Burnt Out Wonder Woman

I've also been searching for the perfect Burnt Out Wonder Woman meme, where we see her the day AFTER being so Wonder-ful, saving the day and taking care of shit. Cause the next day I'm sure she's totally strung out and can't seem to form a complete thought, get anyone dressed, or feed them anything remotely resembling food.

The past few weeks have felt like that -- alternating between being a kick-ass multi-tasker and a bumbling bag lady still in her PJs at 11am ... ok 5pm. It seems I can never quite find that middle ground, that happy medium between productive and relaxed, where the house is clean but not obsessive, the parenting is "just right" -- good enough, because anything more than that is, let's be honest, lost on the 3 year old.

No, I'm only ever at one extreme or the other. Let's take last week. Freelance gig revved into high gear and I did 20 hours of work from my kitchen table; D's wedding handkerchiefs are due oh so very soon that I'm pressing and hemming fabric next to my laptop while simultaneously rendering said freelance gig; Newborn Care class on Saturday meant I was finalizing the lesson plan and practicing the lesson with the child (luckily, bathing and diapering a baby doll is the same as 'playing', so 2 birds); and Etsy is doing very nice things for me lately, so DURING class on Saturday I got an order for a Notre Dame Baby Sweater (Go Irish, indeed). Also, you know parenting. And general self-care. And the keeping of the house. My husband said that he wouldn't let me become a "home-maker", which is why, I think, he's so willing to take the kiddo (and the dog) away on Saturday mornings so I can teach class. And some weeks I'm totally on top of things like dinner -- remembering to defrost something deserves a freaking medal. And when I set up activities for the child, I'm all "give me a mom of the year award, please".

But more often than not, those weeks when I do 3 out of 7 of my jobs at once (freelance TV planner, Childbirth Educator, Knitter/home-made wedding favor-maker), the last four (house-keeper, mother, wife, self) usually get thrown to the back-burner and left to boil over/burn/curdle. I let the kid watch movies all day, I don't shower to eat anything good, and we have pasta and meatballs for dinner -- and don't get me wrong, pasta and meatballs are awesome, so I'm usually not too worried about that one. It's when the kid eats cereal for the 5 meals and snacks leading up to pasta and meatballs that I start of feel guilty.

Oh the guilt. Really, it's when I let any of these 7 jobs slide. I feel like I'm not networking my classes enough, I'm not getting D's handkercheifs done fast enough. And heaven forbid I take a day/night off to just chill out with a book. And it's all me ... no one else is putting pressure on me except me. But I'm a bitch, so when I do it it's totally not in a nice way.

But the alternative is actually DOING all 7 of the jobs, after which I am so burnt out that I can't do ANY of them. Cue mom and kid in their jammies all day, effing around on facebook. Aaaaaand cue more guilt.

Maybe more lists is the answer?

Apparently I'm in charge of Cooking now

I'm a lucky girl. My husband LOVES to cook. He talks fondly about the Christmas when my mother gave him a cast-iron skillet and his life changed forever. Sundays at our old apartment were a sight -- 3 or 4 dinners at once, plus bread and some sort of pie. During the week I would get home too late to help keep baby out of the kitchen long enough for a nightly dinner-prep, so we just filled the fridge on Sundays and ate "leftovers" all week. It was amazing.

But then we moved. Chris still cooked, and I sort of felt guilty about being home but not being able to prepare more than a PB&J or spaghetti on nights when he had to stay late. Mostly because, while we make a meal-plan, Chris didn't always follow specifically and I didn't know what he was thinking on any given day. But then his co-engineer fell ill and Chris is now doing the work of two. Coming home on time is not in the cards at the moment. So I'm now in charge of dinner.

First step was to clean up the meal-planning software. We use Plan to Eat, which is AWESOME. OMG, totally worth the money. They do 30-day free trials, so try it out and see. It takes some setting up, because you have to get your recipes IN there, but once you can plan and cook right from the site, ... amazing. You can drag and drop your recipes into a calendar, and then it will generate a shopping list for you based on your meal plan for the week. It combines similar ingredients ("sugar" and "Granulated sugar") and totals up the measurements. You can save several stores, so you can mark certain items for Stop and Shop and certain items for Big Y (or certain items to the "sale only" store, which is what we do -- things that we'll need eventually, but for the moment only need to buy if they're on sale). The mobile site is great, and you can check off your list as you shop, and the "Cooking View" for the recipe pages is awesome for cooking -- step-by-step pages that highlight the ingredients one at a time. It imports recipes from mainstream cites like Cooking Light and MyRecipes, and for blogs pages and non-mainstream sites, there is a "bulk importer" where you paste in the text and it translates into the recipe format. If it would only come up with a way to scan a recipe from a photo or something, that'd be brilliant.

For planning, you can set the recipe's course (main course, side, breakfast, etc.) and cuisine (mexican, asian, etc.) and main ingredient (chicken, beef, rice/grain, etc.). Chris hadn't been using those, so step one for me was to go through all our "main course" recipes and set the main ingredient and cuisine, because that's how I like to plan -- every week gets Breakfast for Dinner (Friday), Fake-Out (Saturday, more on that later), something new/difficult/fancy (Sunday), and pasta (Wednesday). Thursday is leftovers. I love mexican, so each week gets a mexican dish, alternating main ingredient (chicken, pork, ground turkey, pasta). I don't love fish, but know it's healthy or whatever, so every other week there's a fish. I'm fine with at least 1 or 2 chickens every week, and then I fill in the rest with ground turkey, pork, vegetarian.

Next, the freezer. We buy meats in bulk and separate them into baggies for quick defrosting. But the rest of the freezer was a mess, literally. I needed to find out if we had frozen jalapenos for my corn salsa, and an hour and a half later I had a way-too-precise list of the entire contents of our freezer. (Side note: when we have another baby, we're getting an apartment-sized chest freezer, no matter where we live. Fill it with dinners pre-baby, fill it with breastmilk post-baby. When baby's grown/weaned, sell it on Craigslist. Boom.) Now that list is posted with a dry-erase marker, and the goal is to keep it updated so one does not need to stand in front of an open freezer digging for what you want, AND to be able to take a photo of the list before leaving for the store, because there is ALWAYS that moment of "Oh! ___ is on sale! .... but I can't remember if we have any in the freezer." Of course, this plan involves everyone pulling their weight, so we'll see how it goes.

After that, the pantry. Same issue -- we buy in bulk, but live in an apartment, so it's packed pretty tightly in the room off the kitchen (where most people put a washer/dryer). This one took a a little longer.

The hard part here will be keeping track WHILE I'm cooking -- I jump in there to get the tomato paste, but I have to either mark it down then (while I probably have something on the stove), or remember to go back later. We'll see.

Finally, we're going to actually mark down which recipes we like and which were a flop, instead of remembering "oh, that one with the greenbeans and the sauce, I didn't like that one." For example, last night's pasta with spring vegetables with cream sauce looked great until it told me to add bread crumbs, which sucked up all the sauce and basically made cheese globs. Tasted fine, but globby cheese is not Chris's thing. So after dinner I went back and took out that ingredient (and switched peas to something else ... I'm seriously married to a toddler), so next time I won't have to remember that that's the part we didn't like.

Let's get cooking!

All aboard the Baby Gift Train

Two of my co-workers at TeenNick/NickMom are due around the same time, so I made them cute onesies so they can brag to all their new mom-friends about 1) their awesome job, and 2) their incredibly crafty co-worker.