We made it to March! I'm feeling excited about spring. After the kids had gone to bed on Friday I was gathering what I needed to pump some milk and I was like, "Jared, feeding the people in this family feels like an actual full-time job." Just out of curiosity, we started tallying up the hours I spend feeding people in a one-week span. The results sent a shiver down my spine. Keep in mind, I KNOW I could easily cut this list down, so it miiiight be a personal problem. But I genuinely love food and cooking and also researching how to improve every area of life, including meal time, so I'll probably just continue shooting myself in the foot with this haha:
-Researching new recipes: 1 hr per week (I love doing this--it does take longer now than it used to because I need to scope out recipes that are dairy free, soy free, rice free, and now nut free. Alice had a kind of concerning allergic reaction [instant red mouth, pale face, puffy red eyes] when Jared let her taste peanut butter last week so I'm holding off on all nuts until we can get to her 6 month checkup and discuss if she could benefit from seeing a pediatric allergist before future peanut/tree nut trials since tree nut allergies run in my family too])
-Weekly meal and snack planning before ordering groceries (including discussing with Jack what he would like to cook on the night when he is in charge of dinner): 2 hrs/wk
-Ordering groceries: 1 hr/wk
-Grocery pickup+unloading groceries: 1 hr/wk
-Prepping produce, making and facilitating Jack's snacks and lunches: 6 hrs/wk
-Toddler eating course+reviewing concepts: 1 hr/wk (less than that now, but it was like 20 hours the week I took it so I'm averaging that to 1 hr/wk)
-Making dinner: 7 hrs/wk (this is a conservative estimate honestly. I love cooking dinner and tend to choose recipes that require a slower cook. Also with my current food restrictions we're not eating out and I'm cooking about 5-6 nights of the week.)
-Nursing Alice: 15 hrs/wk (this was more than I thought it would be, but with 6-7 feeds in a 24-hr period, each taking 20 minutes, it's about 15 hours)
-Pumping milk: 1 hr/wk
-Cleaning and sanitizing pump parts: 1/4 hr
-Researching my high lipase issue and learning about milk scalding: 1/2 hr per week
-Scalding saved milk: 1/2-1 hr per week (needs to happen within 24 hours of expressing milk or the milk will turn soapy/sour because I produce excess lipase. I had to throw away over 100 bags of saved milk last month because I didn't know and it had all turned soapy)
-Researching food sensitivities and allergies in babies: 1 hr/wk
-Researching ways to introduce solids for babies with food sensitivities: .5 hr/week
-Planning+planting an herb and veggie garden for the spring: TBD (haven't started yet but I'm so excited to! I'm going to plant my first flower garden as well and I just feel like I want to give myself a big pat on the back and some commemorative gardening gloves for entering my gardening era. I come from a line of really spectacular gardeners--love you Mom and Grandma!)
That tallies up to about 37 hours a week. If it's a week when I'm making bolognese, which happens about twice a month because yum, then it shoots up to 40 hours a week. And I don't even cook Jack's breakfast--Jared loves doing that before he goes to work. But an actual full-time job! It's definitely a phase of life. After Alice is done breastfeeding, that number will cut in half. And don't get me wrong, I actually love cooking and breastfeeding. It's just a shocking number of hours when I consider childcare alone to be a full-time job that I also do 40+ hours a week, completely separate from feeding hours. In conclusion, all you moms (and dads) out there are a bunch of baddies. After we tallied this out we decided to start having me do the meal planning and grocery ordering during our cleaning block of time on Saturdays while Jared and Jack tackle the house. Up until this point I've been staying up way too late one night out of the week doing the meal planning and grocery shopping. Like, until midnight. Not good during these sleep-deprived up-all-night-with-baby months. So this ended up being a good and helpful exercise. Honestly Jack was spending our cleaning hour on Saturday wrapped around my leg whining so I wasn't getting any cleaning done anyway haha. And I still clean up and do laundry on the other days of the week. Happy to pivot to locking myself in our room and meal planning on Saturdays instead. Teamwork!
Review on the book Jared and I finished reading: "The 7 Love Languages." It's a pretty short book but still took us a long time to finish because we would just read a short section each evening, and then about halfway through it started to get kinda boring so we were reading less often. I think our verdict is . . . worth a read? Or at least worth checking SparkNotes. The concept is that we each have a way that we prefer to give and receive love: quality time, touch, gifts, acts of service, or words of affirmation. It's helpful to pinpoint what that is for yourself and your partner so you can both prioritize those love languages. I do think this rings true and can be helpful. Where it got iffy was in the "Acts of Service" section. I do think acts of service could genuinely be some people's love language, but the examples the author gave in the book were bogus. All of them were basically, "My spouse never helps out around the house or with the kids or does anything. I wish they would help out more." And the author's response is that your love language is probably acts of service so you need to tell your spouse that that's your love language so they can know to make more of an effort. NOPE. Me and Jared were both like, "Uhhhhhh, no, this is what we here in 2023 call doing the bare minimum." You've gotta have some basic survival and cleanliness skills, whether you're in a relationship or not. If my spouse never did a single dish or changed a single diaper or did a single bedtime then my love language would all of a sudden be acts of service too. Anyway. Other than that the concepts were good. Didn't love the author's writing style but we still think it's a decent read if you're trying to up your marriage/relationships game.
Our next book is going to be "The Entitlement Trap." Our understanding is that it's a book about teaching kids a home economy and helping them grow into adults who are grateful and hard-working instead of entitled. Because speaking of doing the bare minimum, our lil homeboy Jack is about to learn some lessons in pulling some weight this year. Much needed, and our little energizer bunny really has it in him. It also teaches parents how not to accidentally spoil their kids, because some of us (*cough* Jared *cough*) get a lot of joy from buying their kids candy and toys any time they're at a store and while sweet and well-intentioned and fine from time to time, proooobably won't help our kids out in the long run. Also some of us (*cough* me *cough*) sometimes find it easier to just do things for Jack instead of taking the time to help him learn over and over again how to do it himself until he's mastered whatever the skill is (putting on socks, cleaning his room, whatever).
On that note, as mentioned above, we've started having Jack be in charge of one dinner each week. Jared usually ends up cooking one dinner a week too (salmon and asparagus is his specialty). It's going great so far! Jack's actually really enjoying planning out what he wants to cook, opening the Walmart app with me to find the ingredients, learning about budgeting and checking the prices, and then on his night, homeboy REALLY takes ownership of "his dinner" and cultivates a whole vibe. Which I don't do and didn't tell him to do, but it is funny and sweet and very cozy and we all love it. This last week he wanted to do "Choose Your Own Soup Night" (something I do when we're out of groceries and we each end up raiding a can of soup from the pantry). Jack ordered his favorite spicy ramen, and a soy free dairy free soup for me. On his night we each chose a soup, he added water when needed, and then while I watched the pots/microwave he got very into setting the table, dimming the lights, and then placing a blanket and pillow on everyone's seat so we could all be extra cozy during dinner haha. Love that kid.
Ok I had more I wanted to talk about but wow. So long already and I'm out of time. We'll talk about Alice's updates next week! Love you all! Here are some pictures from our snow day last week. I love how it snows just enough here to squeeze in a couple snow days from school for some sledding before clearing up. I will never forget how picturesque our tree-encased neighborhood looks in the snow.
^^We are still in shock that we have a baby who will just chill on a couch by us. Give her some toys and she's mostly pretty chill about it. I still remember the first time Jack held still for longer than 1.5 seconds at a time. He was over a full year old and he laid still on my bed looking up at the ceiling for probably 7 seconds. I was in tears of happiness about the "special moment" afterward and wrote about it in my journal. So this lil' Alice baby is a TREAT. Jack is a treat too. So fun and curious. Two different kinds of treats.
So anyway, when we were playing Uno last night, Jack was winning. The round had been going for a long time, and he got down to one card. It came around to him again, and his last card was one he could lay down and win, but he glanced over at my hand to see I had 5 cards left, then he glanced over at Jared's little pile of cards, and then instead of playing his last card to win the game, that little boy smiled a little and then drew like 5 cards to drag the game out! Jared was like, "No no no no no! You could've won! If you don't wanna win just draw one card, not five!" And then I smirked at Jared and he laughed and was like, "Oh, so this is how it feels." Hahaha a lifetime of bad game extension karma coming back to bite him in the form of Jack. It's just the most random trait that I really feel has somehow been passed down genetically. What cool guys. I hope they never change. As long as I can leave the game when I get bored and they just do this to each other. The best.