Well, it’s official—autumn is here. Although fall is just as likely to punk us as shower us with pumpkin spice everything, we still love it or, at the very least, have to live through it. Sure, jam-packed schedules, rushed meals on the fly, and school’s many demands threaten to take us down, but we have learned a thing or two.
Step 1: Mutter under your breath, “This too shall pass.”
Step 2: Repeat Step 1 often.
Step 3: Rock the life hacks that keep our families afloat instead of drowning in the carpool.
Click the image to enlarge.
To hear the conversation–or maybe brain dump is a better description—where we lay it all out for you, just click the player at the bottom to hear our latest podcast. We give up the goods about all the tricks and practices that make our lives work.
Now we mention some really great stuff in this podcast, and since we’re nothing if not helpful, we’re hooking you up with a bevy of links. But you should consider these links the breadcrumbs to lead you back to where you really want to be: listening to our podcast. That’s where it ALL is.
1) We wax awfully poetic about our love for crockpots in this podcast. Two of our favorite crockpot recipes are Apricot Cranberry Pork Tenderloin and French Country Chicken. We get really excited about these, so seriously, go check them out. Now, we don’t mention these other recipes specifically, but we have a whole slew of yummy crockpot meals so if you want more, have at it. We highly recommend it.
2) We also mention a favorite recipe planning book that we both use. Once-A-Month Cooking Family Favorites: More Great Recipes That Save You Time and Money from the Inventors of the Ultimate Do-Ahead Dinnertime Method Shwoo, that’s a mouthful. Just click on this Amazon link and buy it now. Yes, we get a teeny tiny compensation, but we promise to throw that penny in a fountain and wish happy thoughts for you. If you don’t end up loving or using this book as much as we both do, re-gift it to your sister-in-law. She’s awesome and busier than you anyway. She’ll think you’re a genius for thinking of it.
But you’re probably going to want to keep your copy and buy your sister-in-law a new one because we have a Sisterhood Secret for you right here. In an unusual turn of events, Ellen took organization to a new level and created a coordinated menu of eight of the recipes with a complete shopping list for them all. Yeah.
3) We also introduce you to this great gal named Alisa who blogs at Mondays are Forever because she introduced Ellen to the Keep app from Google, our newest tech crush. We might get a little excited talking about this in the podcast. Bringing everything full circle, you can input the menu shopping list mentioned above, and just use it over and over again. Worth checking out, no?
And if you need more of a teaser, we share the do’s and don’ts of carpooling, the school supplies we ALWAYS have in our stash, and a little more about how we juggle all of the balls and why we do it.
Homework on the fly.
Intrigued? Interested? Desperate to hear a little something funny with a side of sensible?
Well, click that player at the bottom and hear our podcast.
Erin:Oh sweet sprinkles, I had hoped I would never see the Kahlua Float Fail again. Champagne and ice cream?! Gack.
Ellen: All I can say is I was wooed by this lovely picture. And it would have at least presented better if you had some darn flutes instead of those tacky plastic cups.
Erin:But I had nothing to do with you using caramel jimmies instead of chocolate. To be fair, that picture looks tempting and you usually are pretty good at picking out recipes.
Ellen: It ‘s kind of a super power of mine . . .
Erin:That, and modesty.
Ellen: ANYWAY, the root beer floats I made for the kids were yummy.
Erin:It’s hard to mess up a root beer float, although I guess you could have used mint ice cream or something . . . you know, if Pinterest told you to.
Ellen: Funny. I do have to admit, I was Pintershizzed. Lucky for you, I wasn’t afraid to splash it all over my friends.
Ellen: But didn’t you hear the complaints that I used, gasp, caffeinated coffee? Apparently most of us are so old that we can’t consume caffeine after 2 pm. I have no such problem, but maybe I just cultivate a superior level of exhaustion.
Erin:I’m not sure that is brag-worthy.
Ellen: Well, that is not the Pintershizz anyway. THIS is where I, and I alone, got Pintershizzed.
Gack. Bakind soda and vingar came to the rescue.
Erin:What is THAT?
Ellen: That is the bottom of my crockpot AFTER I had already scrubbed it out twice. And I’m talking the bottom of the cooking unit. The warm and toasty latte that sloshed between the pottery crock and the metal heating part baked to a lacquer-like finish worthy of Chinese cabinetry. Apparently liquid doesn’t transport well in a crockpot.
Erin: That is an understatement.
Ellen: It took multiple cycles of baking soda and vinegar to get that nastiness clean. Hey, maybe I’ll get my revenge on Pinterest by pinning that disgusting picture.
Erin:I think you need to work on your revenge plots. How about we just tell people to follow us on Pinterest because we have a whole board of great libations?
Alright,we are just gonna lay this out for you: we have a great friendship. We laugh, we hang, and we respect each other. Truly. You have heard us wax poetic about each other here, here, and here. We started this blog together because our parenting styles are so in sync. Hello? Sensible Moms.
But every once in a loooooong while, we just take the slightest, teensiest, most microscopic joy in watching the other one squirm. Most of the time, we are both just one missing shoe away from losing our minds, so watching the other teeter on the precipice provides validation that no one is perfect and we’re all just doing the best that we can to keep the crazy train on the tracks.
Butttttt, it also provides pure, indulgent entertainment. If that makes us slightly evil, we are 100% A-OK with that because we look darn good in black and have been diligently practicing our maniacal laughs.
10 Evil Joys of The Sensible Moms
1. Scanner Bite in the Butt
Erin has been telling Ellen for no less than one year that she is about to hook up her scanner. So far, it has only bitten Ellen and the blog in the arse until last Thursday . . .
Erin:Oh my goodness! This morning, like at 6:45 AM, I found out that Biddie (14) needs a 2 x 3 baby picture of herself for her school’s yearbook and the deadline to email it is TODAY! She was born pre-digital! Ahhhhh! I’m headed over to a friend’s house right now to scan one before the bell rings.
Ellen: Oh, is it inconvenient for you not to have a scanner? I can’t imagine what that feels like. Oh wait, I can.
Erin:Not quite the support I was looking for.
Ellen: How about this? Plug in the blasted USB cord.
2. Throwing Gasoline on Girls’ Night Out
Ellen: Erin gets plenty of flexibility training patting herself on the back for her peacemaking abilities . . . and she really should because she has mad skills. She is the one we turn to all of the time to cool down heated discussions and and to salve hurt feelings. But every once in a while, she loses her ever-loving mind over the most unlikely subjects.
Erin: I’m sorry, but Andy Griffith really is not that great.
Ellen: That’s right, folks. She ground not one, but two soirees to a halt because she could keep silent no more about her loathing for Mr. Griffith.
Erin:Seriously? Do we need to rehash this? We already covered it here and, I might add, we decided that I deserved a sliver of vindication.
Ellen: Take your sliver if it makes you feel better. I’m just over here enjoying the chuckles it still gives me.
3. Keening Over Keens
Ellen: So while we are on the subject of Erin losing her mind over the most unlikely topics . . .
Erin: I’m ready to start spreading the evil joy around to someone else . . .
Ellen: There was this one time, while on our Big Love camping trip, that she wanted to stage a photo with all of the Keen sandals.
Erin: C’mon, it was pretty cool that all 5 moms and all 13 kids had Keens. It was like an advertisement!
Ellen: I am totally with you that it was a great picture . . .
A photo like this just doesn’t happen.
Ellen: But here is what YOU always like to refer to as “the rest of the story.” Seriously, if you want to see behind the curtain of The Sisterhood, you MUST watch this.
Erin: The shoes were not matching up because Biddie(14) wasn’t paying attention when she grabbed her Keens out of the garage and picked up TWO DIFFERENT SIZES. And I had to ask a bajillion times for her to even do that.
Ellen: I still maintain that while she made a blister-inducing bed, she snuggled down in it and NEVER complained once that her shoes weren’t fitting. What more could you want?
Erin:How about owning up to it when I was LOSING MY MIND because it looked like we were missing two shoes because of the mismatched pair?
Ellen: Fine. But what is your excuse for the Christmas tree debacle?
4. Christmas Farm or Funny Farm?
Erin:Oh, Ellen, might have been slightly jealous of my Christmas tree-getting tradition in the past. With its rosy glow of familial harmony, it was practically a Hallmark commercial. But that was all in the past. This year, things got ugly on my end and it was Ellen’s turn to smirk. Apparently, there’s only so much Norman Rockwell to go around.
Ellen: I took my evil joy with a side of fabulous family memories topped with some Beyonce-level awesomeness.
Ellen: Let’s be accurate, I played. YOU were still struggling with some of the more technical aspects of blogging and STILL telling me you were about to hook up your scanner.
Erin:I did try to talk you out of it.
Ellen: That is one of the more helpful things you did because it did set me with a fit.
Erin:You took to the tech-y side of blogging like a Gremlin to water . . .
Ellen: I’m not sure that analogy is complimentary . . .
Erin:So it was with the wee-est, teensiest, most minuscule bit of joy that I watched the video have its way with you.
Ellen: Dude! Part of the problem was that YOU couldn’t get the video off of your camera and I had to construct your part on Paint (I know! Right?) with a photo MARY emailed to me because YOU never sent me one.
Erin:What’s done is done because the end product was so worth every hour spent, tear shed, and drop of alcohol consumed. You can read the original post here. Or just get your boogie on with the video . . .
If this inspired you to get your groove on, there is still time to dance your way into Kerry’s Valentine’s Day link-up.
6. Crock O’ Something
Erin: Whilst Big Lov-ing with some of our Sisterhood friends this summer, I thought I made an interesting discovery while making our awesome Chicken Bar-B-Q. I felt like Erin The Science Gal.
Ellen: Here it comes.
Erin:But to feed the army that was five families camping, we brought two crockpots—Ellen’s with the dark crock and Erin’s with the white crock. Same ingredients. Same time. Same everything. Different results. Hmmmm. Well, the theories started a-flying. I believed the color of the insert made a difference.
Ellen: I think that is a crock of you-know-what (Pun!). The entire Sisterhood, not just me, delighted in the way this knocked Erin off her rocker.
Erin:I may or may not be planning a legit science experiment to prove my point. Stay tuned.
Aww, does this look like a group who would throw down over crockpots?? Why, Yes. Yes, it does!
7. Mother’s Day Madness
Ellen: Nothing can send a woman over the edge faster than her family proclaiming that they will devote an entire day to her and her needs when she knows them better than anyone and knows that ain’t gonna happen—no way, no how.
Erin:Mother’s Day 2012 took Ellen down and hard. I, not yet knowing that Andy Griffith, the Keens, the crockpot, and the tree farm would do me in, delighted in Ellen’s monumental Momma meltdown.
Ellen: Oh, Karma is one sneaky devil, she is.
Ellen, Post-Tasmanian-Devil-Style Flip-Out Over Mother’s Day, her calendar, etc.
8. Travel Team Tantrums
Erin:Having kids on travel teams for soccer for the last few years, I almost choked when Ellen told me Coco (14) was joining a travel volleyball league. And then I laughed. But I swear, it was really more in commiseration. I was laughing with her, not at her.
Ellen: Yeah. To be fair, I did my research and the team had NEVER gone to ANY all weekend tournaments. . . until this year, that is.
Erin:I thought I had told you that Travel Team is code for Gas-Guzzling, Time-Sucking, Money-Grubbing Sports Enterprise.
Ellen: I think you undersold it.
Erin:Well, I think in this case the joke’s on both of us.
9. Will Smith Gets Us But No One Else Does
Ellen: Remember wayyyyy back in the day when the Fresh Prince sang, “Parents just don’t understand”. He felt us. Honestly.
Erin:Our families and friends get that we blog. But let’s just say the majority don’t get why or how and, frankly, really don’t understand it. At all. Which is totally OK. But we do get a little evil joy when one of them says, “Well, maybe I’ll go write a blog too”.
Ellen: To which we say, “Peace out. Rock on.” And then cackle into our magic mirrors.
10. The last evil joy
Erin:I’ll admit that there was this one time I got a little smug about my triumph on the blog. We were skewering a children’s book for Ninja Mom’s Character Assassination Carousel, and we thought it would be better to read it aloud, like a read-along story. After HOURS of working (Read: crying, stomping my feet like a two year old, and throwing back some whiskey sour slushies like they were water), I finally got the audio player on to the post. My first thought? I showed Ellen.
Ellen: And MY first thought was, “Ha! I’m glad that you had a hard time with it, because the tech side of blogging has been sucking my time like a leech.”
And on that note . . .
Click the link to read some other great posts over at Monday Listicles!
This week on Monday Listicles the wonderful writer behind the Bonny Bard, Mrs. M, challenged us to make a list of “10 Reasons I Am Great.” We have tangoed with this tough-y a couple of times. While we are just fine with self-revelation and self-promotion (we are bloggers after all), we are not particularly comfortable with high-fiving or back-patting ourselves. In the past we have two-stepped around this problem by writing glowing words about each other or by asking our kids what they thought of us.
But this time, we are going to bite the proverbial bullet and play it straight. Or at least straight-ish.
Ten Reasons We Are Great
1.We are sexy beasts.
Caution: You might not be ready for our Hawt-ness
Ellen: Okay, immediately after agreeing that we were just going to say nice things about ourselves, we both went scrambling for an escape hatch. Unbeknownst to each other, we both turned to our husbands and asked them what they thought was fabulous about us.
Erin:They both (separately) came up with some very nice things to say about us that quickly slid into the land of raunch.
Ellen: We did not share these little gems with each other, so don’t even think for a second we are going to share them with you and the interwebz.
Erin:You’re welcome, Children.
Ellen: Mmmmm, we might have negated any gratitude that may have come our way by calling ourselves “Sexy Beasts.”
2. We have great party tricks.
Erin:We are part of a larger circle of friends who all read. A lot. They all seem kind of impressed that I can remember the authors and titles of books that I have read days, months, and even years later.
Ellen: And I can save your life with the uncanny amount of knowledge I retained from medical school.
Erin:You are always going to win with that one. Whatever. I also make a darn good chocolate chip cookie.
3. We are the Yin and Yang for crazy people.
Erin:I attract them like bees to honey. And I am oblivious to their crazy.
Ellen: And I detect them. And tell her to run.
4. We have other Sixth Sense Superpowers.
Ellen: I constantly catch Erin in the shower with my phone calls. Either she is constantly showering so it increases my odds or it is truly a sixth sense.
Erin:I’m just happy she’s not clairvoyant because if she could see me in the shower, well, that would just be awkward.
5. We are DIY powerhouses.
Erin: To be clear, I am a DIY optimist, which is not exactly the same thing. I have great intentions and vision, but you know what they say about the best intentions. . . The example that proves the rule is the time our friend Mary and I decided to make some t-shirts (20 to be exact) for our great camping adventure. Without calling Ellen.
We actually said, “How hard can it be?” before plunging into our ambitious, yet misguided attempt to iron-on an emblem AND numbers AND THEN tie-dye them. Remember what I said about vision? Anyway, despite spending a lot of time and money, we still ended up short on blue dye and half the numbers peeled off. We also spent a lot of time saying, “We should have called Ellen.”
Ellen: And I did this. Do not hold the time frame it took to get it done against me.
6. Photography Junkies
Ellen: I can really more accurately be described as a photograph hoarder. I take pictures by the thousands, but I’m not exactly a superstar at sharing them. It has been over a year since I made a photo book, and I can’t remember the last time I printed a picture. I haven’t even put Halloween pictures up on my Facebook account.
Erin:I am actually pretty enthusiastic about the sharing. I make photo books every year — for myself and for gifts, too. I have even coerced my brothers and sister into creating a calendar every year that has become one of the most anticipated parts of our Christmas festivities.
So it pains me, truly, to say that I have lost my camera bag. Am I hyperventilating? I still have my camera — thank-you-for-small-blessings — but the bag is G-O-N-E. Gone. Thank goodness that all of my closest friends have the same camera and I can borrow their chargers from time to time.
Ellen: This disappearance has stressed me out so much that I have searched my garage 3 times out of fear that I somehow snagged it.
Ellen: Andsometimes we felt like the new kids . . .
Erin:But, overall, it has made us stronger . So far, we are still friends, it’s still fun, and, as Ellen likes to say, people should hire us to figure out that mess in the Middle East. Seriously, we have mad skills in diplomacy.
Ellen: So far . . .
8. We rock mealtimes.
Erin:One day many moons ago we all met at Ellen’s house for an Easter Egg hunt and recipe swap. Ellen is the hostess extraordinaire and she knows how to party. She seriously hid over 400 eggs on her three acre lot. The fabulous upside was that it kept the 20 plus kiddos busy long enough to rock my family’s world. Seriously. I took home a folder full of every other family’s go-to recipes, and suddenly we weren’t rotating the same five meals any more.
Our friend Mary kicked it up a notch when she introduced me to the idea of planning our meals ahead of time. When I went back to work part-time this fall, getting dinner on the table was the one ball I had no trouble still keeping up in the air. I already had a system.
The book that made the magic happen!!
Ellen: And if the crockpot is not your friend, make nice now. Nothing is better than walking into the house after a long day to find your meal ready and waiting. It is a life saver on sports practice nights. I can sense some of you muttering, “But crockpot meals are gross.” Well, take notice because I have a Healthy French Country Crockpot Chicken recipe that will make you a believer.
9. We have a true Sisterhood.
Erin: Ellen and I are the bloggers, but the stories, the friendship, and the adventures we write about are shared with a larger network of women. We travel together, share books and recipes and funny stories, raise our kids together, and basically figure it all out together.
This isn’t everybody, but nobody has brought a camera to book club. . .yet.
Ellen: We said it before, and we really, really mean it. Parenting in isolation is not a good idea. We feel so blessed to have all of the women in our lives who have made this mothering journey easier. They keep us happy, fed, and sane.
Erin:They also keep us honest.
Ellen: And on that note. . .
10. We are not vain.
Photographic evidence. Or maybe we really are sexy beasts. Hmmm. . .
Thanks, Sisterhood, for making sure we have fodder, photographic and otherwise, for the blog. Together with our kids and our husbands, you are a big part of what makes us great.
Another thing that makes us great is our weekly date with Stasha at Monday Listicles. Her link-up is always a great place to start the week. Check it out!
