Big Brood

… whenever you look at cars passing on the road, you’re silently tallying the number of seats.

… every once-in-a-while you walk into your living room and think to yourself: Hey, where did all these kids come from!?

Our favorite healthy, filling, budget breakfast is crockpot oatmeal.

I finally sat down to figure the cost per serving. This following recipe feeds about 5. You can increase or decrease as needed for your family.

Crockpot Oatmeal

• 2 1/2 cups old fashioned oats
• 5 1/2 cups water
• 3 dried apricots, diced
• 2 Tablespoons brown sugar
• 1/3 cup craisins
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 an apple, diced

Before you go to bed at night, add all of the ingredients to your crockpot, turn crockpot to low. Wake up to breakfast already made.

Feel free to add or subtract ingredients that suit your family. Some options would be honey instead of sugar, raisins instead of craisins, etc. I have heard some families add chopped pecans before serving too.

The cost is around 19 cents per serving. You could certainly decrease this by taking away some of the dried fruit or using fruit that is locally in season.

… you go out to a buffet, they ask you “How many kids?” and it’s a hard question for you to answer.

The Star-Telegram has an article talking to the Hinkles about 10 tips to save money on your food bill.

We don’t have any teens yet so I’m glad to get a little advice from a more “advanced” family. From their tips, the only things I don’t think we’ve tried are:

• Shopping at international markets where you may find things like rice and spices cheaper.
• Setting a once-a-month Use-It-Up week to use up leftovers and bits & pieces.
• Setting aside stale bread. I don’t think we usually get much stale bread.

We do have a few small international markets around here, so it sounds like we need to take our price book and check them out!

Do you have any other tips to add to these that help you to save money on your bill?

Looks like the new CEO for Eli Lily offers his big family as inspiration for many of the skills that got him to the top.

A large family taught Lechleiter how to negotiate, cooperate and get along with others. It also taught him the importance of education. He tore through high school, taking advanced chemistry, physics and calculus classes.

I’ve certainly seen a lot of negotiation happen around here. Too often it’s the “Take it or leave it” negotiation tactic, but I’ve often seen some wonderfully giving moments between my children that make me feel ashamed for my own “It’s MINE!” attitude that I have sometimes.

How about you? Do you see any budding CEO’s in your brood? What kind of “business skills” do you think your goslings are learning?

This is the week to get my tomato and pepper seeds started.  The last frost date for our area is about 6 weeks away and the seeds need about that amount of time to get a good start. 

Thursday my grandma will come over to give me a hand.  I have about 150 tomato seeds, 5 different varieties and 100 pepper seeds to start.  This may seem like an insane amount but I want to be sure to have enough to have a good crop and share seedlings with family and friends. 

I want to plant 20-30 tomato plants this year to hopefully can and freeze enough to get us through this next year.  As gander has mentioned, groceries are going up up up in price and anything is a help!  We have all the jars we need and will only need to purchase the lids.  It seems no one cans any more so boxes of canning jars keep getting delivered to our house!  In fact I have a box on my driveway now!

You might wonder why you would start your own seeds…One big reason is the savings.  One packet of heirloom amish paste tomato seeds was $2.75 for 50 seeds.  I may be able to purchase 2 nice nursery grown tomato plants for that price, and probably not heirloom.  I also like knowing how the plant was grown, from the beginning and what has been sprayed on it or not sprayed on it for that matter.   This is also a great educational experience for the goslings.  They get to see the seeds in the packet become the food on their plates.  It always amazes me how much more willing they are to eat the produce from OUR garden. 

You may have heard starting seeds is too complicated or too much work.  I have little experience myself but the couple of times I have tried I have had great success with only a few hours work. 

The supplies needed are:

• A growing medium such as a sterilized soilless mixture like Jiffy mix
• A container to grow in.  Anything will work as long as it is sterilized (be creative, try yogurt containers, egg cartons, produce containers, old garden center flats), just run through dishwasher or soak in a 10% bleach solution
• The seeds, of course.
• A warm place for your seeds to start, such as a kitchen counter. 

  This is all you need until your seedlings sprout. 

Once they have popped up out of the dirt you will need some kind of light source.  A full day sunny window will work.  We don’t have this option so we use artificial light.  We use hanging shop lights with fluorescent tubes in them.  We hang them from chains in the ceiling so they can be raised up as the plants grow.  I will be sure to post pictures once we get it set up.  We put the lights on a timer so the plants get 14 or so hours of light a day and water once a day. 

I would love to hear from others out there who have had success or failure starting seeds at home.

This Marketplace Report entitled: Rice prices straining developing nation is another example of food price problems much like our rising food commodities prices here in the U.S This rice shortage is due to a combination of environmental factors, the falling value of the dollar (which much of rice trades are priced in) and strong economies in some nations that use rice as a staple.

We are eating a lot of rice because of Goosey’s temporary (we hope!) gluten-free diet but it will only be an inconvenience for us. These people are depending on this as a staple. When you are spending $0.80/day out of your $2.40/day on your food, a small shift makes a big difference.

For a deeper discussion of political implications of the rice shortage, take a look over at The Warrior Lawyer  for The Politics of Rice.

Have you seen an increase in the price of your food staples locally?  Are you doing anything to adapt?

Reading this article via Catholic Mom of 10 a line stuck out to me, reminding me of ourselves:

“I have absolutely no regrets. It was never our intention to have a big family but I wouldn’t go back. It would be lonely. It’s hard work but very rewarding.”

That’s exactly how I feel about or significantly smaller (but hopefully growing) brood.  When they go out of town for any reason, I get lonely!  When they’re around, I know exactly when to go to bed, get up and do my things around the house.  Without them, I wander around feeling dazed and wasting my time on frivolous and distracting activities (usually watching dumb TV or surfing the Internet too much.)  I find myself staying up until 1am, just wasting time.

My life is more of a mess without them, than with them!

How do you feel when you’re brood’s not around? Lonely, relieved, sad, all of the above or something else?  I’d love to hear your comments on this.

Just found this blog entry entitled “You might be a big family if…” over at Mama Archer’s Blog which is simlilar to our “You might be a big brood if…” series and I can totally relate…though, when we get the question “Are you Catholic or Mormon.” we can always answer: “Catholic….why?”