Practical & Conscientious Parenting
Zach
Zach is a soon-to-be father who joyfully works from home creating things for the web and his family. In addition to spending hours in front of a computer, he likes playing mandolin, stirring up delectable vegan cuisine, and being outside. He wants to be a grown up when he grows up.
Home page: http://zbrustudios.com
Posts by Zach
Surprise Potty ‘Training’
15 years
Note: Edie is probably going to ask me to remove this post when she’s older…
So, in a previous post I wrote about how we picked up a BabyBjörn Little Potty for Edie when we were in Seattle. We got it thinking it would be nice to have for when she’s older, or maybe for the summer when she can run around with just a diaper on and no diaper cover. We decided to give it a try, though, just for kicks. And…
We have not had a poopy diaper in four days!
We had been noticing that Edie has mainly been pooping in the morning, so we’ve been sitting her up on her Little Potty as soon as she wakes up. She actually seems to enjoy sitting on it a lot, I think because she has a little longer reach into her basket of toys. And like clockwork, about 3-5 minutes after sitting on her Little Potty, she puts it to good use.
Now, I know we don’t have Edie potty trained by any means, but we sure are getting closer to getting ourselves potty trained as parents! It kind of makes me wish we had tried elimination communication earlier, but I feel like Edie is just now falling into a schedule, with her sleep and everything else. It almost feels like it’s been too easy to get her using it. Ashley has started putting her on it after she wakes up from her naps to pee, also, which I think I’ll start doing as well. I’m not confident it will last, but for now it’s pretty fun, and it’s really nice to know that she doesn’t have to sit in poopy diapers!
Baby Shopping in Seattle
I wrote a couple of days ago about our trip to Seattle, and it says a lot about me that my top priority was to write about the great vegan restaurant we went to, Pizza Pi, and not about the main purpose of the trip: baby shopping.
I got an equal helping of my mother’s joy of shopping and my father’s joy of frugality, so I’ll admit that I’m a little difficult to shop with. I tend not to buy anything unless it’s used or on sale, and I’ll tend to buy the 20% off $100 item over the full price $5 item (it may go on sale soon…). Ashley and I have very different styles of shopping, too: I decide pretty quickly on a purchase, where Ashley tends to think about things a bit more (what’s there to think about if it’s 20% off, right?). This trip was a lot of fun, though, and we were able to get a lot of things that we’ve been needing and couldn’t find in Yakima.
Edie has been nibbling on solid foods for a couple of months now, and it’s been more than evident in her diapers, so we finally picked up a bumGenius Diaper Sprayer. It hooks into the water line that supplies the toilet, and it was really easy to install, although I did have to mop up about a quarter cup of water from the back of the toilet tank. The only issue we’ve run into so far is that our changing pad is set up in Edie’s room/Ashley’s office, which means our poopy diaper routine goes like this:
- Strap Edie in
- Take the diaper to the bathroom, spray it off, and try to fold it in such a way that it won’t drip
- Take it back to the room and say something to try and amuse Edie
- Go back into the bathroom and wash hands
- Run back to the room where Edie is most likely getting board
- Put on a new diaper with a now thoroughly unamused Edie
Anyway, I think it’s just logistics we need to get figured out. We talked about moving the diaper pail into the bathroom, but that makes it inconvenient for the 80% of diapers that don’t require spraying.
Looking towards the days when we won’t have to think of such things, we also picked up a Little Potty from BabyBjörn. It’s cute, little and Edie definitely likes sitting on it. Before she was born, Ashley and I talked about trying elimination communication with Edie, but I’ve only given it a half-hearted attempt on our toilet a few times. Edie gets pretty board just sitting with me holding her over the toilet, but she’s already used her Little Potty a couple of times because she can sit on her own and play with things. I think it will help me get more familiar with her rhythms and maybe make a little headway towards potty training myself 🙂
By far our biggest and most fun scores came from Sugarlump, an awesome new and consignment kid’s shop. We’ve been to a few other stores that sell specifically used kids clothes, and even found a bunch of cute clothes at a store while we were visiting my folk’s in Texas. But judging by the clothes we found at Sugarlump, nobody dresses their kids cuter than Seattleites.
This sounds kind of lame as I talk it out in my head, but the whole experience of baby shopping in Seattle made both Ashley and me crave living in a place with other like-minded parents. It would be so nice to be able to find even cloth diapers in Yakima. But for now, we always look forward to trips to Seattle, Portland, or Corvallis for some good ol’ loot spending.
Edie enjoying her new booty
Vegan Pizzeria in Seattle
15 years
by Zach
in Restaurants
Wow. Oh, wow.
Last night we were in Seattle, and it’s not that Yakima doesn’t have good restaurants, it’s just difficult to find places that serve vegan food here. So, in anticipation of our trip to the big city, I spent about half an hour last night looking at reviews and menus for vegan friendly restaurants in Seattle. That in itself is so different from Yakima, where finding a menu online is a rare treat. I had a few different restaurants picked out, depending on how we felt around dinner time. We decided on Pizza Pi, a 100% vegan pizzeria.
One of our favorite restaurants in Portland is Vita Cafe, and one of the things I really appreciate about it is that it has something for everybody: I can get a vegan veggie burger, and they also serve free range, hormone free beef. I appreciate that I can take anybody there (even veganphobics), and that the meat they do serve is produced in a more responsible manner.
That being said, it’s always an amazing experience to go someplace where I can order absolutely anything on the menu. And last night was no exception. We started off with a vegan cesar salad, and “cheesy” breadsticks with four different dipping sauces: marinara, ranch-style dressing, creamy white garlic sauce, and spinach and artichoke dip. The salad was good, if a little spartan – just chopped romaine, croutons, dressing, and pepper.
The breadsticks, though. Wow. I don’t think I could ever go back without ordering the breadsticks. They made the breadsticks by rolling out some of there pizza dough, sprinkling it with some herbs and “cheese,” and slicing it into long strips (an idea that I’m going to remember next time I’m doing homemade pizza). I wish I knew how they did their sauces, because they were great. The marinara wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but it was very good. The ranch was good, too, but again, nothing too extraordinary. What really got me fired up were the creamy white garlic sauce and the spinach and artichoke dip. Those two were obviously pilfered from the vegan gods. I have never tasted such delectable vegan sauces.
We also ordered a No-Meatball Sub, which is the kind of thing that is just plain fun to order as a vegan. The veggie sausage they used was really well seasoned, and the sandwich was huge and delicious.
And, of course, we had a pizza. Ours was a small pesto, pepperoni, garlic, and broccoli pizza. The crust was great, and just what I like: plain, thin, and crispy. And one of the perks of ordered the breadsticks was that we had lots of dipping sauces for the edge of our crusts. The pesto was good, though I think I’ll try the pink sauce next time, which is a mix of their marinara and white garlic sauce.
To finish it all off, we had a raspberry ice cream sundae, whipped cream, cherry on top and all. The raspberry sauce was really good, but the ice cream they used wasn’t one of the better kinds I’ve had. Still, in all, it was very good and fun to be able to eat.
The people working at the restaurant were very friendly and attentive. The ambience could be improved by a little more lighting, but as it is, it has a good hole-in-the-wall pizza-shop-on-the-corner feel, which has it’s own appeal.
We will definitely being going back here, probably every time we visit Seattle.
UPDATE: Finally got the pictures off the camera, so here’s a picture of me two-fisting the raspberry vegan sundae:
New Friends
15 years
We spent the weekend before last filming a music video in Kennewick – my bandmate Jonathan’s fam lives there, and he scouted out a sweet spot for filming while he was on a run. A perk to filming there was we got to spend more time with Jonathan’s family, all of whom are mega cool. It also provided an opportunity for Edie to hang out with a little one closer to her age. Jonathan’s sister April and her husband Cameron have a beautiful little boy Grey, who is about 11 months old. It was really fun to watch the two of them interact at such a young age.
A highlight for me was when they had a long stick that each of them wanted in their mouth (of course – where else does anything go?). It looked like this:
- Edie: I want this in my mouth (puts stick in mouth)
- Grey: I want this in my mouth (pulls stick from Edie and puts in mouth)
- Edie: There’s that stick again! I want it in my mouth (pulls stick from Grey and puts in mouth)
- Grey: There’s that stick again! I want it in my mouth (pulls stick from Edie and puts in mouth)
It was something I could imagine older kids fighting or getting upset over, but it seemed like neither one of them understood that the other was taking the stick away.
We also were fortunate to get the requisite bath-time photo:
Edie also got to be in the music video. I selfishly hope that she’ll find this way cool when she gets older, instead of saying “you had me sit on the cold dirty ground with nothing on but a diaper when it was 55° outside just for your weird music video?!” That’s Ashley in the background of this picture with the mouse head on, btw:
