Archives for October 2006

That’s what I did on Saturday. But we didn’t have eighty people over for dinner. What we did was prepare lunch for the next month or two.

I’ve tried, no, we’ve tried to make the holidays less stressful for years. Flylady and her “Cruising through the Holidays“-program helps, but I’m always looking for ways to streamline everyday home maintenance so that the important things in life get more room. So I decided to try out the Mega Menu-Mailer. It’s a variation of the freezer dinners obviously available in the US where you go to a place and assemble a couple of dinners to freeze. I thought it would be marvelous if we had everything for dinner for the whole month in the freezer.

Well, in the instructions it says, “Shopping may take one to two hours”. Yeah. I thought about this for days, made the list one week before, pre-ordered meat at health-food store on Monday, they phoned me with questions, had to go to the store again the day after, pre-ordered the fish on Wednesday, went shopping at the regular grocery store on Thursday (one hour, this time taking the car), went shopping again on Saturday for the fish, the meat, vegetables that I wanted to buy at the farmer’s market and to the regular store again for things they hadn’t had on Thursday. Already exhausted from reading? Look at what my kitchen looked like on Saturday afternoon:

I wish I had thought of taking pictures of the meat. Heaps of meat. And my poor husband washed it all. We started preparing at half past three. The manual says that it took people two to three hours to assemble the menus. Well, maybe the assembling only. We spent about six hours washing, cutting, grinding, assembling, mixing, labeling freezer bags, washing up. Maybe it took a little more time because our son “helped”. But he was really sweet. We got a little panicky when we realized that our son’s bedtime drew near and he hadn’t even eaten dinner. He helped himself to a yoghurt. I was beyond feeling hunger since I was the “brain” of the whole enterprise. The only one who was able to read and understand all the instructions. Though my husband’s english is very good, he’d have needed a dictionary. You don’t learn names of spices and vegetables in school. It also took us longer because we had to convert all the measurements.

So, with the whining and the grumbling out of the way, I’m really pleased. We started this to prepare a month of food in advance and then realized that it will last us much longer. You see, we’re not four people in this household. We’re two and a half or so. So, if everything goes right (and the freezer doesn’t roll over and die), we’ll be having delicious fresh meals every day until Christmas. And they will take only little time to prepare. I’m already dreaming of the yumminess.

And I’m really relieved that my husband (though grumbling a lot on Saturday, “I wouldn’t have agreed to this if I had known that it would take that long.”) said things like, “You know, maybe we should do this every year to de-stress the holidays.”

So, what have I learned so far?

• It always takes about twice the time to prepare Leanne’s meals than everybody else says it does. (Maybe I’m a household snail…)
• When you have that much onions to chop, take the time to prepare your big blender. Don’t chop by hand if you don’t have to.
• When you’re preparing that much American receipts convert measurements in advance.
• When you need to mix your own seasonings (just try to find Cajun seasoning in Germany), do it in advance.
• It’s a good idea to check if the freezer needs cleaning before you open it to store all those meals in it.
• You better start the whole preparation thing a little earlier so that you might be finished before bedtime.

What kinds of things do you do to prepare for stress-free holidays? And do they tend to work?

Technorati Tags: FlyLady, Leanne Ely, Mega Menu-Mailer, Saving Dinner

Which limbo you ask? Some of you might remember that I wrote about having a second child or not. Or wanting a second child or not. The question was complicated only because though I want a second child (sometimes more and sometimes less), my husband doesn’t. He feels that one is enough, that we should cherish what we have and that our art won’t survive the stress of going through the first year again. I don’t have any arguments, just a feeling that I want a second child. My body wants a second child. This is one of the reasons that I get a little depressed every month. Not pregnant.

But there are good arguments against a second child. So we use contraception and officially I have been through with this decision ever since my period was late in January and instead of being happy I was shocked.

But all the time I boxed up all the clothing that my son had outgrown. In our attic there was a big pile of boxes neatly labeled with sizes and content. The last time I put something up there I was surprised at the sheer amount of stuff I had been hoarding.

Then my MIL wanted to sell the tricycle. And I thought, why not. And the next thing I knew I was putting up the big stroller for sale too. I was lucky, both was sold, and I had the privilege of meeting the happy buyers. There’s a happy little girl with a new tricycle out there and a mother expecting her second child who loathed her old stroller and hopefully will love the used one that I scrubbed all the rust off.
Selling the stroller was easy, because I secretly wanted to have a different one ever since my son turned a year old or so. But then I started thinking (again, I don’t know what possessed me): How long did I want to keep all that baby and toddler stuff? What if there were no second child? Which is highly likely. I’ve always said that I’ll keep everything until my 40th birthday. And that by then I would be too old anyway. And somehow I feared that the minute I gave everything away I surely would get pregnant again. So I thought I’d better keep it a bit longer. But about two weeks ago I decided to trust in the universe. I’ll give the things away. When there’s no second child, there’s no harm done. If there is a second child the universe will help us to raise it.

So I’ve been spending days and days sorting baby and toddler clothes, ferrying everything to the secondhand shop. It was a very intense emotional experience. Having a stranger go through the clothes that you loved to see your precious child in, with a very critical look. Rejecting things for no obvious reason. Or for an obvious one like she already had shelves full of shoes.

So now almost all the clothes are out of the house. In the course of the next three months I’ll see whether somebody wants to buy them or not.

Is there anybody out there needing a breast pump?

Technorati Tags: children, only child

Interestingly the last post about the Trojan Horse has created the most comments I ever got. Sadly, nobody knew what happened to Helena. So I’ll do you a public service: I looked it up and here it is (according to German Wikipedia):

Helena was known as the most beautiful woman of her time. She was the daughter of Leda and Zeus. Of course everybody wanted to marry her because of her beauty. She chose Menelaos, but before she actually could marry him, Aphrodite promised her to Paris. Helena went with Paris (and left Menelaos willingly). Then – the Trojan War. There are different versions of the story, but in the main one Paris gets killed and Helena goes back to Menelaos. Who seemed to be okay with this.

(And that’s a pajama, my husband is wearing.)

Technorati Tags: greek mythology, Trojan horse

I’ve had this on a post-it note on top of my desk for a couple of days. I read about it on one of the 105 blogs that I’m reading daily. ‘Though I have to admit that the question may have occurred to me without help once or twice. Yesterday I took a pen and wrote beneath it:

WHY NOT?

I am claiming my blog back.

I’ve been feeling a little down with the blog and the not-making music enough and the no-more-shrinking lately. (The reading of 105 blog feeds and the daily watching of two episodes of “Buffy, the Vampire-Slayer” may be a reason for this unproductive phase.) I felt all full of self-pity, constantly thinking, “Nobody wants to read my blogs, why am I doing this?” Each morning I open my stats before even checking my inbox and I go like, “Oh, only six hits!”. What I keep forgetting is that:

1. While it is true that I do have two blogs, they are only mirroring each other. Same content, different language. So I might feel better if I didn’t see them as separate. So it’s not six hits, but twelve.
2. Of course people won’t come to my blog daily, when I’m posting only two or three times a week.
3. What I’m blogging about is not very mainstream.
4. I’m not the world’s best writer. Especially not in English.
5. There are hundreds of fantabulous bloggers out there. If I were not me, I’d probably read them and not me too.

Well, with me there always has to be a but, so here it is: If I were not me, maybe I wouldn’t care about the writing style or anything, if there were another blogger writing about the topics that are dear to my heart. In all my struggling with being creative on the side while parenting, cleaning, exercising, teaching and what not, I’d like to see other mothers like me. I’d love to read all about it and about the, “How do you do it?”

Of course I ‘d like to have lots and lots of readers. And I’m working on bettering the blog. So I’m reading copyblogger and problogger and Liz Strauss and Creating passionate users. I even subscribed to an eCourse to better my blog. This course has left me thinking. All of these resources are geared towards professional bloggers. They help you to make money from your blog. ‘Though I’d love to be paid for all the work I’m doing here, I don’t think this will happen in the near future. (Not with six plus six readers anyway.)

This blog is not a “product”. I’m writing what I’d like to read. This is why I’ve gone back to the “essay-format” that I started in. This is why I’m not blogjolting anymore. I love the thought of a group of bloggers helping each others and recommending each others, but I won’t point people towards other blogs only because somebody told me so.

I found that I enjoy bloggers more, who maybe don’t post daily but when they so they have something to say. Like Martina Kink or Jori DesJardins. I like bloggers who write about creativity and struggles and are authentic. Like Christine Kane. Finding her blog almost stopped me writing mine. She does it so much better than me. But this is like in music. It’s not about being the best. There’s room for a lot of bloggers. Even for a lot of bloggers not on the top 100 technocrati ranks. Even for bloggers with a ranking of about 660,000. (I’m flabbergasted! I just went to technocrati to look up my ranking and instead of 660,000 something, I’m 260,062. Or “Diapers and Music” is. “Windeln und Musik” just sank down from 880,000ish to 1,000,000ish.)

This would be even worth it if I only wrote it for the three of my friends who are reading this. But I like having six plus six readers. And I’m trying to get more. But I won’t spend my time to worry about readers and about my posting schedule and then become the member of yet another blogger network just to gain readers. And I know that the German blogging scene is a little smaller than the American one. And from what I read on other people’s blogs their blog taste is quite different from mine. Short posts about three times a day. Of course there is a lot of the “And then I had coffee and then I went to the mall and then I watched TV variety of blogging. Which I enjoy only if it is written extremely well.

Technorati Tags: blogger, blogging, thinking