Monthly Archives: January 2010

Making freezer meals for a gift

frugal strategies, miscellaneous

Tomorrow is my mother’s sixtieth birthday, and I was thinking that a significant birthday like this deserves more than a birthday dinner (what we usually do).  The problem with wanting so much to do something special is then when you can’t think of something, you feel guilty and end up doing nothing!

I decided not to make a big deal out of this in my mind, knowing that my mother is a person who appreciates everything and won’t be expecting anything.  She already was touched when dd13 called to ask if she would come for Shabbos (and it’s not like this is a rare invitation).  Like me, my mother isn’t so into ‘stuff’, and I can’t think of anything she really wants or needs that will be meaningful.  I know she’ll love homemade cards from the kids and I’m going to encourage them to make a poem or write something heartfelt on their cards.  And we have some special dishes and her favorite dessert planned for Shabbos. 🙂   I’m planning to give her a homemade ‘coupon’ to take her out to dinner (just the two of us) when it’s convenient for her.  She loves spending time with the kids but often says how much she appreciates when it’s quiet enough to have time to talk to me without interruptions, so I know this is something that will mean a lot for her.

Something else we’re doing is making her homemade dinners that are portioned in one person containers that she can put in her freezer and take out at her convenience. Like many others who don’t have anyone else to cook for still at home, she doesn’t take the time to make herself the kind of meals she really appreciates; it seems like too much effort for one person.  So we’re making her pasta and meatballs with green beans, egg rolls, quinoa with stir fried veggies, and maybe a couple of other dishes – I’m thinking about roasted chicken with potatoes and steamed vegetables.  I don’t want to make more than she’ll have room for in her freezer, so I’m trying to be moderate!

This is something I hope she’ll appreciate, not just when we give it to her, but every time she comes home at the end of a long day and can pull something delicious and nutritious out of her freezer and enjoy home cooked meal.  A gift like this for my mother is not just a gift of food, but a gift of time, love, and health.  Time, because it gives her more time in her life to relax or do other things; love, because she’ll feel nurtured and cared about not only when we give it to her but every time she takes one out of the freezer; health, because it’s so much better than the typical frozen food a person can pick up in the store (even the health food store).

Making these really just means buying the ingredients, a few appropriate containers, and taking the time to do it.  I think there are people in a variety of life situations who would appreciate a gift like this, don’t you?

Avivah

Old time radio shows

homeschooling

Years ago I became aware of a wonderful resource, a website that offers free downloads of old time radio shows.  At some point we stopped listening to them, I don’t remember why.   In any case, recently I remembered about them and checked their site.  This week they have three winter time stories available to listen to and/or download – an adaptation of The Long Winter (Laura Ignalls Wilder), The Great Blizzard of 1888 (a true story about the huge blizzard that shut down NYC), and Sgt. Preston and the Dachshund, a fun fictional story taking place in the Yukon.

Dd7 and ds9 have enjoyed all three of these this week.  The older kids liked them as well, but they weren’t around when I put them on for the middles.  These radio shows for the most part were done in the 1940s and 1950 and are a nice homeschooling resource.  At that time entertainment and inculcating good morals went hand and hand, which is nice to listen to and markedly different from what passes as entertainment nowadays.

Here’s a link for the shows.  Enjoy!

Avivah

Toys for littles

miscellaneous, parenting
First, a quick technical note – for the first time tonight I checked the spam filter and saw that a number of legitimate comments were there from first time commenters  who included some kind of link to their business or site in their comment.  I was able to approve those from Thanksgiving and on but suspect that if these comments were directed to the spam inbox, so were others.  So if you’ve commented in the past and you think I was ignoring you, I wasn’t.  I’ve never looked at the spam filter until tonight so I never saw any message that was sent there (most of them have been automatically discarded by this point and I can no longer access them).  If you still have a question you want to ask or something to respond to, go ahead and I’ll be sure to regularly check the spam filter to be sure this doesn’t happen again.
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I was asked a while ago about toys that I recommend for the littles.   The truth is, I don’t buy a lot of toys.  I get games, puzzles, building sets, craft supplies, books, activity kits for kids who are above age 4, but the littles don’t have a huge amount of stuff.   A couple of months ago I was noticing that we were low on toys for that age range (thanks to my desire to declutter things I’m not currently using 🙄 ), so for Chanuka I got them a few new toys.  It’s amazing to me how little kids need to be happy and have fun, as I saw with just the newest additions.
When I get something, I prefer for it to be good quality.  I don’t think it’s good to get dollar store items for young children that break the first time they’re used, and try to stay away from cheaply made toys.  My feeling is better to have less stuff but to get something that will last and be enjoyed for a long time.  I totally love wooden toys.  There’s something about them that just feel so authentic and wholesome.  Maybe it’s partially psychological, but I really appreciate well made wooden toys.
This Chanuka, I got a couple of things for ds3- a set of kiddie tools (no, not wood :() and a large floor puzzle.  For ds2 we got a handmade wood train with five cars – a locomotive, a coal car, a flatbed car (loaded with logs), a tanker, and a caboose – we gave him a car each night. We also got a wooden farm like the one below for them to share.  Naturally, I didn’t pay 89.99 or even the clearance price of 59.99.  I got it at a thrift store for $11. 😆
http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/store3-store_2085_39671432
I’ve been enjoying watching how much fun the two of them can have with just the train and farm.  They load the animals onto the flatbed car or coal car, put the logs down the chute of the farmhouse, and the train makes deliveries to and from the farm.  And I was pleasantly surprised to see how much the baby (7 months) likes the farm!
We changed around some of the living room furniture for Chanuka and now the climber that I told you about getting a couple of days before the baby was born is now in a more accessible place.

The above looks very much like our climber, with a few differences. Ours has one rung less heightwise, so it’s a little bit shorter.  You see the platform at the top of the picture?  That’s two separate pieces that can be adjusted.  We have four pieces, so we put two on the lowest rung for the floor, and the other two get changed from time to time depending on their interest.  Instead of a ladder and a slide, we had two slides but gave one of them away with the second climber we got, figuring we’d be unlikely to use both.   I don’t leave the slide out all the time, but once or twice a day we take it out and let them play with it.  They realized if they put the ladder on the second rung up, they also have a great track to play with their trains- they zoom down the slide and across the living room floor!  And any animals on it get an exciting ride, too.  🙂

We’ve moved cross country and from overseas, and each time most of the toys didn’t accompany us, which is why some of the great toys we had in the past aren’t around for the littles now.  We’ve had two different mini kitchens, a FP (Fisher Price) dollhouse, LT (Little Tykes) playground for little people, FP barn, push toys (including a shopping cart), and riding cars.  These companies have nice quality toys, even if they aren’t made of wood. As far as smaller toys, I like the ones that you create or build with – bristle blocks, legos/mega blocks, gears, lacing cards – there are so many great toys!  I stay away from anything faddy based on movies or tv shows.  I find that educational stores or catalogs carry the kind of thing I like more than typical toy stores.

Whatever you buy, look for things that are made to withstand a lot of use!  For example, we got the LT musical set (tamborine, maracas, xylophone) years ago and it is still in great shape.  The other tamborines and maracas we had that were cheaply made cracked and found a new home in the garbage can.  grin.gif When getting puzzles, I look for ones that have sturdy pieces – I’m biased towards Ravensburger puzzles (and games) but I’m sure there are other great companies.  I stay away from the ones with flimsy pieces that don’t fit together, or the pieces are so generic that many have similar shapes and can all fit into the same spots.

Do any of you have toy recommendations to recommend for the 2 – 4 age group?

Avivah

PS – edited to add that I don’t like most electronic toys because I have a low tolerance for toys that make noise, and I like when the kids are the actively creating their fun with the toy, not being passively entertained by it.   There’s enough noise that the kids make that I don’t welcome more of the artificial sort!  This is where I draw the line for gifts that we receive.  When a grandparent once gave us a toy that made an obnoxious amount of noise (already knowing that I really don’t like these toys), I kind of jokingly but not jokingly said we’d keep it at their house for the kids to play with there.   And it went back home with them.

A menorah purchase for next year

frugal strategies

Yesterday I stopped in at Target and Walmart to check out their post winter season sales – usually this week is the week that a lot of things go on clearance.  I wouldn’t go out of my way to do this (since staying out of stores if you don’t need something is a better strategy for saving money than being tempted by sales), but they were both on my way home from where I was, I needed to buy a new garbage can for the kitchen, I  had a gift card for Target, and so it seemed like a good time!

I was happy to find an adorable hand painted metal menorah – it’s a Noah’s ark with four  kinds of animals, two of each animal, each on a spring.  It looks exactly like this and is so cute!  And it was marked down 75%.  But there was no price on it.  When I took it to the checkout, the cashier scanned it and told me it was $30.  I said it was marked 75% off and she said that was the reduced price.  At times like these you can’t help but wonder if people have lost their ability to think.  It would have to be $120 retail to be reduced to $30, which clearly was way beyond its value.  But all I said was that I thought $30 matched its retail value and was probably the original price, so she took it to the  manager to get it marked with the reduced price.

She came back and told me it was 8.95, which was fine with me in terms of it being a good buy.  But because I thought it was supposed to be 75% off, I asked to clarify how they determined the price, and she told me that the price she told me was 75% off the original price.  I said that I believed 7.50 was seventy-five percent of thirty.  She insisted that they used a calculator to figure out the price.  I pleasantly told her again that it was 7.50.  She clearly wasn’t as confident of her math skills as I was of mine (for good reason :D), so she called the manager over and explained to him that I thought the price wasn’t figured out right.  It took him a minute to say out loud, ‘Half of thirty is fifteen, half of fifteen is 7.50 – yea, she’s right.”  I know Walmart isn’t paying people to think independently, but it’s still somewhat disturbing that two adults couldn’t work this out together just by thinking, let alone not being able to do it with the help of a calculator.

I got this since all of our kids light menorahs from the age of five and up, so I’m thinking ahead about ds3.  Maybe we’ll give it to him next year, even though he’ll only be four.  When we give a menorah, it’s the first gift we give on the first night to that child, so they can use it right away.  I showed it to all the older kids, who thought it was adorable.  It’s part of the fun for everyone that they each get their own unique menorah to light, and they all enjoy seeing the variety of menorahs when we unpack them each year.  Now they’ll get to anticipate their younger brother’s excitement next year when we give this to him.

This is the third menorah that I bought at the end of the season in the past three years for our kids – it’s an affordable way to get each child something much nicer than a cheap tin menorah!  By the way, this menorah retails online for $45 – 50, so this was really an amazing buy!

Avivah

Seeds vs. seedlings

frugal strategies, gardening,

>>have you ever figured out if it is better to plant (mostly i am talking about vegetables) from seeds or from seedlings? i am trying to decide if it pays to buy plants, or if it is a needless waste of money. i don’t exactly have a green thumb, in case that impacts your answer. also, what do you think about planting fruit trees? is it frugal?<<

I got my seed catalog a few weeks ago and have been enjoying poring over it and deciding what to plant for the coming spring/summer.  Before beginning to garden, I never would have understood the enjoyment to be found in looking through a seed catalog!

Seeds are always the most frugal; you can buy 2 -3 packets of open pollinated tomato seeds that will grow hundreds of plants for what you’ll pay for one tomato start.   When you buy a seedling, you’re paying for the foresight that the nursery has shown in starting the seeds indoors so you can get a jump on the planting season.

How much you’ll benefit from using seedlings or seeds will depend on the length of your planting season.  If you have a shorter season, then you’ll want to transplant your seedlings to maximize your time.  If you live in a warmer climate, then sometimes you aren’t gaining more than two weeks, since the seeds planted in the ground once it’s warm generally take off really fast.

But you can start your own seeds indoors and then have your own seedlings to transplant at a fraction of the cost – this is the direction I’d go in, if cost is an issue.  They’ll need warmth, moisture, and light after the seeds germinate.  Most seeds really aren’t a big deal to start yourself.  I’ll probably start some seeds indoors again this year, even though it didn’t make a huge difference to me in getting a start on my garden last year.  I’m going to try a different method this year that I think will be more effective.

Another potential concern is regarding the quality of the seedlings you buy from the big box stores, which is low.  They are poorly tended, low quality hybrids, and often don’t transplant well.  They were responsible in large part for spreading the tomato blight this past year.  So even if you decide to go the route of buying them, realize that while you’re paying much more, you’re not necessarily getting much more.  If you’re going to buy them, look for transplants from reputable nurseries.

Also, as far as seeds go, keep in mind that you often can save the seeds of the vegetables you eat and grow those.  And if you save the seeds of your open pollinated plants from year to year, you’ll never need to spend anything on seeds again.  That means buying any kind of open pollinated seed can be a one time purchase – super frugal!

As far as fruit trees, I don’t see them as frugal in the short term.  It will take years until you have fruit you can harvest (taking into account halachic concerns), and this is affecting my decisions about this.  I’d been planning to buy several young fruit trees to plant in my side yard this spring, and am now thinking I’d probably be better off converting the area to grow vegetables.  But there is the long term satisfaction in being able to grow your own fruit, and eventually it becomes frugal once you’re past the preliminary years.  So we’ll probably go with the fruit trees even if something else would be more efficient in the short term.

Avivah

Free accupuncture

frugal strategies, nutrition

Today was a busy day, a beautiful day of good things: a sleepover for my children with friends, a funeral, an accupuncture session, and then a skating party for a couple of the boys to attend.

If I can squeeze it in this week, I want to write a separate post about the funeral, which was inspiring and very special.  But for now, I’m going to share about the accupuncture treatment I enjoyed.  Because my dh takes our vehicle on Sundays to work, my mom generously offered to give me a ride to the funeral service, and then right after we went to have some accupuncture work done.

I had the pleasure of meeting Julie, the accupuncturist, two or three years ago.  She’s shifting her practice to community accupuncture, a process that allows her to treat several women simultaneously, and I got a message from her that she’s offering complimentary sessions for the next couple of Sundays between 2 – 5 pm.  I’m sharing the link with info because this is a wonderful opportunity to experience accupuncture by an experienced practitioner for no cost.  (Her prices are incredibly affordable even after these complimentary sessions.)  You don’t have to make an appointment; if you live in this area and are interested, just check out the link for the address and show up!

Accupuncture is a method of healing that uses tiny needles to stimulate pressure points in the body and thereby releases blocked energy.  You don’t have to undress; you sit in a comfortable recliner while the needles are inserted into spots on your arms, lower legs, and head.  (I had tights on today so I didn’t have the full benefit of having all my pressure points stimulated, but next time I’ll be sure to wear knee highs that can easily be rolled down.)    This takes just a few minutes, and then you relax and get quiet inside yourself while you wait for the energy flow to start moving around.  This was easy to do while listening to the beautiful and relaxing music playing, the only light was coming in through the windows, and it was very peaceful.

At first I wasn’t sure what I was waiting to feel, so I asked her.  She said it would feel like your body was humming or gently vibrating, and that it takes a few minutes to start feeling it.  Once I started feeling it, it was like a gentle tingling or warmth – an inner humming is probably the best description.  I asked how long it would take, and she said that I would tell her when my body was ready.  Not knowing what that meant, I again asked and she said that usually your body ‘wakes up’.   This is hard to explain but once you do it, it’s easy to understand.  The humming kind of stopped at some point and instead of feeling deeply relaxed, I started to feel like getting up and going home.

If you’re wondering about the set up, there are four recliners in the room.  Because of the angle you lie down at, the fact that you close your eyes when you are having your session, and the way the recliners are set up, you aren’t sitting around staring at anyone.  It’s very comfortable.

My mother and I both found this very relaxing and renewing, and plan to go back together the next couple of weeks!

Avivah

Tuition crisis

homeschooling,

>>Btw, here comes a serious question re: tuition — I would love to hear what you think. Do you believe that sometime soon – in time for my kids highschool (Avivah’s note – kids are currently in 3/4th grade)– the Rabbis/community leaders will come up with the solution for Tution Crisis and schools will become affordable?<<

Well, to be very honest – no, I don’t think that the the light in the tuition crisis tunnel is going to show any time soon.

Too many people are acting as if this crisis came out of nowhere, as if it’s related to the recent downturn in the economy.  It didn’t.  It’s been steadily building and has been absolutely predictable.  How can you possibly expect every person in a community to be able to afford to send their children to private school, particularly when family sizes are larger than the norm?  It’s not realistic to expect a community across the board to have the earning power of the top 2% of Americans, and in order to pay full tuition, that’s what’s necessary.

And because so many people can’t afford to pay full tuition, one very short sighted part of the ‘solution’ has been to raise the tuition to bring in more money.  Then it creates more of a snowball effect since those who are high enough earners continue to pay full tuition, but more people are pushed into needing scholarship assistance.  The financial discrepancy has to be carried by someone, and as the gap between institutional outlay and income increase, the community coffers aren’t covering it.  To solve this problem, there has to be a viable way to close that gap for the long term.

While I understand that parents are overly burdened and feel that schools need to be supported by the community (not just parents), increasing fundraising efforts in the community isn’t going to work, in my opinion.  People with kids in school are already maxed out, those without kids aren’t likely to make schooling a top priority for their charity dollars, and those whose kids are out of school deserve to be able to put their money towards their other expenses (college/seminary expenses, weddings, retirement).  I don’t see it as realistic to reach outside of the religious community for this, either.  There are just so many causes to support, and we can’t expect everyone to make the schools a priority.  And not everyone will see the schools as a necessity.  After all, while you have an obligation to teach your child Torah, there are other ways to accomplish that than to send your child to school.

Until there are indications that those ‘at the top’ are willing to think outside of the box, I just can’t see how change is going to come from there.  Doing what we’ve done has gotten us where we are, and continuing to do the same thing is going to make everything better?  I don’t think so!  Wishful thinking and pulling the wool over our own eyes isn’t going to bring us solutions.

Change is only going to come from the bottom up, as a grass roots effort. Different questions will result in different answers, and we need to start asking different questions.  Every family has to think about how they can meet their child’s educational needs without bankrupting themselves, instead of focusing on how to pay yeshiva tuition.    Do you see how you can generate some different answers by thinking about the issue differently?  As a community we’ve got to start asking some new questions!

I also believe that as families stop being so afraid of doing something different than everyone, that’s when we’ll see some change happening, as it will be the beginning of a positive snowball.  But everyone is just so afraid to be the first one to do something different!  Once a person takes responsibility for their choices, it stops being so critical what everyone else is doing and how they’re doing it, because you can enjoy the peace of mind that you’re taking care of your childrens’ needs.  The reality is that it’s the parents who are responsible for their child’s education, regardless of where and how they school them.

Unfortunately, it tends to be those who feel desperate who are willing to do what needs to be done – and I say unfortunately, because it’s so much more pleasant to avoid falling into the hole in the first place than to dig yourself out. Why wait to be miserable to make a change that will benefit you?

I had plenty of fears when I considered beginning to homeschool – I felt like I was jumping off a plane without a parachute!  Then I did it, and I can honestly say that the hardest part was making the decision to do it.  I’ve never looked back and I’m so, so, so glad that we had the courage to make that decision then, when there really was technically no reason pushing us to it (only inner conviction).  It’s literally changed our lives by providing a framework for a high quality of life that includes lots of relaxed time together as a family.  I look around at all the stress, the rushing, the stress! – and I am so grateful to be able to minimize that in our lives.  This way of life doesn’t require a high income; what it requires is being willing to make a change.

Avivah