This is the spider plant that dominates the living room.  Back when my oldest child was in preschool, his class went on a field trip to a greenhouse.  Each child was given a baby spider plant.  I didn’t try real hard not to kill it:  I don’t like spider plants.  Of course it is thriving, and has thrivened for years, and when I am an incapacitated invalid it will be moved to my hospital bedside because my caretakers will imagine that such an old and healthy plant must be special to me.
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I have cheap tastes.  If you’re coming down off the more expensive stuff, I have some recommendations.

I used to work with a couple of girls who were chocolate connoisseurs. They didn’t consider it chocolate unless it was a bar of squished cacao beans imported overnight from Belgium.  Lucky, lucky me, loving Hershey’s and Dove and Russell Stover.  I especially like the Hershey’s Symphony bars.  If you prefer dark chocolate, try the Dove dark Promises.  MMMmmmm.
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I have five children. I don’t know if you realized this, but it is difficult to find decorative things that represent five children. You can buy “family labels” that have either one or two parents and either one, two, or three children. Holiday ornaments show one, two, or three peas in the pod. Personalized Christmas cards have room for up to six family members total. Target pharmacy has 6 different color-codes for different family members.

I’m definitely not complaining: five children is an unusual number to have right now. Expecting mass-produced items to be available for every family type/size is unreasonable. Still, I’m always on the lookout.

Recently a friend sent me a notecard with a picture of a nest on it. The nest had four eggs in it. This gave me an idea: could I maybe find a print of a nest with five eggs? Oh, sure, the biological analogy is shaky, but I like it anyway: maybe my kids weren’t born in a litter, but they all still seem like eggs in the nest.
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Lately I have been feeling entirely overwhelmed by the sheer amount of children’s stuff in our home. We’ve got baby detritus everywhere — exersaucer, bouncy chair, jumpy suspended-from-doorway chair, Bumbo seat — and dealing with the eighty million toddler toys on top of all that was just getting to be a little too much.

So I made some small changes, and they have worked out so well I honestly feel like part of my brain has been cleared out and now can contain much more useful distractions than fretting about my cluttered house. You know, such as being able to quote Season 5 of The Simpsons in its entirety.

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We have two kids and no plans to expand our family any further (with the possible exception of a fainting goat because hot damn, I’d never get sick of seeing this), and now that we’ve completed our childbearing activities I realize I no longer need to hang on to every item of baby clothes I own. I had no problem offloading my maternity wear, but then again, I didn’t find myself waxing nostalgic about a shirt the size of a circus tent.

Our youngest is six months old and he’s already gone through many of the small outfits I had saved after our first boy. I cleaned out the nursery closet the other day and ended up with a few boxes I plan to send to a couple of friends who are expecting their own baby boys, but there were certain items I just couldn’t part with. Like the incomprehensibly tiny striped onesie that both my kids wore during the first weeks after they were born, their coming-home outfits, the weird little yarn-tied hats they wore in the hospital. The first footed pajamas that fit, the hand-knitted cap gifted to us by a friend, even those unattractive teal-and-pink blankets they wrap your baby with at the hospital — I can’t bring myself to get rid of any of that stuff.
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Paul found the site I’m going to tell you about, and so I might as well give him credit right now or I’ll be hearing about it later like I’ve been hearing about it all month: “WHO found that site for you? WHO is a genius for finding it? WHO shows love by keenly honing in on your interests?” Etc.

The site is called Postcrossing. It is the faceless-one-night-stand version of pen-pals: instead of mailing back and forth with one person, developing a deeper understanding of each other’s cultural likenesses and differences as you build a new friendship, Postcrossing is about sending and receiving postcards with a bunch of strangers who don’t even remember your name afterward.
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We’ve been taking a hard look at our finances lately, in order to try and make sense of just where it is all of our money goes each month. By far our largest expenses are the mortgage, childcare, and savings, but there’s also some big-ticket debits being filed into the Automotive section (car payment, gas) and holy COW do we ever spend a lot of cash on groceries.

It’s important to us to be pretty aggressive with our savings, for our kids’ sake (college) as well as our own (wanting to retire before we drop dead, enfeebled and palsied) — so reducing savings isn’t an option. It’s important to me to keep working, for many reasons too numerous to detail here, so eliminating daycare isn’t an option. Everything else, though, is up for consideration, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what expenses I consider to be mission-critical.
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I covered the topic of must-have baby items a while back (as well as the must-avoids), but I’ve been thinking about the topic again lately since we have friends who are expecting their first child. I put together a box of outgrown (but clean and cute) infant clothes for them, and am thinking ahead to a useful gift or two once the baby arrives. 

Now that I’ve been baby-wrangling my second child for the last five months, I actually have a different list of What Baby Products I Can’t Live Without than the list I posted back in January. Turns out babies are individuals! And what works best for one may not necessarily work for another one, even if they’re siblings! WHO KNEW. So take my new advice with a massive grain of salt, but here are my current suggestions for awesome baby products every new parent should consider:
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Two years ago when Rob had just finished first grade, his teacher sent home materials stating that children lose significant educational ground over the summer. I don’t remember how much ground exactly (waves hand dismissively in “who can keep track of these little details?” manner), but it was enough to impress me. The teacher said that having children read on their own for half an hour a day would keep this loss from occurring—a sort of “sow grass to decrease erosion” for the mind.

One reason I was glad to hear this is that I’d worried “telling children to read” would make reading seem like a chore to them. I’d worked up a nice full-figured fret about it, to the point that I didn’t even want to suggest they read a book, lest it turn them into Booky McHatersons later on in life. But now I had permission from a fully-qualified educator to institute Mother’s Dreadful Reading Hour our daily reading time.
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There were some questions on my first post. Let’s chat!

1. Are you and Linda S. the same person? No. Linda and I also work together on her site SundryBuzz.

2. Where are the cute Target earrings?? Hidden by my hair.

3. Are these your kids’ real names now, or still the pseudonyms you use on your Swistle blog?
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