Daily Musings

January has flown by. A few weeks ago I made the comment to a friend that 1/24th of 2023 was over. And then a few days later, or so it felt, 1/12th of 2023 is now over.

I knew this was going to be an interesting week by Sunday. The forecast was iffy, and that meant potential school closures and my classes would be affected. It also meant I was stuck at home with my children for the entire week without being able to go anywhere.

Now I realize, I "stay home" with my children every single day. However, when the roads outside aren't covered in sleet and ice, we can go to the grocery store, we can go to the library, we can go visit friends. It makes a big difference to the mental state of "staying home" with my children. On weeks like this, I am literally at home with them from the time I wake up until the time I sleep. As much as I love my children, that is not my idea of being a stay-at-home mom. 😅

We started the week yesterday with a moment. My son had used the potty and earned the privilege to flush the toilet himself. We had washed our hands and he was all set to come back down. Except he wouldn't. He wanted to cling to the side of the sink and stay like this. I asked him if he wanted to come down. No. I asked him if he wanted to stay. No. I asked him if he wanted help to come down. No. 

He stayed like that for a while until I decided it was a safety hazard and made him unhappily come down. Somehow, somehow, we made it through the rest of the day without nap time. 

Today's adventure was a little more exciting because of outside precipitation. My children asked to go outside and after an outerwear disagreement, they finally conceded to put on the necessary layers I was requesting and went outside. 

I set out the patio umbrella because then the kids could play in peace underneath it without having to hold up their individual umbrellas. My daughter made a small snow/ice mound and my son wandered around next to her. This was great fun for them until he stepped in her snow mound which upset her and then both kids ended up inside again with me.

They lasted about an hour outside playing. I'd say that's pretty good considering the temperature is quite cold. I'm not entirely sure what we are doing the rest of the day. I might do some story time. I might do some age-appropriate "homework", and I may let them have a lot of tv and screen time later. Who knows. 

They're already asking me for lunch and it's 10:00am. Oh boy....

A Wood-Filled Weekend

With a sequence of events, we need to clear our some more space in our garage. One of the main things that needs to go is a bunch of wood we've saved up over the years from various projects. Before just getting rid of all of it or giving it away, I thought we should try and finish some of our own projects which have been on our to-do lists for years and years now. We accomplished both of these projects this past weekend:

1. A "box" to cover the vent hood pipe that goes into the ceiling in our kitchen. 

In April of 2021, we made the decision to vent our range hood vent outside instead of having a recirculating one. It was one of the better decisions we've ever made for our house because I love it so much. I can cook and vent the smells outside and you can't smell anything after a few hours. I don't regret anything about the project except the person we hired. For the last 1.5 years, we've been staring at a really ugly ceiling patch where the pipe connected into the attic. The pipe is also not centered, but that is secondary to the ugly ceiling.

My husband has mentioned wanting to build a box around it to hide the pipe from the beginning to fix both problems. We were finally able to use some leftover MDF board from previous projects to build a three-sided "box" to place in front of the pipe on top of our cabinets. I had used play-doh a long time ago to trace the edge of the trim against our ceiling so we could cut the appropriate edge to cover there as well. 

After a few coats of paint and primer, we had ourselves a white cabinet box to make our kitchen range hood look centered and neat. 

We will hopefully add some trim around the top of the box to match the traditional style of our kitchen as right now it looks too clean and modern. But for now, this box fixed our main issues. Total cost* of this project: $0

2. Utilizing the other half of our second blind corner cabinet.

For my birthday in 2020, I bought blind corner shelf pull-outs and had them installed. To this day I still love using them and they have been super helpful. We have one other blind corner cabinet but the same pull-outs would not work in the other cabinet because it was a smaller cabinet. 

However, this cabinet had space behind it we could use.

The open cabinet is the one with the blind corner.
We've never been able to fully utilize that space. 

This is the backside of the cabinet which allows us to
make a cut to use the blind corner.

We had talked about cutting a hole from behind and adding another door to create another cabinet in our kitchen essentially. This project never came to fruition because I wasn't convinced we had a way to cut open the cabinet to make a clean rectangular opening. This past weekend on Friday morning, I asked my husband again if we could do this project. I was also more convinced to want to do it as a way to use up some of the wood we had stored before we got rid of it all. 

By Friday evening, after the kids went to bed, we got right to work. It took us the entire evening to get the hole measured, prepped, and cut, but we did it.

Really clean cut with a multi-tool he purchased last year.
I have no problem with spending money when it can earn its value.

The next day, my husband spent the whole afternoon making drawer boxes for me. That evening, we had one installed with the sliding tracks. It took much more time than we anticipated because the drawer slides were nearly impossible to separate. We looked up Youtube Videos from different people with three different methods on how to remove them. After a lot of pulling, tugging, and frustrated grunts, we were able to separate the slides and have them installed on their respective halves. 

On Sunday afternoon, my husband finished making the cabinet door completely from scratch! We used an old piece of plywood originally from the house we had saved from a previous renovation. We added some trim to fit with the style of the rest of our house. I primed and painted Sunday evening and by Monday morning, everything was installed and complete. 

Comparable pull out shelves like this would cost $100+ each...(yes, we've looked into it.)

Yes, I've already filled them up. Will need to reorganize the
pantry now that I have more space. 

The secret passageway has a proper entrance! 

Total cost* of this project: $30.90 

I'm really pleased with the way this project turned out. I know we waited years before turning this cabinet into a reality, but now that it's completed, it's really exciting to add another 4 cubic feet of storage space!

*Cost refers to new dollars spent. All other materials we had leftover from previous projects.

Why Your Child is Fat

Last week we went to tour some model homes in the metroplex. No, we are not buying a new-build, but it was highly entertaining to be able to explore the house and indulge in the free drinks and snacks with someone who was looking. 😁 Our kids were highly entertained for an afternoon. 

We went upstairs in the model home. This particular house had a game room, separate media room, and three bedrooms upstairs with two bathrooms. In the game room, they had decorated it with some shelving and decor.

It looked fine, but upon closer inspection, I noticed a lot of the decor was created from very simple objects. I noticed there were a lot of blank books. I got curious because they looked like books with covers torn off. However, it may have been a very rustic version of bound blank paper. 

My curiosity got the better of me and I decided to take one of the booklets off the shelf and flip through it to see what it was. Somehow by divine intervention or otherwise very "strange" luck, I flipped it open and  landed on a chapter title: Why Your child is Fat.

Just my luck.

After discovering this was in fact a real book with the covers torn off, I went to the front of the book to find out what kind of book I was actually holding with a chapter entitled "Why Your Child is Fat."

Ah, that clears it up. 

Clearly this was a book that ended up in the bargain pile or at goodwill and someone was looking for an inexpensive way to decorate a million dollar model home by ripping off the cover and displaying the blank page. Little did they know some overly curious visitor would dare to flip through one and reveal their secret! 

If you choose to copy this inexpensive design hack, I hope you keep in mind the curious people like me who will discover your secret. Choose wisely. 😂

Conclusion: Small Kitchen Appliances

At the beginning of last year, 2022, I set out to track my small appliance usage every single day. I created a chart, printed it out, and put it on the side of our refrigerator. Every time we used an appliance, I would mark a tally. I limited myself to one tally per day because if I tallied every single use, it would affect the results. My logic was I could borrow an appliance from a friend and use it three times in one day and return it. But if I used it three times over the course of two weeks, I would have had to keep someone else's appliance for two weeks or borrow it three different times. I am less likely to do the latter. 

My small kitchen appliances.

My chart contained 19 small appliances. I go into a bit more detail on how I define small appliances and why I included the ones I did in my original post linked above. The toaster oven, kettle, and rice cooker did not receive tallies because they were automatic winners. I will never get rid of these no matter what, and if one breaks, we are definitely replacing it. They are staples to our lives and that's never changing.

From the rest of the list, the lower was our hand mixer. It received 0 uses this year and I actually sold it in November of last year. 

For visual learners, here's the data summary if you can understand my notes.

Now for the rest of the list starting from the bottom:

10th place: Stand mixer - 2x

This one makes me kind of sad, but at the same time, I know why it came in last. I don't really bake. I enjoy cooking much more. It's also a very heavy appliance to move from storage to counter, and unfortunately, it won't fit underneath the cabinets on the countertop for daily storage. I will never get rid of it because I do occasionally make cookies, banana bread, or knead dough with it. But the number of times I do in one year will be very small. 

9th place: Steamer and dutch oven - 3x

We switched to induction last April, and since then, our steamer does not work with our induction cooktop. I figured out a creative way to still use the steamer, but it didn't happen often. Off the top of my head, we use our steamer to make two things: turnip cake and steamed buns. I made neither of these multiple times, hence why we only used our steamer three times last year. 

The dutch oven refers to my enameled cast iron dutch oven, I have a stainless steel dutch oven I use regularly in cooking. My enameled cast iron dutch oven is the lesser used because it is heavier to clean and I need to be a little more careful when I use it. It's one of those things that's great to have but in all honesty, I could probably get rid of it if push came to shove.

8th place: Popcorn maker - 4x

This was a surprise not-last-place for the popcorn maker. I didn't use it all year and was expecting it to come in last. However, my kids have gotten older and I remembered we had it so I pulled it out and made popcorn for them a few times. I think for now, it is not on the chopping block, but down the road, we may reconsider whether to keep it or not. 

7th place: Juicer, Mini warmer, immersion blender - 6x

We bought our juicer specifically to juice citrus in the winter months when citrus is in season. It received a lot of use in 2021. Unfortunately, that wasn't the year I was tracking. Last year we saw less juicing because the winter storm killed the fruit trees at my in-laws's home so they didn't have excess to share with us.

My mini warmer is a small plug in warmer that came with my crock pot. We have used it the most to heat up canned corn to go with certain meals. It's safe to say we ate at least six cans of corn last year.

The immersion blender is one I'm not convinced I will need often in the future, but it will earn its keep for now. I used to use it a lot when I was making baby food, but again, that was not the case in 2022 as my youngest turned 2 and could already feed himself. The one use I love is to blend beans in my chili. My kids will eat the chili I make, but they will not eat beans. So halfway through the cooking, I blend up the beans and then add the rest of my ingredients. 

6th place: Crock pot - 8x

I was genuinely surprised I used my crock pot this many times. Because we do have an instant pot with slow-cooking capabilities, I expected just to use the instant pot. However, I do find sometimes the instant pot is too hot, even on the slow-cook function. It is also nice to have both to use for double portions when cooking large amounts. 

5th place: Griddle, Waffle maker, Vacuum sealer - 17x

These three appliances align in how we use them which is perhaps why their usage was so similar. We use our griddle primarily to cook bacon and tortillas. I cook an entire package of bacon on the griddle and then freeze the leftovers. When we run out in the freezer, we repeat the process again. Tortillas are similar except we do not freeze them because it ruins their texture when homemade (in my experience). 

I use our waffle maker to make a large batch of waffles to freeze and we reheat for breakfast. Each batch lasts anywhere from 2-4 weeks depending on how often my kids want to eat waffles for breakfast. It is super convenient to be able to pull out pre-made waffles from the freezer without paying a premium for commercially made and packaged ones.

Our vacuum sealer gets used approximately 1-2x a month so this number is very reasonable. Whenever I see a good price on meat, I will buy large quantities of it and then vacuum seal them for the freezer. I save it in the freezer anywhere from 2-8 months generally. Sometimes, if it gets buried deep, we will end up with meat that meets its first freezer birthday. We still eat it. I've yet to get sick from eating vacuum sealed meat we stored in the freezer. We're more likely to get sick from fast food, grocery store sushi, or old orange juice, all of which has happened at least once.

4th place: Food processor - 28x

I used my food processor a lot last year. I used to not be inclined to want to use it because of the cleanup, but I realized, it's so much faster at shredding carrots and potatoes than I could ever do by hand on a grater. I also ground my own meat in my food processor this year just to experiment. The cleanup was a little bit messier than I would have liked, but the end result was very similar to what I would have gotten buying ground meat from the store. 

In fact, I used my food processor so many times last year, I justified buying myself a new one during the holiday sale. I had actually been eyeing one since holiday season 2021 but did not bring myself to purchase it. After tracking the usage in 2022, I justified making the purchase. I was even able to sell our old one to help cover a portion of the new cost. 

3rd place: Blender - 29x

Our blender gets most of its mileage in the summer during smoothie season. The rest of the year it may get used sparingly for a pesto or tomato sauce. Our blender turned eight this year. We said goodbye to our warranty, but it has replaced two blender cups and one base motor for us. We aren't complaining. To us, it's been well worth the investment we made. 

2nd place: Instant pot - 39x

Technically, first and second place are the same appliance. However, I separated them because even though we purchased it together as a bundle, they can be purchased separately. So because of that, it is possible to be a separate accessory which changes the entire use of the appliance. I've loved my instant pot since the second year we owned it - the first year was my learning curve...which was steep because I was too afraid to try it. After I got the hang of it, I love it. As you can see, the average use is over 3x per month.

1st place: Instant pot air fryer - 65x

Our air fryer earned its keep with flying colors last year. It averaged being used over 5x a month. We were really excited when we first bought it, and it's still very handy to have now. I have returned from taking my kids out, been crunched for time, and put lunch on the table in 10 minutes from entering the house. That's the power of air fryer convenience (and frozen food). 

Now air fryer vs toaster oven vs air fryer toaster ovens....that's a topic to ponder for another post. 

Any ideas on things I should track this year? 😀