The Cluttered Pantry

So, if you’ve been reading along with the blog from last years post about the girls you know that we spend a large percentage of our kitchen time doing everything we can to help the girls gain weight. They started so far below the standardized charts that even if you looked at the numbers [...]

The Wee Kahunas like to play tea party more often than any two little girls I’ve ever met. I can see why, the play time covers all the bases; undivided attention from Mommy, getting to play with tiny tiny cups and sugar servers, dress up time, and the best part is that we always [...]

The Kahunas are all summer babies. It’s one happy birthday party after another from July through September. Of course any reason to bake and eat cupcakes works for me…
These are lemon cake (yes, I’m still using the left over juice from the limoncello making) with chocolate butter frosting and lemon sugar on top.
I saved [...]

Earlier this year my 3 year old started begging us to let him to walk rather than being pushed around in his cushy City Mini Double.  Seeing this as an opportunity for him to expend more energy and, in turn, tire him out enough to get him to sleep at a decent hour, I searched for a sit-and-stand [...]

If you don’t use it in the first place you won’t have to recycle it right?  I’m sure I’m not the only who has a stash of bags taller than my children in the corner of my pantry. I try to reuse them as often as possible, they collect cat littler, trash, get used as [...]

You may have thought that Cluttered Pantry is just a name we came up with for a blog full of lots of different topics. In fact my actual pantry is far more a part of my world than it should be. I explain this a bit better in theIntroductory Post for the site, but suffice [...]

Ok, I know, this is a product review that I should have written in 1930, but I wasn’t born yet, so…meh. It’s for a fabulous product that I really do use. Why?
If you read the post on making limoncello, you understand that this is a house that often has large quantities of citrus [...]

Ok, in this case I went out and bought the lemons, but it made for a good title anyway.
It’s finally getting warm here in Chicago…the longest spring ever (not that I mean to complain, I prefer the cool air to the humid and hot.) So now it’s time to break out a drink that [...]

I’ve held off on publishing this product review to make sure that my initial impressions still held true after real use here in the city. So far we are at 9 months of use. Since they do, here you go!
The search for the perfect stroller included standing in a posh baby store (well, they [...]

When we first got home, from Siberia, with the girls most of our focus was on trying to communicate, figuring out basic parenting and life skills, and getting calories -lots and lots and lots- of calories into the Wee Kahunas.
Once we got past the shock and awwwwww ( as in oh my goodness they [...]

Somewhere in the back of my mind I have been mulling over the idea that any habits I want to have for the rest of my life I ought to have set in by the time I turn 40.
You know, things like flossing every day, getting at least regular exercise, reading a book – a [...]

When we started shopping for the items we’d need to hit the ground running with the “wee kahunas” we worked our way down the long list of things for a nursery…and then it suddenly hit us that we actually needed to be setting up the rest of the house for the tiny people we were [...]

These images are part of an ongoing project to capture the colors of nature. I have this thing about shooting nature in ummm nature. Hand held, natural light, in the wind.
Locations as far flung as my own garden and that of my neighbor (who plants thistles and pink roses) to the botanical garden here [...]

Ok, so we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves here….but at this point we are planning on a combination of montessouri pre-school and homeschool for the girls, at least for the first couple of years if possible.
There are lots of ways to do this, but regardless of the “school of thought” [...]