This photo of my goofy 8, 10, and 5 year olds was taken earlier this summer. Enjoy!

Your company is great!  You offer what most people lack……..service!

Service is HUGE to me.  I am always so disappointed when I shop somewhere and it is apparent that my purchases there mean nothing.  My goal is to get orders out the same day when possible, and the next day without exception.  I love to pack up your orders and get them on their way to you speedily.  :)  I think of how delighted you will be when the package arrives and you say, “Wow!  That was fast!” 

Thanks for your support of my little home business!

 I wrote this post several years ago, and now dig it out every year and re-post to share with people each summer.

We have an Easy Set pool at our house. It’s a pretty big one, and we have floatation swim suits for our three youngest boys to wear, although we keep the pool shallow enough that all of them can walk around in it and still have their heads above water. Last year when I bought the suits the baby was one and the better quality suits did not come in his size, so I got a cheaper one, which he had continued to wear this year.
The other day the kids were playing in the pool while my husband and I sat on the deck watching them and chatting. Our youngest, who is now 2, lost his footing in the pool and very quickly was floating face down in the water. Fortunately my husband saw it right away and got to him within just a few seconds, so everything turned out ok.

BUT

The problem is that this suit was not designed to flip a child over onto their back if they needed to rely on the floatation! Our baby was helpless, face down in the water. He would have actually been safer with no suit on at all, since he would have been able to stand to his feet after losing his footing.

It only takes a very few moments for a little one to drown. I am so thankful we were right there with our eyes on the pool happenings.

We tossed out that suit and today I went and bought him one of the better ones, that are designed to keep a kid floating on their backs.  Here is the difference between the two suits:

The kind that flips a child onto their back has a float in the front of the suit that is longer than the one in the back.

The kind of suit that put my baby into the pool face first is a kind that is designed for children who need a floatie while learning to swim.  The floats are all around the suit and are the same size all the way around.

Just thought someone else might appreciate the reminder. Go check and see if your little one’s floatie suits will flip them to their backs in their moment of need.

I thought it might be fun to get a Supermom’s Health and Wellness group going on Facebook.  We have a discussion board for sharing tips and recipes, so I think this could be very fun!  Just go to Facebook.com and then do a search for Supermom’s Health and Wellness.  Click to join!  And tell your friends–the more, the merrier!

Hey folks,

I am considering adding two cool new products to the store, but wanted to get some feedback from you to see if these would even fill a need.

The first item is glass baby bottles with a cool silicone sleeve. Many parents are becoming increasingly concerned about the chemicals in plastic baby bottles, particularly when warming them or having warm milk in them. Glass bottles are great for the safety, but can be too hot to hold, slippery, and of course there is the concern about breakage.

These cool silicone sleeves go over the bottle, so they protect little hands (or yours!) from the heat of warm milk and slippage, and still allow you to see the measurement markers.

These come in both 4 and 8 ounce bottles, and would be priced at $10 and $12 respectively.

The other item I am considering adding to the store is this:

These are knee pads for your little crawlers! They can slide right over bare legs or pants, and provide a silicone cushion at the knees for your little tyke as they explore their world. I think these are really cute and smart, and wish there had been something like this back when I had crawling babies!

These would be priced at $17.95 for a pair.

What do you think? Any interest?

Just a quick reminder that any orders placed from now through next week probably won’t be sent out until Friday, June 13, 2008.  Thanks for your patience! 

~Erica

Here we are, in the car on our way to the Games. We took 7 kids + 2 adults. Woot!

The next photo is of my oldest son, demonstrating How Not To Sit While Wearing a Kilt. His was given some skirt-wearing pointers, but as you can see, he didn’t take the advice.

The first thing I did when we got to the Games was to fall and hurt myself, thanks to a sharp difference between the pavement height and the grass next to it. Somehow, I was so skillful as to have my right foot get half on the pavement and half off of it. So my right foot kind of rolled sideways downhill, and my left knee went crashing into the cement. So here is a picture of my scraped up knee, just to prove it. (thankfully, I was wearing cropped pants that covered my knees. I am so thankful that I didn’t hit the concrete with bare skin. And, extra bonus!, my new cropped pants *did not rip* which I thought was pretty great)

I got right up and kept walking. My husband has been ahead of me, as had most of the kids, so they hadn’t seen what happened, although they heard me say ouch. They checked in with me and I thought I was fine, so we kept on truckin’ for another few feet, and then I decided that maybe I should get some ice.

We found an ambulance so walked over to it, only to find not a single emergency services type person in sight. What a crock. We couldn’t find any ice near where we were, and then we saw a pipes and drums band starting, so we just went to watch that. I toughed it out.

After that we had to go to the farthest reaches of the grounds to find The Old Man, who is the vendor with the cheapest array of wooden swords, knives, and muskets. THIS is what our boys were looking forward to more than anything.

As you can see from the next photo, they had fun selecting their weaponry just in time to take the closest hill in a battle.

The thing that I was most looking forward to was seeing NeedFire play again. We just loved this group last year and have listened to their CDs since then. Well, they did not disappoint! Such a fun group to watch on stage, and super nice to their fans off the stage. Four of our kids had t-shirts that they got signed by the band members. Cool people. Very fun to see them again.

The one and only down side to the concert was that as I sat there, I noticed my foot starting to hurt. It had hurt just a little bit after it twisted as I fell off the pavement.

I don’t know if it was sitting for so long, or the amount that we walked, or just the amount of time since I fell, but the pain started intensifying and then extending all the way up my leg, almost to my hip. And that was just when I was sitting.

When I got up to walk…zowee! The pain was quite intense, and all I can say is that having birthed six babies, I do know how to breathe through pain. However, constant pain is quite a bit different than intermittent contractions with a cute baby to show for it at the end.

My husband stopped at a store on the way home to get me souvenir meds. (My daughter said to him, “Maybe you could find something herbal and natural for mom..” He was like, “Honey–they aren’t going to have anything herbal here….” It was nice of her to think of that, and I realized that I really, really need to get that first aid kit made up for the car like I’ve been thinking of doing for….years!) Neosporin for the scrape, Blue goo to make my foot feel cold, and Aleve, which ended up saving the day.

I could walk on my foot without too much misery by the time we got home. Yay! Thankfully, by Sunday my foot was feeling quite a bit better, although I took a lazy day to mostly stay off of it, seeing as how *Monday* we will be helping my husband’s sister’s family move into their new house, near us! They are moving here from 14 hours away.

Overall, it took a lot of energy and patience to take the kids to the Games, particularly when speaking through teeth clenched in pain. They had fun, though, and say they want to go back next year.

True to my make-lemonade-out-of-lemons personality, I have decided to experiment with a wonderful herbal healing salve on my knee scrape. One side of the scrape is getting the herbal stuff, the other side I am leaving alone. I already notice an obvious different in how much each part hurts. (the herbal side feels much less painful) I am thinking of offering this new product after I return from my vacation. This is a perfect opportunity to give it a good test.

So it’s been a year since my husband and I first went to the Glasgow Highland Games, and the whole family has been looking forward to attending in 2008. Since we knew we’d be going back, we started accumulating some good Scottish garb for the children. Would you like to see…??

This first little Highlander is my 5 year old. It was kinda sunny that day, so he did a lot of squinting.

Pained squinting, to be exact….

And this is my 6 year old. Cute, eh?

My daughter was quite happy with her costume.

Wild clan of cute young men…

Here’s one of all the kids together.

We had these kilts and my daughter’s outfit made by some very sweet and talented young ladies. You can go to their web site here. I highly recommend them.

Tune in next time for actually photos from the Games!

So earlier this week I tried my hand at cheesemaking, using the mozarella kit that I purchased from cheesemaking.com. We bought a gallon of milk (we used 2%) and got to work. The description of the kit had said that it would help you make about a pound of mozarella and some ricotta cheese as well, all in about a half hour.

Yeah, well, don’t believe everything they tell ya.

First of all, it takes quite awhile to heat a gallon of milk to 88 degrees without scorching it on the bottom. So, my children, who had previously been set up to help me make this cheese and observe this scientific wonder gradually faded away to the back yard while I stirred, and stirred, and stirred a slowly-heating pot of milk.

Eventually the milk got warm enough and we moved on to the stage where you add another thing (I can’t remember if it’s the rennet that you add now, or the citric acid….one gets added at the beginning, one at the point where the heating is done) and then wait for the milk to firm up into curds and whey. (Hellooooooo Little Miss Muffet!) This took about 15 minutes for us (or, more time for uninspired children to play on the swingset) and then I got into the highlight of the experience, which was trying to *separate* the curds from the whey. Also known as the “Why did I think this was a good idea and why did I think it would be fun?” stage.

I used a slotted spoon to try to fish out the curds, which are like milky, slippery jello pieces floating in a yellowy sea of liquid (whey). As you fish out the curds, you get a lot of whey with it. According to what I learned from watching the cheesemaking DVD, the curds are quite fragile, so if you do not treat them with tender loving care they will break apart and end up being too small to corral into your cheesemaking process.

Again, this portion of the process is not on that exactly keeps children on the edge of their seats. They walked in, saw me fishing out curds, pronounced it “looks gross!” and went back outside. Who could blame them? I was up to my elbows attempting to fish out curds for probably 20 minutes (which feels like a lot longer when you’re doing it, let me tell ya!).

I had a lot of trouble trying to pour off that pesky whey. You’d think it would be a no-brainer, but for me, it wasn’t. I think that by the time I finished I learned that I could have worried less about the whey and just moved on to the next step without trying to be too thorough about it.

Eventually I got annoyed enough with the whole curds-and-whey thing that I did something that they tell you not do to on the DVD, which is to pour the rest of the curds and whey into a colander that was inside a bowl. Apparently some curds are just too fragile to even be poured this way, but I felt like it was either that, or stand there all day fishing for my long-awaited curds, or waste a whole lot of material that was supposed to be turning into cheese. I was willing to throw cheesemaking caution to the wind and take my chances.

I got a good amount of curds from the colander, and then I used the cheese cloth to line the colander and poured the whey through it again, so that I could catch all of those teeny-weeny pieces of curd that I had traumatized thus far in the process. That worked out fine and I probably got another cup and a half of curds that way.

After you get your curds together you microwave them for about a minute, then do some kneading or stirring, and this is where the curds start sticking together and it becomes a lot easier to pour of the whey. (Next time I’ll worry less about the whey and just get on to microwaving.) You microwave a little, add in your cheese salt, then stir and knead and stretch a little, microwave again, etc. until you get to the point where the whey is gone, and your cheese is now looking like it should. By the end it is shiny and stretchy and doesn’t break apart even when you stretch it for a long way. At that point I started feeling pretty excited. “I made cheese! Yessirree I did!”

When your cheese is done, you plunge it into icy cold water to cool. One tip that I thought was fun was to stretch the cheese into lines (log shapes) before cooling it, and you end up with string cheese. I also did some twists of cheese as well. And the rest I just left in a circle.

It tastes very good, just like it should. Nothing weird about it, nothing objectionable in any way.

It took me about an hour and a half, and that didn’t even include ricotta, which I found out was not something that could be done with the leftover whey as I thought it would, but required a whole other gallon of milk. And, frankly, I just didn’t care at that point.

I did save all of the whey by pouring it right back into the gallon jug. I was amazed to see that there was about 3/4 of a gallon of whey. Seems like a lot of waste to me. Apparently you can use this in any recipe that needs sour milk or buttermilk, and it can be used when making baked goods, pancakes, etc. Of course I made pancakes the other day and forgot to use the whey, but am thinking of making a big batch of pancakes for the freezer, so I can use some of it up then.

Overall, it was a learning experience, and although it didn’t go super-easy or super-fast, I feel like I will enjoy trying my hand at cheesemaking again. It would be a decent activity to do while doing some other kitchen things and chatting with my husband. There were some really interesting ideas and suggestions for things you can do with the cheese where you combine the cheese with herbs and so on that seemed like they might be really yummy. (and in true “If You Give a Moose a Muffin” tradition, this made me think that I really, really need to get started on growing my own herbs….ha ha!!)
I don’t consider cheese (or milk) to be all that healthy, but have found that it is something we just aren’t ready to entirely part with yet. Now that I know about the various chemicals that are added to cheeses that are sold in the store (brick cheese as well as shredded) I am more motivated to try to get better at this cheesemaking thing and see if I can fit this into our regular life.

The DVD (included with the kit, as well as a very nice book with lots of cheese recipes and instructions) of the cheesemaking was very interesting and I learned about many cheeses that I had not heard of or been familiar with. I think that the DVD is a lot more interesting for children since it edits out all of the boring wait time involved, which is a whole lot of it.

I did get a hard cheese kit as well, so that I can make my own cheddar, colby, and so on. I think I will need a cheese press to get into that, so haven’t tried it out yet.

Each kit has enough ingredients to make many pounds of cheese (I think between the two kits I have enough material to make 100 pounds of cheese!) so when I look at it like that, it was a decent investment. I plan to keep my radar up for bargain organic milk ever time I pass by Kroger.

I did notice that they sell the Yogotherm at cheesemaking.com, and they also have *kefir* which I mentioned a few weeks ago as having been on my radar. Apparently in the yogotherm you can make cream cheese, sour cream, yogurt, buttermilk, kefir, and a bunch of other fancy-shmancy sounding soft cheese that I am not cultured enough (ha ha punny!) to be familiar with. So, I will have to think about whether or not it would be worth it to me to try that out as well. ($69.95—I’ll have to be pretty sure, won’t I?)

I do think that cheesemaking has the potential to be a fun activity and to provide for some creativity that could be a fun thing to dazzle people with at the meal table. Loving to be an enigma as much as I do, adding “I make homemade cheese” to the list is quite appealing, I must say. (even cooler than “I make homemade bread and grind my own wheat”!)

My cheese-making kit!  I am so excited.  (bouncing, bouncing, bouncing)  Not sure when I am going to have time to make some of it,because today and tomorrow are fairly busy days.  But….it’s HERE!  This is gonna be fun.  I’ll let you know how it goes.