Get real . . .

. . . Food!

Before I tell you of my latest adventure into insanity, here’s something that Stay at Home Mommies won’t tell you – they all have a fetish, and they spend hours pursuing whatever that is.  For some, it might be a “Fifty Shades” type fetish (which I admit I went through too – Ok, maybe not to that extreme, but we all know that HfH just dropped his jaw and found an attorney to put a gag order on me); for most mommies (including myself) it’s much more boring than that. 

Here’s what I’ve realized . . . we have approximately 6 hours a day to “do whatever we want”.  But, here’s the kicker, 75% of that time is spent doing sh*t for SOMEONE ELSE.  Whether it’s volunteering in the classroom, cleaning the house, grocery shopping, making endless dentist, dr., and orthodontist appointments, or making the third trip to the school that day because someone forgot their lunch.

That leaves 25% of my time to workout, blog, work for my part-time job, or research and implement my latest obsession (that was definitely created because I spent too much time on the stationary bike reading magazines or watching the Today show).

Which brings us to my “fetish” – real food, and while I’m at it, limiting the amount of plastic that we use in our house.  And by the way, I would not have developed this obsession were it not for the hours I spent at double header softball games, so technically the Superego (oldest child) has no one but herself to blame for this.

Miraculously, the whole family has agreed to a 30 day “trial” of this real food game and mommy will track a few items including: 1) did we save money; 2) did we throw away less food than before; 3) do they sell it at Costco; 4) How much plastic did we save; 5) unexpected favorites; and 6) complete bombs!!

In a nutshell, we have to eat foods that are either fresh or have less than 5 ingredients.  We just finished week 1, and here’s what we all learned:

I want my mummy . . . meatloaf

So before I dive into today’s Halloween family fun, a couple stories.  Tonight I was driving home from a charity function (which I’ll mention more later) and it occurred to me . . . I missed a HUGE opportunity with yesterday’s post.  The title of the post should have been “Give ‘the finger’ to school lunches”.  I have never had so many people comment to me about how much they too hate packing school lunches.  My favorite comment came from my mother-in-law.  Here’s what she wrote in an e-mail to me:

I too hated to make school lunches - choosing to have them buy instead.  I never felt creative about lunches.  There was a time when [my son]* couldn't remember to take lunch money and I finally had to tell the teacher "No more lunch loans!"  She thought I was really cruel!

(* “my son” has been substituted for my husband’s name so as to protect the guilty).

The best part about this little story, at the very moment that I received this e-mail I had just hung up the phone with the school district’s automated system that said “Dear Mrs. Dugdale – the Superego (yep, the automated system calls her that too) has a school lunch account balance of negative two dollars and fifty cents”.  Now isn’t it interesting that we have three children at that school, all three of whom always have the same lunch scenario, and yet only one of them has exceeded her account balance.  Apparently the school lunch account apple doesn’t fall far from the tree!

Ok, on to family fun.  Today it was mummy meatloaf.  Here’s what I learned about making shapes out of an otherwise mundane dinner: