Educating the Wheelers

I hate to waste food and have been working on more interesting ways to use things up. Take bananas. My husband is the big banana eater in the house, but won’t touch them after they start to get a little spotty.

If I don’t have much time, I just toss them as-is into the freezer, and later when I take them out, I peel them slightly defrosted with a paring knife and use them in whatever recipe. Pancakes, waffles, mashed into french toast bath, smoothies, the usual. But I get pretty sick of banana bread and muffins pretty quickly.

This is my new favorite way to use them:

Banana cookies.

2-3 ripe bananas, mashed in a bowl
1.5-2c uncooked oatmeal
1/3 cup oil
Splosh of vanilla
Handful of dried fruit, whatever you got. I like chopped dates.

Mix it all together, let it sit for awhile and soak into the oatmeal. Then drop spoonfuls onto a greased pan [mush it down, they’re better a bit thinner] and bake at 350 until done. Usually about 10 minutes or so. Can be up to 20, depending on your stove, and how thick you made them.

Love them, love them, love them. And if you can get your dried fruit cheap, fairly frugal, too!

I’m about 32 and a half weeks pregant now, so I need to get moving on getting things ready for the little guy.

I’ve been on the lookout for good deals on diapers [I decided not to switch to cloth for this guy, though I kicked it around for awhile], so I’ve got a bit of a stash already. All other diaper changing gear [wipes, cream, rags, etc], we already have plenty of since Audrey is still in pull-ups.

I haven’t ordered a Medela parts kit for my old pump yet, and I need to do that. That’s about 25 bucks. I know you can reuse the parts with yourself, but I gave my pump a thorough thrashing before Audrey could finally attach at three months, and looking at the old thing … it just doesn’t feel like even a thorough boiling and sterilization procedure is going to make it feel clean again. Oh, and I’m going to need new milk freezer bags, too. That’ll be about 17 bucks. Again, I’m paying more than I have to here, there are cheaper varieties, but these will hold up for 6 months in our deep freezer. So if we don’t need them in that time, I can donate them to the Mother’s Milk Bank, like last time.

I picked up a handful of “new” outfits for Little Guy at the thrift store in MN, practically brand new stuff for about a dollar a piece. Didn’t feel bad about that, though I’m sure I could have made do with Audrey’s unisex hand-me-downs.

The freezer is already full, but mostly with meal “parts” rather than completed meals. I’ll want to change that ratio a bit before he arrives, because I won’t want to be doing any cooking for awhile.

I think that’s really all that’s left to purchase. [I’m not counting the actual cost of the birth, etc.] Lots to do, but not lots to buy. That’s a plus.

Paragraph breaks appear to be back [Yay!], and I’ve re-added a link bar on the side. But I know I’ve missed a bunch, so if you don’t see your blog up there, please drop me a line or leave a comment. I’m going to be adding more as I get time today. [I just did a gmail search on “blog link” to see who I’ve exchanged emails with, and added whoever I happened to read this morning before Audrey wakes up. I hope that catches most of them, because my pregnancy brain is pretty mushy today!]

I thought Austin was going to breeze right past the big housing run-up/bubble/”correction” situation that a lot of areas seem to be dealing with right now … but yesterday I called the guy who does all of our remodelling, etc, and asked him about doing a job for us before the new baby comes.

He said that things were dead during the winter — almost 4 months of zero work at all — but now he’s backed up for weeks, almost all of it work for California investors who are snapping up properties here and fixing them up to flip.

This makes me nervous.

Andrew has been fiddling with Other Blog Solutions lately, and it turns out that one of the tools for slurping up the previous posts out of blogspot to transfer to another system can kind of mess things up. Oops. I’m not sure if anyone even reads this blog on a regular basis, but if so, you may have noticed that it was completely borked without a template for a day or two, and we’ve also lost our links on the side and paragraph breaks in previous posts. I’ll be working on getting those back.

Or maybe I’ll just move to one of the other test sites he’s been fiddling with.

When I got out of the shower this morning, I got quite the whiff of surprise when I was toweling my hair dry. What was that weird smell?

Aha!

The laundry was hanging on the line yesterday when we started up the grill for dinner yesterday. The towel and everything I’m wearing today smells like bbq.

I finally set up a Treasury Direct account for purchasing I Bonds and the like for a little more diversity in our savings. As an apocalyptically pessimistic person, this doesn’t quite qualify as “SHTF” stash, but it’s closer to that end of the spectrum than our stocks and mutual funds. Heh. [And I’m always a little nervous when I start wondering under what circumstances I wouldn’t be able to access, or would have delay accessing our Emigrant Direct funds. Or our regular neighborhood brick and mortar bank, for that matter. Or these I Bonds.] I do feel strongly that I need to have some sort of plan in place for an economy-in-the-tank, extended-unemployment situation.

I’m not going to be investing much to start with, 50 dollars a month moved automagically over. But it’s a start while I get used to it.

Audrey and I are back home from our nearly month long vacation visiting my folks up in Minnesota. She got to play in snow and make her first snowman! [Also, her first igloo.] Very exciting for her since we almost never have snow in Texas.

I spent more money up there than I usually do at home — but, these days, I spend very little money at home, so that’s not too big of a surprise. I’m enjoying getting back in the swing of things here.