Momzoo | Page 21

Beans fresh out of the crock pot, rinsed and draining. Some will be saved for dinner, the rest will be packed in bags and frozen.

In my (renewed) quest to save money AND stock up on freezer meals for when Little Miss comes, my thoughts have turned to dried beans.

Dried beans are a wonderful way to get bang for your buck, the amount of food you can produce for the amount of money spent, dried beans are one of the most cost effective foods you can buy. They are also full of nutrients, unprocessed, easy to cook (once you know how), and store forever.

One of my favorite go-to bean meals is burritos. They are very versatile, you can throw almost anything into them, whatever you have, and if you keep precooked beans on hand they can make up the bulk of the burrito. I serve them hot and cold, and they freeze beautifully.

Basic burrito made for freezing, cheese, beans, ground beef.

Rolled and ready for the oven. They don't need to be cooked before they are frozen, I just feel like they hold together better if they have been cooked first.

Fresh out of the oven, cooling, waiting to be bagged and frozen.

Once they are completely cooled, place in freezer bags and into the freezer they go. These will be warmed up later for a quick lunch or dinner.

I generally think women should be capable.

I don’t have a problem with division of labor and gender rolls in general. Here at the “zoo” Dadzoo and I have our rolls, our division of labor. Mostly it runs along traditional gender ideals. I don’t work outside the home, Dadzoo does. I mostly handle the day to day caring of the home and children, Dadzoo brings home the money and takes care of the more physical chores involving our home. That is basically what we have done, and it works for us. However, there have been times where one of us has had to take over for the other. I have found that it makes things much easier if I am at least capable of doing Dadzoo’s “stuff” even if I am not proficient at it. (As a side note, he does a much better job taking over for me, than I do in taking over for him).

For example, Dadzoo mows the lawn. He always has, and has never expected me to do it, he would rather it wait a week than have me mow it. In the 11 years we have had a lawn to mow I think I have done it two, maybe three times. While it isn’t really my “job” and I don’t do as good of a job as he does, I am capable of staring up the mower and mowing the lawn.

However, in all my pride at being capable, I found myself bested by a clock.

Yep, a clock.

For the last week Dadzoo had been out of town. He went to a (well, THE) Microsoft convention in Orlando and I stayed home to hold down the fort. Typically in the summer I am a sleep late kind of gal, I like things to be slow and unscheduled. Well, that isn’t working out so well so far. Punk #1 has to be at the Jr. High at 8:00 for summer band, which means I have to get her up at 7:00 so we can be leave by 7:45. (Yes the school is 15 minutes away, that means it is a 30 minute trip to drop her off). Seven o’clock might not be early to some, but for me it is, in the summer I really try to stay in bed until at least 8:00, more if I can, but being the good mother I am (ahem) I will drag my behind out of bed so my oldest can play the flute. Anyway… in order to make sure I am up by 7:00 I need to use the alarm, and the alarm isn’t my “role”, Dadzoo handles that. It is on his side of the bed, he sets it every night and handles exactly how it is run. Well, late Sunday night (in actuality Monday morning, after the zillionth time checking the door, windows, kids and every strange noise) I went to set the alarm for 7:00. Blah! In my bleary eyed tiredness, I couldn’t figure out how to change the time on the darn thing. After, what felt like a good half hour, probably more like 5 minutes, I crawled into bed and just left it at its default time, 6:00 am. Promptly at 6:00 it went off, and I hit the snooze button 6, yes SIX times, because heaven forbid I get out of bed before 7:00 on a summer morning. Now, you would think the capable part of me would figure the darn clock out during the day when I was fresh and wide awake, but the uncapable part of me forgot until that night and so I once again went with the default time, and that is what I have been doing all week, waking up at 6:00 am and hitting snooze every 10 minutes for an hour.

Here’s to being capable!

I will be so glad when Dadzoo gets home and he can just wake me up at 7:00 and I won’t have to fiddle with than dang alarm clock.