I'm starting to fall back into a workable routine around here. Dishes, laundry, baking, laundry, scrubbing, laundry... Want to keep me company while I'm dragging this household back into shape? Here's the easy swipe I did today: grab the washcloth from the bathroom, spritz with cleaner, swipe the floors with it. Don't worry about scrubbing Filth of the Ages, this is just a quick swipe. Swipe the floor to the edges, and then give the baseboard thingie a swipe to grab the lint and dust. Rinse your cloth, repeat the swipe across and around your sink. Dump the used cloth in the hamper, and set out a clean cloth in your shower/tub/area.

It took me maybe two minutes to do this while I got dressed. A second habit that I started to use last summer which has really helped is to spritz the inside of the toilet bowl every morning when I get up with cleaner. I hardly ever remember to scrub the toilet, but a quick spritz of my multipurpose cleaner is perfect to keep it looking nice and non-icky. If I do this everyday, I actually don't need to use the scrubber more than once a month on it to get any stray Ick out of there.

Alright, so I have yet to get my butt around to making that tuna casserole. I did make something else last night, however, that turned out way delicious and super-easy.

Smothered Salisbury-style Hamburgers.

Cook 4 hamburger patties -note, do not add salt or any other seasoning to this stage. Remove from pan and set aside. Add a can of cream of mushroom soup to the pan and stir around to loosen up all the brown crunchy bits left in the pan. Add to that a few shakes of minced onion, about half a Tbsp each of ketchup and mustard, and return the hamburger patties to the pan and simmer for a few minutes.

Serving suggestions:

I put it next to white rice and green beans. It was yummy. Because of the salt content in the soup, it was quite seasoned enough, and I can only think that adding anything extra by way of salt would send it over the edge with that flavor.

Did you know that a snuggly toddler in the morning makes up for all the screaming of last night? It's true. This morning she greets me with a smile and a hug, running to the door and happily sitting in my lap to eat cheerios and drink her milk.

Excuse me, but what did you do with that other toddler? The one that indicated that her heart was breaking last night, that bedtime was the saddest thing to happen in your short life and an indignity from which you would never recover?

Chalk it up to a learning experience. Again. Or just one of those things. I don't care, the gray skies this morning don't faze me at all. The rain is icky and it makes my bones ache. There's a happy child playing in the other room right now, and she loves me, and that makes everything completely perfect in my world.

Potstickers come in big bags in the freezer case and I'm hopelessly hooked on them. How easy is it to fry up half a bag and serve them up next to a bag of stirfried vegetables? Delicious, easy, and less than half the price of a chinese takeout dinner for two.

Of course, that's always assuming that you like potstickers and don't mind skipping a lot of high-sodium sauces. While I didn't check the salt content of either the plain potstickers or the vegetables, I also didn't add sauce to it. It was still delicious. It still made my family pile their plates high and pig out.

The bag was about ten dollars. Five, for half the bag. Vegetables about two dollars. That's thrifty, right? And healthier than takeout.

The NICU is starting to encourage us strongly to arrange for an overnight trip so that we can spend more time with Robbie as he comes closer to discharge. Eep! My preemie is coming home soon. When did this happen, it was just two months ago that he was born. Um. Well. I've looked into getting Hotel Reservations but it always seems like such a hassle. I hear that this site removes a lot of that hassle for me. The deals are great and I can check out the accomodations before I get there. There's a toll free number to book with, or I can do it online. A lot of times the discounts brokered by sites like this are better than what you can get at the front desk, so definately plan ahead when you're traveling. If you are traveling by air you can book the whole thing as a package and save even more money!

In the past two weeks I've been really using the library system here. I've paid them $3 to hold 6 books aside for us. Of those six books, I'll be reading all of them, and the other two adults under this roof will be reading about half. I have the edge- I have the library card and PIN number that lets me do this.

Recently I was reminded by how much I'm coming to rely on this system. How else to effectively use my time and funds while carting a toddler around? While she loves to go to the library, I find that I can't chase her around as much as I used to be able to. This ability will go down even further in a month or so when Robbie comes home again. How to cope? I can maximize the time we spend over there by me pre-reserving everything I want to check out. We can go for a few minutes, explore the books, pick out some for the children, and check out everything all at the end. A small price to pay for avoiding the screaming child pulling books off the stacks while I'm trying to look for something interesting to me.

Online coupons are a great way to save money, and they have the added benefit of not needing you to clip them ahead of time! Most web merchants have promo codes and deals, and there are now several sites around to help you find them. With Valentine's Day sneaking up on us -and how does it manage to catch me by surprise every single year?- this is the time to plan something special for your loved one. Of all the places I could get my husband a present, I'll feel better getting it with a discount. Since he loves computer stuff so much, Dell coupons are a safe place to start looking. Or I could look for Best Buy deals. He wants a new laptop more than anything (aside from a clunker car just for him, a million dollars, and a trip to somewhere he could hang out and do nothing but laze around on the beach all day long.) If I had all the money in the world I'd do all of this for him this year. He's been my greatest supporter of all ever since we first decided to see if this relationship could work between two incredibly stubborn pigheaded people.

So far it's coming up on 6 years together. 6 years, 1 enlistment, 2 deployments, 2 preemies, and uncounted tears and laughter.

Hey, so I just remembered that I forgot to a) make that tuna casserole and b) blog about it. Forgive me? I've been slightly insane, what with the child who won't sleep and the anxiety surrounding billpaying, and with the hundred other things I'm obsessing about.

My crockpot meal for today, however, is smelling and looking just lovely, so why don't I tell you about that?

Creamy scalloped potatoes with ham and leftover pork.

4cups of potatoes, sliced thin (about 20cents worth, they were on sale)
1 can evaporated milk (fifty cents)
1 can cream of mushroom (sixty-eight cents)
1 and a half cups chopped ham (leftover, maybe a dollar's worth)
1 cup of frozen chopped onion (fifty cents)
a handful of leftover fried potatoes from a dinner last week (I count this as free)
about half a pork chop, ditto, sliced up (ditto)

cook in crockpot for one hour on high, rest of day-ish on low. The recipe doesn't call for stirring, but mine was starting to scorch at the sides of the bottom so I started stirring every two hours or so with a wooden spoon. This has caused the potato slices to crumble a bit, making it look more creamy and less lumpy.

So I've got a full crockpot for $2.88 This is supposed to feed 6-8 people. That works out to either .48 or .36 a plate. Not too shabby a frugal meal, hm? I'll plate it next to green beans, which will only raise the total a little bit.

Sometimes I feel that running this household turns into managing an office. Except that I do have the power to spank unruly children, and I never get the luxury of calling in sick or taking a three week vacation on the beach. Around here I'm in the process of instilling communication skills training in the children. One kid already has a communication problem, the other may -too early yet to tell- and either way I feel like organizing my Plan of Action in a real business-like manner.

I used to watch all sorts of motivational videos when I was employed. Some were training films, some were designed to reinstill a sense of pride in work. The best I ever saw were funny; I wish they had the animated clips back then. The cartoon-style teaching films are not only great at motivating and teaching adults, they work well for teaching kids. As always, I have to say that I do favor tv in my kids' lives. With moderation and parental supervision. That's the key for us- and everybody knows how to use the "off" switch.

I don't know why animation holds this kind of ability. Is it the sense that we, as adults, are indulging our childhood selves? That as long as it reminds us that we're still young and cool we can't possibly have turned into responsible adults with car loans to pay and budgets to adhere to? Animation is fun. Cartoons are more fun, and watching them when you're supposed to be working is a lot like having fun on the clock. Which makes the day go faster, the employee more productive, and everyone a lot happier with their lots in life. Or their low pay, middling benefit package that sounds a lot better on paper then it ever does when you're sick... I could go on, but I don't want to depress anyone. Let the reader beware: there's always something that your boss won't tell you when you take the job that may just change your mind about taking it in the first place.

Yesterday I renewed the costco membership for another year. It may seem as though it's a tad wasteful; I mean, how often do I succeed it getting over to the warehouse and when am I going to find the spare funds to go there monthly? Well, let's look at one of the things that we use and consider a "good" buy.

Baby wipes come in a big box, 740 wipes in 8 packages for a little over $15. That comes out to be about 2 cents per wipe. Luvs is a fraction of a cent higher, and Pampers is a whole cent more per wipe. Since we don't tend to buy the Luvs brand in any case, that's a cent cheaper than pampers. I like the popup style; the reach in style (I'm looking at you, Huggies) always gets stuck together and I can't separate them easily in the middle of the night when I'm asleep.

Also, chicken of the sea tuna is .66 a can. And gas is cheap. And both yeast and benadryl are cheap as dirt. Which is something I really approve of. Later today I will be preparing a new casserole based upon a classic tuna noodle that I found online. I'm going to prepare it a tiny bit differently, and I'll let you know how we find it.

It's kinda a nobrainer that you save money by using the library for all those books instead of buying them. You save on household clutter as well. But there's a bit of a gray area when it comes to holds and reserves. It might be considered less than frugal to pay the fees that so many libraries are charging these days, but I like to weight that against what it costs me in time and aggravation to get the exact things I want. Right here it costs 50 cents to go online and reserve a book. I can have access to anything in the combined collections of the entire San Joaquin Valley Library system (spanning a couple of counties). It arrives at my local branch in about a week, and is held there for another week until I can come in and pick it up. Half a dollar per book, I know it's there before I leave the house, and that to me is worth that fifty cents.

Another pantry essential for me is flour. Lots of flour. I say this because I forgot, then I made bread yesterday and found to my horror that we're almost out of flour. Flour, and yeast from costco that is almost cheap enough to offset the entire membership cost for a year for this family, and which will keep safely in our fridge until we get ready to move again.

Then there's paper goods. All sorts of paper goods. And dish soap. And cases of canned vegetables.

I like to think that I've generally got two weeks worth of meals from these staples on hand most of the time, but this past year I've slowly whittled down that two week window to maybe two days worth. How did it happen? I had a complicated pregnancy and a lot of stress with the Toddler. I tell you, fairly soon I'm going to sit down again and start working my way through that pantry and get it back up to speed.

It's critical to me to know what I've got on the shelf. A good deal of that comes directly from pantry basics. Some of my basics are freezer quart-sized ziploc bags. Spaghetti sauce (spaghetti too, usually), rice, otter pops, canned tomatoes.

Other staples of life include peanut butter (chunky), wheat bread, and generic crystal light. With these in the house I can survive. The Toddler can be fed. Sure, it seems a bit monotonous on occasion, but I know she'll eat the stuff. I do feel like a bad mama for letting her eat nothing but peanut butter sandwiches for dinner on most nights. On the other hand, it's nutritious and she'll consume it without a fight. I am always looking for good deals on these things. Note: some stuff is a trade off between price and quality. What's your minimum standard on a product? At what price point do you find yourself doubting the quality of the item? I paid 75 cents a can this past week for sauce. That would have been my limit, and to be honest I would not have trusted the sauce had it not been of a known brand. Usually I can get a jar of sauce from walmart for a dollar, and feel good about it. Also, there's so much I can do with the sauce. I can fill calzones, spread pizzas, dip garlic breadsticks, or do spaghetti or a lasagna. So many options. It's definately one of the multitasker foods.

Another way I save a little money and cut back on sugar-laden stuff is to use generic crystal light drink mix instead of apple juice for the Toddler. Now, she does get fruit juice. The real stuff, about a cup a day in addition to her milk. But for hydration purposes we use the other stuff. I know that I can drink as much as I can stand and it's water flavored with artifical stuff and not sweetened with sugar that bounces both of us off the walls. I get generic, and I mix it up half strength (thus stretching it much farther) without losing any of the taste. That stuff can be pretty strong if at full-strength; I have to admit that I don't really notice a drop in taste or quality at half-strength.

As far as jugs go, I got one of those gallon jugs of apple juice, the kind that comes in a heavy plastic. Very durable plastic. I bought two of them on sale for $5, and am still using them a year later. Every third or fourth refill I empty the whole thing down and wash out thoroughly. One jug is drinking water, the other is juice.

Anything to make the job of staying hydrated go a bit better. It can be hard enough getting enough fluids in the body, especially in the heat we get here in the summertime. I didn't get used to it last summer, not really, and I know that I'll find the coming year just as bothersome.

Ever throw something together on a whim and had it come out of the oven so perfect that you didn't want to touch it or eat it? I had this happen over the weekend. Fortunately the batteries in the camera were working.

Why is it that I hate to take pictures so much? Is it because I did not grow up in a high-picture family? I take a few snaps of my kid(s) every few weeks and think nothing of it. I certainly do not walk around with a camera all day waiting for them to do something picture-worthy.

The dish in the picture is a simple plate of loaded potato wedges. Baked potatoes, leftover, wedged and sprinkled with seasoned salt, chopped broccoli, chunks of freshly fried bacon, and cheddar.

I'm still waiting on this baby. That sounds odd, doesn't it? It's just that I'm in this strange in-between time of being mother of two and not being mother of two. I'm still nesting. I'm getting ready to hear a sudden phone call that it's time to take my baby home now. I'm recovering from the delivery like it was a bad case of the flu or something... except that I'm pumping breastmilk day and most nights. It's wierd.

But at least I'll be able to move when he's home with us. When I'm called upon to take midnight diaper changes and feedings, I'll be awake. When he needs me, I will be able to get out of bed without wincing and pick him up without pain.

This waiting game, though. I'm not so good at it. I hate waiting. I hate being patient. What a thing to have to be patient on. Motherhood- with any luck these two children's start in the NICU will be the last major medical crisis I'll sit them through. Can I get the hardest part over with now? Or, as I thought the other night, is this not the "hardest" part yet? Would it not be harder to see them in ICU later on, after I've bonded and grown to love them more than life? Right now it's beginning for Robbie. I love this newborn. I'm his mother, I love him, but it's not set in place by those long afternoons together. I have yet to bond. Yet to hold him against my skin, to feed him myself, to fall asleep listening to him breathe. To do all that and then see him go off for days and weeks on end without seeing him; that would be worse.

I have GOT to stop thinking like this or I'll drive myself crazy. Crazier.