Friday Hodgepodge

Three and Three

This week, I take a trip down memory lane. I'll pass along three parenting hacks and post three recent photos of the kids' art.

1. At one point in his infancy, our son suddenly turned against formula in favor of milk, complicating night time feedings in the two-story house we lived in at the time. At first, we tried using a small refrigerator upstairs to cool the bottles, but its running noise was a deal-breaker.

Then I remembered we had a couple of thermoses for the kids that were rated for twelve hours. Each night, I'd just fill a couple of those with a serving each and take them upstairs with a couple of empty bottles. For feedings, we could just transfer the cold milk to a bottle, making a quick return to bed possible for the one filling the bottle. As long as we got up for the day in time, any left-over milk could be bottled and placed in the fridge.

2. After dropping one milk carton cap too many, I realized that the quickest and most sanitary way to have a clean cap on the active carton was to clean an old one and have it on hand. So I started doing that, making sure to have one for each brand I commonly used. Now, whenever a cap I'm trying to replace falls to the floor, I set it aside to wash and place the old, clean cap on. I now have a small tub in my kitchen for these, as well as other kinds of caps and lids I notice wanting to replace, such as dishwashing liquid caps and sour cream lids.

3. Being well-stocked on kids' towels, but low on linen closet space after a move, I quickly became annoyed at the hassle of finding one boy's towel and one girl's towel at bath time. Being the Chief Launderer at home, I saw a solution in the fact that these are almost always printed on one side, like beach towels. I adopted a convention of folding the boy towels printed side out and the girl towels printed side in. Now, I can pick the right kind from the single stack of kids' towels. This also simplifies putting them away.

4. During spring cleaning, I went through school and daycare papers and took photos of some of my favorite art. Here are a few.

	Pumpkin's butterfly graced our refrigerator for quite some time.
	Little Man's planet, on the other hand, was consigned to obscurity until early this week. How did I miss this? He turns five soon.
	Here is another, of a crab, by Pumpkin, who is about to turn seven.

-- CAV