[tags]wordless wednesday[/tags]

I’ve really been enjoying being able to choose what my daughter has for lunch at school. It’s been a bit of a challenge to my creativity, especially when I didn’t think about it the night before to ensure that basic ingredients would be ready.

Those are the days I resort to chicken soup in a thermos. It works well enough if not ideal.

The simplest way to make providing a healthy lunch easy has been to send leftovers in the thermos or to have something precooked, like pasta, and add veggies and a sauce to it. Very quick and simple pasta salads go over quite well.

I’m definitely not a fan of Lunchables and similar. I know a lot of people like them well enough but they really aren’t to my taste, mostly for nutritional reasons. I’d rather pick better quality meats and cheeses and make something like a Lunchable on my own for far less.

I always include one or two kinds of fresh fruit. Since my daughter is in kindergarten she gets both a snack and lunch. If the fruit is small, two kinds can keep things a little more interesting.

Fresh vegetables work really well for us too. Most common are carrot sticks or slices, but leftover salad, cauliflower and broccoli have gone over quite well on a regular basis. Then again my kids have what I understand to be a rare love of raw vegetables.

On occasion I do include something that is more of a treat, aside from the fruit. The school forbids candy, but we have sent shortcake with berries on top for a really fun dessert.

One of my best purchases was a container that could be split into several small sections. These are available in many forms, but I like the overall function of the Laptop Lunches bag from ReusableBags.com best. It has a lot more room than the little box I have right now, and once my daughter needs something a bit bigger, that’s what I’m getting.

Having a lunchbox that has compartments really does make packing healthy, interesting lunches easier. With my current little box I can pack a sandwich by cutting it in half and stacking it, then using the little compartments for veggies, sliced fruit, crackers or whatever. Or I can put pasta salad or other foods in place of the sandwich. I just love the flexibility.

Things I don’t pack include fruit snacks or rollups, the aforementioned Lunchables or anything else with too much sugar or overly processed. I’ve put a lot of effort in avoiding those at home, so I don’t want to suddenly add them just because my daughter eats lunch at school.

Do any of you have favorite school lunch recipes or ideas?

[tags]school lunch,lunch ideas,kid lunches,lunch,laptop lunches,healthy food[/tags]

It’s just a couple days before Halloween, and time to think about what to do with all that Halloween candy. You know what the kids will want to do with it, and it’s up to the parents to decide whether or not to let them do it.

Many, perhaps most kids will want to just gorge on the candy, and that may not be the worst of ideas. It gets rid of the candy quickly. A single day of eating a ton of candy is not going to produce instant cavities. You can work on control later… say the next day or two, at which point it really makes more sense to limit candy consumption.

Of course, even letting them overdo should be within limits. You don’t want vomiting children if you don’t have to.

I’m really not the type of mom who throws the Halloween candy out. So far we just put it in a single bag for everyone to share, but as the kids get older and more possessive I suspect that won’t work. Changing tactics as kids get older is often necessary.

I remember my sisters and I going through our bags in detail, figuring out what to trade and what to hide. We had some pretty good hiding spots for candy, and it was pretty much a competition to see who could have a stash of Halloween candy the longest.

I think it’s important for parents to remember how much they enjoyed their Halloween candy as a kid and to not spoil it for their own children. Combine good habits to balance the candy intake with healthier foods, and proper dental care, and the short term added candy intake shouldn’t be a big problem.

[tags]halloween,trick or treat,halloween candy[/tags]

I won’t let them win.

I’m watching my sister’s two daughters today so that my sister and her husband can go clean their house of ash and such from the fires. It’s been a crazy day.

How crazy?

Crazy enough that I finally decided to kick off my In Mother Words website so that I could start sharing stories. And that was before the water fight in the garage.

I hope to get a lot of other people sharing stories about their kids and their experiences as parents, always on the humorous side. I like getting time to share the laughs.

[tags]parenting humor,kids,children,humor[/tags]

Well, not so much my train of thought as my overall work efforts. After spending several days evacuated to my mother’s house it’s a challenge getting myself focused again.

Besides, Halloween is coming and I still haven’t made my son’s costume. But I did get a start last night. He finally informed me he wants to be a blue dragon. Of course the stores only have red dragon costumes.

I’m up for the challenge, though. I bought a hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants for the costume, and I’m making a tail and spikes for him out of scrap material. The may not be too hard, just a bit time consuming. And it’s a nice way to keep my hands busy whenever I watch television.

We haven’t even unpacked fully yet. Did bring things in from the car at least, but not all the clothes are back in the closets or other stuff fully put away. After all that stress the big thing I’ve wanted to do these past couple days is relax.

Today I’m determined to stop that and get some actual serious work done. There’s enough I meant to get done before the fires started, and now I really need to get going on all that.

I’m back home after being evacuated due to the Witch Fire in San Diego. It’s really been something. An apartment complex we had once considered moving to is still closed to residents due to the fire. Homes my husband remembers seeing built as a child burned to the ground. Ash is all over the place.

We’re quite grateful to have escaped unhurt and that our home was far enough from the fires that we can’t even see the burn areas. That’s mostly due to the hills, since there are burn areas within about 2 miles of us.

But on to the Thursday Thirteen thoughts:

1. Keeping kids busy indoors is tough, even when you’re fortunate enough to have family to evacuate to, rather than going to a shelter. I should have grabbed more of their toys.
2. There are times when it doesn’t matter that the kids watch a lot of television, so long as it distracts them from the crisis.
3. Kids run a little more wild when you get several of them together.
4. Try to keep some routine going.
5. Have a lot of art supplies for the kids. Markers, especially washable ones, or crayons are easier to deal with than paints.
6. Think about when you let the kids out when the air is bad. Get masks if they really need to play outside, and be especially careful if any of the kids have asthma or allergies.
7. Ash can creep under closed doors.
8. Think about the animals. My family doesn’t have any pets right now, but my sister does. It takes a lot more effort to care for pets during an emergency, even if you aren’t in a shelter.
9. No matter how much you pack, after you leave you will wish you had brought more.
10. Cooking for 11 people is a challenge, especially when you haven’t had a lot of time to plan for it.
11. Going through a crisis with loved ones is the best way to deal with it.
12. Watching too much news will burn you out on it, whether or not your home survives.
13. It feels really, REALLY good to go home again.

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For those of you who have high school or college-age kids, or are in college yourself this could be fun. The Gallery Collection is holding a $10,000 Greeting Cards Scholarship Contest.

The contest is open to high school, college and university students, and it ends January 14, 2008. Your work has to be original, of course. It can be a photo, artwork or graphic.

If the contest interests you, probably one of the smartest things to do is to familiarize yourself with what the Gallery Collection already offers. One of the areas they like to be known for is business Christmas cards, and they do have some beautiful ones. So thinking about what would look good for a professional to send out as a part of his or her business should be one of your considerations as you design.

I’m not a student myself these days, or I’d find it tempting to enter. That’s a nice bit of money towards improving an education. I hope whoever wins it makes the most of the addition to their educational opportunities. It’s so hard to pay for college these days. I had to work hard to make it through myself, and it has only become more expensive.

If you know someone who might enjoy entering this contest, let them know. You don’t want to wait until the last minute to start planning and designing.

Made it home today. Very first thing I did was take a nap. It’s just so exhausting sleeping in a house full of other people, not in your own bed, even when they’re all family. And I won’t even mention the occasional barking of the dogs.

We’re more or less out of danger now. A shift of winds or something like that is not completely out of the question, but the winds are expected to die down by 6 pm today. They’ve already been much better.

Home looks like it usually does. A little bit of ash blew in under the door, but that’s it. In the 2003 Cedar fire the winds were blowing perfectly to dump massive quantities of ash in my mother’s yard, but this time she didn’t get that, and we didn’t get it here either, despite being much closer to the fires.

While the risk of fire is not completely over, the most dangerous conditions are gone. No more high winds to whip it up into an inferno too quickly for anything to be done about it, and as I said the last bits of the wind will be gone soon.

We’re keeping prepared for now, just in case, but it’s highly unlikely that we have anything to worry about.

My sister still can’t go home, and she doesn’t particularly want to go home until they have water. She may not leave until the boil water order is over, in fact. That means at least a couple more days.

Gage is napping really well right now. He resisted, but like everyone else the poor kid is exhausted. Ariel is disappointed that she had to leave her cousins. All one big party to her, which helped except that they were much too rowdy at times. All us parents are all too glad to be done with that.

Now I just have to keep Ariel busy all week until school starts up again next week. I’m sure we’ll be making that up at the end of the school year. Gage’s speech therapy was closed for the week too. We got a call from them saying they’ll start up again next week. They were probably very close to some of the burn zones.

But around here, the entire drive from my mother’s house here, in fact, you’d hardly know anything happened. Didn’t pass any of the burn zones. Of course that also means no interesting pictures.

I hope the smoke clears from the air soon. We’re supposed to keep children inside as much as possible. Sounds fun, doesn’t it? We are letting the kids outside just a little because it is really hard keeping them 100% cooped up.  That was a big part of the reason the kids were so wound up at my mother’s house.

Now I get to catch up on everything around here. It will probably take me a few days to get back into routine, especially while keeping a slight extra eye on the news. But I’m not going to watch it all day. Did enough of that and the odds of anything immediately relevant have become slim enough.

[tags]fire,poway fire,witch fire,evacuations,home again[/tags]

My husband is off to take a look at our house today to see if things look good enough to come home. I told him that so long as it looks good and the air quality is sufficient, we may as well go. The kids are going utterly stir crazy around here. Separating our kids from their cousins would probably help a lot.

If anyone wants to get a good look at things, I found out that SDSU has a nice compilation of links for the fires.

Things will take longer for my sister and her family. They live in Ramona, and there’s no water there right now. The pumping station broke down. It’s going to be about two days before things are fixed, then they’ll be on a boil water order.

We aren’t watching the news quite so hard anymore. Short of a new fire or a big shift in the winds our homes should be safe.

It’s been a crazy couple of days and I’m really looking forward to getting home and getting my computer set up again. I’m lucky to have my mom’s to use, but it’s just not the same, and that drives me nuts. Along with all the waiting and worrying, of course.

We’ve been fortunate since we haven’t had to go to a shelter, sleep on a cot or on the floor or anything like that. Lots of people had it far worse, and will for a while yet.

[tags]fires,san diego fire,witch fire,poomacha fire,poway fire,evacuations[/tags]

We took a couple hours’ break from listening to news about the fires. It gets to where you know it’s mostly repeating, you aren’t in imminent danger of being ordered to evacuate, and it’s time to take a break.

Plus one of the dogs is having puppies tonight. My sister’s sister-in-law is staying here. She breeds boxers and one was due any time. That time turned out to be tonight. Two puppies so far that we know of.

So far no one I know seems to have lost their home. It looks like we’ve made it through the worst for my family, although I know many other people are still waiting and hoping, or know that they’ve lost their home. It’s quite a thought.

My daughter will eventually be disappointed, although she’s been having so much fun with her cousins here she won’t realize it until school starts. That field trip I mentioned earlier to Bates’ Nut Farm. School will be out for the entire week, and that means no field trip. No idea if they will reschedule or just leave it cancelled.

I will be very glad to get back home. I think it will be possible tomorrow. Technically it’s possible today, but we feel it makes more sense to stay away from the smoke and out of the way should the fire change course yet again.

[tags]poway fire,san diego fire,evacuation[/tags]