After you get home from the hospital with your newborn, your only goal is to get through each day with everyone alive and intact. It is a full time job now though, as you have an infant that needs round-the-clock care and a body that is in some desperate need of healing. You have exactly zero time and energy to expend on anything not directly related to perpetuating your family's existence.
So you wear pajama pants for days on end, sleep precisely when the baby is sleeping (if you are feeling particularly energetic, maybe take a shower), forgo nutrition for whatever is quick and convenient, and studiously ignore the dishes and laundry piling up around you.
If your conscience gets the best of you, you may indulge in a twinge of guilt when you see the kitchen table covered in baby shower gifts you haven't sent thank you cards out for yet (you were so sure you'd be able to get at least some done in the hospital!) or engage in some halfhearted "foot cleaning" (kicking things thrown on the floor to the edge of the room so nobody trips). But guilt itself is a luxury you don't have energy for, so you give it up for a bad job and go back to staring sleepy-eyed at your perfect and precious new taskmaster.
That survival state of mind is not only for when you have newborns--families go in lockdown during times of illness or stress, lost jobs, death. It is the stripping away of all extraneous responsibility and focusing on keeping your family whole until you can function again.
Eventually, I would like to transition out of this almost feral one-day-to-the-next mentality. There are little signs that we are improving. The living areas of my home are generally presentable. I wear real people pants almost every day (no promises on the weekend); in public, I might generally be found sporting basic makeup. Our meals are all homemade and full of vegetables and nutrients and all those things kids aren't remotely interested in eating. I can feel a shift, however slight, toward a less chaotic life.
To get to that point though, requires a lot of planning and foresight on our part. Michael and I have taken precautions to set up our world to run a little smoother, make life just a little easier.
For example, groceries is a bit of an undertaking.
Every month, I am in charge of the grocery shopping. The third weekend of the month, I start writing out meal plans--looking up recipes, consulting my notes on what everyone will and will not eat. Benjamin does not like potatoes or beans. Gabriel is not a big fan of meat; he will not eat something with small pieces of meat mixed in with everything else (pot pies, soups, chili), but he will eat all the components separately. Emerald I have allowed to pick three things--three things I will never put in her food or make her eat. She chose yogurt, sour cream, and guacamole. When she is eating food someone else has provided, all bets are off--if I can eat mayonnaise and smile serenely, she must too. At home, at least, she will be spared. That is just preferential things; the need portion is a little more tricky to finagle.
In truth, our family is sort of difficult to feed. It is why I shy away from meal-centered outings for us--why I haven't been able to bite the bullet and attend a small group for our new church, or go to Wednesday night dinner. It is one of the things some families take for granted that is just more trouble than we usually would like to take on.
Michael is lactose intolerant and has the acid reflux and the ulcers; he can't eat spicy, acidic, tomato-based, or dairy. I am a vegetarian that occasionally will eat fish. Benjamin is generally not going to eat much, but at least is more or less a person about it. Emerald and Gabriel are the two really complicated ones though.
Emerald is, of course, diabetic; she will need a finger poke and an insulin shot after meals, for which I have to count carbs and calculate (and hope she isn't eating anything I didn't expressly give her). While everyone in this house follows basically the same diet as she does, at someone else's house there is a good chance she will have to watch other children eat things that I am going to have to tell her no on.
And yeah, yeah--I know that the occasional dessert will not kill her; yes, I could give her a little more insulin and let her have sweets like everyone else. I promise it isn't that simple, though. You just gotta trust my judgment on this one. If I am telling her no, it is not because I am being mean. Pressing the point, "oh, come on, Mom!" is going to make me cave on something I have thought through and decided against. Which is just kind of a well-intentioned crappy.
Gabriel cannot eat with utensils. He finger feeds, which is incredibly messy, and a complete no-go for most meals. Worse than though, he is a food thief.
That part can be incredibly embarrassing--watching other children eat prison-style with one arm wrapped around their plate, eyeing Gabe suspiciously. He will casually walk by (he does not sit still for meals at all; that is something we are still working on) and take a fistful of your food and walk away. It is unsanitary and gross and rude and...
Okay, so I keep getting off on a tangent, but I did have a funny story about this: Jarrod and I had taken the kids to eat chick-fil-a in the mall. We sat in a booth so Gabe specifically so he could not steal. He kept turning around in the bench, but was otherwise doing really well. There was an elderly couple with their grandchild sitting behind us, and the grandparents were shaking with silent laughter. Gabriel had been turning around, stealthily nabbing one waffle fry at a time from the child's container; the child was baffled as to why his food was disappearing so quickly! When I finally caught on, we apologized and offered to buy him a new one, but they waved us off, still laughing.
Back to the story at hand, eating out in public or with other people is just one of those things I usually just default to, "Thank you for the invitation, but we can't."
Where was I going with all of this?
Groceries, right.
So, I make my meal plans, with wiggle room. The following week, I check all the circulars and coupons and specials for every grocery store in town, as well as what Bountiful Baskets has to offer. I use this to make my master list, broken down into categories of dairy, meats, produce, etc. Then, we are all set for grocery day.
Grocery day is the most exhausting day of the month for me, which is precisely why I do it only once. I need the full 29 days to recover before doing it again.
Benjamin and I go to the store while everybody else is at school or work. Painstakingly, I go through my list, cross-matching coupons so that I have the exact right brand in the exact right size so there is no hiccup that I will be too tired to fight at checkout. I have a general idea of how much everything is going to cost, and we have to stick to a budget.
Once I get home with my bounty, I have Ben help me carry it all in. I put away what perishables I can, and we have lunch. He goes down for nap, and I start round two.
Round two is prep. I know from experience that fresh fruits and vegetables are going to ruin waiting patiently for me to use them. I also know how much more expensive shelf-stable (frozen, canned, etc) produce is, so I buy fresh what I can, when I can.
If you are going to use the fruits or vegetables within two months, you don't have to do the blanch and shock treatment to freeze them; you can just wash and dice them, and they are ready to go in the freezer. I did not know that at first; cutting the cooking part has cut down on some of the trouble of it.
But for the next several hours, I wash and dice and chop and freeze everything we will be using that month--onions, carrots, celery, squash, eggplant, everything. Everything goes in individual portions so I can pull out just what I need.
After that, I measure out and bag all the cereals and snacks and chips so that I don't have to think about how many carbs are in a snack or breakfast; I all ready know, because it is all ready measured. This has the added benefit that if Gabriel is going through one of his phases where he is dumping everything on the floor (a phase that has lasted roughly six years at this point), he is only dumping out a single serving of a thing and not the entire family sized jumbo bag.
The next several days, I have the crock pot and oven on nearly constantly. I don't buy canned beans or stocks. It costs about $1.30 for a bag of black beans, which makes 6 cans worth of beans when cooked; each can costs $0.89 or so. It is just much cheaper to make my own. Plus I can control how much salt goes into it, and (once again) can freeze the individual portions of beans so they are ready to use. I also makes soups that I freeze for my lunches.
One of the things I do for Michael is that I make breakfast bowls--roasted russet potatoes, salsa, scrambled eggs, some sort of meat, and cheese--for him to take to work. That and a ton of peanut butter sandwiches. (He's gotten rather spoiled on this and insists that it is not the same when his peanut butter sandwiches have not been frozen). I write little notes or dorky jokes on the baggies for him to find. But that way, he can just grab a homemade breakfast to take to work, all ready to go. It is so easy to go to McDonald's and get something, but the price adds up over time; this is much cheaper, healthier, and seems to make him happy.
I do all of this so that for the rest of the month, I have everything on hand, ready to go. We don't eat out because it's faster or easier. I don't have to stress about what we are going to eat every night, or spend two hours in the kitchen trying to get everything ready. No food gets wasted or spoils. And for the most part, everyone is relatively happy.
The other big thing we do to smooth out life is that I hang the matching bottoms on the hanger with the shirt when I do laundry. It is bulky, but for any of my children, you can reach in and grab a whole outfit without having to go digging. And I don't have to fight Emerald in the morning for trying to wear shorts that are too short to school or leggings with the wrong type of shirt. Fight-free mornings.
You can see us start trying to venture out more. Starting to socialize, make friends, becoming more people-y. I have faith that one day, we may eventually return to sane, normal adults.
Probably not today though ;)
--Andie
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