Homemade Spaghetti Sauce

I tried my hand at canning this year. I had never done it myself, though I had watched my Mom make strawberry jam, spiced peach jam (my favorite!), and canned peach slices in the past. Our tomato plants had exploded this year (as they usually do, actually) with more tomatoes than we could use up at once, so I decided to try making homemade spaghetti sauce. I followed the instructions, including the seasoning recipe, found here, omitting the celery and salt.

The first time I tried making tomato sauce earlier in the season, we picked every tomato we could find, including the yellow variety, to try to get the 20 lbs required. I started right when R went to bed at 8 pm, and did not finish until 2 in the morning. I am not impressed with that batch. The texture was watery and stringy because the tomatoes would not boil down, and the 1/4 cup of lemon juice in addition to all of those yellow tomatoes made it taste incredibly tart. I canned it anyway and called it "Zesty Marinara."

I decided to try again. This time, I collected and froze the tomatoes as they ripened in batches. I had heard that freezing and thawing tomatoes was an easy way to remove the skin, and I thought it might cut down on the preparation time. Not at all. I started the process this morning at 9 am, and I'm writing this post as the jars are in the canning bath now at 2 pm. My back hurts from leaning over the sink trying to remove seeds for three hours, and my feet hurt from standing in front of the stove seasoning the sauce for the rest of the time. When I looked at the large pile of unusable skin, seeds, liquid, and other tomato parts, and compared it to the pile of usable tomato flesh that was HALF its size, I told myself, "Never again." This is far too much work. I would rather let tomatoes rot on the vine than try to do this again.

The plus side to today's aches and pains is that this batch can be properly labeled "Spaghetti Sauce." I didn't use a single yellow tomato, I only added two splashes of lemon juice instead of the 1/4 cup the recipe called for, and I blended the sauce to make it a better texture. Freezing and thawing the tomatoes removed far too much liquid, though, and I had to add 3 cups of water back into the sauce. I'm only getting 5 pint jars out of this batch, which is incredibly frustrating since only 4 jars fit in the canning bath at a time. I'll be waiting an extra 35 minutes just for one jar to process, grrr. But at least it tastes good.



My kitchen is a disaster, sigh. Next time I try canning, I think I'll stick with jams.

Running from Lions

Remember this post? And this one?

The in-laws are coming back. The feeling of letting them back into my house is akin to letting lions into one's home: welcome them inside to tear apart your furnishings and family. Nothing good can come of this.

Thankfully this is just a short weekend trip for them to empty our garage of their stuff, not an extended live-in like we've dealt with in the past. Still... I want to run away. I have nowhere to go, but I can't stop them from coming, and I don't want to face them. There's no choice in the matter. I have to stay strong because they'll want to see R. If I run, R is coming with me; but no, they'll want to see her. I have to stay. Leaving R here without me is not an option. I don't trust them enough to be with my daughter unsupervised.

All I can do is let it go. Don't think about it too much or it'll tear me apart. The lions are already here: shadows of fear that lurk in my mind and stalk through the hallways. Am I stronger than a lion? Am I more cunning than a pair of lions? History says no. I should just lie down like the welcome mat on the floor when they step into my home. I get walked all over anyway.

I wish I had something more positive to say. Maybe in the next two weeks I'll learn how to tame a lion. I just have to put on the cool, confident mask that is reserved for these occasions as I twitch the whip in my hand. My only positive thought is that Labor Day weekend will come and go, and then we'll be done for now. Until the next holiday. Crap.

You can't run from lions forever.

What a day.

I was a bundle of nerves today. R woke up at 7 am this morning screaming. She would fill up her lungs, pause all blown up like a balloon, and then scream again to let the air out. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Needless to say, I was freaked out. I've seen her upset-- oh yes, this colicky baby has been plenty upset in her 6 months of life-- but I'd never seen her unable to normally exhale like that.

Being a massage therapist, I've taken pathology classes, and my mind was reeling. She was absent of any nasal congestion. Emphysema? Doesn't make sense in a baby, but we had the air vents cleaned yesterday and that surely stirred up lots of dust. Anaphylactic shock? She's started eating solid foods and I've been giving her a small variety (I'm talking 3 here, nothing huge) instead of sticking with just one type of food. I also make her food. Did something bad happen in the production of said food? Oh God, I made her some apple-prune baby food and I used the orange-flavored prunes since I had a ton of them leftover from the pregnancy. Orange-flavored prunes!!!

Yeah, freaking out.

After she calmed down I continued to watch her like a hawk. Is she breathing right? Is she still having problems? Sure enough, she'd breathe normally for a bit and then stop for 3-5 seconds, only to pick back up again with a little gasp. I went back and forth in my mind about taking her to the hospital. I remembered in my childbirth classes that the nurse said to always take your baby straight to the emergency room when it came to respiratory issues. That statement completely agrees with my mindset that, above all else, babies must breathe. Breathing means heartbeat. Breathing means oxygen. Babies must breathe!!! I called Senpai at work and he agreed that the hospital was a good idea.

I flew, throwing together bags of diapers, toys, milk, bottles, and pumping supplies. Anytime I thought, "Oh, they have that at the hospital," I decided not to take the chance and bring whatever it was with me; just because the hospital has diapers/wipes/breast pump/bottles, does not mean that you will get them when you need it, if at all. It was a lot of crap to lug to the car, but I am so glad that I had just about everything I needed when I needed it. The only thing I did not bring was a thermos of hot water to heat up R's milk, and of course the nurse had to give me grief when I asked for a cup of hot water. I can't imagine getting through today if I had depended on the hospital for all of the other things I thought I could get there.

I took her to the emergency room, keeping a sharp ear out for her breaths the whole drive there. The triage nurse put a pulse ox on her toe (Side note-- The last time R had worn a pulse ox was in the NICU, when she weighed from 4 to 6 lbs. They wrapped the pulse ox around her entire foot back then, and today it went just on her big toe! Her big toe!!! My baby has gotten so big! :-D), took her temperature, and listened to her chest. She had no fever, no suspicious chest noises, and, surprisingly, thankfully, her blood oxygen was 100%. All that meant we could sit in the waiting room instead of being rushed back immediately to see the doctor.

Back in a room, the nurse couldn't find anything wrong. She had an attitude about her that rubbed me the wrong way, and I had to firmly impress upon her that no, it's not normal for my baby to stop breathing for any period of time, and yes, she is stopping breathing, if only you'd have the patience to stop talking at me and listen. This is the same nurse that didn't want to give me hot water. Not my favorite person of the day. Anyway, the doctor came in with more patience than the nurse, and she did notice the gaps in R's normal breathing pattern that I was talking about. She couldn't find a reason for the gaps so she sent R to get chest x-rays. The x-rays came out clear of any problems, and the only thing the doctor could think to do at that point was transfer R to Children's Hospital to see if they could find anything wrong.

Let me point out here that after the initial call to Senpai in the morning, my cell phone then decided to stop working. It could act as if it was making and receiving calls, but the call would never actually connect. Instant stressor on top of everything else going on. I'm in the hospital with my baby who isn't breathing properly and I can't call my husband to tell him what's going on, or my friends to ask someone to come help me, or my Mom to summon my inner b*tch (I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at 6 years old: whether at doctors' offices, emergency rooms, or even restaurants, my Mom knows all about standing up for your child's health). Though I couldn't make any calls, I was so relieved to still have internet connection on my phone. I typed on the touchscreen keyboard with fury, sending out e-mails like a mad woman. When I mentioned in an e-mail to Senpai that the x-ray technician had equated my description of R's breathing problems to a person drowning, he immediately left work. I got the text from him saying he was on his way. And that was the moment I realized I could text, too. My brain had been too fried to consider it.

I drove R to Children's Hospital in St. Louis, while Senpai went home to gather more resources in case they were needed before meeting up with us there. After another lengthy intake process, the doctor at Children's was very nice in explaining to us that R was perfectly fine. Yes, her breathing was off, but it was nothing dangerous. The doctor said that since R has grown bigger, she doesn't need to breathe quite as frequently as she had before, and her body is in a sort of transition period of figuring out the new pace. Hmmm... I've never heard of such a thing. Have you? Regardless, I had to agree that her breathing had normalized from what it was doing this morning, her vitals were perfect, and all of my concerns over baby food and dusty air had been shot down. I'm still going to keep a close eye on her, and she has an appointment with her pediatrician on Tuesday. For future reference, the doctor clarified that babies need to come to the ER when they stop breathing for any longer than 20 seconds (that is WAY too long in my book), and turn blue.

Spare me any more days like today. What a day.

Carseat of DOOM/ Cabin Fever

Oh, the carseat. Yesterday could have gone so much better if I hadn't tried to put R in her carseat. I just wanted to go to the Target down the road and buy creamer! We now have three different bottles of creamer in the fridge and I doubt they'll last until next week. Girl has made me a coffee addict. So yeah, Target. Creamer. Easy. Right?

It was supposed to be perfect. I had just pumped my breastmilk (check!), fed the baby (check!), changed the baby (check!), and the diaper bag was packed and ready to go. She always wakes up in stores, so I figured it would work out better to have the outing be playtime, instead of doing playtime and then going out with an overtired baby who can't fall asleep. That's so smart of me, right? No. Oh, no. I did not check that the carseat straps were loose enough before buckling her in. R grows exponentially, and, sure enough, the straps were too tight. No biggie, I loosened them, and that should have stopped her screaming, right? Once again, no. No amount of carseat rocking, or jiggling, or pacifying would calm her down. She had an unpleasant memory from 5 minutes ago of the straps being too tight and she wanted them off NOW. So I had to pull her out, rock, sway, cajole, all to no avail: please calm down, baby, PLEASE. 40 minutes later and she still hadn't stopped crying at me. Partly because I had tried again to put her in the carseat. Yeah, like that would work. An hour had already gone by, I was losing precious time before needing to repeat the pump/feed/change routine, and she still hadn't slept yet, wasn't going to sleep, and certainly wasn't going to let me buy a bottle of decadently sweet creamer. I called Senpai and sobbed over the phone to him, as R sobbed in my arms, that she will never ever let me out of the house.

I should tell you that the only way we (note, I said WE) do leave the house with her is to have one person driving while the other sits in the backseat and holds a pacifier in her mouth. Oh, child, please discover that you have thumbs!! So me, being one person, can't possibly take her anywhere in the carseat (especially not when the straps are too tight!), and it's too hot outside to walk anywhere. So... I'm frothing at the lips trying to get out of the house. I don't even have anywhere to GO really, it's just nice to have the thought of, "Oh I could go somewhere, whenever I want to..." Haha, not in this reality.

As a step in the right direction (freedom!!!), tonight Senpai threaded the carseat straps through the higher shoulder setting and left them really loose. He gently placed a calm R-baby into the seat, and gradually tightened the straps to the proper fit. Then we all watched SYTYCD. Happy ending.

Sometimes I feel like we had R to make other people feel better about their babies. I don't mean that. Maybe I do. Luckily, she pays me in cuteness. And she pays well. I guess I can put up with this.