Sunday pictures

The kids looked so cute before church yesterday that I thought I'd try to take a picture. Unfortunately, there weren't any pictures where both of them had a good pose. I got a lot of comments about Heidi's dress. I believe it was made by my dad's cousin for me when I was born (Right, Mom?). Kevin's suit was a consignment sale find--three dollars!

pictures of Happy Heidi

Heidi is seven months old and she is such a sweet baby.

Heidi crawled right out of her pants. (See this post.)

Don't you love that sparkle in her eyes?

[Hmmm . . . here's another post I didn't publish for some reason, from all the way back in January!]

This has been a busy week with schoolwork and my Relief Society activity. This weekend I have finally started to get a little caught up. I started by bulldozing Mount Laundry. Tomorrow I have one load of clothes and one load of diapers to fold and then I will be caught up. I've used a lot of Spray 'n' Wash this week for some reason, which has mostly been effective except for a stubborn stain on a white onesie. I'm hoping things don't deteriorate too much this week, but I have to finish reading Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick and write a five-page paper about it, so we'll see. It's a very interesting book, by the way, about several people who lived North Korea and managed to get out of the country.

Heidi is starting to figure out how to get down without hurting herself when she has used something to stand up. She also took her first real crawl "steps" this week, but she still favors her inchworm crawl most of the time.

Kevin is doing great sleeping in his bed. He's only fallen out once (although there was another time when Ryan happened to be there to catch him before he fell out in his sleep). Bedtime and naptime actually seem to be a little better now--there's less protesting. He actually asks to go to bed some of the time! So I guess he was ready for the switch.

Ryan's plugging away at his research. On Friday he helped set up the timer for the Pinewood Derby, because when he was doing Cub Scouts he was the one that always did that part.

72-hour kit activity

I took on the daunting task of planning out a 72-hour kit activity for our Relief Society. Tonight was the activity, and I think it was very successful! I had a lot of people come to me and say how much they appreciated it.

We only did the food for the kits. Here is the food for one kit (which all fits into a gallon-sized ziploc bag):

3 oatmeal packets

3 chicken/tuna salad and crackers packets

6 granola bars

3 fruit snacks packages

3 Lipton instant soup packets (chicken noodle)

6 spoons

9 individually wrapped sanitizing wipes

The kits ended up costing about $8 each. It's pretty simple and it's not exactly gourmet living, but it would keep you alive in an emergency.

We got most of the supplies from Sam's Club. Emily, one of the committee members, found out that you can order things from Sam's Club and then pick it up the next day, so she and Chelsey, another committee member, were able to pick it up and load it into Chelsey's van without having to get six carts to buy it all. The soup packets were on Amazon.com. We were planning to do a sleeve of Ritz crackers, a can of chicken, and some mayonnaise packets, but then today Emily found out that the chicken and tuna salad with crackers packets went on sale and she decided to drive to several different stores to buy them and save some money and space. Amazing. I was so grateful for Chelsey and Emily's help with the shopping and set-up, because I certainly could not have done it alone!

At the beginning of the activity we had a short discussion about other items to put in the kits and how to prepare for emergencies. I made a handout that was largely copied from here. We put all the food onto three long tables and then people went through and put together their own kits. It was a lot of food! I feel like it went really well and was helpful for a lot of people. What a relief to have it all done--and to have our 72-hour kit again!

organizing my life

Ryan has been trying for a while to get me to make a schedule for myself. He knows I like lists and it bothers me to make a list and then not do everything on the list. So I decided to make a chore chart for myself and also outline my routines for morning, afternoon, and evening. I tried to keep my chore chart simple because I tend to get ambitious and make unrealistically long lists, and life with a toddler and a baby isn't always predictable. So my plan is to do one job every day, and also one load of laundry from start to finish--wash, dry, fold, put away. That doesn't include diapers, because that depends on how quickly we run out of clean diaper covers. (And Eliza, I'm thinking of you and your 15 loads of laundry in 4 days--I know this won't always work for me!). Most of my routines are things I already have in place, but I've put in a few things that I want to start implementing. Here's my chore chart and my routine page if you're interested in what I've come up with (click to enlarge):

Kevin's first night in a big boy bed

I took the side off the crib today to make it into a "big boy bed" for Kevin, and tonight is his first time sleeping in it. He got out of bed three times and just went and turned his light on and sat by the door. The first two times he just sat there, and the third time he fell asleep and I put him back in his bed. We'll see how he does. Once he realized it was time for bed he actually seemed a little nervous and pointed at the pantry door to tell me to get the crib side and put it back on so he could go to bed.

A few weeks ago when Heidi had a doctor appointment I mentioned that Kevin was crib jumping, and the doctor said if it were her, she would just get a bed for him. I thought about it but decided that I didn't want to deal with it until he was a little more mature and could understand the invisible boundary of the bed. Then a few days ago I was lifting Kevin into his crib and I realized he was getting really heavy for me to be lifting him into his crib. After thinking about it a little bit I decided we need to just get it over with and put him in a regular bed. Since he climbs out of his crib so easily it won't be much different anyway. So I'll give him a little while to get used to the crib side being gone and then we'll get him a twin bed. It's kind of sad to take this step since it means he's grown up so much, but it's also fun to see him learning and growing.

sensationalism--mechanically separated meat

Have you seen this image? Have you read the caption that comes with it?

"Say hello to mechanically separated chicken. It’s what all fast-food chicken is made from – things like chicken nuggets and patties. Also, the processed frozen chicken in the stores is made from it. Basically, the entire chicken is smashed and pressed through a sieve — bones, eyes, guts, and all. it comes out looking like this. There’s more: because it’s crawling with bacteria, it will be washed with ammonia, soaked in it, actually. Then, because it tastes gross, it will be reflavored artificially. Then, because it is weirdly pink, it will be dyed with artificial color. But, hey, at least it tastes good, right?"

Okay, before you start freaking out, I will also point you to what snopes.com says about this drivel: http://www.snopes.com/food/prepare/msm.asp. Yes, I know snopes isn't a journal article, but at least they actually put sources at the end of the page instead of making stuff up, which is more than the people who are distributing this image have done.

So here's my thought. I frequently buy split chicken breasts, the kind that have the bones and skin still attached, because I can get them for half the price of the boneless skinless chicken breasts. Then at home I will detach most of the chicken breasts from the bones myself. Sometimes I chop it up into small pieces and freeze it like that to make it easy to use for stir-fries, and sometimes I just freeze the whole chicken breasts after separating them. But afterwards there is still a lot of usable meat on the bones. (I boil the bones and then the meat shreds off relatively easily, but it's still time-consuming--you can get a lot of good chicken broth this way too, by the way.) This is the meat they are talking about that they use for mechanically separated chicken. It's perfectly good chicken, it's just that it's difficult to separate from the bones, and if you're processing meat in large volumes it's not really profitable to pay someone to pry off every tiny bit of meat from the bones. But then they figured out that they can grind it all up and then press it through some kind of sieve to separate the perfectly good meat from the bones. I don't know about you, but that sounds to me like trying not to waste perfectly good chicken.

As for the "weirdly pink" color of the chicken, that's what raw chicken looks like, my friends. It's pink until you cook it, and then it's white.

And in response to the video at the end of the article on Snopes, my opinion is that the kids were disgusted by the chicken carcass because it was raw meat, not because it was the yucky part of the chicken. They would have given the same reaction if he'd waved a raw chicken leg in their faces.

I am sick and tired of sensationalism, especially when it comes to nutrition. If you want to help people be more healthy and eat more nutritious food, that's great. But when people stoop to making things up and spreading it all over the internet like it's fact, I get really annoyed, because that's dishonest.