All posts by NerdMom

house management

Morning Routine

Leave a comment


Tammy’s Recipes is hosting Make Your Home a Haven and this week she is focusing on having a Morning Routine of 5 things. The theory behind 5 things is that if you make your list to daunting you won’t do it. To me the 5 things are just a few of the things to get my day off right but I haven’t been consistent. So here is my first 5 things I want to get done in the morning.
1. Brush my teeth
2. Go to the gym
3. Shower and change
4. Make breakfast for the kids
5. Start a load of laundry

That is mine. What are yours?

house management

Meal Plan Monday

Leave a comment

So here we meet again. The weather around here can’t decide if it is cold or warm. So I am going to focus on a little comfort food.

Monday: Stew
Tuesday: Cube Steak, Corn Casserole, Broccoli
Wednesday: Chicken, Asparagus and Pasta in a Butter Garlic Sauce
Thursday: Corned Beef, Corn Casserole and Broccoli
Friday: Pasta Carbonara Florentine

Books, gift worthy, giveaway

The Perfect Baby Handbook: Review & Giveaway

Leave a comment



The day I got a pre-release copy of The Perfect Baby Handbook: A Guide for Excessively Motivated Parents I was in serious need of levity. Lucky for me I got it! This book is a refreshing mockery of all the “how to get the perfect kid” talk we here and read. Now I will admit I sometimes try a little to hard to get the perfect kids but sometimes I need to be reminded to take it easy. All to soon these kiddos will be grown so lets find the humor! This book was so funny. I laughed so hard my eyes were watering.

Walk into any bookstore and you’ll encounter a ludicrous number of “expert” baby-rearing manuals. Although The Perfect Baby Handbook provides a solid foundation, it goes without saying that you’ll need to read them all. A sampling:

* Are You My Mother and, If So, Must You Slouch Like That?
* Infants and Their Little Anxiety Attacks
* No Ifs, Ands, or Buts: How to Parent Without Using Certain Grammatical Constructions
* Throat Lozenges of the Baby Whisperer
* 10,001 Great Baby Names Selfish Celebrities Have Already Snapped Up
* The No-Cry-from-4:01-to-4:03-a.m. Solution
* The Obviously Gifted Child: A Guide to Spotting Glaring Brilliance
* Layettes of the Aztec Kings
* What to Expect When the Word “Expect” Becomes Meaningless
* Because You’re a Terrible Daddy Who Just Smoked a Gigantic Joint
* Creating Insecurities in Your Baby—So He Can Triumphantly Overcome Them
* The Tale of Peter Rabbit’s Unfortunate Speech Impediment
* An Angel Fell Out of the Sky and Landed in Our Nursery, Slightly Injuring Our Baby

Win it!
Wants some more humor? Well, you can win your own copy of The Perfect Baby Handbook: A Guide for Excessively Motivated Parents? Well I have 5 copies to giveaway!

To enter:

* Just give me a moment of hilarity from your own parenting experiences.
* A random winner will be selected and notified on April 4th.
* The winner will then have 3 days to claim their prize.

To earn extra entries, you may do one or all of the following. Each one counts as an extra ticket but you must leave a separate comment for each one.

* Subscribe to my feed.
* Mention this giveaway on your blog with a link back here.
* Subscribe to my Twitter

This giveaway is open to addresses within the US. Please leave a way to contact you in case you win.

If you want to see more giveaways pop over to Making Money Keeping Money to see more giveaways on Contesting Monday!

FRN, gift worthy, kids

Play and Learn Baby Spoon Review

Leave a comment


I got these awesome spoons from Baby Human to try with my NerdPud. Here in the NerdFamily we are slow to transition to spoons because of the horrible mess. So when I read about how great these help kids learn to use a spoon I was excited to give it a go!

First off they are made of an awesome soft plastic. It has a little give and it top shelf dishwasher safe. It is curved and perfect for little hands to hold it. As soon as the NerdPud picked it up she could get it right to her mouth because of the shaping. It also has a neat safety feature. It has a gag guard. That little disc right after the bowl of the spoon prevents the spoon from being able to go to far into the kiddo’s mouth. It even doesn’t stain. We did spaghetti sauce and it cleaned right up, leaving not a single stain!

Now, the NerdPud has a bit farther to go until she can feed herself everything with a spoon but I do think within a week she will be great! For only $8.99 you can pick up a 2 pack of these awsome spoons at the Baby Human website or Amazon.

(This is a FRN review)

Food

Hell’s Kitchen 3/19

Leave a comment

I wonder if Carole is going to make it another week. Or if Jay will be the one to go. Let’s find out!

It looks like we are going with Tapas this week. The chefs are trying Ramsay’s salmon based tapas. Each team had to create 5 small plates from leftovers. They had 20 minutes to make them. But first Ramsay moved Giovani over to the red team. Lacey doesn’t have any ideas so someone had to give her one. The red tie ended up winning but just a little. The punishment has to set up both kitchens for service that night. The red team got to go to the horseraces as a reward. Lacey just can’t figure out what she is supposed to do. She is totally going to be put up if the blue looses. She feels that people are respecting her but then she asks what to do. She threatened to leave again. They said go if you need to go and she went. What really got me is when she was talking about how she is treated like a donkey and then she is supposed to help them. “Help them”?!?!?! Isn’t she doing it for herself? She came back but…

Then we open. The rice that Jay made for everyone was mush so they had to start over on the rice. Then Jay and LA just seemed to be sleepwalking. Jay finally screwed up to the point that Ramsay tossed him. Then Jay left, he really packed up and left. Then Ramsay tried to help the blue team reorganize. Giovanni has really become a leader in the red team. He is outside the girl’s bickering so I think he is taken more seriously. It seems Ramsay has it in for Ben next. Paula was getting props from Ramsay with “the best Wellington ever served at Hell’s Kitchen”. Now Ben can’t seem to get a Wellington right. Ramsay said he was aiming for Ben because he is next to go. I think Carole may take a swing at Andrea in the next week or two.

The blue team got told to go upstairs and each of them had to figure out who was the 1 person they didn’t want on their team. While Ben did mess up, Lacey isn’t a team player. I notice that Ramsay didn’t say pick someone to leave. I am figuring a team shake up especially since Jay left. All the guys voted against Lacey and Lacey voted for Robert. Ramsay called Lacey and Ben to the front. They both got told to get back in line. Nothing changed at all.

Christianity, church

Sunday School Reflections

Leave a comment

In James 4 there is a verse that says to “Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.”I put before you that this is so much more than just getting the dirt off. When I was a freshman in college I was blessed to attend a Shabbat at the local Chasidic rabbi’s house. 1 of the things I remember was a ceremonial washing of hands. Everyone (including me) did it after the men’s prayer time and before the meal. There wasn’t any scrubbing but a specific calm procedure that served to cleanse you. Could this be what James is referring too? A solem cleansing of our sould and being?

These are the things that I think about during Sunday School. Where the Old and the New collide without fanfare or attention.

education, Homeschoooling

Technology, Education and Life

Leave a comment

All I could think as I watched this video is about if our educational system is prepared to equip our kids for the next new things. The current public school system seems to be built upon a system that wasn’t working before so why would it work better in the future? The current system teaches kids (by design) how to be great followers and workers, not entrepreneurs and inventors. Learning how to learn, logic and a love for knowledge is what kids need to be taught today to be competitive tomorrow. Are we teaching them that? I hope that I am.