Check me out, it is FALL and I rock

Apples, before I brutally slaughtered them into
a delicious dessert.

Have you ever heard of apple butter?  I sure hadn't.  Prior to the Beans destroying all that is good about dessert by developing allergies to the worlds greatest food combo -- peanut butter and chocolate -- I had no reason to branch out.  Then he ruined everything and I had all but given up on anything good, sweet and fattening.  Oddly enough I wasn't loosing any weight, a fact I can't explain and which is entirely off topic ...

But, then came apple butter.

Its like applesauce, but not at all good for you and way creamier.

My parents wound up buying a place with a ton of apple trees, so we needed to use them ... my kitchen (and waistline) will never be the same.

In the interest of complete transparency -- it is time consuming and messy as heck, but it is easy.  Slap on a good podcast, movie, or some music and go to town!

You can search Pintercrack for much more thorough or serious sounding recipes.  Or you can hang out here.
 

Me picking the apples.
I should have Linda Hamilton Terminator arms by now.

I started by mixing cheap wine and Sprite.  No, seriously.  It doesn't actually go into the apple butter, but I find that it makes the process more enjoyable.  Why mix?  Because I will be singing show tunes before the apples are even halfway done if I drink the cheap wine straight.  I am not much of a sipper, more of a gulper.

So I mixed my Mommy Juice, snapped my iPod in because I could hear Handy (with his whiny assed tools) Manny in the background still.  And got to work.

My apples are small, and the skin is really thin so I don't peal them.  If you are getting store bought apples you may need to peel them and won't need as many because they are probably bigger.  Don't get horribly hung up on what kind of apples to use because by the time you are done cooking them with all the spices they will all be delicious.  Just know that if you want tang, pick a tangier apple, tart or sweet same deal.

For this round of apple butter I am using ... well, I am not entirely sure what kind of apples they are.  Here is a visual of the four main "types" but I think one and four may be the same kind:

I have googled them and come up with a couple different names, but I would love to hear what you think they are.

Now to the actual instructions.  Brace yourself for my thorough, foodie level instruction giving skillz:

Step one: Wash the bird shit and bug shit off.  Seriously, why they gotta poo on my food?

Step Two: Core and slice the muthahs.  And since my apple core-er sucks, I do this with a knife.

*insert possible brief intermission for ER visit here*

Step Three: Re-fill your drink, undoubtedly it is time.  Then toss the slices of apples into your food processor.  Process until they are in small chunks, smaller they are the faster they cook.

Step Four: Dump the chunky, wet apple matter into the CrockPot.

Blurry pictures happen when someone's hands are slippery.

Step Five: Spices.  Don't ask me to measure, I don't really do that and I am already a full drink in (my cup is 32 oz) by this point so my already low standards are dipping.  I eyeball it.  If I had to guess, for a full pot I use at least a full cup of brown sugar and then coat the top of the apples with cinnamon and allspice (so like 2 to 3 teaspoons each).  Here, I offer pictures to those of you who know what you are doing ...

It is a lot more spices than I have ever seen in another recipe, but to be honest I have never heard anyone complain LOL

Step Six: Set your Crock Pot on long and low.  For mine this is the 8 hour setting.  I try to do this as early in the morning as possible because you really do want the apples cooking for 8 to ten hours.  It makes for creamier apple butter in the end.

Step Seven: Try to not eat it through out the day and feel very Martha Stewart-ey because your house smells like fall and you seem to know what you are doing.  Stir occasionally, but really, you don't want to do much.

Step Eight: When the apples are plenty squishy, start shoveling them into a blender, food processor, or be uber fancy and have an immersion blender.  I know it is a huge surprise, but I am not uber fancy and lack an immersion blender.  I blend this bad boy until it gets creamy.

Once we have blended the snot out of the apples, we are technically done.  You can eat it straight, mix it in something, jar it, or even ice cube it like this:

I do that because then the Meatball can drop an apple cube in his oatmeal and it both flavors AND cools it.

I know, you are in awe of my general bad ass glory here, aren't you?

Anyway, it does freeze well, so jar it up and store it for later so you can have apple butter year round.  One full CrockPot made 6 full pint jars.

In a few weeks I will be cute-i-fying the jars somehow in order to give them away, so I will share that later.

Cheers!

All Purpose Cleaner, ghetto style!

I love the idea of making my own stuff.

Okay, no, I don't.  But I almost got that lie out with a straight face.  I am just cheap and being that we are a one income family in a world where two incomes is advisable we are broke enough I consider it.

While cleaning products aren't something I have to constantly buy (I usually did the bulk purchase option which lasted a bit) it seemed like they coordinated when to run out so that it would really bankrupt us.

Toilet Bowl Cleaner: "Hey y'all, the stash is getting low out here.  We only have one spare bottle that she will open the next time she cleans!"

Glass cleaner Refill: "Dats good with me, I am almost out too!  I will make sure she spills on the next refill and she will have to replace us at the same time!"

Antibacterial Surface Wipes: "No worries here!  Kids are back in school and you know she will be disinfecting the poo out of them daily!  Ha ha she will have to replace all of us!"

Meanwhile the toilet paper and paper towels are chiming in that we are down to the last roll too.

So the bulk that can be so great stinks when you have to replace three things at 20ish dollars whenever it happens.

So, I again hang my head and turn to the Pintercrack gods and ask if they have something that won't kill me, burn the house down, or land me on some government watch list if I make it in my kitchen.

I started with something that was an all purpose cleaner.  I went with that because my beloved wipes were running low, and in order to MAKE new ones I needed to MAKE the fluid first.

So I looked and looked ... for something supposedly so simple why are there so many options?  Oh and why does vinegar have to work so well for cleaning and smell like vinegar?  I mean really, isn't there a way to not make it smell like athlete's foot in the midst of the throes of death?  After the microwave incident it seems unlikely I will intentionally make my house smell that way, right?

Anyway, I went with this pin, because it did seem simple.

1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp dish soap (everyone uses Dawn LOL)
2 tbsp white vinegar
2 cups warm water

Aaaaand apparently I took no pictures during the whole making-it process.

Great.  Well I will tell you that I used the Dawn with Olay in it so it smelled like pomegranate something or other.  This one:

While that may leave a film behind when you clean (since it IS a lotion in the soap) it made the smell of vinegar much less overwhelming and it was the only Dawn I had in the house left over from a homemade scrub making session.

I followed her directions, which are nice and simple and I heart that, and wound up making several batches.

Here are my bottles of completed All Purpose Ghetto Cleaner (yes, a classy and creative name really sells the product) ...

Stunning, I know.  Yes, that is an empty Squirt bottle re-purposed for a life of holding the back up refills.  I made a ton of this stuff, mostly because I had the supplies and it was easy.  I found that with the Dawn I used that the vinegar smell was actually very tolerable, so I was stoked to use it.

I did use the spray to clean somethings and oh em gee it was a fantastic cleaner!  Like seriously, I was genuinely impressed.  I honestly thought when people raved about their homemade cleaners it was just them patting themselves on the back for having made it and scrubbing their asses off in order to fool themselves into thinking they worked.  Sorta like the whole microwave thing, I figured my new exercise plan would be that all my home cleaners sucked and I had to work four times as hard to make the house passably clean.  Not so!  I was actually impressed at how clean stuff looked.  I do have to follow up my wet wiping with a dry wipe, probably because I used the Dawn with Olay and it streaks if I don't.  But it smells pretty decent, cleans well, and costs very very little.

Usually in posts like this people tell you that it only cost them $0.08 a bottle or something, honestly I have no clue.  I do know that I had all the ingredients, including the empty 2 liter bottle and dollar store spray bottle, so technically it cost me nothing to make it that day.  Having had this in the house for over a week I can tell you that I use it pretty often but I am not running out yet, so it is certainly economical.

So, I didn't blow anything up and didn't even make a big mess this time!  Well, at least I didn't until I started to make the wipes ... but that is tomorrow's story ...

vinegar + microwave filth

So on my list of forty things that just needed done so desperately around here (that I swear will get done before I die) was the microwave.  I had put the microwave in the Meatball's chore sticks because it wasn't like I was expecting to do surgery in there or anything.  However, since the previous homeowners chose to grace posterity with off white appliances it was getting a tad icky looking.  So I of course turned to Pintercrack to help me find a totally effective yet lazy way to not humiliate myself when people are over and need to zap food.

Cue this pin.

Well I happen to have a butt load of vinegar here from my science teacher days and a dirty microwave, lets do this!!!

Note: She lists a toothpick as an optional supply.  I would suggest a jackhammer if the grime in your microwave has the sheer stubborn staying power mine had.

Here is before, and I swear it was worse that it looks.  By a lot, I am not even trying to be all "oh it was just a mess from the night before!" nope, y'all I barely every clean it and stuff blows up in that thing all the time.  It was bad, the camera adds ten pounds but subtracts a years worth of slobbery.  Oh, and the marks you DO see are semi permanent, I swear.

I should have taken before and after pictures of me.  They would have been something like this ...

Before ... and ... After

Here is the microwave, after I tried to asphyxiate the hell out of my whole household with the ungodly stench of hot vinegar and scrub like Cinderella.  Ugh.

The original poster says she only had to zap the vinegar once.  Well, I lost count after five 2 minute increments.  Or maybe the stench just killed enough brain cells I couldn't count any higher, hard to know for sure.  Seriously.  It was the stickiest crap ever, it was like trying to take a tattoo off with a dry baby butt wipe, thus why it was still on there after all this time and my paltry attempts at cleaning that proceeded this one.

I found that when I moved the cup directly under or next to the section I was focusing on it made it a lot easier to clean that part.   This is why I had to do it several times, slow and stinky but effective.

In case the whole cup in the microwave thing was hard to understand.
This is for the visual learners.

Gagging the whole time I did it and while I snapped those pictures, but I must say, I am impressed.  I am also annoyed I didn't have the wherewithal to try this when it was nice outside because I'd kill a small village to open a damn window up and ventilate this place.  The pin tellith no lie, it works, but oy vey it smelled worse than I expected for a little while!

Of to pin "how to get rid of vinegar smell" ...

I am that good

Okay I have totally sucked donkey bits at blogging lately, I will give excuses later.  But I wanted to share with y'all what I am clearly not doing in my bloggy absence.

Being any good at anything that resembles "domesticisty."

As an example for you this fine day I offer this pictoral piece of evidence:

Now while you are wondering what you are looking at, and why you are looking at that random assortment of crap I would like to blow your mind.

It was in the couch.

Not just under the cushons, I am not that bad.  Shit, I have needed spare change plenty of times in the last decade of that couche's existance to have lifted the cushions in hopes of a Dr. Pepper from Circle K.

No, my couch eats things.  It once tried to eat my Great Dane's leg, no joke.

This was all in the frame of it.

In case you are not yet impressed with my complete bad-ass-ness yet, please direct your attention to the top leftish of the picture.

See the pacifier?

That was Meatball's.

He is eleven.

Boom!

mod podge, hair "gel," and cheapo x-mas gifts

Sometimes even I can be amazed at my own ability to be overly confident.  For Christmas this year I decided that somehow I was capable of not only being crafty, but sewing.  I don't know what the hell I was thinking with the sewing part, but that is a separate post that I will probably drink my way through writing ... and sewing, I think it may improve my odds.

This post?  Well I thought this would be easy, after all I have done this stuff before.

Remember my easy yet cheap gift for my mother?  This one?

Yeah, all of two ingredients, Dawn dish soap and sugar, and you have a pretty scrub.  I foolishly signed on to make about a million of them for a baby shower  which was adorable by the way.  Here is a picture of the blue version since the mama-to-be was baking a baby boy in her oven:

So by the time December rolls around I am like a scrub-making-bad-ass.  Done it a few times, can't possibly screw it up.  Right? HA!

I made the scrub without a problem, because honestly it is that easy.  But then I looked at that jar and I thought to myself "Self, I don't have any more cute spoons.  I need a pretty label!"  So I sat down and I made these.

So far so good, ultimately.  I am not a thousand percent pleased with the label but I needed to glue those babies on and get my jars drying because some of my presents were getting mailed and I needed to get on that.  So out comes the Mod Podge and in comes all those opportunities to screw stuff up.

How to Eff Up EASY Christmas Gifts in Twelve Simple Steps:

Step One: Gather your supplies.  This should be easy, make your scrub following the directions found here, and pour into the jars of your choice.

Then grab Mod Podge, and something to paint it on with.  Side note: If you are going to use a really cheap brush you happen to have and intend to just throw away when you are done please note the odd pricking sense of foreboding you have because the brush is about to be your downfall.

Step Two: Nearly rip all the skin on your hands off trying to open the murther fracking Mod Podge that has sealed itself within the bottle.

Step Three: Put some Mod Podge on the top of the jar.

Step Four: Put one of your labels on top of the Mod Podge.

Step Five: Start putting Mod Podge on top of the label.  This is when shit starts going wrong.

Step Six: Realize that the ink from your printer is smearing and you need to use fewer brush strokes.

Step Seven: Realize that your cheap assed brush is shedding hairs into your pretty Mod Podged labels.  Try to pick it out and swear at it without smearing additional ink around.

Step Eight: Run your hands through your hair in frustration and realize you just Mod Podged your hair into a pony tail.  There is no picture accompanying this damn step.

Step Nine: Realize that you might have just Mod Podged the goshdamn lids and/or rings on to the jars and remove/wipe as necessary.

Step Ten: Add another layer of Mod Podge while still picking out hairs from the brush and feeling your own hair solidify.

Step Eleven: DO NOT TOUCH THEM.  Just leave them alone, you have done enough damage, let them dry.

Step Twelve: Remember to put a hat on before answering the door for the FedEx guy because you haven't had time to take a shower so you still look suspiciously like a scene from Something About Mary.

So with all this success rolling around the house I decided today is not the day to attempt sewing, something I cannot do well at on a good day.  I figure when I need to chisel my hair we can safely assume this is not a "good day."

There is the finished, not wrapped product.  Not quite as cute as I pictured, but at least no one knows what I was aiming for.  Without that mental image to compare it too I think they work just fine.

"cougar" is a homonym

Some times I can pretend I'm not married to a redneck.

Most of the times, I try.

But when I dust off his commemorative Number Three shot glasses it's harder to be successful about the whole thing.  I figure it isn't like I am some high class prize myself, though I do not understand the value of cars driving around in circles even if it is really fast.

When it comes to parenting, Paul Bunyan and I are of a similar mind.  Sometimes this is a good thing, but sometimes I wonder if things would be a bit better off if one of us was more mature -- just generally speaking.

Case in point, the other night was Family Game Night.  A very serious affair here in a house of deeply competitive individuals.  We eat appetizery foods, have special fancy glasses for our beverages, and pick a board game of some sort to play.  Since Meatball got Catch Phrase for his birthday and we hadn't got to use it yet that was the one we chose.

So it is me, Meatball and Paul Bunyan sitting around a table.  Bunyan had devised a complex schemed with which he would constantly be switching teams so as to be "fair" though Meatball and I noticed a few rounds in that this meant he was like never guessing.  Cheater.

So Paul Bunyan is prattling off clues and Meatball and I are bouncing back and forth but here are a couple of moments that make the devil on one shoulder laugh and the angel on the other faceplam.

Paul Bunyan: Sex on Fire!

Meatball: KINGS OF LEON! (he only has one volume when playing this game and it is "sonic boom")

Paul Bunyan: Uh, the lead singer peed her pants on stage once!

Me: Black Eyed Peas!

Paul Bunyan: A large cat ...

Meatball: LION

Paul Bunyan: No ... um ... another breed, big cat ...

Meatball: TIGER!

Paul Bunayn: No, no, keep guessing ...

Meatball:  JAGUAR?! LYNX?!

Paul Bunyan: Keep going ... its one that is agile ... oh that doesn't help ...

Meatball: OCELOT?! LEOPARD?!?! PUMA?! CHEETAH?!?! LIGER?!?!?!?!?!

Paul Bunyan: No ... Its an older woman who is interested in young guys!

Meatball: OH, A COUGAR!!!!  IT IS A HOMONYM!!!

And that is total parenting winning right there folks!

parenting, something I am so good at

I'm not exactly a parenting paragon. I accept that. My kids haven't totally gone postal and blamed me in the plea bargain, so I take some consolation int that. But it's not like I pretend to be all serious and right and shit.  People (and blogs) like that drive me nuts.  

That said sometimes I possess even the astounding ability to amaze myself. Take tonight for example. In the course of one single hour the Meatball acknowledged that I am the source of his knowledge on swearing in sign language, witnessed me trying to wedgie Paul Bunyan, and said "we'll if its a pin up of you then it would be clever and pretty."

Starting at phase one -- sign language swearing fluency -- American Sign Language (or ASL) is a second language for me. Growing up with a non-verbal sister we incorporated sign into our familial language early on.  Naturally, I learned to swear proficiently because ASL offered me the opportunity to not only communicate with friends brilliantly on multiple choice tests, but also a way to covertly be a rebellious little pain in the ass in high school.   Apparently somewhere, sometime, somehow Meatball saw me sign a phrase that rhymes with "duck two" and tonight he asked me "Mom, what does this mean?" Um yeah, mom of the year I never claimed to be.  But at least I don't lie to him.  Oh, and I also told him that if he ever uses it I will shave his eyebrows off in his sleep.

No, that is't a how-to for you, but it is a totally badass ASL interpretation of Marilyn Manson's This is the New Shit.  If you watch it closely, you are likely to learn most of the bad words anyway.  Be smart about watching the video if there are children around or if you are at work.

Second high point of the evening, wedgie time. Dear ol' husband and I are being argumentative and messing with each other, so of course we resort to fighting slightly dirty. When Meatball and Beans where looking the other way, Bunyan proceeds to smack my ass hard enough to make a loud crack. Of course, the boys notice that, and somehow *I* am blamed.  Don't ask how, logic has no place in this.  My menfolk have solidarity, none of them claim to miss the toilet or leave the seat up -- yet both things happen regularly -- and no one will rat the others out.  So when the boys look the other way again I know I only have moments with which to exact my revenge.  Knowing that returning the spanking would only thrill the perverse Paul, and not make my point at all, I decide on a small, but ever so poignant, wedgie.  Of course, Paul Bunyan can strike my derierre on the downlow but I can't yank his boxer briefs up without getting caught. While I believe that parents should honor each other and never argue in the presence of their children, I categorically refuse to believe that my wedgieing Mr. Bunyan is in anyway not a healthy precedent for me to set.

Lastly, me as a pin up. Meatball really doesn't understand pin-ups a sexual beings, he knows them as a tattoo style of women he wished would be more conservatively dressed -- an indication of both the environment we've created (tattoos are art) and his youth and kootieish tendencies (he's eleven, this will end soon). So when I was mentioning using my Kitchen Aid for something I had to bake I told Paul Bunyan that I'd seen these amazing works of art (artist's website) and desperately want to do that to MY mixer.  We decided it should totally be a redheaded pin up in an apron, thus making her look like me.  Being the wise little brown noser he is, it was at this point Meatball dropped the line about how if it is a pin up of me she'd have to be clever and pretty but wondered how we could fit all the awesome on to the surface of my mixer.

Well played, Meatball.

But I will still shave your eyebrows if I catch you swearing in sign language.

Parenting Advice 101

It isn't often that I give out parenting advice.  This isn't one of those blogs.  But it is often that I alert you to potential hazards and pitfalls you may encounter should you chose to do certain things.  Well, here is a doozy.

Do not teach your child to play "knuckles" on National Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Why?  Well, a combination of karma, bad luck and the universe's sadistic sense of humor will combine and you will find yourself texting this to your husband:

So I spent National Talk Like A Pirate Day (September 19th) with my left eye tender and debating the value of an eye patch.  Sure enough I had a shiner the next day.  Trust me, you feel like a total badass telling people that your black eye came from an adorable little nearly-18-month old.

The bright side of this story of course is that if you walk up to the Beans and say "knuckles" he will bump your knuckles  with his fist and make an exploding sound.

Its very cute, but it still makes me wince a bit.

dreeeaaam the impossible dream ...

Werd!

So on my short to do list today we have the following impossible tasks ...

• Do the laundry because there are no towels.  Well, no clean ones. I actually uttered the words "well we wouldn't run out if you didn't use them so often" to my husband this morning.  I even facepalmed in real life on that one while he laughed.
• Sweep, mop, dust, and do a general pick-up of the crapalanche all over because my mother in law is coming.
• Make my house look like I know what I am doing because my mother in law is coming.  Too bad I am not sure how to do this ...
• Make an impossible, yet thoroughly awesome, cake.  Pictures and blog post to come.
• Bathe a dog because he smells like human feet.  Why I don't know, nor do I want to.
• Keep two children alive and cleanish.
• Not kill the guys next door re-roofing the neighbor's house for the excessive noise they are making, even if they wake the Beans.
• Maintain my sanity and sobriety.
• Shower.  After the towels are done.  

Ah yes, the impossible tasks listed right there next to the highly-unlikely-ones.  I debated putting something about cold fusion and finding a political candidate that doesn't lie or annoy me, but I thought that may be a tad far reaching.

But hey, at least I am blog hoppin' again!  Lets see if we can surpass ten followers today!

"Fat Ass" to "Bad Ass"

So I have been really hard on myself lately.  If you have read here for a bit you might be thinking that seems fairly in character, but this is different.  Here on the blog generally I laugh while sharing failures with cooking, or stupid mistakes I make while trying to recreate some crafty thing.  That is one thing, I can laugh at me there.  It is a safe thing.

But there are other things that are harder to laugh about.

For example, I hate my body.  Okay, hate is such a strong word.  I don't hate my body.

My body has borne two children into this world, carried another two for a short time before they earned wings and went to heaven.  My body takes me through my long day, half sleeping nights.  It picks a kiddo up from school, facilitates homework, makes meals, cleans a house, plays with a baby, walks dogs, and does a million other things.  It keeps this house sanitary (though not impecible), manages a million things at a time, and makes some of it look easy.  While not the fittest body in the world, it is still hanging in there okay and my health is nothing I can complain about having had moments of much poorer health already in my life, and many more to come surely.  My body is pretty amazing when I really think about all I ask it to endure, and how little I give it in return.

But I still have such a love hate relationship with it.

While I can DO all those things, there is stuff that my body can't do too.  Like fit into the jeans I want.

In the scheme of things this whole jean fitting thing is pretty minimal.  But it matters to me.

To my husband, my body is a John Mayer song.  He is more than happy with me as I am, tells my I am beautiful, attractive and other stuff I'd just rather not share even on my semi anonymous blog.

But I know that even he'd be just fine with my body with a little less sag, flab and padding.  He'd never say it,  but we can be honest here.

So I have been wanting for a long long long time to get in to better shape.  Not for anyone other than myself. Because I want to look in the mirror and be okay with the reflection rather than say stuff like "holy shit I have an extra chin in the works."  I do not want to be a twig, I do not want to fit into my high school jeans, I do not have some burning desire to rock a bikini next summer ... those things may be nice and all but I have no desire for it.  Well the bikini would kick ass, but that isn't my point.

My point is that I have been trying to exercise with any regularity and it really seems like fate is just content with my ass being this size rather than the one I want.  Everything feels like it works against me.  If wanting to lose weight, and sucking at it, were enough to have a rockin' bod I would be set.

Take yesterday for example.

After repeated failures at going for a jog or walk, after not being able to use any of the exercise equipment at my mom's house (a whole blog post in which I nearly set off her alarm and had the popo called on me), and many other failures too frustrating to even list I decided to enlist the help of the Wii Fit we bought forever ago.

And the fun really began.

First, I had to find the controller, and the little step-on-me thingy.  Once found, I set them up, and tried to turn everything on.  The batteries in the Wii controller had been pilfered for something else in requirement of a couple double A's.


So I did the only thing reasonable at that moment since I had no spares, I stole some from a kid toy -- seems fitting they contribute since I only started gaining weight because of them! -- and I was ready to go.

Or so I thought.

The batteries in the thingy you stand on were there, but dead as door nails.  So the tally of stolen batteries is now up to six.  Feeling like I have now waisted a massive and precious twenty minutes hunting batteries I got started and discovered that I have in fact gained 2.6 lbs since the last time I used this beast.  Oh joy.  By the time I was done taking my "tests" and updating from ages ago when we last drug this thing out of the corner, the Beans was aware I was doing something for me and promptly began screaming his adorable head off like he'd severed a limb.

If you count my mad dash back to his room, while envisioning the severe yet completely imagined trauma his shrieks implied, I probably burned a total of 27 calories.

Yeah, that is like licking a doughnut.  Gargling a Dr. Pepper, then spitting it out. It certainly has no impact on !@#$ing jean size, hotness, flat tummies, or imagined bikinis.

So here I sit feeling very frustrated and dejected and needing to vent.  Because I know when my husband comes home he will have some stupid-man-line ready like "oh you don't need to exercise" or "why don't you just get the Beans busy doing something and then work out if you really want to?"  Well gee wiz Einstein, why did I not think of that?!  Bleeding brilliant piece of goods, you are.

How do other mom's exercise?  Gym isn't in the budget and my eating options are actually quite healthy an balanced.  I just need something in my home, cheap, and fairly easy that I can do.  If it is an exercise with your kids thing I don't know how to keep a very active and wanting to run one year old in place very long.  He likes to run, but not long enough to make an impact on my waistline.

Any suggestions? Please?