Pantry Challenge Complete!

We ended up spending $52.54 on food for the month of January.  This was all grocery expense since we didn’t eat out at all during the month.  We consider that a smashing success!!  Here’s how the cupboards looked after the challenge and before the shopping trip on February 1st.

The snack cupboard was the first to empty.

The pantry.  It still looks full but we really did make a dent.

The meat drawer also takes a beating.

Eating From the Pantry Recipes

Here are many of the recipes I have been and will be using this month as we eat from the pantry.  I have included links to many of the recipes I use or recipes I have used in the past.  Most of the meals are delicious and we would eat them any day of the week, so we don’t really feel like we are sacrificing much.

Pizza – with whatever toppings you have handy.  We do pizza night every Friday so I always have plenty of cheese.  I also make my own pizza crust (so easy!) and can my own pizza sauce in the summer.  We love BBQ chicken pizza and chicken-artichoke-ranch pizza as well.  I usually go ahead and make two pizzas even though there are only 3 of us, so we can share with friends that sometimes come over or eat it for lunches over the next few days.  We will likely run out of chicken and cheese before the month is over, but I’ll try to stretch it.

French dip (AKA drip beef).  Both versions are excellent.  If you don’t like spice, avoid the one with pepperoncinis.  I make my own sandwich rolls, which are shaped into mini loaves.  We had tots and spinach salad to balance out the meal.  We will get 3 meals (whether dinners or lunches) out of 2-1/2 pounds of chuck steak (cheapo piece of meat).

Salmon with boxed mashed potatoes (forgot we even had them in the pantry), spinach salad, and green beans with sesame seeds.  The green beans were frozen from the garden last summer.  The salmon (frozen) is from Costco, which is usually a pretty good deal.  We can stretch one salmon fillet (with plenty of sides) to feed all of us.

Enchiladas (using leftover meat from the freezer or from one of the previous meals) with corn (from the garden and frozen), refried beans, and Mexican rice.  I’ll add tortilla chips, olives, guacamole, and sour cream if I have them on hand.  For sour cream I have substituted plain yogurt with a splash of lime/lemon juice or vinegar and it is close enough to fool most people.

Chipotle pork posole with cornbread, green beans, spinach salad (with varied homemade dressing) and applesauce (home canned).  Should be lots of leftovers.

Chili with left-over corn bread and pears (home canned).

Cheese and spinach ravioli (from Costco) with a browned butter sage sauce.  Serve with garlic cheese bread (or french bread), spinach salad, and peaches (home canned).

Chili cheese fries with leftover chili.  Serve with green beans and a fruit (applesauce, pears, peaches, or fresh fruit).

Marinated salmon with couscous, whiskey glazed carrots, and salad.

I use up the meat I have and this time I happened to have 3 steaks I froze in marinade.  Served with fries and a Mediterranean chop (spinach) salad.  I should have made some rolls to go with it, but it was the weekend and I didn’t wanna.  The salad is heavy duty on the protein so it will be part of Hubby’s lunches during the work week.

Passover Brisket with caramelized green beans and pine nuts, and a noodle kugel.  This should be a meal with plenty of leftovers for lunches and even a possible rerun.

Scramble with hashbrowns, onions, bacon, cheese, and eggs.  Serve with cinnamon toast and a fruit.

Maple salmon with spicy yam fries and peas.

Coconut-lime turkey and rice soup with crusty bread.  This will feed us about 3 meals I expect.

Tuna melts with pretzels/chips and a fruit.

Soy glazed salmon with maple whipped sweet potatoes and a salad.

I also make a lot of muffins, scones, and bagels, which all work great for Husband’s grab-and-go breakfasts, as well as waffles and pancakes for those of us who eat breakfast at home.  I typically avoid things that take a lot of eggs, meat, or cheese.

For snacks I make deviled (or plain hard-boiled) eggs, pretzels, or I have cut-up carrots/other veggies and make ranch dressing, hummus or spinach artichoke dip.  For sweet snacks I make cookies or other desserts, “poptarts“, pretzels, or granola/granola bars.  Dessert is actually one of the easiest things to make while cleaning out the pantry.  I also canned some cherry pie filling and apple pie filling and have some frozen berries and other fruit.  We tend to have good desserts because I plan ahead better when doing the pantry challenge.

Open Your Heart

A friend of ours gave us a CD by the Laurie Berkner Band.  If you haven’t heard of her, she has a beautiful voice, is very giving and socially conscious, and writes very catchy kids music.  Her songs are wonderful and the munchkin loves them.  I love some of them purely because their content is so rich.  She has one song called “I’m not Perfect” and it ends with “…you aren’t perfect, and I love you that way.”  Not surprising, the song is all about how I’m not perfect, we aren’t perfect, you aren’t perfect, and its okay.

My favorite on this CD is a new song called “Open Your Heart.”  It is perfectly written for adoption.  Laurie wrote the song for The Pajama Program, a not-for-profit organization, that provides new, warm pajamas and new books to children in need in the United States and around the world, many who are waiting and hoping to be adopted. These are youngsters who may not know the comforts of a mother or father to tuck them into a cozy bed and read them a bedtime story.  Too many have been abandoned, most deprived of any love at all.

Open Your Heart
The Laurie Berkner Band

I can use my voice to sing out a song
And use my muscles when I’m feeling strong
I can use my arms for hugging you tight
And use my pillow when I sleep at night

But some things I can’t do
That’s why I need you
To open your heart
My heart is waiting for you
Open your heart
My heart is waiting

I can use my head to say no or yes
I can use my mouth to take in a breath
I can turn a knob to open a door
And I can dance my way across the floor

But some things I can’t do
That’s why I need you
To open your heart
My heart is waiting for you
Open your heart
My heart is waiting

What’s inside when I open my heart?
Turn the wheel, and what do I feel?
I feel love when I open my heart
Do you feel it too?

I can use a key to open a lock
I can listen when the two of us talk
I can taste my salty tears when I cry
Or use my body to jump up high

But some things I can’t do
That’s why I need you
To open your heart
My heart is waiting for you
Open your heart
My heart is waiting

Open your heart
Open your heart
Open your heart
My heart is waiting!

Eating from the Pantry, Year 2

Last year for the month of January we attempted to eat only food from our pantry.  On average, according to Mint, we spend $338 per month on groceries.  Last January we spent 123.68.  I’m ashamed of this (a bit), but $40 of that is coffee.  But (justification coming), we had just gotten a coffee sampler from Just Love Coffee because we wanted to try them out.  We are hoping to do some adoption fund raising through them and wanted to know what to suggest if we did so.  (Of those we tried we liked the Rwandan best, then the Sumatran, Honduran, and finally Guatemalan least of all.  Visit here if you buy coffee, especially fair trade, good quality coffee and want to help us out.) This month we won’t be buying coffee so we are hoping to have a grocery budget of under $75.  We will be buying milk, possibly eggs, and fresh veggies.  Otherwise, we will try to eat only what we already have in the house.  That includes eating out.

The before shots…

Garage freezer:

Pantry:

Kitchen fridge/freezer:

I started by making a list of what we have in our fridge, freezer, and pantry.  Then I designed our meals around that.  It is a great way of focusing on less to have more to help bring Baby #2 home.  And it is always shocking how much extra we have.  We are blessed with plenty and most of the time I don’t notice.  This is a good reminder.

Filed under Adoption, Home life | Comments (4)

How to Stop Finger/Thumb Sucking

Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

My daughter has sucked her fingers to comfort herself for a long time.  We don’t know when she began to do it in her first year of life, but from her pictures I believe it may have been before she was 6 months old.  Because she was adopted it felt wrong to take away something that so obviously soothed her.  But we have already begun to see her teeth show the effects of finger sucking.  We had decided to try and help her ditch the habit.  We expected a terrible struggle, with lots of late nights and terrible sleep for weeks.  Her potty training has been a long and difficult process (we aren’t through it yet, just taking a break).  We expected this to be much, much worse.  After all, potty training in the beginning doesn’t keep you up all night.

Our cousin has a daughter who is a year older than ours.  Her daughter sucked her thumb, so she made a plan for her daughter to give up her habit.  When she “turned 4, she  didn’t need it anymore”.  She prepped her with this saying, and on her birthday she was to give up thumb sucking.  It worked fairly well for her, my cousin said.

I stole this idea lickety split.  I may have even (I at least waited until the car ride home) said to my daughter on that serendipitous day, “When you turn three you will be a big girl and not need to suck your fingers anymore”.  This was many months before we were planning on making her stop.

Husband and I continued to remind her once in a while that once she turned three she was done.  In the summer I started giving her permission to suck her fingers.  In the beginning of December we ordered Mavala, the nasty, bitter, terrible, awful fingernail paint to use.  We tempted the munchkin with fingernail polish in any color she wanted (orange, which was a bit of a suprise).  And on her third birthday, we reminded her before bed that she was done sucking her fingers.

Incredibly, that night she fell asleep without sucking her fingers and without a fight.  We used the Mavala, because we really hadn’t expected her not to try and suck.  During the night she woke up two or three times crying because she had subconsciously put her fingers in her mouth.  But all I had to do was go in, pull her fingers out and pat her on the back and she fell back asleep.

The next night, and the next, and the next went similarly.  She was able to suck through the Mavala and I caught her sucking a few times in the late night/early morning.  But it was always subconscious.  I painted her nails orange but she didn’t really need the incentive.

After that, she was done.  It has been 2 weeks now and she seems to really and truly be done.  With this one thing, it has been astonishingly easy.  I can’t stop thanking God.  He gave her an amazing personality.  You can bet your buttons we will be trying this again when we go round 4 for potty training.

Birthday Bash

I can’t believe our baby has been home for two years and is now three years old.  I could say all the cliches about children growing, time flying, and loving children, and they would all be true.  But that just brings out Husband’s sarcasm.  It’s not that I don’t love seeing her grow and change, its just that I love her so much as she is right now.

The morning of her birthday she woke up to balloons and streamers.  We asked her why there were balloons everywhere.  She, in the blink of an eye, replied, “It’s my birthday!” and proceeded to dance and jump around as if she’d won the lottery.  I love celebrating with children.  I love celebrating with her.

She wanted “a smile face” chocolate cake this year.  Much easier than I would have chosen.  She also wanted funfetti, purple steamers, purple frosting, and three pink balloons.  Hello, independence.

This looks exactly the same as last year.  If it wasn’t socially reprehensible I would eat my cake this way too.

Her dad thought it was time for her to have her own knife, and so she got one of his first knives.  Shined, sharpened, and wrapped in a box full of balloons.  I don’t know that I would advise getting most 3-year-olds knives, but she handles them well, is careful by nature, and only gets to use it with mom or dad.  She loves it and has used it on every gift she has unwrapped since then.  She also likes to open her fruit snack bags with it, which I think is adorable.

Misty made her a tutu.  Love that.  The vest was from grandparents.  She is just now getting into dress-up and being fancy.  Some days she loves it, other days she hates it.

This is a picture from her second  birthday party.  We would like to have one party but can’t fit everyone in our house.  So the first party is for family.  The second is for friends, and by friends I mean her college buddies.

Travel & 1,000 Thanks

We are planning on leaving on Wednesday (the 14th, as in next week!!).  We won’t return home until October 1st.  We plan to fly to Beijing and spend 2 nights and hopefully see the Great Wall.  Then on to Kunming (in Yunnan) to meet our son on the 18th.  We receive him the day we meet him and will spend 6 nights in his province.  We hope to see the place where he was found and his orphanage, and take care of some business.  The we are off to Guangzhou, where the embassy is located to get his passport (to come to America).  We will be in Guangzhou 7 nights and then take a train to Hong Kong.  We will stay in Hong Kong for one night and then fly home.  It should be a fantastic journey.  I’m so thankful its finally here.

On that note, I decided I wanted to be more thankful and more intentional about being thankful.  To that end I decided I would try to come up with 1,000 things for which I am thankful (not my idea, saw it on another blog).  Day by day, (I can’t even fathom sitting down and doing it all at one time!) until I have 1,000 things I’ve written down.  These won’t necessarily be posted on the day I write them.

Gratitude journal:

#1 running in the morning (and neither shuffle jogging or feeling like vomiting) with a wonderful friend (thank you!)

#2 coffee made by Husband (thank you Sweetheart)

#3  a shower all by myself

#4 canned pickles and blackberry syrup done!

#5 fresh, free, delicious produce

#6 fresh and clean water (and any temperature we want!)

#7 sunita falling asleep all by herself

#8 a wonderful church family

#9 sunny and warm days

#10 a finished pantry

Beach House 2010

Our annual beach trip with Husband’s family is always fun.  This year, unlike almost all the other nine years, we had beautiful, sunny, warm weather.

And Halloween (the night we came home) was fun too.  The girl loved it this year.  As soon as she got candy at each house, she would immediately say “I want to go next house”.  Obviously, this year she “got it”.  Bock, bock!

Hello Fall

I love fall time.  I love the feeling in the air.  I love the trees changing colors.  I love the holidays.

We started fall on the right foot around here.  Hubby was able to take some vacation at the end of September, and we started working on adding a closet to the back “guest” (aka junk) room so we can move our bedroom back there.  The munchkin will move to what is currently our bedroom and the nursery will be prepared for baby #2.

We found out bad things can happen when saw horses get old.  Like them doing the splits.

We got a lot of house and yard work done, but more importantly we enjoyed being a family

We watched Saturday morning cartoons, 2010 style.

We visited the zoo.

We carved (or sometimes chewed on) pumpkins.

Yeah, it’s been a good fall.  We’ve also done some other activities, like camping at Silver Falls, staying at the beach house with Husband’s family, and trick or treating.  More posts to follow…

Giddy-up, Cowgirl

A friend of ours (thanks Laura!) let us come and ride her very sweet and gentle (and smallish) horse.  The munchkin started riding with me but quickly warmed up and was ready to try riding by herself.  I haven’t ridden in years and it was great fun for me too.  The munchkin mostly didn’t like the helmet (it was too big) but she loved riding the horse.  On the way home I asked her if she would rather have a dog or a horse.  She, without pause, said, “A dog AND a horse.”  Like, duh, mom.