Farewell my dear post-partum (aka fat) jeans. You've been reliable, comfortable and there when I needed you but you aren't flattering and you don't encourage me to better myself. I'll never forget you; you're in all the pictures of my kids' first years. I wish you much happiness in your new home but I'm ending our relationship.

Flip Cloth Diaper inserts

I almost fell over laughing when I opened the pack of Flip disposable inserts. If your school used antique sex ed materials you might too. Back in the 70's, before adhesive was added to menstral pads, you used to use a belt and suspenders to hold on your gigantic pads. The Flip disposables look just like an old maxi pad. I guess that is what they are but I seriously cracked up picturing my son in his menstral belt.

"We must, we must, we must increase our busts!" I understand the book has been updated to remove the pad belt since dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was a child.

Meatcakes

I am not a person who should ever allow herself to become bored.  I used to be a bit wild but these days I just don't want to call the babysitter's mom to explain that she's going to be late because I'm in jail. I have a nice homelife I don't want to disrupt so my appetite for destruction has to be well directed.  I'm more blowtorch than flamethrower these days.

But alas a bit of boredom did hit and I unleashed the meatcakes.  I blame Cake Wrecks.   She did a bit on April Fool's jokes.  She linked to an entire meatcake gallery.  A gallery of meatcakes!  And like any crazy person all I could think was, "I can do better than that."  And frankly I did.

The original recipe is basically three layers of meatloaf covered in mashed potatoes all in the shape of a cake.  Meatloaf is disgusting.  Flour based foods are fine in loaf form.  Meat is not.  It also requires a ton of meat and I only wanted one meal's worth of meatcake so I decided to wing it.

Meatcakes recipe
Mix 1/2 pound ground beef with 1/2 pound hot Italian sausage.  Press into a 12 slot cupcake tin.  Bake at 350 for 20-30 minutes.  I don't remember which and it depends on how well done you want your meat anyway.  Dump them out on papertowels to drain and blot a bit if your meat was fatty.

Meanwhile, make some mashed potatoes.  I used instant.  Yeah, I'm a slacker but my two year old helper can't be trusted with a masher or beaters.  She can stir the heck out of some potato powder though.  Mmmm.  Potato powder.  I used Betty Crocker Potato Buds.  They're non-dairy non-soy unlike most other instant potatoes.  I used also olive oil instead of butter, rice milk instead of regular milk, and garlic powder to give it a bit of zing.  Also, garlic icing gives me the giggles.  Put down the bucket, its not that gross.  Really quite tasty in fact.

    Mmmm.... Low chemical, dried, flaked, potatoes.

The mashed potatoes didn't quite look like frosting at this point.  They're a bit yellow to begin with and then the garlic was making it a bit spotty so I decided to dye the whole thing.  Search Amazon.com for gel icing color wilton I let Froggy pick the color and she chose green.  Frankly I expected pink but we were making cake for Daddy and I suppose in her mind he likes green.  He does wear it every day.  A bit of gel icing, a bit of stirring and ta-da a big bowl of green garlic mashed potatoes.  It was even more disturbing in person.

To assemble place a meatcake in a foil cupcake paper.  It needs to be foil or the weight of the mashed potatoes will knock over the paper.  Mine shrunk a bit with cooking but no worries when you're coating the whole thing in "frosting".   Put the mashed potatoes in a piping bag with a star tip and squeeze them on there.  This was my first experiment in piping and it wasn't visually distressing.  It wasn't attractive either but it definitely looked cupcake like.

I planned to tell my husband we were having dessert first when he came home for lunch but he seemed to sense something was up.  He saw the tray of cupcakes on the table and got out the camera.  Froggy immediately ratted me out.  "Daddy it's mashed potatoes!! Hahahahah!!!"

 

More mashed potato shenanigans in May.

Detergent Test Report: Crunchy Clean

Some of my reports on the detergent are kind of funny and I'll want to access the information later so I figured I'd pull them for the blog but without background it's a little bit confusing. Here it is incredibly simplified.

Cloth diapers require a detergent that cleans the hell out of them and then rinses out very well. Not enough cleaning and your baby is sitting in old poop. If soap is stuck in the diaper there's no room for pee and the clothes get wet.


Test round one is complete. Crunchy Clean rates about even with Tide and All on regular clothes and a bit worse on diapers.
Positives: It doesn't have the build up feel of the major brands. It gets out surface dirt. The gardenia scent is wonderful. The clothes are soft.
Cons: It doesn't get out the smells. Ug. I openned the door to the basement when the diapers were almost done in the dryer and it smelled like a port-a-potty on a hot day. DH's shirts were mostly clean but one armpit was somehow missed in the washing and when I sniffed it I gagged. This could be an unfortunate twist in the washer or a product problem.
Other issues: There was still a bit of gardenia scent on one load as it came out of the washer. Some say that means there's still residue on the diapers and some say it's a positive.
Test method: For regular laundry I followed the directions on the bag for regular / heavy soiling and used 2T. For diapers I ran a prewash without detergent on perm press (this gets off all solids all the time in my machine) and then a hot wash with the 2T suggested on the bag. I did not do an extra rinse. I never do. We can start another thread on water attitudes if you like. :)
My diapers in current rotation are a combo of bamboo and cotton fitteds and microfiber pockets and AI2s. I have a few bits of organic cotton, hemp, and wool backed doublers in there too.
Since my fluff is now funky smelling my next step is to decide if I'm going to strip or Rock the Soak. I've used Rocking Green before and it does at least as good a job as Dawn at taking out the funk and doesn't require 7,000 rinses.

I don't care if you call it aspic or a Pfalz specialty, it's still pork jello.

I can't think of anything I love doing so much that I'll crap my pants just to keep on doing it.

Crazy kid

Still feeling the Cartman's mom vibe. When your two year old goes from screaming for pizza to singing an I love you song to her peanut butter sandwich in 15 seconds, "OK. Eat up hon," is the only sanity preserving response.

According to Froggy chocolate tastes like gorilla because both are brown.

8AM and they're all still asleep. Wonderful but if it keeps up I'm going to start checking for a gas leak.

Portion control

"Feeds 16 when cut into 16 pieces". First response: Duh. Second response: You've underestimated me.

Nursing woes

Bubba needs to wake up before I explode. He's taking an extra long nap and my boobs are displeased with his decision. I grabbed the extra oval from my bamboo diaper to have some extra absorption in the bra.

Yesterday he was popping off to look around, leaned on one and shot himself in the eye.

12 months nursing Froggy, 9 months with Bubba and still nursing issues can command all my attention.

Jerks in Spain

Jerks #1, 2, and 3 - I'm thrilled your sports team won. Now STFU. I don't let my two year old chant at the top of her lungs in a closed environment so three men in their twenties should be able to handle the same limit for two hours on a plane.

Jerk #4 - There was no assigned seating on this trip and a dozen empty seats yet you sat down directly in front of the woman with a baby on her lap and reclined your chair all the way back. You're an asshole.

Jerks #5 - 3AM is not the time to show your traveling companion all the fun beeping features on your phone unless you are in a private automobile. In group transport with dim lighting it's considered quiet time.

Jerk #6 - Hey cabbie, just because we don't speak your language and aren't familiar with the town doesn't mean we can't read the map on your GPS and tell we're being driven in circles.

Jerk #7 - Really? Racing a toddler to the bathroom. Really?

And yet despite all of you cretins it was a pretty good trip.

Nine ten idiots. Nine tranquilizer darts. Decisions, decisions.