Monthly Archives: January 2011

Great friends and a freezer full of food

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Like many moms of multiples, before my daughters were born I started filling the freezer with prepared meals for quick dinners while I was in the hospital and after I came home with two babies. Regardless of what the babies would need, there would still be two parents and a toddler to feed.

By the time the girls were four months old, I realized that I had to find some new strategies for feeding our family. Before I got pregnant, I had gone to a meal preparation service.  You purchased a dozen or more meals, and then came to store to assemble them. The process was quick and the meals were delicious, but we were paying $4 or $5 per serving. It was convenient but we couldn’t afford that when I wasn’t working.

One day at Costco, I found the solution.  It was The Big Cook Book, a cookbook designed for batch cooking. The authors’ idea was that 3 or 4 women would get together every few months and prepare as many as 200 meals in a single day. Each family would then have a freezer stocked with meals for the next month. I soon found three friends ready for a meal cooking experiment.

The first time, we met at my house. All of our children except our 4-month old twins were looked after elsewhere. Beforehand, I planned the menu and, using an excel spreadsheet, prepared shopping lists for everyone. We all arrived with our ingredients, some extra kitchen supplies (knives and measuring cups), and snacks. We started at 9 am, and my kitchen was clean and I was off to pick up my son by 4 pm. We made 72 meals (18 each).

A few months later, we did it again. We made some changes to be more efficient in our shopping, prep work, and assembly. We also added some of our own favourite recipes, including some vegetarian meals, an area which is lacking in this cookbook. We opted for takeout for lunch, and prepared 14 meals each, plus 4 containers of homemade tomato and vegetable pasta sauce.

We’ve continued to do get together and cook every 3 or 4 months. Three of my friends, who didn’t really know each other before, now consider each other friends. Between us, there are now 9 children and 8 adults. These meals, and our friendship, have helped us through pregnancies, new babies, going back to school, shift work, camping trips, moving, medical problems, and more.

We’ve prepared over 90 meals in a single day. Our meals cost between $6 and $8 a meal, which comes out to about $0.75 to $1.30 a serving since most meals feed our families dinner with leftovers for lunch. Our cooking days have become a fun, economical and convenient way to feed our families. It also makes meal planning easy – there’s always something in the freezer – and it avoids the hassle of cooking at end of the day when everyone is already tired.

How do you handle meal preparation? Do you have any favourite recipes to share?

Boys Will Be Boys?

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“Can I have a ponytail?”

“I need a barrette!”

“Today I want pink undies.”

“Where is my leotard?”

I hear questions and comments like these almost every day. From Buba, my son.

He sees his sister (Tiny) getting pretty things for her hair, a special outfit for gymnastics class, and all kinds of pretty, sparkly, pink things, and he wants them too. At this point, I haven’t fully figured out why he really wants these things. Does he really, really want a ponytail, or is it just that he wants the same thing that Tiny is getting?

I think it might be a little bit of both. He seemed not to care much about the leotard until Tiny started to make a big deal about it. Once I gave him a special set of clothes (a Gap T-shirt and some gray sweatpants) and told him that they were just for gymnastics class, he stopped asking about the leotard. But he does seem to genuinely like pink things, and, especially at this point, I feel it is okay to let him have and enjoy the pink sparkly things. Because, well, who cares?

For the most part, I try to avoid any gender stereotyping with my kids. They both got baby dolls and trucks for Christmas, and they both love playing with the tea set just as much as they enjoy playing with the set of toy tools. But they’re starting to become aware that some things are perceived as being for boys while others are for perceived to be for girls. At the dentist’s office, the kids each got a goody bag to take home. Buba’s was green with trucks and dinosaur stickers inside, while Tiny’s was pink with Strawberry Shortcake and princess stickers (along with a toothbrush and sample sized toothpaste, of course). And then there was the donut shop girl who, after serving a chocolate frosted donut with multicolored sprinkles to Tiny, gave Buba a plain chocolate frosted donut and explained that this was the “boy donut”.  No one has a problem with Tiny racing around the floor with her cars, but even a close relative told Buba that he needed a wallet, not a purse.

I guess my feeling is that I just want to let Buba be Buba. If he wants to dress up in a tutu and carry around a purse, fine. It makes him happy. And that makes me happy.

So how about it? Anyone else have a little boy like mine? How have you handled gender stereotyping with your family?

the crazy twin vs. the smart twin

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At bedtime one night, P was being wild and I asked him to settle down. He replied, “Sometimes it is fun being the crazy twin, because you can do stuff you’re not supposed to.”

I was puzzled.

“So, are you the crazy twin?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “And G is the smart twin.”

He said all of this with a big smile on his face.

Immediately I knew he must have caught an episode of “The Suite Life with Zack and Cody,” although this is a theme in plenty of shows and movies featuring twins. Ugh.

I gave both boys the obligatory pep talk about how neither one of them is the smart twin or the crazy twin or the anything twin. I told them I didn’t want to hear anything like that again.

The boys have started to get interested in seeing twins on tv and in movies. It’s only been in the last year or so that we’ve met other sets of multiples that look alike — it’s still new to them. Unfortunately I haven’t found shows where the twins are just normal — a little bit alike, a little bit different, and doing their thing without their twin-ness being the main point of their presence.

Any recommendations?

Jen is a work-from-home mom of 6-year-old twin boys, and two girls ages 4 and 8. She also blogs at Minivan MacGyver, where she chronicles the many disasters narrowly averted using only her pluck and the assortment of household objects found in her 2001 Pontiac Montana.

This is how I imagined it would be

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Earlier this week as I planned what I would write today, I frequently came back to the idea that being at home with my children was not how I had imagined it would be. I finished my time as student and our nanny’s contract ended in December, so I decided I would take some time at home with my children. I don’t know if it was the excitement of Christmas, the changes in routine of the holidays, the cold weather that kept us inside, my expectations about what I get done each day, the appointments and activities we had scheduled, the transitions into the “terrible twos” (times two!) or the physical effects of diet, sleep and exercise patterns, but things were not going as I had imagined.

But today, things seemed to get on track. My son (Big Brother or BB) got up and came down for breakfast with a smile on his face. We enjoyed our breakfast together. I cuddled my three children (and their three babies) on the couch and we read stories together. The girls (R and S)  took turns examining each other and their babies with the medical kit. BB planned a pretend birthday party for us, and he sang happy birthday to each of sisters (after asking me “what name is this baby?”). That seemed like a perfect time to have snack, so they had the homemade muffins we made yesterday sitting together in the living room.  My son vacuumed up the crumbs, while R and S took the dishes into the kitchen. Everyone helped out.

For lunch, we made cornmeal muffins with leftover chicken and vegetables. They were thrilled with muffins for a main course, even though lunch was a little later than usual. BB stayed upstairs for his required quiet time, and I got to have some time to eat my lunch by myself. R and S settled for nap, and slept over an hour.

When quiet time was over BB played independently for a while. When the girls finished their nap, they played fairly independently too. I showed BB how to play a counting game on the computer (also good practice for his fine motor skills), and I had a few minutes to sit down and look at a new cookbook I got for Christmas.  Dinner was leftover soup I made in the crockpot yesterday, so there was no panic to get food on the table for dinner.

We accomplished quite a bit during the day. I worked with R and S using the techniques from speech therapy. We worked together to label with new toy bins they got for Christmas. I’d been anxious to get this done, so it was a big relief to cross it off my to-do list. I got two loads of laundry done, which is the minimum required to keep up with recently potty-trained twins since I refuse to buy pull-ups for naps and bedtime. The kitchen was mostly clean before dinner after two loads of dishes. BB had vacuumed parts of the house, and most of the toys were put away in the toy bins.

The day wasn’t without its moments. I did have to intervene and take away a few toys.  There were a couple of accidents, and some poopy training pants. I had to threaten to put the girls in playpens before they quieted for naptime, and my son tried to disassemble the Learning Tower. There were a few flare-ups between the kids, particularly when I was on the phone.

But overall, something was different. Maybe things did go more smoothly. Maybe my expectations were more realistic. Maybe I’m getting better at integrating what the kids need with what I want to accomplish. Maybe we’re all getting in to a routine, especially when we don’t have to go anywhere or do anything. Whatever happened, today is much closer to how I imagined things would be.

New Year, New Voices

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A very Happy New Year to all of our moms of multiples out there!

You may have noticed that posting has gotten a little… irregular around here.  Sorry.  Our bad.

But what that means, we think, is that it’s time for some new voices, new stories, new enthusiasm.

Do you want to write for HDYDI?

Moms (and dads, for that matter) of all walks are welcome.  Whether your multiples are newborns, in elementary school, or are still in utero, however they came to be a part of your family, whatever the make-up of your family is.

If interested, please send an email to [moms (at) hdydi (dot) com] with the following info:

  • Your name
  • Your multiples (age and gender/zygosity, just so we don’t suddenly have a blog written entirely about identical boys or something)
  • Your blog’s URL (would prefer if you currently maintain your own blog, but having one is not a requirement)
  • Your Twitter handle (if you have one)
  • A link to one or two of your favorite posts that you’ve written (or, if you don’t have a blog of your own, please submit a sample post in the email, less than 1,000 words)
  • Any other info about you or your family that you think is relevant to the kind of voice you could bring to our site.

Details from our side:

  • We would like to schedule people to post twice a month, generally on weekdays.
  • Despite the fact that we do run some advertising, this is not a paid writing gig.  At the moment, the ads we have generate enough to cover web hosting.  If that changes, we can re-evaluate.
  • While we sometimes post about products that we enjoy, this is NOT a review blog.   We do not post advertorial content.  Only your own words and your own opinions.  If a company or person provides something to you and you want to write about it, you must disclose that connection.

Any other questions, let us know!