The MomSpeak

It’s lunchbox season again. And again I find myself wandering the grocery store aisles looking for inspiration. The “fruit snacks” and sugar-filled yogurt tubes my kids beg for only depress me. Where’s the real food?

It is indeed possible to pack delicious lunches with a minimum of fuss and waste. Here are a few tips passed along by Parent Hacks readers over the years:

Send your kids on a spy mission. I ask my kids to report back to me what their friends are eating that looks good. I’m often surprised by what they tell me. Some of the ideas that came back from last year’s recognizance: hard-boiled eggs, lasagna, skewered apple chunks.

Freeze a week’s worth of sandwiches. Build your sandwiches assembly-line style on good quality bread, then pack them back into the thick plastic bread wrapper and pop the whole package in the freezer. Works well for peanut butter and jelly, many lunch meats, and cream cheese on raisin bread, and cuts down on the morning rush. (This trick works for muffins, too.)

When it comes to dressing my preschoolers, I’m sort of a snob.  

The daughter wears smocked dresses like playclothes; the son sports the preppiest duds this side of Bermuda.

My secret?  95% of their wardrobes are secondhand. 

And why not, when you can buy Kitestrings for less than K-mart? 

Recycling clothing eliminates waste and teaches kids that expensive is not necessarily better.

Here are 4 places to score quality kids clothes for pennies on the dollar:

Consignment stores (like Kid-To-Kid and Once Upon A Child):

You can browse through their racks just like any boutique, but you’ll find tags from every store imaginable.  Most items are priced $8 or less, with clearance prices as low as $1 an item.  Store buyers check carefully for stains and flaws.

You don’t have to conduct an elaborate research project to know that busy moms rate mealtime as among the most stressful times of the day. As we all know, it’s no small feat to tackle all your daily to-dos AND get something heathy, economical, and enticing to the table seven days a week.

Let’s imagine a familiar scenario. You are scheduled to work in your kindergartener’s classroom in the morning, then pick up your baby at the sitter and take her for her six month’s checkup before school lets out.. When it does, you’ve promised to take your two and your neighbor’s toddler to the playground. After that, it’s absolutely crucial that you take the car in for the oil change it’s been needing for at least a month. In the midst of all this, your partner, who usually does grocery duty, gets called out of town on business before making it to the market, As you’re all too aware, the fridge is empty, but you’ve taken the kids out for pizza one too many times this week.

What’s a busy mom to do?

Meal planning. Sounds so sensible and mundane. Where’s the spontaneity? The allowance for food cravings? And what if there’s no room for the overhead of planning in your already busy life?

I wouldn’t classify myself as particularly organized or systematic, but I do consider meal planning to be the backbone of my domestic week. The fifteen minutes I spend mapping out the week’s meals save me hours of time I’d lose dashing around my house trying to scare up dinner, or running back to the store for an overpriced item from the deli case.

I’m here to reassure you that meal planning does not have to include seven days’ worth of perfectly balanced meals, nor does it require a lot of work or time. Just a few minutes and the willingness to sit down with a cookbook and a grocery list.

The first time I opened the big fat Baby Book That Shall Not Be Named, I freaked. Just freaked. It was probably a combination of first trimester hormones and the legitimate fears of a first time mom-to-be, but those so-called experts destroyed my confidence in my ability to be a parent.

It seemed to me from the Baby Book That Shall Not Be Named that parenting had nothing to do with love or commitment or even instinct, but one’s ability to memorize the 14 pediatrician-approved breastfeeding holds or dedication to creating a perfect germ-free home.

I was going to be a total and complete failure as a parent.

And so, like tons of parents-maybe even like you–I turned to the web. I couldn’t believe what I found: Message boards, blogs, websites, and online communities filled with people like me who were admitting that they too were freaked out. Plus advice. Oh boy, was there advice. But not from experts who seemed to have no understanding of the constraints and limitations of real-life moms– more like moms themselves who were willing to contribute their own experiences to the community and see if it might benefit anyone. Less the “ask an expert” approach to parenting and more “ask the chick from your new moms group, the one with the bangs and the cool sling.”

Along with ever rising gas prices, the price of milk is headed for the stratosphere, salaries seem to be shrinking, credit card balances rising - let’s not talk about keeping our kids in clothes. Still, even as we struggle and squeak the budget til it screams, it’s hard to ignore others who have far less than we do and suffer from far bigger troubles. We want to give back, especially to teach our children the value of thinking about others, but most of us have as little time as we do extra money. What to do?

The internet has made giving easy and inexpensive, with sites such as www.KIVA.org , which lets you make small business loans to people all over the world who want to start a business but need help. You can donate as little as $25.00 to someone you choose from an array of profiles. Best of all, the loan is repaid once the business gets underway. Heifer International (www.heifer.org) is another terrific site also dedicated to helping people help themselves out of poverty.  For as little as $10.00 you and your kids can buy a share of a dairy goat (or pig or sheep), something that will supply a family with several quarts of milk a day or enable them to add protein to their diets and even begin a small dairy or weaving business. Closer to home, www.kitzforkids.org lists organizations all over the country that for $12.00 will get packages of school supplies to kids who can’t afford them. This one’s especially nice right now.  These worthy organizations make giving really easy. But they’ve established a real presence already.  What about the small local programs working hard every day to make a difference without getting much publicity or attention?

With grocery prices at record levels, we’re all looking for ways to save money on our food bills. With just a little bit of forethought and common sense, you can lower your grocery budget while still eating well. Here are a few tips to get you started:

Plan your meals. This one’s obvious, but may feel overwhelming if you’re not one who likes to cook (or plan). Any meal planning you can do — even if it’s for three dinners during the week — will help you buy only what you need, and, in the process, save you money. You can also build in time to defrost meats you’ve purchased on sale or cook dried beans (rather than having to buy more expensive canned beans). Another option: sign up for a meal-planning service such as savingdinner.com or thescramble.com. For a subscription fee, you’ll get meal plans and grocery lists emailed to you each week.

I recently got into a fascinating discussion about 4-year-olds, during an eyebrow wax, of all times. My aesthetician and I were discussing routines and other random tidbits, like how we’d be more excited that our kids can talk in long paragraphs if only they had an on-off button. We ended up on the subject of my daughter making her own bed.

“You have her make her own bed?” she asked me curiously, the way all moms seem to do when I reveal this fact.

“Absolutely,” I said. “She’s been doing it since she was three.”

Sometimes, the only thing better than a really cheap activity is a totally free activity. We here at the Savvy Source have identified our favorite 27 items that are already in our houses that function as toys or games and narrowed it down to our 10 favorite most fun!

All but one of these items can be found in anyone’s home, so you can refer to this list when striving to entertain your child in a child-free home.

1. Cardboard box: really big or kinda small, can be used as a playhouse for the kid or for stuffed animals and dolls. Have fun decorating it with stickers and paint.
2. Paintbrush: use to paint sidewalk with water from hose or bucket.
3. Sheet + Table = readymade fort. May require more sheets and blankets than you remember from when you were little.
4. Electrical tape: use it to make a hopscotch board inside or to create race tracks for toy cars and the like. If you don’t want to commit your carpet to the plan, maybe you can dig up more cardboard.
5. Handbroom and dustpan: sweep up bits and bobs from under my dining room table. As long as I call it “doing work” then Holden is game. Bonus that it helps me out!

Everywhere we look, everything we read (assuming we have time to read), proclaims that women have trouble taking time for themselves. This is very old news. If you’re a mother, especially one with even one child in diapers, it’s pretty certain you have trouble even finding time for yourself, let alone taking it to indulge. We get it. But we also know that if we don’t treat ourselves once in a while, we’re more likely to respond to life’s unremitting demands by getting grumpy, impatient, and even more susceptible to stress. May we offer an unlikely and inexpensive path to joy: chocolate.

If you’re like most women, you think of chocolate as a guilty pleasure, emphasis on the guilt. You may lust for it, but try to resist for all the familiar, old school reasons - it’s fattening, bad for your heart, skin and teeth. Resist no more. Chocolate has joined red wine on the list of decadent things that are now actually good for you. Scientists have found that chocolate is good for the heart, the brain, even the libido. Certain natural substances in chocolate (called flavonoids) help lower blood pressure and slow the rate at which the body processes bad cholesterol. As if that weren’t good enough, some lab studies suggest that cocoa flavonoids not only act as antioxidants, preventing damage free radicals can cause in healthy cells, but may even reduce the growth of cancer cells.