Canning: An Update

Originally, I debated puting off my first attempt at canning until summer, when some sort of produce was in season and my co-worker could teach me how to do it.  However, I rescued a lavander Bumbo chair from the landfill, and bartered with a soon to be mom to get some canning jars in exchange.


Bumbo Chair Rescued from Landfill





Jars which were bartered for Bumbo

I then found a bunch of apples for a very low price from a local produce seller.  What do apples and canning jars mean to you?  To me they mean apple butter.  I had been buying a jar of apple butter from a local farmer every other week for about $4.  Now we have our own stock for about $5 for 8 jars. 
How do you can if you've never done it before and don't have any specialized equipment?  First, you can only can certain things without a pressure canner.  Since I used boiling water in a large pot usually used for brewing beer, I could only really do fruits, certain vegetables, and pickles.  Since apple is a fruit, I was okay for using my canning method. 

I found this You Tube video really helpful, although they have a bunch of equipment I don't have.  Specialized canning tongs, for instance.  Sheesh.  Just use a big pair of tongs that are sturdy enough to lift the jars.  Another site I found useful is the Food in Jars blog.  She has tons of recipes and instructions on how to can.  If you are lucky enough to live in Philadelphia and have some money floating around in your pocket, she also has courses which I hear are quite good.  In fact, the recipe I used for my apple butter is from her site.

Working!

Ready to boil




Apple butter ready to can

 In any case, the apple butter is wonderful, especially on home made bread.  And I no longer have to feel guilty for using so much of the stuff!

“teach the young women to be wise, to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, sober, having a care of the house, gentle, obedient to their husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed.”  Titus 2:4-5.
One of the things I am really thankful for is that just as I came into motherhood, I met a number of women in my community who were already practicing their vocation to homemaking.  They came from all political and religious backgrounds, and I am truly blessed to know them.  What amazes me about these women is that in spite of a huge cultural force against homemaking, these women decided to do it prior to becoming mothers, often as a founding principle of their marriage. 
As I mentioned before, I didn’t really have any positive models for homemakers in my life, and had never even considered that it would be my vocation.  I figured I would get married (although I did consider becoming a nun for a long time) and have kids, as people do, but that I would also continue to work.  I was really convinced I could have it all.  As that illusion started to fracture against the realities of motherhood and marriage, these women modeled for me another path, one that would work for my family.  They taught me what homemakers do, and how valuable their work is… and they did it for the most part without saying a word.
As I shift from high-powered career woman to homemaker who happens to work outside the home in order to keep her home secure, it has been so important to me to have the support of these women with their strong but gentle voices.
Thank you.

Canning

Currently, I live in a small urban apartment but I eventually want to move someplace where I can have a pretty extensive food-growing garden and put up some of my produce.  My husband has even started to get excited about this future project.  In preparation, I am going to learn how to can food.  In years past, I would have gone out today, bought a bunch of canning jars, a nice, high end pressure canner, a couple of books, and gone to town.  Right now, however, we’re in gazelle intense debt repayment mode (to use a Dave Ramsey term), and that simply isn’t in the budget.

I’ve been reading a couple of books from the library and watching some youtube videos instead of buying a couple of books.  I even managed to get my first lot of canning jars as a barter for a Bumbo chair that I rescued from the landfill!  We already own a huge pot which we currently use to brew beer, so I’ll use that as a water canner.  While boiling water canning rather than pressure canning limits what I can store to some extent, it’ll give me a chance to get my feet wet.  What I want to put up is amenable anyway.  Tomorrow I’m going to make apple butter!  I managed to find a bunch of very cheap apples which will be perfect for my purposes.  If I can manage, I’ll take some pictures.

One  thing I’m learning about doing things like this on a budget is that the more you talk about it, the more you find resources.  One of my coworkers has been canning, and owns a big pressure canner.  When the season starts, she calls all the local farms to find seconds and cut-rates and puts up enough to get her family through the winter on a shoe-string.  She agreed to let me come help her can this year, in exchange for willing hands.  I’m also excited to pick her brain for who she calls to get deals.

Before my decision to be a homemaker, I never would have taken the time to build community this way – money would have allowed me to buy my way out of making relationships with actual people.  In the end, though, that’s the choice we have: relationships with people and a life giving economy based in the home, or relationships with corporations using money and an extractive economy that tears us from our homes.  Part of the vocation of a homemaker is building community, and I’m surprised by how naturally that flows from focusing your life on the home.

On The Cheap: Diapering

Having a little one in diapers can be extremely expensive, especially if you’re using disposables.  Cloth diapers, though, can be pretty intimidating when you first look into it because there are so many options.  I’m not going to try to walk you through all the options with cloth diapering, I’ll just tell you what works for my family, and answer some of the questions we get all the time.  If you want an exhaustive review of the options, take a look at http://www.greenmountaindiapers.com/.  They have a very nice description of each option, and were very helpful when I was first starting out.

We use Thirsties Duo Wraps (http://www.nickisdiapers.com/thirsties-duo-wrap-diaper-covers.html) and prefold diapers (http://www.nickisdiapers.com/imagine-indian-prefolds.html).  The basic idea is that the prefold diaper is just absorbent material, while the Duo Wrap over top makes it waterproof. 

When baby was newborn, we also used snappies (http://www.greenmountaindiapers.com/snappi.htm) to help hold the prefold in place, but now that he’s a bit older the diaper cover is tight enough that it holds the prefold where it’s supposed to be.  For us, this option provides the best balance of convenience and thrift.

So how does this work?  You take your prefold and fold it in any of a few fold options, all of which are quite easy to learn.  When baby was newborn, we would use the angelwing fold (http://www.dy-dee.com/html/basic_angel_wing.html).  It looks more complicated in the drawings than it really is… just take a doll before your baby comes and try it out on the doll.  Once you get used to it, which takes about two or three times in real life, it will be easy.  Once the prefold was in position, I’d snappy it into place.  A snappy is basically the modern alternative to pinning, and doesn’t involve anything sharp near your precious little one.  It holds things quite securely, so you don’t need to buy the more expensive fitted diapers.  Once the prefold is in snappied or just held into place, you put the Thirsties wrap over top which makes it waterproof, keeping the pee in and off baby’s clothes.  As baby got older, we started just folding the diaper into thirds and fastening the Duo Wrap over top, skipping the snappie and the more complicated folding.

Why use prefolds and wraps rather than All in One or Pocket systems?  They look more convenient.  It’s cheaper.  Every time your baby wets the AIO or pocket diaper, the entire diaper (cover and absorbent part) has to be changed out.  Since the expensive part of the system is the cover, having to buy enough to see you through a few days of diaper changes when you have to change it out with every change is quite expensive.  In contrast, the prefold and wrap option requires that you change the wrap only when it gets messy… which happens only once every day or two. 

So how many prefolds and wraps do you need?  I have 24 newborn size prefolds (which I recommend if you’ll be cloth diapering your newborn) and 36 infant size prefolds, which are what I use now that baby is a bit older.  Sometimes I still use the newborn size prefolds as a doubler, which buys me extra absorbency at night.  I have four wraps in each size, which has been plenty for us.  In comparison, if most of my friends with pocket diapers or AIOs need 36 diaper/cover combos, each of which is more expensive than the wraps. 

Do you have a diaper service?   No.  We just do it in the washing machine and dryer.  It’s a lot cheaper that way and not inconvenient.

Tell me about laundry.  I was reading the internet and there are all these descriptions of the crazy lengths  you have to go through to get diapers clean.  Like so many things on the Internet, the people discussing these topics are the people who are having problems.  Here’s my routine.  When baby wets a diaper, we put it in an old plastic bucket with a lid (like these: http://www.homedepot.com/buy/paint/paint-accessories-apparel/homer-bucket/5-gallon-orange-homer-bucket-55315.html).  If he poops the diaper, we spray it off in the toilet before putting it in the bucket, using this potty sprayer (http://www.pottypail.com/learn.php).  Spraying is quick and easy.  It sounds like it might be gross, but it’s really not bad. 

Anyway, when you’re ready to do laundry you wash it on hot with a regular cycle.  We use Nellie’s All Natural laundry detergent for our diapers, which doesn’t leave a residue (http://www.amazon.com/Nellies-NLS-100T-Natural-Laundry-soda/dp/B001GODIEE/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1327353612&sr=8-2).  It looks expensive, but we’ve done a couple hundred loads and really have only gone through about half the tin.  Then we either line dry or dryer dry the lot, depending on my mood and willingness to spend 1.25 on the dryer.

That’s it.  It’s just a couple extra loads a week!

What if the power goes out?   When the hurricane came through, we devoted some serious thought to this.  As an experiment, I did a couple of loads by hand in the bathtub.  While I wouldn’t recommend this for routine use, it worked quite well.  Line drying is always convenient and thrifty, but you have to plan for the extra diapers you’ll need to get yourself through while the bulk of your diapers are on the line. 

What about blowouts?  I’ve heard cloth diapers are more messy than disposables.  Totally not true in my experience, or in the experience of any of my mommy friends.  These aren’t the cloth diapers from when you and me were kids – the technology has improved dramatically

Do you have any questions?  Just post below and I’ll happily try to answer.

The Consumer, The Producer, and The Homemaker (Part 2)

Let’s go a little further.  Why do you think it is that it is Suzie and not Lucy who is projected to us as the stereotypical homemaker?  Who benefits? Who is doing the great majority of the broadcasting?  That’s right, the great majority of broadcasting is controlled by people who are trying to sell you something!  Food (sweets and highly processed foods)! Toys (for you and for your children)!  And the people who want to sell you something benefit from the two income family in two ways: first, because you have more disposable income (what a horrible term!  You should never “dispose” of your income!), you have more to spend on things you don’t really need; second, because, since they have directed a lot of the advertising at your children, you aren’t there to police it, and honestly are you really going to spend the 20 minutes you spend talking to your kid each day fighting about whether or not they are getting that new toy, or would you rather just give them the toy so you can have some peace?  There are people profiting from the two income family, and it isn’t the two income family.

Who else benefits?  Since Suzie is not the primary educator of her own children, public and private schools are.  The powerful in this world benefit from a populace which is uniform and therefore easily regulated.  Those who are found to be not so easily regulated can be drugged.  Sound like science fiction or the product of a paranoid mind?  Then why are so many kids on Ritalin.  Let me give you a hint… it is not because the inability to sit at a desk for eight hours straight at six years of age is a disease. 

And one last step, if you’re still with me.  Who is it that finally benefits from all of this destruction?  Who is it, in the end, who benefits if people are “consumers”, if corporations are “persons”, if parents are “relieved” of their duty to educate their children, if the home is blasted and blighted and so many marriages end in divorce?  Who is it that benefits if children are seen as such a burden (Gaaa!  The cost of childcare!) that many of them never see light outside the womb? 

“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”  (Eph 6:12)

The Consumer, The Producer, and The Homemaker (Part 1)

You’ll notice I tend to use the word homemaker rather than housewife or stay at home mom (or that wonderful abbreviation SAHM).  I do this after much thought, and I do it to emphasize what exactly it is that a woman does when she is at home working in the role of wife and mother.  I also do it because while a homemaker might be a stay at home mom, she might not be a mother, and she might not exclusively work at home. 

Housewife is a wonderful term, but like “charity” it has been debased by overuse and abuse, and has lost to a great extent its original meaning.  If you are interested, consider the world “husband” [house-bound] and it’s history.  Not so different than housewife, huh?  And why do you think that is?  Questions for another day, but important ones.  As a hint, if you are looking for that information, it has to do with the fact that both terms originated prior to the Industrial Revolution, when the home was the productive unit of society, and one was either bound to a home or to a lord and his manor (i.e., you were a serf).

Meanwhile, back to the issue of housewives and homemakers.  The big reason I use the term homemaker is that I want to emphasize the inherently productive nature of the homemaker.  Let’s compare a couple of stereotypes.  The first is Suzie the housewife-as-consumer.  The beneficiary of numerous labor-saving devices and an industrial food complex, she no longer has to bake her own bread, sew her own clothes, or hand wash the laundry.  Her children attend the public school, thereby relieving her of her role as primary educator of her children.  Her role instead is to acquire those things that her family needs – i..e, she is the consumer extraordinaire!  She “educates herself” with advertising, and buys buys buys.  The more labor she is freed from, the more bored hours she has to fill with buying. 

Next let’s look at Lucy the homemaker-as-producer.  Lucy is well educated in the traditional sense, but more importantly she has the ability to figure it out.  Toilet not working?  Rather than pay someone to fix it for her, she goes to the library or searches the internet or asks a neighbor and figures out how to fix it.  Her husband might make te money, but she uses very little of it, instead using her labor to stretch it as far as it will go.  Plugged into her local community, she may not even need to buy the tools she uses so occasionally.  She bakes her own bread from a 50 lb bag of flour she bought after carefully researching where best to buy it from… because she enjoys it, because it saves money, and because she and her family like it better than the store-bought stuff.  She has a garden and grows a significant amount of her family’s produce.  She homeschools her children, often teaching herself material in order to teach it to her children.  She keeps her home a warm and inviting place which shelters the members of her family from a sometimes brutal world.  It is the sanctuary to which her husband and her children return to refuel and renew prior to returning to engage the world once again.  Having such a place allows them the security to develop a voice which is independent of the world.

I think a lot of the reason we look down on homemakers in our society is that it is Suzie not Lucy who is the predominant referent in these discussions.  It is also because, as Lucy operates outside of the extractive economy, in which work is extracted from her so that she can get money, which she then uses to extract as much labor as possible from someone else to do things like fix the toilet, she fixed the toilet herself.  Nowhere does it show up that she “made $100 as a plumber”.  It is only a small shift in viewpoint before we realize just how valuable Lucy is.  It has been said that penny saved is a penny earned.  Really, though, a penny saved is about a penny and a half earned… the saved penny is not subject to tax.

So you want to be a homemaker?

So you want to be a homemaker?

… First you have to work out the finances.  Unfortunately, because we’ve come to expect a two income family, this can take some doing especially if both husband and wife have significant student loans as we do. 

A few weeks after my son was born, I peered down at him sleeping and thought to myself, “How can I ever leave him for 80 hours per week?”  Then, I shook my head and pulled myself together, reminding myself that of course I would go back to work just like everyone else.  As my maternity leave became more past than future, though, I knew in my heart that I couldn’t leave my baby.  I brought it up with my husband, and he was very sympathetic, but reminded me that there was no way we could afford to live on just his income. 

The problem is that our fixed expenses (rent… Thank God we hadn’t bought a house yet… student loan minimum payments, car payment, etc.) were based on two incomes.  As I ran the numbers, I noticed that what really pushed us over the edge was our debt payments: car and student loans.  Plus a lot of wasteful spending.  And by a lot I mean a lot.  Eating out.  Impluse buys.  The sum total of consumer culture.

I’m going to recommend two books here, which had a big influence on me as I came to terms with the financial reality of becoming a homemaker: 

The Two Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren and her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi.  Whether or not you agree with her solution, her description of the problem is mind-blowing.  Even if you aren’t thinking about becoming a homemaker, it’s worth reading because it discusses how traditional, two-income based financial planning fails to take into account the increased risk of basing your fixed expenses on two incomes.

The second book I’m going to recommend is far more practical:  The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey.  Am I a strict Ramsey-ite?  No.  We still spend a little extra on certain things because we have to keep our home warm and inviting for this to work for us.  That said, we are darn close.  Let me summarize a few of the most important things I took away from his book.

 First, the debt snowball.  I wish we had started ours earlier.  Basically, the idea is that you pay off your lowest balance loan first (not your highest interest) so that you have some early victory.  It also has the advantage of lowering your minimum payments.  You then roll that minimum payment into making additional payments on your next lowest balance loan.  At first, I thought this was a motivational gimmick at the expense of good financial planning, but at the time I didn’t understand the disaster factor outlined in the Two Income Trap.  Namely, if one of us gets laid off, will we be able to afford to live?  Had we not started our debt snowball in exactly the way DR describes, we would have been in real trouble when my husband was laid off a few months ago.  As it was, we had paid off enough of our very low balance loans that our minimum payments were much lower.  Just low enough, in fact, that we are still making it on just my income. 

Second Dave Ramsey pearl: paying off debt is mostly a motivational problem.  You have to break with our consumer culture in order to make additional payments.  Our break with consumer culture was deciding not to buy a new car when our last car developed a leaky sunroof, flooding the car twice in a two month period.  The car STANK!!!  We discussed just buying a new car.  We were frustrated.  I nearly vomited every time I got in from the smell.  But you know what?  We had just paid off the car.  It may have been a junker, but it was our junker.  So we took a roll of duct tape and taped over the sunroof.  Leak fixed, we then cleaned everything out.  The car still doesn’t smell pristine, but it gets us from point A to point B.  It hurts my pride still, though, when I give a friend a ride in my stinky duct-tape mobile.

Introduction

I was raised in a two career household and taught that in order to “be someone” you had to work outside the home, preferably away from children all together.  Homemaking was never even discussed as a possible vocation.  When I told my father I wanted to be a teacher, he told me that teaching would be a waste of my talents.  Great things were expected of me: scientist, doctor, ruler of the world.  I eventually went to a top ten college, thinking nothing of the very large student debt I was accumulating.  After all, when I was a hot shot doctor, I would be able to pay off my loans in no time flat.  I went on to a top ten medical school, then completed years of residency in a competitive specialty.  I was, until a few weeks ago, on the slipstream to success in academic medicine.

Of course, I planned on having it all.  I married my wonderful husband about a year and a half ago, and we wasted no time in starting to procreate.  We are, after all, Catholics... and we take that whole thing about “Be fruitful and multiply” quite literally.  Our plan was simple: he would spend most of the time with the kids, and I would be the high powered career woman.

My plan was not God’s plan.

A few weeks ago I walked into my program director’s office to resign.  I can still see him holding his head in his hands asking me if I had completely lost my mind.

I hadn’t.  You see, in the nine months of pregnancy and six months of motherhood leading up to my resignation, I had realized something very important: the feminists lied... or at the very least, they were sorely mistaken.  My baby could tell the difference between his daddy and his mommy, and he wanted his mommy.  Home.  At all times.  When I had to leave, he was inconsolable.  He started to wail the second I got near the door, even on days I wasn’t working.  As he has gotten older, he has become more tolerant of my leaving home for my 12 hour shifts, but he is still a different, calmer baby when I am home for a few days.

I have changed, too.  I want to be home with my baby and my husband.  I don’t want to relegate to a nanny the playing, the diapers, or running the household.  I want to be the one to kiss the boo boos, to teach him how to read, to console him when he’s frustrated.  I’ve come to believe that I’m the best person to do those things.  I’m his mother.  

I’m also a wife to a wonderful husband.  I don’t think I completely realized how wonderful my husband was until I went out on maternity leave... I had been so self involved with my career.  Having looked around at others in my workplace, I’ve realized that a lot of them are divorced, some many times.  I don’t want that for my family, and my guess is if I work as hard at keeping my home welcoming, my husband happy, and my family whole as I was planning on spending on my career, my family will go in a better direction.

This blog is going to be about the transition and, hopefully, the happy outcome.  I'll talk about what I'm thinking, what I'm reading, what I'm planning, and what actually happens.  This will be something of a process -- our finances won't allow me to quit working today.  However, my job is now significantly restuctured to allow me to spend more time at home and our finances have been adjusted to allow us to pay down our debts rapidly.  We're excited to start our new adventure!