Binkies and Briefcases

SUBSCRIBE

My Dads

By: Stephanie1 Comment

We will be out of town for Father’s day this year, so I wanted to post this early.

My children are very fortunate to have four father/grandfather figures in their lives and even more blessed that all of these men are genuinely good people and great dads.

Of course there is this guy in our family
Daddy

Eddie is an amazing dad. It takes a special 21-year-old guy to agree to adopt a child out of foster care. When we had an infant in the house Eddie did more late night feedings than I did because he didn’t get to see the kids as much during the day and he also wanted me to be able to get more sleep. He is often seen coming home from a 14-hour work day and going straight outside to jump on the trampoline with his kids. You can read more about what makes him awesome here.

We also have Poppop (my dad)

My dad was an amazing father and now grandfather. He has remarkable patience with children and I have some very heart-warming memories of my childhood, thanks to him. Like the time when I was about 5 and decided that I would surprise him with breakfast in bed…I thought I was being very creative and I mixed all of his favorite foods together in one bowl: Crackin Oat Bran cereal, ketchup, mustard, Old Bay Seafood seasoning, Lipton Iced Tea mix…you get the idea. I was so proud of myself. He ate it and pretended it was good. He also has a old leather recliner that is literally falling apart sitting in his bedroom closet. He refuses to get rid of it because it’s the chair he used to rock me to sleep in as a baby. We all had a great time this year with his birthday present to the kids: a family trip to Disney World!

And we have Gramps (Eddie’s dad)

Gramps has been known to do a mean Cookie Monster impression. He has also been known to drive our moving van for 23 hours straight through the night. He can often be found laying our kitchen floor, installing new windows in our garage, and just a few days ago he didn’t hesitate to drive over and check on my mom because I was freaking out that she wouldn’t answer her phone. (She was fine.) The kids love spending the night with Nana and Gramps because they know Gramps will be wrestling with them on the floor, taking them out on the pier, and just about anything else a preschool-sized heart could desire.

and last but not least, we have Poppop Hank

(My grandfather, who apparently has successfully avoided my camera during every waking moment for the past few years)

Not only can Poppop Hank fall asleep on command, he also has the most hilarious story telling voices ever. I have memories of our 13 hour road trip to Boston, when I was in middle school and my grandparents volunteered to take me along on their trip. He has a knack for finding the absolute best steamed crabs available and will remember the effort you put into cooking him something special for years to come. My mommom on the other side of the family made a green pepper cole slaw that she stopped doing years before I was even born and he still talks about it to this day. He also has been known to climb up on our roof to install an antenna & satellite dish or two.

I feel so blessed that my children and I have all of these father figures in our lives. Eddie and I both have lost grandfathers also. Each of them were equally as amazing in their own ways. I sincerely hope that you and your children have men like this in your lives as well.

What makes your dad/grandfather/husband a great father?

Farming

By: Stephaniecomment

Central Pennsylvania is a beautiful, calm, and peaceful place to live. I love the humble roots that are everywhere. There’s a reason they call places like this God’s Country.


Here in our little town, we’ve been doing all kinds of farming lately.

On the home front, our tiny veggie garden now looks like this:


I counted 26 tomatoes yesterday! 2 weeks ago there were only 7.

We also went strawberry picking recently, but I don’t have any pictures yet. Strawberry picking is a messy business and I didn’t want to mess up our camera, so I used a disposable one and I haven’t gotten around to having it developed. That same local farm will have raspberries ready to pick next week.

Then I read on my friend Satoko’s blog that she had taken her kids to the local dairy farm where apparently they buy all of their milk and ice cream and I was like…rewind! Say what? Where is the magical ice cream farm? We have been friends for years and live 5 minutes from each other and I have never heard her mention this. I wanted in. So today I learned that there is, in fact, a local dairy farm 8 miles from our house that not only produces it’s own milk, icecream, and other products to sell in an adorable little general store, but they let the kids feed the calves at 4pm every day. Who knew?

Satoko was right, there was ice cream to be had

and vintage parasols to admire

antique tractors to be ridden

calves to be fed

and lots and lots of cows. (and flies.)

We bought milk, ice cream, and apple butter to take home.

The staff was very sweet. One of the young men who worked there made sure the tractor would be safe for our kids to play on (apparently it still works and they actually use it so he had to set the brakes correctly) and they let the kids pet the cows and roam about freely. There were even signs around the property restricting where cars could go so that kids could have free range to run, play, climb trees, or whatever they pleased.

I have to apologize again to Satoko because I got lost in the winding country roads on the way there so we were half an hour late to meet her and her boys. Also, Nick was having so much fun that he didn’t want to leave, so he threw a very dramatic temper tantrum for our last 15 minutes or so together. (and the entire way home, and then a little while longer…) but, regardless, it was a very nice afternoon and we will definitely go back again soon!

So what do you DO all day, anyway?

By: Stephanie2 Comments

She is always signed on to Facebook…

I saw her pull into the driveway with kid’s meals at lunchtime two days in a row!…

She lets her kids run around outside in their underwear…

Her house is a DISASTER…

She hasn’t done laundry for two years…

What does she do all day????

These are all things that I would not be surprised to hear my neighbors say about me. I still think I’m a good mom, but it took me a while to get to the place where I could accept that, for me, this has very little to do with my housekeeping skills (or lack thereof). In my opinion, housekeeping & homemaking are two very different things. Many times I have looked around my house at the end of the day & seen yesterday’s dishes still in the sink, toys all over the floor, kids that did not get bathed, and thought, “What the heck did I do all day?”

I’ll admit that I had a really hard time with the transition to being a stay at home mom a few years ago. I felt like my identity had been stripped away and everything I had worked hard to achieve in my career, education, etc was being put on pause indefinitely. I felt like all I did was sit around a messy house, unshowered, getting spit up on and changing diapers. I also have a very hard time accepting the changes in my body. While I’m really looking forward to all the blessings another child will bring, I have to say, the baby stage is HARD for me and I’m kind of dreading it. The good news is that it doesn’t last forever, and the stage that comes next is a million times more fun.

Leaving the house with kids

The other good news is that I still have all summer and fall to do whatever I want with my now bigger kids. Sometimes whatever I want is to stay inside and color and sit on the couch watching movies all day because being pregnant is exhausting. But, mostly, I need to get out. Often.

I know next year with a 5, 3, and 6-month-old we might not be quite as ambitious with our “adventures”, so I want to pack as much into this summer as I can. (Next year my plan is to turn on the sprinkler and spend every day in the back yard. I think it’s a good plan.)

What I do not do during the day when I am alone with my kids is housework. Sorry, I just don’t. Eddie does all of our laundry because he’s awesome like that and he volunteered to take over when I was pregnant with Abby. I don’t clean until the weekend or when Eddie’s home because I don’t like having chemicals out around my kids when I can’t be 100% attentive to them. (If there was ever a kid who would drink bleach just to see what it tastes like, it is my Nicholas.) Plus, Eddie truly doesn’t mind helping me clean or watching the kids so I can do it, and even when I do clean up during the day it’s just a big mess again by the time he gets home anyway.

Sometimes I do a load of dishes, but that is pretty much it. If I spent my days cleaning my house I would feel like a babysitter/maid/slave and I would resent it, that’s no good for anybody. My husband is willing to come home to a pile of toys and some dirty dishes if it means I feel more fulfilled because I spent my time with the kids doing things I consider to be more worthwhile.

It’s also true that I check Facebook/my email like a bazillion times a day, but that’s mostly because our computer is in the kitchen, where we spend the majority of our time when we are home. Many times I’m signed in, but not actually sitting there, although if I see the red blurb pop up that tells me I have a message, I’ll respond pretty quickly. Also, about half of those times we are signed in because Abby loves looking at the pictures of our family and friends.

I know a lot of my mom friends feel exactly the opposite and they are overwhelmed by the idea of leaving the house to take their kids out as often as I do. They like the idea of serving their families through housekeeping, etc. I know that stuff needs to be done, but I struggle a lot with the idea that a clean sink would somehow make me a better wife/mother. That does not work for me. At all. Some people might think that means I don’t have a”servant’s heart.” I just think I, personally, better serve my children creating memories of fun times we had together than memories of a floor always swept and a kitchen counter always cleared. I’m saving that for when they are off to school. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. 😉

I need to get out of my house pretty much every day or I will turn into a cranky and resentful person that I’m not proud of.

So this summer we will be out and about a lot.

So far we have:
gone to a minor league baseball game
gone bowling a few times
gone outlet shopping twice
gone to meet daddy for lunch twice
gone to a local farm to pick strawberries
gone to Dutch Wonderland (a local amusement park)
gone to a few parks
gone swimming with friends
gone to have lunch with my grandmom at a local diner a few times

We also have plans to spend a few weekends at the beach, hit up our local theater for the $1 movies on Tuesday & Wednesday mornings, go to a few more farms, make good use of our bowling passes, participate in our library’s summer reading/letter rubbing program (they hide stamps in local parks, it’s kind of like geocaching), visit family in Virginia, make a few trips to our local farmer’s market, take a trip to Hershey, boat rides, get our mommy book club back on track…the list goes on.

This week our schedule looks like this:
Monday: Go to the outlets & meet daddy for lunch
Tuesday: Go to a pool party with our Mom N Me friends
Wednesday: Meet friends at a local dairy farm
Thursday: ???
Friday: Pack up and go to the beach

Most of this stuff we do during the week and I feel really blessed to be able to make these memories with the kids and to have an extremely hard-working husband with a good job that affords us these opportunities. If I spent the majority of my time doing housework I feel like I would look back and regret not taking full advantage of this time. I’ve never regretted not getting the dishes done before we left for the park.

Tuesday’s Tip

By: Stephanie4 Comments

I’m not sure why our culture has gotten away from a lot of the things our great-grandmothers used to do, like preserving food. I have to admit, it seemed really intimidating to me, but I decided to try this year. Blame it on the nesting, maybe?

So for the past few weeks, I’ve been stocking the pantry and our new freezer with stuff. I feel very Martha Stewart, but the truth is it’s not that special. Women used to do this all the time, and many still do. And guess what? Turns out it’s really easy.

Homemade Chicken Stock

I used a water bath canner and preserved the strawberries we picked from our local farm as jam and syrup. That was more of a process, but there are tutorials all over the internet that explain it much better than I can (no pun intended) if you’d like to get started.

Today’s tip is super easy, but I’d never done it before last night: Making your own chicken stock.

We had a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store for dinner last night and after I’d picked off the leftover bits of meat and put them in the refrigerator, I went to throw away the bones like I always do, but this time I stopped.

My grandmother is forever telling me to make soup out of my leftover bones, but I never do. We never eat a whole pot of soup. We get sick of eating the same thing over and over again and it gets wasted.

So instead of making soup, I just threw the bones from the rotisserie chicken into a large pot of water and let it simmer on the lowest setting of my stove for about 2.5 hours.

Ta-da. Chicken stock. I strained it, then ladled it into small freezer bags. (Bonus tip: fold a freezer bag over a coffee mug to make it easier to fill the bag.) That way I can defrost one bag at a time if I want to make what would be equivalent to a can of soup for lunch. I can just throw in leftover meat, vegetables, rice, noodles, or whatever. It will be a different kind of soup each time. Perfect for individual servings for the kids, or if I want to send homemade soup to a sick friend, or during the winter snowstorms when I like to send meals to the widowers in our neighborhood.

Or I can cook with it when I’m making other meals or use it in the crockpot.

You can easily make different kinds of stock out of whatever kinds of bones you have on hand.

I really like the idea of having the smaller servings on hand, I think I’m going to make it a habit.

If you’re looking for a delicious soup recipe, you can use the homemade stock with my Chicken Corn Soup Recipe. This traditional Pennsylvania Dutch recipe is perfect for a rainy, cold day.

Pennsylvania Dutch Chicken Corn Soup

 

 

 

 

A Lesson in Manners and Good Parenting

By: Stephanie3 Comments

If you are a Walmart employee you should avoid using the f-word in regular conversations at work. Especially with customers. Especially in the children’s section.

If you are a mother in line at Subway and your child tells another mom in line that her kids are cute, you should avoid screaming at your child, calling her an embarrassment, and sending her to wait in the car for an extended period of time without the keys to turn on the air conditioning. Especially on days in June when it is 103 degrees inside of cars.

This lesson has been brought to you by Miss Manners.

My mind is still reeling with things I should have done/said when we ran into these people today.

Sheesh.

Off Balance

By: Stephanie4 Comments

Remember that exciting family news I told you I’d share in a few weeks? We’re pregnant! We were so NOT trying to conceive, but it’s a happy (and slightly terrifying) surprise.

So things have been a little off-kilter around here. Eddie started a new job and is hardly ever around during the week. Two toddlers and a pregnant lady make for an interesting team. I feel like a bi-polar mom lately. One day I will take the kid’s berry picking and can my own homemade jam, the next day I have no intention of getting anyone out of their pajamas. There is no middle ground. I’m either in Super Martha Mommy mode or a top contender for Worst Mom Ever. Some days I can achieve both on the same day.

Mom Thoughts

Today, for example, started out with me turning on the sprinkler for the kids to run through in the back yard, coming in for lunch and homemade rice Krispie treats, getting both kids to nap at the same time (!), Nick using the potty (!!!) and taking the kids to the neighborhood playground after their nap.

I was all I’m totally awesome at this, we are so going to be fine adding another one.

Then I burnt out after learning there had been a mistake with our new insurance and trying to make the phone calls to fix it. By the end of the day, my kids had watched 3 full-length movies and I was yelling irrationally and driving to McDonald’s, willing myself not to puke, not wearing a bra, and in my 13-year-old cheerleading t-shirt from high school with two barefoot, screaming kids. I might have eaten a BigMac and a McChicken sandwich. (And cursed the universe for not allowing me to eat honey. Stupid no unpasteurized foods rule. French fries dipped in honey are amazing and it is totally unfair to take them away from me right now.)

Then I was all I totally suck at this, what the heck were we thinking?

But then we came home and when the kids sat down to eat their nasty, processed chicken nuggets and french fries they both reminded me, separately, that we couldn’t eat before we said our prayers. So right now I’m leaning toward fairly confident in our ability to handle a third without messing him/her up too badly.

We’ll see.

Frozen Hot Chocolate On a Stick

By: Stephanie4 Comments

3 ingredient fudgepops.

I think it’s safe to say that hot chocolate season is no longer upon us. It has been as hot as 95 degrees here this week! So instead of letting that hot chocolate mix sit in your pantry until next year then finding it has expired and having to throw it away, let’s turn it into a yummy summer treat, shall we?

These popsicles are SO easy.

They aren’t particularly healthy, but they are a fun teat and they only have 3 ingredients. 

The recipe for the mix is modified from my homemade pudding:

For easy home made fudge pops:

1/2 a cup of hot chocolate mix/powder. (I used Nesquick)
2 tablespoons of corn starch
2 cups of milk

Whisk chocolate and cornstarch together to blend, then whisk in milk.
Microwave for 3 minutes, then stir.
Microwave for 1 more minute, stir
Microwave for 1 last minute, stir.

It will thicken a bit, but not to a pudding consistency. (We need it to be pourable.)

Let the mix cool for a few minutes, then pour into popsicle molds and freeze overnight.
Any excess chocolate mix can be folded into Cool Whip for an easy chocolate mouse.

The customers were happy with the results:

 

How Does Your Garden Grow?

By: Stephanie2 Comments

It’s a miracle. My garden has officially survived for almost 2 months!

This is the first time in the history of my adult life that something I’ve planted has lived.

Although I know it is about 0% me and 100% the week straight of rain followed by the week of 90+ degree sun, we are actually starting to see fruit! Also, apparently the secret is raised garden beds. (and not living in Florida anymore)

So far I have 7 little baby green tomatoes poking through, quite a few blueberries, and a few peppers starting to flower.

This little guy won’t be seeing fruit for a few years, though.

A friend of mine asked me recently how I find time to garden, blog, serve at church, etc. with two toddlers. Umm…I let my kids run around in their underwear and play with sharp objects?

True story.

What’s Shiny, Silver, and Cold and More Practical Than Jewelry?

By: Stephanie1 Comment

This!

There was a Memorial Day sale at HHGregg over the weekend and hubby has been working lots of overtime so we decided to take the extra $$ and buy a new fridge.

Now we just need to add crown and shoe molding to the cabinets and walls and the kitchen will be D.O.N.E.

It can’t come soon enough because in 6 weeks we will be at the two year mark for this kitchen renovation.

I keep hearing my mother’s voice in my head saying, “The ability to delay gratification is the mark of a mature adult.” What? Am I the only one whose mom is a psychologist?

Two years is a little ridiculous for one room, even I have to admit, but the end is in sight.

You can read more about our how we redid our entire kitchen with materials from Craigslist here.

Reading This Will Make You Feel Better About Your House, Promise

By: Stephanie1 Comment

Sorry I’ve been MIA for a while. We have some exciting family news I’ll be ready to share with you in a few weeks, but until then please bear with me.

In the meantime, we have started renovating our second bathroom. YAY! Actually the demolition part of the renovation took place back in January, but then got put on hold while Eddie prepared to take his Professional Engineering exam, which he passed, ya-hooo! So our family of 4 with two potty training toddlers has been using one bathroom for five months. It hasn’t been as bad as I feared, but I’m still excited that the end is in sight.

Brace yourself, what I’m about to show you might be the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen in your life, but it was actually one of the main reasons we bought our house. You see, when we were house hunting most of the houses in our price range only had one bathroom, but this one has 1.5. That was a huge selling point for me. Although the half bath looked like this:

The 70’s called, they do not want their bathroom back. Yes, that is 40+ year old brown shag carpet you see. And fake laminate paneling. The yellow “stripes?” That would be plywood streaked with glue. My guess is that at one point in time there was some very groovy wallpaper attached, but not so anymore. Just lovely exposed glue.

Also, this space was not insulated, there was no electrical outlet, and spiders constantly were getting in because it’s sandwiched between our garage and the crawl space under our front porch, neither of which were properly sealed or insulated either.

I’m claiming the title for worst bathroom ever, unless one of you thinks you can beat me. If so, please share!

The new walls and floors are finished, but there is still A LOT of work to be done hanging trim, re-installing fixtures, etc. I can’t wait to reveal the after pics to you guys, hopefully really soon!

What You’re Saying

Latest Posts

ALL I Never Knowed: The Book Is Here!

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my Email Newsletter. Thanks for visiting!Welcome back! Be sure to check out my Email Newsletter. Thanks for visiting!It’s finally here, in my hands. It has been a loooong time in the making, but our book, All I Never Knowed: Mental Illness, a Mother’s Love, and […]

Save Money with Fetch

Hey everyone! This is Chelsea, Steph’s asistant, back with the simplest app for getting cash back on things you’re already buying! We’ve covered Ibotta, Shopkick, Coupons.com, Swagbucks and we’re all saving hundreds of dollars by now, right? RIGHT!? I’m really hoping you guys have jumped on the rebate app savings train because it’s just so […]

Splendid Spoon Review

I was excited to receive a box of products to try from Splendid Spoon this summer! They invited me to try their line of plant-based, ready-to-eat foods and delivered them right to my door. Check one in the pro column for convenience. I did receive these products free of charge in order to rate them […]

My Networks