Some days, ok most days, I get to the part where I am about to put dinner on the table and in that millisecond, when everyone is still and quiet as they wait for food, I suddenly see what lays ahead of me and I want to bail.

I want to jump ship right then and there.

I want to walk out into the paddocks.

I want to get in the car and drive away.

I want to discover a magic spell that will take me from that moment to bed time, bypassing all the mayhem in the middle.

This is my ‘arsenic hour’.

We try to cram in eating, cleaning up, brushing of teeth, reading of books, and getting to bed in an hour or so when everyone is already tired, stressed and quickly loosing their minds.

It’s not pretty.

Abracadabra! Simsallabim! Presto Chango! Leveosaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

Perhaps if I say the magic words over and over one day it will happen….

This is what I am struggling with at the moment.
(That, and the random animals that keep cropping up in inconvenient places.)

What parenting stuff are you struggling with right now?

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What Are You Struggling With? is a post from: picklebums.com

Will I ever have any space?
Will I have to fight this child to sleep every night?
Will he ever go to sleep?

I roll over and turn my back on the tossing, turning, screeching, toddler.

My eyes fall on my big boy.
In his almost too small bed.
Asleep.

I remember when it was that boy screeching and fighting sleep.
I remember when he woke every 45 minutes.
I remember when he had to run his scratchy little fingers up and down my arms and drive me insane in order to fall asleep.

As the current toddler head butts me, I roll over and start the patting and rocking all over again, but this time I remember…

I remember that these nights won’t last forever.
I remember that one day this one will be almost too big for the toddler bed.
I remember that one day he will only need a quick cuddle and story before he falls asleep… on his own.

“This too shall pass” they say…
and it will.

Despite the current ‘never ending days’ soon they will be gone.
Soon I will have all the space I could ever dream of, and soon I will miss these days…

How quickly I forget…
And there are so many many things I need to remember….

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I need to remember… is a post from: picklebums.com

Recently, while pondering where we shop for our food, I shared that our monthly grocery budget was $550. I got a lot of comments and emails from people asking me to share our budgeting secrets. I promised I would… but to be honest I’ve been putting off this post for a while.

I am no budgeting guru.
I don’t have any amazing tips or tricks up my sleeve.
We don’t use any fancy system.

So if you are here looking for life changing budgeting tips, best you click away now, before you are disappointed.

If you are determined to keep on reading then I’m happy to share a few things we’ve done to keep our spending under control, perhaps they will be helpful to others, or perhaps not.

What’s in The Budget?

Ok, lets see what our budget actually covers…

$550 a month covers basic food for our family of six, as well as groceries and staples like toilet paper, cleaning goods etc.

It covers about half the nappies we use, the other half are reusable cloth nappies.

It doesn’t cover the occasional take out meal or after school bakery snack. It doesn’t include anything my husband might spend on snacks or food while at work (though he usually takes leftovers and snacks from home which are part of the budget). We also often buy items like laundry detergent or dishwasher detergent in bulk which is outside of our usual monthly budget.

We are also acutely aware that we can’t maintain this budget forever. Over the past 12 months we’ve upped our budget by $100 and as our children grow and eating 12 nectarines in 24 hours becomes a regular thing, our budget will have to grow with them.

How Do You Do That?

The short answer is…. I don’t know, we just do!

And the long answer? Well here are a few things that I think help us come in under budget each month.

We use the envelope system.
Put simply, at the start of each month we put the grocery money in an envelope and when it’s gone, it’s gone. I’m a visual person. I need to see it to know where I’m at, so this helps me keep track of spending, and stops me just chucking things into my basket without thinking.

We do a big shop once a month.
Once a month we drive into the suburbs and stock up on a months worth of staples at Aldi. I do a basic monthly menu plan and over time have learned how much of things we’ll need to get through a whole month. We pick up fresh fruit and veg and a few other bits and pieces locally each week, but the majority of our shopping is done monthly. My goal is to not end up at the shops every day and to use what we have. This is getting harder to do however, the bigger our kids get, the more they eat and I am struggling to fit a months worth in a single trolley these days!

We try to eat what is in season and we grow some of it ourselves.
Some years are better than others when it comes to growing our own food, but it kills me to pay big bucks for a zucchini in winter when I know that we’ll have more than we can possibly eat at the end of summer, so I just don’t. We are getting better at storing or preserving the things we’ve grown too. Last year we only bought two jars of jam, and we go through at least a jar a month! We also have some lovely friends who are happy to have our excess produce in return for things they’ve grown or have access to. One friend keeps my kid’s three minute noodle addiction supplied in return for fresh eggs every fortnight.

We don’t eat lots of meat.
We enjoy eating meat but right now our budget doesn’t stretch to a lot of it. Instead we eat a few vegetarian meals, we like tuna (a lot), and I usually use less meat than the recipe calls for and make up the difference with things like beans, lentils or extra veg. We also choose less expensive cuts of meat… chicken and minced beef are pretty much our staples. Our kids idea of a treat is a whopping great leg of lamb!

If we can do without, or use something else we do.
I don’t buy many commercial cleaning products, just a lot of bicarb and vinegar. We probably use half cloth, half disposable nappies at the moment. We don’t really buy expensive personal grooming products like face cream, or hair products, we just don’t use them (you can probably tell!). We use cloth instead of paper for things like serviettes and wipes.

I try to make lots of things from scratch.
Our shopping baskets are not 100% free of snacks and treats but I try to make at least half of the school snacks and sweet treats we eat myself. The same goes for things like tortillas, bread rolls etc. This is definitely a work in progress for me, and I often splurge on this stuff when I am feeling stretched and just can’t face having to roll out another darn tortilla.

I’m a tight-arse.
Yep, you read that right. I’m a tight-arse.
I think that is the single biggest thing that keeps our budget in check. I don’t like to spend money unless I absolutely have to. Sure… I can impulse buy with the best of them, and now and then I manage to justify splurging on things we don’t really need, but I get terrible buyers remorse and that definitely keeps me in check. I also get a strange sense of pride for being able to feed my family well and live comfortably within our budget. I dream of one day being able to buy an enormous, locally grownm, organic, leg of lamb every week, and one day, when we are not on a single income and trying to build our own house, we will do just that. But for now, our priorities don’t put expensive food at the top of the list and I think we are doing just fine.

So there you are…. nothing earth shattering really, but that’s how we do it.

How about you?

How do you manage to stay within your budget and feed a growing family?
Got any great tips for finding grocery bargains?
Any recipes that are family friendly and economical?

Please jump in and share your ideas and information in the comments, or if you have a blog post you’ve written on the subject please include a link so we can come have a read.

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Muddling Through a Food Budget. is a post from: picklebums.com

I think I may have an unhealthy obsession with bird houses….

I need a collection of these.
I’m pretty sure I could make a tea pot bird house.
We’ve grown gourds before but never done anything with them.
And I’ve just decided what the kids are getting for Christmas next year!

I am trying to mitigate the bird house thing with other garden pretties…

These beaded garden stakes look pretty, and easy enough for the kids to help make.

We’ve made spider webs like this one for climbing veggies before and they are always fun.

Our neighbors have a little pine forest so I think we could collect enough pine cones to make a lovely rain chain, but I’m not sure where we could hang it.

I adore this stacked rock sculpture… I need to start collecting suitable rocks now!

Of course all these things would look lovely… if we had a garden instead of a forest of weeds!

What garden pretties would you put in your dream garden?

{image by See-ming Lee via flickr}

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Lovely Links – Garden Pretties… is a post from: picklebums.com

It’s one part science, 1 part magic, 1 part sensory play and 2 parts fun!

It’s begins as two simple ingredients – wet and dry, corn flour and water.

Mix them together and at first it just looks like a tub of mess… but sink your hands in. Go on… I know you want to.

Squeeze the ooey gooey goopiness and it suddenly feels hard in your hand. Open your fingers and it magically turns to liquid again and oozes back into the tub.

For little hands this is a fun sensory experience, but for older hands this is science and magic! There was much talk about mixing, consistency, ingredients, measuring, solutions, etc…

Individual Goop Recipe

For each child:
1 cup of corn flour
1/4-1/2 cup of water.

Give each child a container or tub to mix in. Pour water into the cornflour a little at a time mixing as you go. Add water until the mixture is quite wet, but not watery. You may need to add a little more water or corn flour as you go.

This mix can be quite messy to play with, but if you let it dry you can sweep or vaccum up the dried corn flour quiet easily and it washed off hands and out of clothes without issue.

Now pour and squelch and make a mess till your hearts content!

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Sensory Play – A Tub Full of Goop! is a post from: picklebums.com

There are so many things that I love about school holidays but after six weeks with all six of us crammed into our little house things are a getting little fractious.

We’ve all enjoyed being a little (or a lot) lazy but lately it feels as thought we’ve let things slide almost to the point of insanity. Late nights, early mornings, too much TV, tantrums, crappy food, shouting…

It’s clearly time to get back on track and I’ve been thinking about the expectations we have of our kids, and for our family as a whole.

Are they too high? Too low?

Do I ask them to do too much or too little to help around the home?

Is the behavior I expect from them appropriate for their age and stage of development?

Are they really old enough to stop whining?

Are they actually capable of keeping their room under control?

Do I expect more of the boys because they have their older sisters to live up to?

Are my expectations in line with what I really want for my family?

The answer to all those questions is…

Well…

Most of the time I just don’t know.

Usually I take a wild stab in the dark and wait and see if things come crashing down around me or not. Not exactly the most enlightened way to parent huh?

But I’ve been thinking about it lately and really it’s hard to know exactly where my kids are at, what they are ready for, or what they could achieve if given the chance. I want to challenge them, to encourage them to be all they can be and do all they can do, but I don’t want to force them into things they are not ready for, that just makes everyone miserable.

So I’ve come up with an idea that just might answer my question…

Expect a little more… Accept a little less.

If I expect a little more than I might normally, I give my children the chance to shine, to try new things and grow and develop. At the same time, if I am happy to accept a little less then I am creating an environment where it is ok to ask for help, it’s ok to have a bad patch, to work on a skill at your own pace or make a mistake.

It doesn’t mean that I raise the bar way too high, or that I let them get away with murder… it’s just a way to hedge my bets a little, to let them walk the high wire with a safe place to fall onto.

What expectations do you have of your kids?
How do you decide if you are expecting too much or too little?

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Expect a Little More, Accept a Little Less. is a post from: picklebums.com

I’ve been living in denial for the last week or so, but there is no getting away from it… my girls go back to school on Thursday and my big boy has orientation at ‘grown-up kinder’ (ie 4 year old preschool). That means I am back making the dreaded school lunches, and this year I have a kinder lunch to make too!

I need a little inspiration. A little something to jog my memory and help me remember what it was I fed these children last year, and the year before. Surely if I managed this stuff before, all be it a little begrudgingly, I can do it again?

I’ve trawled back through my archives and rounded up some back to school cooking ideas. Some of these recipes don’t fit my ‘cooking from scratch’ goal 100% as some of them contain ingredients that are already pretty heavily processed which I’m trying to reduce or avoid, but I feel that making those items is still better than buying 100% shop bought, super highly processed, full of crap snacks.

I am a work in progress. I don’t think we will ever be totally, utterly, processed food free. I will never make every single thing we eat from scratch, and I will never cut out every ingredient that I couldn’t possibly grow or somehow make myself at home. I am going for the 80/20 rule (thanks Shae) and I’m not beating myself up over the rest.

Homemade School Snacks

Homemade Pizza Rolls
Big Fat Chocolate Chip Cookies.
Cornies Biscuits.
Thousands of Biscuits – tiny cookies made from freezable dough.
Apple Spice Cakes
Berry Bars.
Breakfast Muffins

Are you trying new things and cooking from scratch?
Got any recipes or ideas for school snacks to share?

You can read more about what motivated me to begin cooking more from scratch here. And don’t forget to visit Little Eco Footprints and join in Trish’s Skipping the Supermarket Challenge.

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Adventures in Cooking From Scratch – Back to School Snacks. is a post from: picklebums.com

My kids would eat tacos every night of the week and never tire of them.

They like soft tortillas with their tacos… lots and lots of them, but those things are expensive, not to mention full of all kinds of crap. Speaking of crap… there is a lot of that in store bought taco seasoning too. For a long time I thought about making my own taco seasoning and tortillas, but it all seemed too hard. In reality, it’s actually not hard at all!

So here it is, my first adventure into cooking from scratch….

Taco Seasoning

Taco seasoning is one the of easiest, most forgiving, ‘from scratch’ things I’ve ever made. What’s more, you probably have all the ingredients you need in your cupboard right now… or something else that would do just as well!

There are many great ‘recipes’ for taco seasoning online, I have pinned a few on my ‘family food’ board on pinterest, but I don’t follow any of them to the letter. Here is what usually, probably, sometimes goes into our home made taco seasoning…

Homemade Taco Seasoning Recipe

2 tsp chilli powder – or hot paprika works ok if you don’t have chilli powder but maybe put a bit less.
3 tsp garlic
3 tsp ground cummin
3 tsp mixed herbs
3 tsp sweet paprika
2 tsp salt
1 tsp flour/corn flour

Mix well and store in a sealed container. You can adjust the ingredients or amounts to your taste… Put in less chilli if that is not your thing, leave out the herbs if you don’t have any, put in less salt, or none at all if that is what you’d like. This is very forgiving but I’ve found the taco-ish flavour comes from the cumin, garlic and a little something spicy and in my opinion the salt is important too. Use as much or as little as you like!

Soft Flour Tortillas

Making your own flour tortillas is a little more work than the taco seasoning, but it’s not hard. A little time consuming, yes… but not difficult! There is no yeast, no waiting to rise, just lots of rolling out little circles, though (thanks to an enabling friend) I have been coveting a tortilla press which would make it a sinch.

Homemade Flour Tortilla Recipe

4 cups of flour – bread flour is better, but regular flour works ok too.
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup of ‘shortening’ – animal fat works really well but you can also use a vegetable oil or butter
1 – 1 1/4 cup water (generally I need the extra 1/4 cup)

Combine all the dry ingredients. If you are using shortening or butter cut it into small pieces (if you are mixing by hand I’d melt the shortening/butter first). I dump the dry ingredients into my food processor with the dough attachment (which is actually terrible for kneading proper bread but ok for this) then add the shortening and set it to a medium speed as it mixes I pour the water in slowly, stopping when the dough begins to come together. I poke it a bit with my fingers and scrape down the sides of the food processor to decide if I need to add a little more water… you are looking for a firmish dough, a little like pastry dough. You can also mix by hand and knead well for a little while until you get a smooth pliable ball of dough.

If you have time wrap the dough and pop it in the firdge for 20 minutes. Cooling it will make it easier to roll out, but I never have time for that!

Divide the dough into around 12 balls, more or less, depending on how big you want your tortillas to be. (We usually make more smaller ones, so everyone gets lots). Roll them out, the thinner the better in my opinion, but by about number 5 I give up on the perfect thinness and just get them done.

Heat a frying pan to medium hotness, pop a tortilla in the pan and cook till you see it start to bubble and puff up, then flip it over and cook the other side. Place cooked tortillas on a plate and cover with a damp tea-towel to keep them nice and soft.

These are fabulous eaten while they are still warm, but you can warm them a little in the oven or microwave if you cook them a little ahead of time. Unfortunately they don’t keep well… in fact mine go hard and rather like cardboard the next day, but that’s ok because there usually isn’t any left overs anyway.

With home made ‘salsa’ (really just cut up tomato and cumber with some balsamic vinegar cause that’s what my kids like!), lettuce from the garden and loads of cheese, there is never anything left over after this ‘cooked from scratch’ meal!

Read last week’s post to find out why I am on this crazy mission to make more home made food, and stay tuned for more recipes, failures and adventures in cooking from scratch!

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Adventures in Cooking From Scratch – Taco Seasoning and Tortillas! is a post from: picklebums.com

Despite planting this year’s veggies way later than we should have, I am really pleased with how the garden is growing at the moment.

The only thing we are eating is lettuce, herbs and the ever present rhubarb, but things are budding and beginning to fruit and flower so I am hopeful that there might be lots of food to come.

It looks like we will once again have a glut of zucchinis!

The kid-made bean support seems to be making the beans happy. Morgan is checking them every day for signs of his favourite snack to appear.

Can you see it? Right there! Hiding among the leaves… We have one, tiny, green tomato! I am still hopeful though!

We’ve never had much success with cucumbers and this year seems to be no different. The plants are still small but they are growing, ever so slowly, so maybe we’ll be able to make enough pickles for us to have one each? Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could boost them along?

We also planted a mixed cover crop over some of the bare soil that we aren’t using this year and it’s coming along great! That darn pretend cat freaks me out every time I go out there, but I don’t think the birds are remotely bothered by him!

I am always surprised what grows in our veggie garden, despite my ineptitude!

Are you growing things?
I love checking out other people’s gardens so if you blog about your garden make sure you leave me a link in the comments so I can pop on over and say hi!

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This Year’s Summer Garden is a post from: picklebums.com

We are all still enjoying the lazy days of summer holidays, and no one more so than me! No set bed times or getting up times, being able to plan as much or as little to do as we please, eating at whatever time suits our activities for the day, and long stretches swinging in the hammock dreaming up big plans for the year. These are things that our holidays are made out of. But I am becoming more and more aware of how few lazy days we have left and how soon my day dreaming will have to turn into actual doing.

I am not one for making new years resolutions or grand ‘all or nothing’ type goals, but I do like to spend some of my down time thinking about how I can make the craziness of the busy days more organized, productive and better for my family. At this time of year I am inspired by lots of ideas, books and blogs and I am often left wondering how these motivating ideas could be worked into our lives.

One of the ideas that has inspired me this summer is Little Eco Footprints ‘Skipping the Supermarkets Challenge’.

In the past our family has been inspired to consume more local produce and be mindful of where the things we buy come from, so Trish’s idea to totally stop using all of the ‘super chain’ type stores really struck a chord with me. I dislike the monopolies of the super chains, the fact that they make so much profit while the primary producers receive so little and especially the disconnect between the food we eat and the items we consume and where these things really come from. But, to be totally and brutally honest, the idea of never shopping at a supermarket or super chain, even for a little while, scares me.

There are many excuses that I could use to explain why we couldn’t possibly take part in this challenge…

We have a groceries budget of $550 a month (I must apologies I put down budget at $450 initially which was our old budget, my husband pointed out that it is $550 a month now that the kids eat 12 nectarines in a day) and there is no way we could manage without using some of the super chains.
We don’t have many options or alternatives where we live – there are no food co-ops, no CSAs no bulk stores and to get to these things would mean an hour or more of driving.
We are renovating our house ourselves, there is no way we could do that without visiting that super duper chain hardware store… and often.

I could go on, but it’s easy to make excuses, and while they might make me feel better in the short term, they are not very helpful.

What is helpful is thinking about the things we can do.

Perhaps we can’t avoid supermarkets totally, but we can avoid them sometimes. We can make more informed choices about the ones we do visit, and what we buy from them. We can look for more alternatives that work for us. We can visit our local farmer’s markets (there is one close every weekend). We can choose the smaller locally owned supermarket. These may only be small changes but every little bit count, and I think just being more aware is a positive thing.

One thing we can definitely do is make more of our food from scratch.

It’s something I have been steadily building on for a while now. Cooking food from simple, real, ingredients, using less pre-made, chemical laden, convenience type food and ingredients. Not only do I feel this kind of food is healthier, it also means we spend less, we drive into the supermarket less and we lessen our dependency on those super chain stores.

Now I am not a total zealot. We still use and enjoy some convenience foods and even the occasional take out and we do so without guilt. My goal is not to eliminate these things from our lives all together, but to cut down on them, and to be more aware.

I am not a super confident cook, nor do I have much success experimenting and making things up in the kitchen, but most of the ‘made from scratch’ food items are really basic and a whole lot easier than I ever imagined. I have a growing list of things I can cook from scratch – pizzas, bread, cakes and even home grown popcorn!. But there are many more things I would like to try. Some things are not practical to try at the moment when my kitchen still has no walls, or ceiling and zero storage, but I’ve been putting off others that are quite doable even with only half a kitchen.

Do you make many foods from scratch?
Over the next few months my goal is to be more aware of what we buy from the super chains and look for more alternatives, but mostly to cook more from scratch, to try new recipes and to share my success, and failures, with you. So keep an eye out for my ‘made it from scratch’ recipe series!

Do you think you could avoid all super chains for a year? a month? forever?
If you are keen to give it a go, then pop over to Little Eco Footprints and sign up for the challenge. I’ll definitely be following along reading Trish’s journey with interest.

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Thinking About Food – Cooking From Scratch is a post from: picklebums.com