Big Binder

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I am guessing that since school is finally starting in Grand Rapids, most of you don’t need suggestions for how to keep busy this week; but I’m going to give you one anyway. 

It’s what I do.

I have spent the last couple of days trying to nail down our fall schedule.  Tae Kwon Do has once again made the cut, however, Boy Scouts and Gymnastics will have to wait.  This is Maybelle’s first year of having class every day and A.P.’s first year of having class all day.  Throw in the first year of Faith Formation at church on Wednesday nights, and my kids are going to be pooped!  Plus, when you live in an awesome place like Grand Rapids, you don’t need a million classes to keep the kids busy.  I love fall and I can’t wait for it this year! More to come on fall fun soon…

Even with school starting, you’ll still need to make sure your kids get some exercise.  Did you sign your kids up for the Grand Rapids Marathon yet? A great way to log some miles on Labor Day is at the Labor Day Bridge Walk.  Follow it up with the West Michigan Labor Fest, which, according to the website, includes a “blow up bouncy house” for kids. 

Looking for more? Check out “What’s Happening In Grand Rapids“, and then have a great week!  Don’t forget to enter my giveaway for a great picnic tote and blanket but hurry – I’m picking the winner on Saturday!

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Late summer is the perfect time for picnics.  Unlike outdoor dining attempts in the spring; the ground is warm and not muddy.  Unlike mid-summer outdoor dining attempts, it is not so muggy you just want to get done with the meal and get back into the air conditioning. 

Here is a list of the top 10 things you need to take with you on a nice, late summer picnic:

1. A picnic basket
2. A blanket
3. Frisbee (in case there is a disc golf course nearby)
4. Paper plates, napkins, and silverware.  I use disposable stuff, and fully acknowledge that it is ironic to enjoy a meal in nature while simultaneously destroying it.
5. Wipes, for sticky fingers and any little spills.
6. Drinks like bottled water and juice boxes.
7. Some sort of main course-ish meal.  Sandwiches or wraps are the easiest.
8. Potato chips.  This is the only legitimate instance in which they are considered an actual ‘side dish’, so take advantage of it.
9. Something that can be frozen, then allowed to partially thaw in the cooler, thus doubling as an ice pack.
10. A trash bag to throw all of your junk in when you’re done.

I wholeheartedly suggest Yoplait Splitz for number 9.  I was asked to try them, and they were a hit with my kids. They freeze great, and both kids want to take them in their lunches at school.  There are a bunch of yummy flavors, and will counteract the potato chips as there are no artificial flavors or high fructose corn syrup.  

Also, the picnic basket and blanket? I got a really cute ones as a thank you for trying Yoplait Splits, and so can you! Just pop over to the Yoplait website and check out the flavors.  Leave a comment letting me know which one you would like to try, and one commenter will win the same insulated carrying tote and roll up blanket I received.  I’ll draw the winner this Saturday.  Please make sure I have a way to contact you, or I will have to pass the prize along to another commenter if you win and I can’t contact you!

I received the Yoplait Splitz, the prize pack, information and the prize package for giveaway from Yoplait through MyBlogSpark. All opinions are my own. This post was linked up to Top Ten Tuesday at Oh Amanda.

For this week’s Budget Booster, I have a very easy way to get a little extra money.  And because it’s very easy, it’s very little money but still… easy.  It’s with MyPoints.  You sign up and receive several offers in your mailbox to click on.  Clicking on the email gives you the points.  See? Easy. 

You don’t have to sign up for the offers (although if you do, many more points are waiting for you) – just click.  It’s almost always five points a click, and once you’ve accumulated enough points they can be cashed in for gift certificates. It takes an average of 1550 points for a $10 gift card to most places, so if you just follow the lazy email clicking plan I am on, it will take a while to add up. But I promise, it will add up.

You can also print grocery coupons and receive points when they are used.  MyPoints would really like for you to shop through their site and they work with major retailers so if you remember to start there when you’re doing some online shopping, you’ll get points for every dollar you spend.  Personally, I have an almost 100% forgetfulness rate for MyPoints shopping. Sign up for MyPoints and see what you think.  I think you’ll like it!

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I love having dinner recipes that offer a lot of flexibility if I forget to buy an ingredient, or just want to make something a little different.

This is a good one that is very forgiving of substitutions.  Enjoy!

Stuffed Peppers

• 6 medium size bell peppers (any color)
• 1 pound ground beef (or turkey)
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• 1/4 cup chopped onion
• 1 can (8 oz. size) tomato sauce (or leftover spaghetti sauce) plus just a little extra for the baking dish
• 1 cup soft bread crumbs (or leftover cooked rice)
• 1 cup grated cheese (anything will do, really)

1. Cut tops off peppers, remove seeds and precook for 5 minutes in boiling water.
2. Chop tops and add to beef after browning. Add salt, pepper, onions, garlic, and tomato sauce. Add crumbs.
3. Fill peppers. Top with grated cheese and sit upright in baking dish with light layer of sauce water in the bottom.
4. Bake at 350 degrees for 40 minutes.

Share a recipe with us! This weekly feature is co-hosted by BigBinder and Sarah’s Deals. Each blog will host it’s own recipe, but share a common linky. The co-hostesses links will appear at the top of the list and you are welcome to join in.

Please link to your ACTUAL POST and not just your home page so people can find it easier. Also please put the recipe title in parentheses to help out the other readers. Old recipe posts are fine. While we appreciate a link back or the addition of the button above, it is NOT required. Thank you for participating!

Don’t be sad!  Summer is almost over but there is still a little time left to squeeze in some fun.  You could catch one of the last free summer concerts, enter your kid in a Mud Run, or cash in the remaining summer reading club logs.

There is just a crazy, random mish mash of stuff happening this week in town (check out the “What’s Happening In Grand Rapids” tab up top).  We will be roaming all over for the next week or so, eating for free.  We were very strategic in our procreation, and our kids’ birthdays are three days apart.  So that Coldstone coupon? We get two.  The Red Robin Burger? Yup.  Half of the family eats for free all week. 

Tomorrow is a very exciting day for us as we head to Lansing for the Sandbox Party.  My kids could barely get to sleep.  They associate political involvement with friends, donuts, and fun. They don’t know they are getting the attention of the state’s Gubernatorial candidates and asking them to hold early childhood programs in high regard but that’s OK.  When my grandchildren have excellent preschool, outstanding prenatal care, and access to award education they’ll be glad they did.

My posts will be a little further in between next week so I can spend time focusing on my two awesome kids for their birthdays, and before school starts.  If memory (and Google Analytics) serves correctly, many of you are pretty busy next week too and it is a slow week for blog reading.  As it should be. 

Get out there and enjoy!

Last week we went to Meijer Gardens for a County Fair program, and sat in on a cooking demonstration.  The cook was very sad to report that Michigan Peaches had not quite come in yet, so he had to use Georgia peaches for the pie he was making.  I am not sure what his peach source is, but the place I get my peaches from was ready to roll.  

I spent all afternoon Thursday canning my fool head off and if you’ve ever canned peaches you know the yield ratio is about 1 truckload of fresh peaches: 8 quart jars of canned peaches.  Pits and skins are everywhere, and then your husband yells at you because every year you forget to not put the pits in the compost pile because they do not break down.

For the remainder of peach season, I will be dealing with much smaller quantities, such as are found in this absolutely delicious pie.  Also, the pits will be disposed of properly.

Gingered Peach Pie With Glazed Pecans

Gingered Peach Medium Set Filling

• 8 whole peaches
• 3 cups + 3/4 cup sugar, divided
• 6 cups + 1/3 cup water, divided
• 1 1/2 inch piece of fresh ginger
• 1/4 cup cornstarch
• 1 pie crust, baked (either home-made or store bought; I won’t tell)

1. Peel, cut in half, and pit peaches.
2. In a large pot mix the 6 cups of water, 3 cups of sugar, and ginger (peeled and thinly sliced) and bring to a boil. 
3. Add all peaches and seal with a piece of parchment paper cut to fit the put.  Keep pushing down on it until it submerges and stays under water.
4. Return to a boil for 1 minute and turn off heat.  Let pot sit out until it has reached room temperature.
5. When peaches are back at room temp, slice as desired and reserve 1 1/2 cups of liquid.
6. Mix remaining 1/3 cup water and 1/4 cup corn starch and set aside.
7. Add 3/4 cup sugar to reserved liquid and bring to a boil in sauce pan.
8. When boiling, quickly whisk in water/cornstarch solution and let boil 2-4 minutes until thickened, stirring frequently.
9. Pour immediately over sliced peaches and let set in pie crust; preferable set out at room temperature instead of refrigerated.

Glazed Pecans

• 1 cup egg whites
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 tbsp flour
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 1/2 to 3 cups pecan halves

1. Mix sugar and flour together.
2. Beat egg white until foamy; slowly beat in the sugar/flour mixture.
3. Add salt and vanilla, then fold in pecans.
4. Transfer pecans to a greased baking pan and bake at 250 degrees for about 45 minutes.

When pecans and pie have cooled, place pecans on top of pie and enjoy!

Share a recipe with us! This weekly feature is co-hosted by BigBinder and Sarah’s Deals. Each blog will host it’s own recipe, but share a common linky. The co-hostesses links will appear at the top of the list and you are welcome to join in.

Please link to your ACTUAL POST and not just your home page so people can find it easier. Also please put the recipe title in parentheses to help out the other readers. Old recipe posts are fine. While we appreciate a link back or the addition of the button above, it is NOT required. Thank you for participating!

My daughter’s fifth birthday is next week.  Like me, she will have a watery disaster commemorated on her birthday every year until time dims the experience of it. Or until someone writes a song about it. I share my birthday with the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald; a freighter that sank in Lake Superior on my fifth birthday.  A year later, Gordon Lightfoot wrote a hit song about the biggest shipping disaster ever on the Great Lakes; which is played (in Michigan, anyway) every year, over and over, on my birthday.

My daughter shares her birthday with Hurricane Katrina, and because of that I have very little first-hand understanding of what the media frenzy was like.  I had, after all, just spent the day prior having a baby. I’ve watched it since, but it isn’t the same.  I know how it turns out. 

When my daughter was six months old, my husband was laid off from his job in construction.  My uncle was laid off from the same company a few years later.  Shortly after that, my sister was laid off from her job in manufacturing.  And that’s just one family.  That story was repeated over, and over, and over.  For years. 

The obvious question is of course, “Why don’t you move?”.  Someone may have had to experience at least some amount of marital hardship to understand the answer, which is, “I know it’s not good now, and getting out would make sense to a lot of people.  But I have hope”.  Hope that it will get better.  Hope, and faith, and love. 

And I do love it here.  I write, day after day, year after year, about just how much I love it here.  And I have hope that my work gives others faith in our state.  In each other.

Has the bleeding stopped? We don’t know. We know we have to do things differently, so we started thinking about what we can do for ourselves. 

We gathered people together to decorate and celebrate our space.  We asked the city if we could raise chickens in our backyards.  We decided that the judging of good art was best left to the public, and created the biggest art prize in the country.  We reduced our water consumption, built more bike lanes, and became the most sustainable city of it’s size in the entire country.

All of that. In two years.

Not long after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico this year, my family took a trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  I don’t exaggerate when I say that I was stunned by the natural beauty; but also by a place so untouched even the cities felt inherently safe.  It felt like what I think 1950 felt like, based entirely on sitcoms from that era. No fear; not from bravery but from lack of danger.

I kept picturing what an oil spill would be like on our Great Lakes.  What would be lost.  And although the Upper Peninsula and it’s beauty are very, very old – it was the same sadness I’ve had when I think of someone dying young.  All of the memories and experiences never realized.  What if an oil spill happens here? What if my kids don’t remember what it looked like before?

I took lots of pictures, and went back to feeling safe. 

And then, six weeks later, it happened.

A pipeline broke.  It leaked oil into the Kalamazoo River, which empties into Lake Michigan.  Then it was our wildlife being washed in Dawn Dish Detergent.  Our wetlands being destroyed.  Our air that stunk. 

Some states like to be snuggled by mountains.  We like to be snuggled by lakes.  Big lakes. Bigger than you think.  They are freshwater oceans, and they are dangerous and beautiful and shocking to people who see them for the first time and had the audacity to think they knew what a big lake was prior to meeting the Great ones.

They are ours, in sickness and in health. 

And so, we stay.

This post was submitted to the ”Hope Remains Five Years Later” carnival at Story Bleed.

When I wrote the post as sort of a tribute, I guess to the unborn, uncounted baby that died on Flight 93 I didn’t necessarily have a message in mind, other than to recognize that child.  Almost immediately after I wrote it, I coincidentally met several women who have lost children, or experienced miscarriages.  I have friends who have also had these sad, sad things happen to them.

I can’t for a second pretend I know what this was like for them.  Just last night I decided I wanted to write a post that provides a listing of resources to help them heal. The today I saw this:

It’s not local to Grand Rapids – it’s actually in Australia but reaches people across the globe.  For all the supposed evils the internet brings to our society, this is an example of the good.  The ability to connect with other families, around the world, who understand.  If this is something you have dealt with, I’d encourage you to go and pay this site a visit.

Three years ago (can that be right??) I wrote a post about how much being in a mother’s group had helped me to make friends.  I joined that group when A.P. was 11 months old.  He didn’t talk until he was almost three, so things were pretty … boring. 

Now, he is almost 7.  Maybelle is almost 5.  I’m in a completely different place and I just sent the treasurer my “no; I won’t be renewing my membership” email.  It killed me. 

I used to be the treasurer.  I used to hate those emails, but they were pretty much from people who hadn’t shown up at anything for like a year, so I didn’t really know them anyway. 

That’s me now.

Sending that email made me think of how much my six years of membership has changed me.  It’s hard to separate my kids’ earliest years from my playgroup friends.  It was my life – in a good way.  I used to keep a binder of activities and send everyone emails with ‘stuff to do’ around town, which evolved into BigBinder.  I am in an amazing book club that grew out of that group too.  Some of my closest friendships were formed with other members. 

It wasn’t all wonderful, though.  People moved away and broke my heart.  And there was drama of course.  Take 25 women, about 40% of whom are pregnant and the other have had a baby (or two) in the past few years and the hormones and stress made some perfectly lovely people very un-lovely sometimes. 

Still, it’s hard to say goodbye.  It’s not hard, though, to say thank you to the wonderful group that was such a big part of my life for years. I love you guys.

Here is a listing from my original post – do I need to add anything? Let me know, please leave a comment or send me an email at Big Binder Blog at gmail dot com.

We have been just enjoying ourselves lately.  Meijer Gardens had a Fair Days event and we learned to finger knit, how to make a ginger peach pie, played some old-fashioned games and… A.P. won an ice-cream eating contest.  I was extremely proud because he did it while chewing with his mouth closed the entire time.

We also took advantage of the free admission for Grand Rapids Residents at the Grand Rapids Public Museum on Mondays.  I was feeling brave, so I took my two kids, plus our neighbor.  When we were done, we headed down to the Amway Grand Plaza and checked things out then walked along the river to look at the sculptures. And the ducks. 

I felt like I had done my civic duty indoctrinating the next generation of Grand Rapidians, so we went home and ate ice cream.

My kids had a basketball/reading event (I don’t know what the deal is with the random events there – but it went better than the pigeon racing).  They enjoyed themselves, but I’m going to go ahead and eliminate basketball scholarships to pay for college right now.  My kids have no skills or frankly, talent on the court.  So we came home, and hopped on the bikes and rode to the ice cream shop.

I don’t know about that giant Water Slide downtown as a kids’ event.  First, there is a 48 inch height requirement and that cuts out the little ones. Although it’s supposed to zip along quickly; I still think it will be crowded and probably best for a little bit older group.  Plus, I am not sure if I want to see all of Grand Rapids in it’s bathing suits.  I think we’ll stay home with our ghetto slip – n – slide; which is a tent tarp slathered with cheap dish soap and hosed down occasionally with water.  And eat ice cream.

What I do see as great events this next week are:

1. The Tour De Gaslight Criterium Kids Race for children 6 and under.  It’s in East Grand Rapids, and kids will love riding their bikes at this great event! Here are directions. Hey! Have you signed your kids up for the Grand Rapids Marathon yet?
2. Discovery Days, where pre-schoolers, accompanied by their parent or guardian, will cool off with water games, see what lives in the pond in Ada Park (1180 Buttrick Ave., Ada), and create a water color painting. Admission: $4 per child. Pre-registration requested. 676-0520.  If your kids are a little older, they also have events for 5-7 year olds, and 8-11 year olds on different day.
3. Eating lots of ice cream.  Summer is almost over – enjoy it!

A whole list of events can be found here.  Have a fun week!