EasyLunchBoxes.com – The Lunchbox System of my Dreams!

When you live out in the country and you have multiple children aged 4 and under (which was me one year ago!)… leaving home is hard work!  Just getting everybody up, dressed, fed and in the van is a marathon event!  (Or should be, in my opinion.)  And that’s before we even get out the driveway.  So, grocery shopping takes us all day.  ALL DAY.  ALL STINKING DAY.

Let me digress for a moment.  When Papa the Farmer came home and said, “Let’s open a farm” it occurred to me that tilling the soil, irrigating, weeding, planting, pest control, harvesting, canning, finding customers, etc, etc, etc would be way easier than going grocery shopping with toddlers.  That’s why I agreed to it.
Anyway, back to grocery shopping.  It takes us all day, partly because we live an hour away from the healthy grocery stores and partly because we have to visit the potty anywhere from 15-30 times per outing.  So, we pack a lunch!  (Yes, we are the only family I know who packs a lunch just to go grocery shopping!)  Last year I was looking for “the perfect” lunch box…. I could envision it in my mind:  It would have several Bento-style containers that stack on top of each other and would be neatly contained in an insulated carrying bag.  (It has to be insulated here in Texas!)  Then everyone’s lunch could be pre-packed and it would be easy to just distribute lunches at lunchtime.  But alas, I could find no such lunch box.  I found some great lunch boxes for $50+, but let’s do the math:

$50 x 5 people in our family = more money than I am going to spend on lunchboxes! 
Scrap that idea.  I couldn’t even find something similar to “make do” with, so I ended up settling for some Walmart lunch bags with sandwich boxes that don’t exactly fit and the children can’t even get open with out help.

Then a couple of weeks ago, I found Kelly Lester!  She is the Mom-CEO of easylunchboxes.com!  She must have been reading my mind, because a year ago, when I was wandering around town dreaming up “the perfect” lunch box system, she was busy manufacturing it! 



Exactly what I had imagined!  Check out her website, for lots of yummy lunch ideas!  (This picture says “click”… On her website, you can actually click and it takes you to the gallery… Here I think you’d better click here to go to her gallery.

I immediately ordered 5 sets.  Of everything.  Now Kelly is an actress in California.  I don’t think she would be offended if I said she is a bit of a city girl.  She doesn’t know how much little farmhands can eat! She wrote back and said, “5?!  Are you sure?  Isn’t that a lot?”  Yes, Kelly!  I am sure!  5 Lunchboxes for my hungry little chow-hounds!  We are all so excited waiting for them to arrive!  Kelly is so sweet!  She is sending us lunchboxes and we will be sending her a big box of Good Old Days Farm soap!  I am working on a batch of soap for her now! 

Anyway, Kelly invited me to appear as a guest blogger on her website.  The blog post I wrote for her was about our top-secret recipe for delicious and healthy, allergy-free “fudge"… just in time for the holidays.  Here is the picture from her blog.  Didn’t she do a great job dressing it up?  It’s actually a fuzzy picture from Papa the Farmer’s birthday feast a few weeks ago!



You can read the fudge recipe here on Kelly’s site!

Babette’s Blanket

I was about 13 years old when my grandmother died.  Somehow, after she died, one of her crochet hooks and a book about how to crochet ended up at our house.  That year during March break I was particularly bored so I picked up the book and decided to give it a try.  Let’s just say… I was hooked!  (Pun intended!)  =)  I love to crochet!  Unfortunately, so many crochet projects are just so… 1970’s.  I mean, is there anything that sums up the 1970’s more succinctly than an avocado green, orange and white granny square? 

Enter Babette’s Blanket.  This is a great pattern!  (It’s sold on the  Interweave website if you’d like to buy the pattern.)  The granny squares are solid, which gives the whole afghan a modern twist.  But what makes this blanket so much fun to make is that each square is different!  There are no two squares exactly alike, so each square is like starting something new!  I love it!

I started the Babette Blanket a couple of years ago but I was interupted by a pregnancy that left me… um… let’s just say “unavailable” for crocheting for several months!  So last night I pulled Babette out again!  I’m making her out of left over “Caron Simply Soft” yarn in various shades of purple, turquoise, rose, blue, grey and white.  Ok, ok, she might look a bit strange right now…  But just wait until I am finished!  She is going to be beautiful!  =)

Here is a picture of Babette now:


If you’re familiar with the pattern,  these are sections 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. 

If you’re looking at that picture thinking, “What is she thinking?”  I would like to point out that the pattern calls for 17 different colors.  Since I am trying to be frugal and use up what I already have, I am only using 8 colors!

And if you’ve read all the way down to the bottom of this post, I applaud your diligence!  You must be curious enough about Babette to want to view other people’s versions in various color combinations.  Take a look at the Flickr gallery.  Some of those ladies do amazing work!

Fall In Texas

I love fall in Texas!  It’s the best of all worlds!  Warm beautiful sunny days coupled with nights that apparently get just cool enough to bring out some beautiful orange and red hues!  No doubt, the fall colors here are nothing compared to the leaves where I grew up in Canada, but that’s a small price to pay to avoid all that nasty winter weather (freezing rain, sleet, blizzards… ick!)

Turning my mind back to lovely Texas weather… Here are some photographs I took this morning of around our farm:

Here is the peach orchard.  What looks like round bales of hay are actually our fig trees!  We used grass clippings (organic!) to cover them.  Now they won’t die if we get a hard freeze.  In a couple of years they won’t need to be covered like that, but for now they need a little extra special attention.

The north side of the property

Our entrance, looking out towards the road.  That large tree on the left is a pecan tree.  Texas is famous for its pecans!

I don’t know what kind of bush this is.  It’s just a bush growing out behind the shed.  But I can see it from my window and I think it is just so vibrant and pretty!

And one final shot:  Grass!  This is rye grass, so it’s going to stay green all winter!  Yay!  I love being able to see Green in December and January!

Handyman for Hire!

I’ve been meaning to show these signs for a while now…  Obviously we aren’t at the point that we can live off the farm, so Papa the Farmer has to have a day job…  He can’t get the farm going if he’s commuting 2+ hours each day to a software job, SO…..



he has opened his own handyman business called “1 Man & A Toolbox”!  (edit:  We ended up changing the name of the business after this post was written)  His signs came in a few weeks ago.  (As his proud wife, I must brag that he designed them himself!  Didn’t he do a great job?)  They really jump out at you when you drive by.



Last year we took “Financial Peace University” (The Dave Ramsey course in Personal Finance) and loved it.  We are totally committed to running the farm and the business 100% free from debt.  So, that makes Papa the Farmer a rather unusual business owner!  Other guys in construction and handyman-type work around here have big fancy flashy trucks (presumably with big fancy monthly payments).  We have chosen a different route.

Here’s a peek at Papa the Farmer’s “business vehicle”:

Yes, it’s his commuter car from his software days, and yes, it would be wonderful if he had a utility van, but you know what?  It’s paid for!  =)  Anyway, I have to tell you, I love this little car!  We would have driven it much longer, but when we had a third baby the only way to fit all 3 carseats in the back was to leave the back doors open.  That won’t work!  So it became Papa the Farmer’s!  I call it the “Mary Poppins Car.”  If Mary Poppins drove a car, it would be this car!  Remember her carpet bag and how she could pull everything out of that carpet bag?  Well, this car is like that!  It’s amazing what a handyman can fit in this teeny tiny car!  We never quite know what is going to come home in (or on!) that car!


(That’s “Tuggy” – the Tugboat Sandbox, in case you’re wondering!  Tuggy is good advertising.  Several people look twice when Tuggy is riding up top!) LOL!

Cypress Lake Ranch!

This week we headed out to Bailey Texas (a teeny-tiny place just outside of Bonham) to visit our friends out at Cypress Lake Ranch.  In addition to growing fruits, vegetables and herbs Miss Krista raises and sells all kinds of unusual live stock.  Looking for a pet rabbit?  A Horse?  Pony?  Goats?  Hedgehog?  She’s got it!

Miss Krista with her goose!

A 3-month old colt with his mama. 

Goats! 

And an itty bitty hedgehog!

Kill-A-Cold Recipes

For some reason, Cold & Flu season always takes me by surprise.  Here in Texas it is still so pretty outside and all of a sudden, everybody is sick.  Papa the Farmer came down with a cold last week.  He got over it, but not before he passed it on to the little farmhands.  Children (as any parent will tell you) pretty much only get sick at night, so after 3 nights of not much sleep, my resistance was low and now I’ve got it too.  So, the Good Old Days farm is waging full-scale warfare on our colds this week!

Over the past several years I’ve pretty much been perpetually pregnant or nursing and so we’ve turned to natural remedies to help cure many of our ills.  Since so many people are fighting colds right now, I thought I would share with you some of our favorite (and more unusual) natural remedies for the annual fight against colds:

This is a yummy anti-cold drink using herbs!  (See that little farmhand’s face?  This tastes pretty good!)  First, we boiled about 1 1/2 cups water.  After the water boiled we turned the heat off before adding herbs.  (Boiling the herbs will destroy their healing properties.)  Next we added a handful of chopped fig leaves that we picked off one of our fig trees.  We also added a handful of fresh oregano (about 1 1/2 tsp dried oregano), 1 tsp thyme, 5 or 6 bay leaves and some licorice root extract.  Now, I know that sounds pretty yucky, but after we let that steep we added 3 or 4 cups of pineapple juice to make it taste good… and it sure does taste good! 

Onion tea is another favorite of ours that we drink when we have sore throats or coughs.  You would think that onion tea would be so strong, but it tastes so good that the children ask for it even when they don’t have coughs!  First we just chop up an onion and cover it with water:


We boil it and let it steep like tea.  I drain the onion out by placing a strainer over the cup.  (I save the onions to use in soup later!)

Then we add some honey:

  And it is steamy-delicious!

Fall Harvest of Persimmons!

Remember last spring I posted these pictures of persimmon blossoms:

 

 

Well those little green flowers have turned into this:

A local farmer was telling me that pumpkins don’t grow in Texas.  (So Texans, if you’re taking your children to pumpkin patches… all those pumpkins have been shipped in from somewhere else!)  I guess God knows that everyone should have an orange crop in the fall.  It’s just so… autumn!  So He gave Texas persimmons!  Aren’t they pretty!

I grew up in small-town Ontario (Canada!), so the first time somebody presented me with one of these beautiful little orange fruits, I bit right into it … and had a big disappointment!  Wow!  Can they be astringent!  They have this way of sucking all the moisture out of your mouth and making your mouth and teeth feel fuzzy.  I really didn’t see what the big deal is about.  So, I was less than thrilled when Paper the Farmer decided to plant various types of persimmons in our fruit orchard a few years back.

This is the first year we’ve had a significant crop of persimmons!  And let me tell you!  There is a WORLD of difference between eating a store bought persimmon and eating a persimmon while you’re standing under the persimmon tree!  They are so sweet and succulent and juicy.  In fact, one website about persimmons calls them “food for the Gods.”  The thing is, you have to pick them when they are really soft… almost squishy… for them to be sweet.  So I guess they’re not really a highly transport-able item.  And I suppose they would spoil quickly if you let them ripen on the tree.  I wouldn’t know about that though.  We eat them too fast around here!

I’ll leave you with two more pictures.  This tree has dropped all its leaves, but the persimmons seem to be just ripening up now:


And here is a different variety of persimmon.  It is lighter in color… a beautiful autumn golden-yellow!  Can’t wait to try this one!