Off to St. Barts...

Ha - psych! We're not really going to St. Barts, but we have secured some Grandma/Grandpa free-of-charge babysitting services, and we're damn well going to take advantage of it. So I'll be away from a computer for a few days...

Yes, I am taking a vacation after only two posts. I can tell this is going to be a wildly successful blog. See you all in a few days!

Happy New Year and all that poop.

~Erin

Recessionista Mama: Recycling Crayons

Let me preface this post by saying I would NEVER, ever do this. But times are tough, and who knows what parents are willing to do to save a buck...

What to do with all those pesky little broken down crayon stubs after your kid is done mutilating them? In my opinion, throw them out. Or, according to Chica and Joe (via Lifehacker), you can recycle them into triangular shaped rainbow crayons.

Basically, the steps are as follows:

Simply separate the used crayons into similar color families (so you don't end up with a bunch of poopie-colored crayons) and remove any remaining paper. Put one color at a time in an old metal can and place in oven or pot of boiling water. Remove when wax is totally liquid. When the can is cool to the touch but the wax mixture is still warm, spoon the mixture into silicone ice cube trays (Chica and Joe's author recommends triangular ones from Ikea). Drop in as many colors as you can fit after each previous color has cooled.

Once you have completed the project, take a nice, long look at your life and try to figure out how the hell you had enough time to make more crayons out of crayons.

Click here to read the full article.

The likelihood of me doing this project would be greatly increased if the end result was edible... it looks delish doesn't it?

Big ups to reader Shaun who sent this article in to us.

*Photo courtesy of chicaandjoe.com*

~Erin

Baby Weight Hell

I'm not off to a great start with this parenting blog if my first post is about losing baby weight, am I? How cliche! I guess you can file this one under the "parental venting" bullet point of Little BoogieDowner's mission statement.

Here's the deal: I had Pearl 11 months ago, so by Jessica Alba standards I shouldn't even be harping on this subject of baby weight. It should be a long lost memory that I shudder thinking about as I strut around trying on cute, tight dresses for some fabulous New Year's Eve event. Instead, I'm sitting here in my one and only pair of jeans that actually fit (size 10 'Curvy' GAP jeans, thank you very much... long gone are the pre-baby days of the GAP's 'Long and Lean' stylings) and lamenting the fact that I finally gave in and ate the entire Toblerone chocolate bar that I've been avoiding in my refrigerator for a week now. I guess that means I'm not dieting today?

See, that's the problem. Against the advice of every celebrity trainer interviewed in US Weekly, I seem to be unable to approach weigh loss as a "get healthy" initiative. For me, it's much more of a "get back into my GAP 'Long and Lean' size 4 jeans" initiative. Prior to having Pearl, this was actually not that hard of a feat. If I needed to lose a few pounds (or, to be more specific, 15 pounds after waaaaaay too many Coors Lights in college), I'd get my ass to Weight Watchers, start logging what I was eating, and hit the gym.

That was before Pearl... After Pearl, weight loss is a much more difficult task, and I've finally figured out WHY: because it's not about me anymore. It's about the damn kid. So I can't just trot off to Planet Fitness for a session on the elliptical, or go out for a mani/pedi to congratulate myself for losing a few pounds. Nope, no sirree. If I want to lose weight now, I have to just not eat as much. No distractions, no real rewards, not even too many compliments of "You look great!" I spend most of my time with Pearl, who cannot talk yet and certainly doesn't care about whether I manage to whittle away the jiggly belly she saddled me with. So I guess that explains why we're approaching Pearl's first birthday and I'm still working on shedding 15 more miserable pounds...

As we get ready to ring in the New Year and everybody starts talking about resolutions and plans for weight loss, here's hoping that I'll be buying some size 8 GAP jeans soon...

And oh yeah... screw you Jessica Alba. My kid's cuter than yours.

~Erin