Vinegar saved my Keurig

So the other day I went to make a cup of coffee in my Keurig. It was the Dunkin Donuts Mocha Mint coffee that I had just bought and I was so looking forward to it.  I stepped away for a minute while it brewed and to my surprise when i returned the cup was only about a quarter of the way full.  Hmm. That's odd, I thought.  So I refilled the chamber with water and tried to rebrew, but again only a trckle of water came through. Oh no, I thought.  My Keurig is done for.  I decided to google "Keurig not brewing" and was directed to the Keurig site on how to maintain your brewer.  Well, we all KNOW we should clean our coffee makers every once in a while, but do we do it? No.  It recommended trying to descale the brewer with white vinegar.  Worth a a try so I found the vinegar (out in the laundry room, of course) and brewed 10oz of vinegar.  And then another 10oz.  After the third round the brewer started to get back to a normal liquid flow.  SWEET.  I repeated it a few more times and then rinsed with several rounds of water to remove the vinegar.  Now my brewer is pretty much back to normal and I am a happy caffeinated camper once again.  PS. I used the hot vinegar to clean and deoderize my kitchen sink. I dumped a bunch of baking soda in the sink (epecially down into the disposal) and the poured the hot vinegar over it.

Newest business idea: Recipro-Sitters or Sitter Swappers?

Sarah is my reciprositter.  She is a mama of twin girls that I met about 4 months ago and she has become one of my closest friends here in CA.  She gets it. She knows the struggles and joys of raising twins.   Although our educational backgrounds differ, she understands the frustrations of trying to have a career and be the best mom she can be. We have similar styles of parenting and are going through similar milestones with our kids.  We are both not from CA - she is from Canada and we are from the Northeast so neither of us has a lot of family that live close enough to help babysit.  And weirdly, our twins are very similar.  We both have one headstrong, fearless twin and one feeling, observant twin.  She is also my twins' Music Together teacher, a class where we have no fewer than 3 sets of twins each week.

So the other day Sarah suggested we trade babysitting. Of course we should.  We decided to do an evening sitting swap. She came over on Friday after the kids were in bed, and me and the hubby went out to dinner.  For free.  She even washed some dishes out of the kindness of her heart!!  And then on Saturday I went over to her house after her babies were in bed and they went to see the new James Bond movie. It was the first time she and her hubby had been out to a movie in 13 months - since her twins were born!!  It was great because the kids were in bed and all I had to do was pet her cats, have a cup of tea, read my book and eat some of the delicious mint chocolate cookies that she baked me (she is fabulous, BTW).  I thought, wow this could be an awesome buiness: matching up families with similar aged kids and parenting styles for evening babysitting.  The only catch is you have to return the sitting job and pay me (the business owner) a small fee. I mean, if we get a sitter through a service, we pay 16.50$ an hour plus a monthly fee plus gratuity, and the minimum is 4 hours. So that can make for a very expensive date night!  Nowi am not sure how the business model works after you make friends with your recipro-sitter family. I mean, how do you keep collecting a fee?  But anyways I thought it was a neat idea!

What do you think?  Did you ever have any creative ideas for a business ( I also think there should be drive-thru super-markets and craft studios with child-care on-site!)

Time Savers for Toddler Meal Prep...

So this week I posted on Facebok asking how many people put hot food in the freezer to cool it down super quickly for their toddlers.  I find myself always waiting until the last possible minute to make food for the kiddos and I know I should really start planning ahead but I am just not that person.  So today I went to make them some pasta (Annie's wheat mac and cheese) and I was thinking that I should steam them some carrots, but of course I had that thought about halfway through microwaving the pasta. But then I thought that maybe I could jut throw in a few baby carrots into the boiling pasta water and they would be ssoft enough for the kids to eat.  At about 3 minutes left on the microwave I added about 8 baby carrots and then restarted the microwave.  When it was done I drained the pasta and carrots and added a little bit of butter.  I took about a cup of the pasta and carrots and stuck it in the freezer to cool quickly, and with the rest I made the regular version of mac and chesse for myself.  The carrots were nice and tender and easily cut into pieces for the kids, they got a healthy quick meal and I only got one bowl dirty!  How's that for time saving???

What tricks do you use to get food on the table quickly??