Author Archives: crunchymetromom

7 Realities of Life After You Have Kids

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These aren’t all of them, mind you, but a few things have occurred to me since I had kids. Well – since I had KID, and then with KIDS comes some kind of strange new math whereby 1 kid + 1 kid > 2 kids. I hope they don’t put this on a standardized test. Feel free to add more of your own in the comments; my hope is that this will be both cathartic for me (and perhaps other parents) and instructive for those who don’t yet/won’t ever have kids. I feel like I endlessly need to explain to people that this is how things are, because if they don’t have kids, they don’t necessarily see things from that different perspective. I remember what my perspective was before I had kids. But everything’s changed. That’s not to say that I don’t love my kids (I love them immensely and can’t imagine my life without them). I’m just acknowledging that things in my life have changed, and part of why I feel like I’m always struggling for balance is because it’s not something you get back right away after you have even 1 kiddo. Your entire globe shifts by more than a few degrees, and it continues to shift daily (sometimes hourly).

So, here’s my list of 7 things that are the “new reality” for me, at least, post-kids:

1. You can’t just do/say/buy what you want whenever you want anymore. Your schedule is no longer your own, since you now have to rearrange things around when the egg timer expires on the sitter that you’re scrambling to afford paying or the day care that promises to charge you $3 for every 5 minutes you’re late. Saying whatever you want is also out the window, since there comes a point in every parent’s life when they realize that their small human child has turned into a small human-shaped parrot. Words you said five days ago will pop out of the child’s mouth at random points and you suddenly realize that it’s like carrying little tape recorders around in your car. (“C’mon – move it!” – d’oh!) And, of course, buying is a thing of the past without planning. I used to have what economists term “disposable income” (income above and beyond what you need to pay for your necessities, like food and housing). Once I had kids, my income was disposed of for me in Children’s Orchard and Old Navy, at day care, and in seemingly endless quantities of Pampers.

2. Tired is the new normal. Even when you get a full night of sleep, one fuss seems to drain it all out of you. I have a theory about this: since kids seem to have infinite energy at times, perhaps they get it by systematically draining us of ours? Some of this must have to do with keeping up with someone else’s needs all the time. Of course, when they let you nap (and don’t draw on you with non-washable marker), you should consider those kids definite keepers.

3. Your party circuit WILL have to change. Hey – I like a bouncy place as much as the next person with two bad knees…watching the kids play Lord of the Bouncy always cracks me up something fierce. Kiddo parties (or those organized by parents of small children) typically end up being ones that are the easiest to attend, since they’re typically timed not to start at their children’s bedtime. Becoming friends with your kids’ friends’ parents is a great way to continue to socialize; not only do you get to hang out with people who are typically right near you, but you also have a built-in way to find people who have kids of similar age to bounce ideas off or compare notes with on things like the local school system. This doesn’t mean that I am ready to cast off the shackles of my former party circuit; I miss my friends terribly. It’s just that going to, say, a soccer game or a party that kicks off at the kids’ bedtime means I have to get a sitter ($$$), miss reading bedtime stories and giving goodnight kisses to my kiddos (!!!), or risk having melty kids at an event that they’ll likely not enjoy from being so tired attending.

4. You may have to eat your favorite foods on the sly. Unless you plan to become what my mom used to term “a restaurant” (“I’m not making four separate dinners! Do I look like a restaurant?!”), dinners end up relying heavily on whatever the kids will eat. I was flipping through the grocery store flyer earlier and noticed they had shrimp on sale. Shrimp…I love shrimp. And no one else in the house will eat them. Sigh. Even if dh and I are the only ones who will eat something, we’ll typically try to find a way to seed the dinner with other things that the kids will eat. For example, we know that we promised the kids pizza one night for when we have a sitter coming over. We’ll be having a quick dinner before the sitter arrives, so I realized that this was the perfect opportunity to make something they WON’T eat. Crock pot turkey chili to the rescue!!

5. Embrace what doesn’t complicate your life further. This could also be known as “the crock pot rule”. I love my crock pots because they’ve allowed me not to have to fret about not having sufficient time to prepare healthy, tasty meals in the short time I have between when I get home from work with the kids and when dinner needs to be on the table. We eat family dinner together every night, and we try to eat it around the same time every night so that the kids’ routine won’t get thrown off. (Hungry kids and velociraptors have a LOT in common, including the sharp claws bit.) This isn’t to say that I endorse just dragging out frozen dinners every night, but there are nights when it’s a freezer raid to get stuff to the table and I refuse to apologize for it. Who should I apologize to? Every meal has some protein, some starch, some veggie and some dairy. That type of constant 4-food-group plate requires planning, and between weekly meal plans and the crock pot, we’ve been able to keep ourselves mostly sane about dinners for the last several years.

6. Balance becomes a lot harder to accomplish than ever before. There’s a section of Dr. Seuss’ classic “The Cat in the Hat” where the cat is trying to show how much fun he can be by balancing on a ball and successively holding more things in his hands, on his tail and on his head. Eventually, he tumbles to the ground under the weight of all of it (and hopping on the ball), because it’s just too many things to try to balance at once. I feel like that some days. Working full-time and trying to keep the house in some semblance of order while co-raising two kids sometimes seems like a ride on a hamster wheel redesigned by M.C. Escher. The things I love doing, like yoga, have become a lot harder to do in the context of our schedule and reprioritizing kid stuff higher in order to keep to our routine). I’m not resentful; I’m resigned to it. Things will get easier as the kids get older, just as there was this amazing evolutionary leap forward in my quality of life once the kids were both old enough to be left in the living room to play while I finished preparing dinner. Balance will continue to evolve; I just need to continue not to beat myself up about not doing/being everything I want to do/be all the time.

7. You have to do what works for you. This was basically the motto of the online birth group I joined when I was pregnant with dd. We found this oasis of sane in a whirling dust storm of negativity and “PARENTING: UR DOIN IT WRONG” that seemed to pervade the rest of the boards our group was a part of. We supported each other, gave advice that was open and honest and we didn’t jump down each other’s throats when someone who supports cloth diapering heard that another wanted to use disposables. There’s so much trial-and-error in parenting, especially when they’re young; it’s just impossible to follow a roadmap exactly and have everything work out perfectly. What works for one kiddo may not work for another, and what you loved as a kid may be despised by your own kiddo. Constant adjustment and refining is the order of the day. Feeling guilty, or giving others guilt, just is so counterproductive.

 

I’m sure I’ve missed some. These are just my highlights. These are the things I’ve come to realize over the last 5 years and 2 months. I don’t miss childless life any more than I miss the single life. I know the aspects of those times in my life will come back later (and I can just bypass reliving the aspects I didn’t like nearly so much). For now, for me, it’s about embracing where I am NOW.

What it’s like to be fat

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This story goes back a ways. I think I’ve always been overweight. Back when I was a kid, you were “chubby” or “husky”. These days, you’re “obese” or – if they really want to scare the bejeezus out of you – “morbidly obese”. As if looking at you makes others very, very scared. Really, the only person who needs to be scared is you.

According to the CDC’s BMI calculator, my BMI puts me squarely into the “obese” category. In fact, it suggests that – for someone of my height – I should be about 100lbs thinner. Now, I’m willing to grant the CDC that I need to lose a good chunk of weight, but I can’t shed half my weight without looking skeletal. I know what my body looks like when I’m about 70lbs below where I am…and it’s in the “damn good” category. Take another 30lbs off after that, and I will most likely look like I strolled in from Dachau. There’s something terribly wrong with society when the governmental calculators tell you that you need to be scary thin to be healthy and the clothes manufacturers are “vanity sizing” clothes so that none of us have to feel badly about the fact that our size 16 jeans should really be a size 20.

I was a chubby kid. I had cheeks that everyone seemed to want to pinch. Once I realized I couldn’t see the chalkboard from the back of the classroom, I became the short, fat kid with glasses. It’s like the unholy trinity of suckitude: how to make a kid in the late 70’s/early 80’s as uncool as possible. I had being smart to fall back on; I could write and spell relatively well, and I was good at math. So, the same kids who wouldn’t give me the time of day on the playground also wanted to copy off my homework.

I never felt comfortable being out on the baseball diamond or the soccer field; I grew up encouraged to develop my mind and there was little interest on my part to try to learn how to run that mile, when it seemed like every 1/4mi I ran was enough to set my lungs on fire.

High school got a little better, and being a bit more active (having to take stairs EVERYWHERE, plus aerobics in the a.m. during my senior year) made my frame even out a bit better. Still, I never got below a size 9 – even at my smallest. My senior year, pushing 5’4″ tall, I was around 140lbs when I was at my thinnest point. My mom thought I looked too thin, but I thought I looked good. I was meaty but not fatty, and I felt healthy.

Once college set in, my weight went up and down a little, but it never really settled back that low and it never really got that high. The next time I’d start to get healthy again was when I began hanging out with my friend (who would later morph into Local Kitchen) who I saw wearing these cute skirts all the time. I wanted to be able to wear cute skirts like that. I could never pull off cute skirts like that. So, I hit the gym for the lofty price of $80/mo, and I lost some weight. It was a good time. Even so, it didn’t really last; I couldn’t keep the momentum going, and my weight went up some.

After dh and I got together, my weight fluctuated some more, but it didn’t really go down a lot. When we married, I was probably in the range of 220lbs. There was a point not long after the wedding when I saw the wedding picture of the two of us and was horrified by the width of my body. Sure, my dress started 2 sizes too big – that’s how wedding dresses are; and mine had been taken in quite a bit, anyway. But I just looked enormous.

It was at that point that I went on Weight Watchers. That was the first of two times I’d join WW – online, not in-person. I think I did fairly well, but even the restriction of running out of “POINTS” was stressful. Having kids through me off even further (I had dd in between WW attempt 1 and WW attempt 2). Let me be clear about this, though: my inability to stay on WW was a reflection of ME, not of WW. It’s a great program and it teaches you a ton. I just need more discipline and I need to train my body not to want crap all the time. I also need to retrain my life so that I’m not in a position where the thing within easiest reach and designed most for my lifestyle is the crap. I need to re-do a lot.

I know several people who are doing the “shake” thing, where they drink shakes as meal substitutions, and these “vitamin and nutrition-packed” shakes are supposed to make them feel fantastic and lose weight. The trouble is, you don’t learn how to eat better. You don’t learn how to move more. You just learn how to become dependent upon chemically-designed shakes. That’s not sustainable for me, and it doesn’t help me balance out nutrition intake & exercise for my family, either. After all, this isn’t just about me – this is about how to get us all to a healthier place (putting better food on the table, encouraging everyone to exercise) without putting all the adult anti-fat crap all on the kids so that they grow up with distorted body image issues.

So, when I was asked to join a research study at a hospital near where I work – this research study being about pairing reduced caloric intake with increased exercise to reduce weight – I decided to go for it. I don’t know how much I can talk about the study, and I’ve asked the program director to let me know what I can/can’t say. Otherwise, I’ll just talk in even vaguer generalities about how I’m fighting this personal battle.

At my weigh-in today, my baseline (with clothes on), I was at 216lbs. That’s just awful. It’s not unfixable, though. Hopefully, this study will help me use the next year to get a lifestyle in place that I can manage and that helps me get healthier. It’s not that I need to be a skinny girl. I just want to be a healthy girl. And life sucks as a fat girl. I’m not being down on fat girls, but I know my life would be better if I were a healthy girl, and that’s what I’m aiming towards. I’d like to see if I can get to 150lbs. What’s my timeframe? I dunno. The study suggests weight loss of up to 1-2lbs a week, which is the average in WW and is also considered the average for healthy weight loss. If I can manage that for even 20-30lbs, I think that would make a big difference.

I could use a big difference right about now.

Crock Pot Mexican Meatloaf

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When I was a kid, the idea of meatloaf was just NOT remotely appetizing. Ew. Loaf. Really? Ew.

It wasn’t until I hooked up with dh that he made a meatloaf that I was willing to try. And then I realized something: I like meatloaf! (It was like that moment at the end of “Green Eggs and Ham”, when Sam-I-Am FINALLY gets through to his beleaguered foil.)

So, of course, my thought is: can we do this in a crock pot? OF COURSE WE CAN. We’ve made a recipe a few times, but it’s a PAIN to clean up. Even lifting the thing out of the crock can be a complete nightmare. In the prior cases, we devised a pair of criss-crossing long foil strips to make a partial basket to lift it out of the bottom of the crock. Of course, seeing as how the bottom of the meatloaf often has the least moisture, it inevitably sticks to the bottom of the crock (no matter how much non-stick spray you use), and even some of the foil stays with it! Cleaning the crock, afterwards, is then a nightmare…which means that this dish doesn’t get made nearly as often as I’d like to eat it.

Cue the entrance of the “where have you been all my (crockpotting) life?!” technology: the slow cooker liner. As I mentioned in a prior post, dh bought me a package of these for Christmukkah. I figured this was a perfect chance to try one out, and I was EVER SO RIGHT. The moisture content was completely unaffected, the quality of the dish was completely unaffected, but our quality of life from not having to scrub a crock for 20 minutes was VASTLY IMPROVED. Two very happy thumbs up from each of us!

And, of course, the meatloaf was tasty. Even better – it had more flavor with the mods I made (which are already included below), to the point where I didn’t add any ketchup to my plate. Double score!

Now, the one drawback remaining to this dish is the prep time. I won’t sugarcoat it for you – this is a good 30-35mins of prep. There are also a couple of ways to make the meatloaf extractable from the crock pot, and the steps noted below are a bit lengthier than usual, to accommodate the two methods we’ve used successfully.

So, as shown in the prior post where I talk about the liners, I did a multi-step prep over time. I made the meatloaf in one mixing bowl, then put the liner into a second (smaller) mixing bowl. (see below)

Mexican Meatloaf, pre-crock

Meatloaf in liner, in the smaller mixing bowl, ready to go into the fridge

I covered the bowl with plastic wrap and used a rubber band to keep it all in place, then it went into the fridge. I made the meatloaf the night before I was planning to put it into the crock pot because – let’s face it, there’s just not enough time in the morning to get US out the door with the kids, so adding 30 minutes of crock pot prep time to the morning would’ve been a disaster. My hope was that I could just lift the liner out of the bowl, place it in the crock, cover it and GO.

The answer was: YES. This worked out perfectly. In the morning, I removed the mixing bowl from the fridge, removed the plastic wrap and just lifted the liner from the bowl and placed it into the crock.

As you can see in the next picture, the liner had excess dangling outside the crock (this is what the manufacturer recommends you do), and then I was able to put the lid on it and just get the crock pot going.

Mexican Meatloaf ready to cook

Mexican Meatloaf, in the crock and ready to cook

The joy of being able to have a fuss-free morning (at least for the crock pot), was brilliant. Even better, clean-up was a breeze, since the only part of the crock pot that needed any cleaning was the lid, and that was mostly just affected by condensation. EASY. And, better still: TASTY.

Crock Pot Mexican Meatloaf

What's Spanish for NOM?

Prep time: 30-35 mins

Cooking time: 10-11hrs on LOW, plus 15 mins on HIGH

Serves: 4-6

Ingredients

For the meatloaf:

2 lbs ground turkey

4-1/2 cups Fritos regular corn chips

6 oz shredded cheddar cheese

3/4 cup salsa

2 eggs

1/4 cup (1 pkg) low-sodium taco seasoning

For the glaze:

3/4 cup ketchup

3 Tb brown sugar

1/2 Tb dried mustard

Make it Happen

1. Crush the corn chips – you should have about 2 cups of corn chips once the crushing is done.

2. In a large mixing bowl, combine the turkey, corn chips, cheese, salsa and taco seasoning. Beat the eggs and add to the mixture; combine by hand until you have a fairly well packed mixture.

3. a) If putting in a liner, place the liner into a 4qt round crock and transfer the mixture to the crock pot base. (If making this the night before, place the liner into a smaller mixing bowl and transfer the mixture there, then cover it before placing it in the fridge. DO NOT put the crock into the fridge overnight; it could crack during heating! This is why I recommend using a mixing bowl if you want to do the prep the night before.)

b) If NOT using a liner, I recommend using foil strips to give yourself a way to get the meatloaf out. Liberally coat the inside of the crock with non-stick cooking spray. Get two long lengths of foil (about 2 ft apiece). Fold each lengthwise until you have two foil strips about 2 in wide x 2 ft long. Place them in the crock in an “X” pattern, so that they are perpendicular, with some excess hanging over the top of the crock. This will make a bed (with straps!) for the meatloaf. Then, place the meatloaf in the crock.

4. When the meatloaf is in the crock, cover and cook on LOW for 10-11 hrs.

5. When the cook time is over, add the glaze ingredients to a small bowl or measuring cup and stir to combine.

6. Pour the glaze on top of the meatloaf and then re-cover the crock. Cook on HIGH for 15 minutes.

7. When this 15 minutes is up, remove the meatloaf from the crock and place on a cutting board or platter.

NOTE IF USING A LINER: a small amount of grease may have accumulated in the liner and this will end up on your cutting board/platter. Use a bulb baster to siphon this out before starting to remove the meatloaf from the liner.