called Penske and added that discount onto our truck reservation - and it dropped the cost of the truck by $255! So a $25 membership saved us $255. We basically "made" $230 by buying AAA. Obviously absolutely worth it.

Some of the things we've done in the last couple weeks to prepare for this road trip are:

• Cleaned the car
• Washed and adjusted the carseats
• Got an oil change
• Got our brake rotors fixed (the front rotors were warped)
• Collected figurines, coloring pads, stamps, and books for Toddler
• Picked out toys for Baby
• Got music and books on tape for Jason and I (except - as I type this up - I am realizing that I forgot to download the books on tape to my phone. Whoops!)
• Got good road trip snacks and a small cooler that could fit in between the seats
• Put an outfit for each girl, for each day, into a gallon ziploc bag with a label on it
• I sewed an ipad holder for Toddler's ipad, so she could watch movies on it

I want to expand on that last bullet point, since it was kind of a big project and turned out to be enormously useful already. 

Toddler has an ipad that was given to her by her Grandpa quite a while ago. I wanted someway to be able to mount it to the back of the seat in front of Toddler, so we could play movies on the drive and that she could watch them. But I didn't want to buy anything, because we try to be frugal. So, using fabric from some pajama pants that were too short for me, some plastic vinyl I got from the sewing store for under a $1, and some velcro I got fromt the sewing store also for under a $1, I made this:

The ipad slips into the front side (and is inside it in the first picture). It has four straps on the back that wrap around the headrest of the seat in front of Toddler and velcro in place. And for something that only cost about $1.50, Toddler can watch movies! I did buy a small portable speaker to go with it so that she could hear the movies over the road noise, and that has been worth it. Without that, she wouldn't have been able to hear the movies. But she could, and it worked, and all is well.

I also want to expand on the bullet point about the girls' outfits. I was kind of stressed about packing their clothes for them (for some reason it just seemed overwhelming to me), and mentioned it to my sister-in-law Sarah. She suggested picking out an outfit for each girl for each day, and putting each outfit in a ziploc bag so that it would be clear and organized. And that's exactly what I did, and it was perfect!

These are the bags. As you can see, each girl has seven bags for our six day road trip. They're labeled for each girl - "Toddler Day 1," "Toddler Day 2," "Toddler Day 3," etc., all the way to Day 6, plus an extra bag. In each bag there is a day outfit and a pair of pajamas. 

So in these fourteen bags there are fourteen day outfits and fourteen pairs of pajamas, all labeled and ready for each day. It totally took all the stress out of packing for the girls for me. 

Now, how we got ready for the hotels/motels. Like you'd expect, we research hotels in each city that we were staying in and picked the best options for us based on reviews and price. We then booked the hotels through the cheapest options online. Sometimes that was a travel website, like Booking.com or Expedia, and sometimes it was the hotel's own website. Then, last week I called each hotel to confirm our reservation. And it was good I did! Four of the five hotels had no problems with the reservations. But one of them - booked through Expedia - had been told the wrong day by Expedia and so had us reserved for the day after we were actually going to be there. Luckily, there was no problem with switching us to the correct day. But it was good we checked!

Finally, we've been looking up attractions and good food places for all along our route and the cities that we'll be stopping in. Even though this road trip is a necessity and not something we really would have chosen out of the blue, we want it to be fun. We broke the trip up into six days to shorten the driving each day and make it a bit easier on the girls. That gives us time to have fun (and eat good food!) along the way.

So those are the biggest ways that we've prepared for this road trip! It's been a lot of work, but we are seeing some of the payoff now as we're on the road. Keep checking back each day this week to follow us on our way across the country!