Today, it’s this:

That’s everything I bought at the Farmers’ Market on Sunday. Amazing!

Fresh produce, flowers, food…it all makes me happy. And sharing the experience with my sweet girl on a sunny Sunday morning — well, so much the happier. (Not pictured: the amazing apple turnover we got from the French bakery that had a stand at the market, which we ate in about 27 seconds flat while buying the newly-picked first crop Gravenstien apples and the bunch of cosmos.)

I think it may have helped bump me up out of my cooking rut. I’ve got a menu planned for the week (two nights down, three to go) that I’m actually excited about, thanks to these amazing things I bought yesterday.

I really appreciate all your suggestions. I’d love the recipes all of you mentioned, so if you can, send them my way. And I really appreciate all the ideas. I haaaaate being in a cooking rut; hopefully it’s broken now for a while.

To keep me accountable, I’ll share my meal plan. It’s nothing super fancy. The only new-to-me recipe is the potato salad. The rest are tried and true favorites, but I guess that’s a good way to start. Only one night of pasta, and no taco/burrito meal, which is pretty amazing as that’s one of our primary fallback items.

Sunday: Lentilles de Puy, salad, bread.

Monday: Pesto, new potatoes and green beans, salad, bread

Tuesday: Vegetable Dinner: corn on the cob, green beans, roasted brussels sprouts, salad

Wednesday: Sesame Lentil Stir-Fry

Thursday: Garlicky Potato Salad with Greens, salad

I’ll let everyone know how it goes!

The bike that I’ve been riding here at the beach is a sort of Wicked Witch of the West bike — big handlebars, big tires, cushy seat. Sure, it’s a little frumpy, as bikes go, but it’s pretty comfy and it’s easy to ride. I want to get one and put cute little saddlebags or panniers or something on it to carry groceries and other stuff in.

I think about how my life would be revolutionized if I had a bike. I could put a baby seat on it for Elanor, and we could get to and from places so much faster than walking, and with the ability to put my bike on the bus, I could dovetail biking with public transit and get around so much easier. Plus, I’d get lots of exercise. Maybe I’d even get some muscle tone for once!

I’m going to keep my eyes peeled for a cheap bike. Let me know if you see anything or if you know of any good places to find a bike!

Aaaaanyway, with that long and rambling introduction, I’ll get started.

I have like four immediate things I want to blog about, but I guess I’ll just pick one and then try to write up the others while Elanor is asleep so I can post them later this week.

For a while now, I’ve been wanting to get gDiapers. My friend Isabel uses them with her son and has been singing their praises for a while now, and I’ve heard good things about them elsewhere, too.

While we usually use cloth diapers at home (and let me just be very clear that I love, love, love my cloth diapers), we do occasionally use diposables: when we travel to Portland, when Elanor has a bad diaper rash and I want to load her up with diaper cream, or when I’ve been lazy and all our diaper covers are dirty.

But we’ve had some major problems with disposables lately. One result was this:

And the other was this:
It’s obvious what happened in the first picture. She had a blowout of epic proportions. ( Thank you, Seventh Generation. )

In the second, she’d had another huuuuuge blowout, this time in a restaurant while we were on Bainbridge Island for Joel and Rosanna’s wedding. ( Again, thank you, Seventh Generation. )

This second event resulted in her clothes being covered in poop, and me running to the grocery store next door with Rosanna to buy something, anything other than Seventh Generation diapers. Then when I got back outside, we had to strip her completely naked on the sidewalk so I could wipe her down with baby wipes and then put a new diaper and a new outfit on her, since there wasn’t a changing table in the restaurant and I wasn’t about to change this one at the table. Uh, no.

So, because of those two incidents, I’m done with Seventh Generation, which is unfortunate since they worked well for us when Elanor was younger. It’s also unfortunate because at Fred Meyer right now, they are on sale for $7 per pack. Yes, that’s right — $7. It’s a great deal…but not if they inspire huge blowouts.

Anyway, some of you might be thinking, “Why doesn’t she just use Huggies or something?” Well, I don’t want to use so-called normal diapers, the kind with all the chemicals/dyes/scents. I know. Call me crazy, or fanatic, or whatever, but I just don’t. For one thing, they don’t decompose for a very long time. For another, Elanor tends to get rashy when we use them. So we don’t. Am I being stubborn? Maybe a little, but given our other crazy environmentally-friendly tendencies, are you surprised? Probably not.

Since Seventh Generation has failed us so epically multiple times now, I had to find an alternative. I bought Tushies that day on Bainbridge Island, which were just ok. I didn’t love them, and although we didn’t have an epic blowout, that’s only because Elanor didn’t poop while wearing them, and not because they work any better. I think they’d probably be about the same as Seventh Gen, honestly.

I finally just bit the bullet and invested the money in the gDiapers starter kit, since we were almost out of the Tushies anyway. And let me tell you, gDiapers = awesome.

I put her in one when we got home yesterday, just to try it. I went to change it a couple hours later, and, much to my surprise, she had pooped. And there was no epic blowout — the poop was contained!

HOORAY.

Granted, the cover was dirty and I had to wash it, but that’s par for the course. I usually have to wash our cloth covers, too, after a poop, so it’s not a big deal to me.

The liner even flushed exactly like it’s supposed to, despite the fact that our plumbing is old and somewhat crappy.

Plus, the covers are seriously cute, and they are nice and trim like normal disposables, so if she has an outfit where her cloth diaper is too big, the gDiapers will still work.

I’m just thrilled that they’ve worked out so well, and that I seem to have found an environmentally-friendly pseudo-disposable that works well for us and will make traveling a lot easier.

Coming later this week…a favorite (easy, cheap, healthy) recipe of mine, a good-bad-ugly post, the week in review, and a follow-up to this post. Yeah, I know I’m being ambitious, advertising four upcoming posts in a week, but you never know; I might actually be able to make that happen.