Facts About the Peanut Butter Recall

I posted today over at my Twitter Moms blog about the Peanut Butter Recall.

It is important information for Moms and families, and the recall covers products that might surprise you. It's not just jars of peanut butter, but snack cakes, crackers, ice cream, diet products, granola bars, and pet food.

It's especially important for moms because half of those who have gotten ill are children! So far over 500 people have been identified as contracting Salmonella poisoning, 22% of them have been hospitalized and 8 have died.

This is serious business, especially if your family is as addicted to peanut butter as we are.

Please check it out for yourself. The article gives links to the comprehensive list of products to avoid -- everything from Wal-Mart bakery cookies to Keebler brand products to diet bars like NutriSystem bars and the Zone. Products from both Wal-Mart and Meijer are included, among other regional grocery stores.

It is worth the time to keep your family safe and healthy.

- Midwest Mom

Fit Mommy Friday Pint-Size Personal Trainers

Well, it's Fit Mommy Friday again, so I'm handing out another fun tip for Moms who want to be more active and raise a healthy family at the same time.

Today's tip: Get a Pint-Size Personal Trainer

Most moms I know take a look at their kids and wonder, where do they get all that energy? Well, what if we could channel that kid-energy and get a little workout at the same time? Well, you can when you play The Fitness Game.

Here's how you play:

1. All the players stand in a circle. In our case, there were four of us: myself and my three children.



2. Take turns being the Trainer. The trainer leads the rest of the group in any type of exercise he or she chooses for a pre-determined amount of time. Our turns were five minutes long. We played long enough for each of us to have one turn (20 minutes total) or two turns (40 minutes total) depending on how much time we had in the schedule.



3. The trainer is completely in charge, but he has to make sure that the exercise he teaches is fun for everyone. If he wants us to do something we've never done before, he has to teach the skill. (It was so fun seeing my oldest teach my three-year-old to do jumping jacks). The timer doesn't run during teaching -- only when we're exercising.

This week, my Pint-Size Personal Trainers came up with some very inventive stuff when it was their turn to be the leaders. Oddly enough, each session offered a nice balance of cardio and strength training. They even included stretches when they needed a breather toward the end of their turns.

Sit-up peek-a-boo: Players pair up. Each 2 players lay on their backs with their feet touching and their heads in opposite directions. As they do crunches, they say peek-a-boo to their partner and count to three before they lay back down. We did sets of twenty.

Jumping ABCs: My daughter wanted to jump and sing the ABCs, so we each took turns leading the song. Four ABCs worth of jumping is a lot of jumping, let me tell you!

Frog jumps: One of my sons had the idea to do frog jumps. We started in a squatting position with hands on the floor, stood up and jumped as high as we could with our hands in the air. As soon as we landed, back down to the floor went our hands and we were ready to jump again! We did thirty.

Foot fire: My oldest loved the "foot-fire" drills in his soccer camp, where the team ran in place as fast as they possibly could. He chose that drill for all of us when it was his turn to be the trainer. We all ran fast while he counted to fifty -- mighty slow.


It was fun to see what new ideas my Pint-Size Personal Trainers would come up with each time we played The Fitness Game this week. I don't think we did the same exercise twice! Have fun giving it a try with your crew, and here's to more healthy, active families!

- Midwest Mom

Dreams Really do Come True

Can you tell what we've been dreaming of lately? Here's a clue...

Does that give it away? No? Then how about this?

Hmmm? Got it yet?

Well, when we woke up this morning, we had quite a surprise. There were seven inches of the white stuff piled in the front yard, on the street, on our back sledding run, on the cars, even on the bird feeder and garbage can lid. The weatherman told us only to expect an inch.

Aren't surprises wonderful?

So, instead of going to school, we did a little of this...

And we did a little of this...

We even (because some of us are crazy boys) did this!

Yes, those are icicles in his hands... (oh, brother!)

We had tons of fun playing snow tag and making snow angels so deep they almost buried us. Thanks to an industrious neighbor thrilled to use a brand new snow blower, we didn't even have to shovel the walk! (The driveway? That's another story... Hubby might need a hot bath later.)

All in all, there's nothing like a little fun to keep your mind off the heavy stuff. And a little dream come true never hurt anyone.

- Midwest Mom

It's Time To Reach Out

People in the news talk about unemployment numbers as though they were just numbers. They're not. They're people without jobs.

My husband works for an automotive supplier, and last week he came home every day talking about who was heading home for the last time.

I didn't let on, but I dreaded the conversation we would have every evening. Early in the week, he told me a few people were "let go" with a sense of half-relief. "They usually make all the cuts in one day," he said. But the next day there were more cuts and more and more. By the end of the week, we found ourselves talking about financial strategy.

It was and is nerve-wracking.

Today, the President came out and said that the economy may worsen before it gets better. That may be true, but I can feel my hair going grey and those pesky worry lines on my forehead getting deeper. When I opened this morning's news paper, I saw that John Deere announced they're cutting jobs in Iowa. Caterpillar is cutting jobs in Illinois. I won't even talk about Michigan. The evening news held announcements of job cuts at Home Depot, Nextel, Spring, Pfizer. Every state is being hit -- hard.

During the past year, we have trimmed our household budget down to bare bones, or so I thought before last week. Now, when I think about how we could survive job loss, if that were to happen, I know that we could have to cut much more. All over this country, men and women are having to make choices about whether to buy food or keep warm, whether to get a doctor's care or fix the car, whether to pay their house payment or their credit card bill. There is no doubt about it; we are in a rough place as a country.

The question is, what do we do about it?

During times like these, when I feel my sense of worry deepen, just about the only way I can find comfort is by reaching out. Last week, we went through all our clothing to donate warm snowsuits, jackets, sweaters, and boots to our local family clothing ministry. My boys are participating in a food drive through school to help keep our local food pantry stocked. We have set aside furniture to donate to the YWCA shelter for abused women. I know it's not much, but it is something.

When I think about how bad the economy is and how bad it may become, I think about how our grandparents' generation made it through the depression. I think about how my own parents made it through tough economic times, even with 6 children.

They made it through by counting on each other.

People make the difference in difficult times. Neighbors help to fix a car. Sisters help to share food or babysit. Friends offer a shoulder to cry on or a listening ear. Strangers donate food or clothing or transportation to the doctor.

And so I tell myself, no matter how worried I am about the future, I have a loving family. I have caring neighbors. I have friends at church and school. I have faith.

I take a deep breath and despite my worry I tell myself, We will be okay.

And then I look around to see who I can help. Please, I truly hope you do, too. In our lifetime, there has never been a more important time to pitch in.

Maybe if we all do, these troubled times might become a little bit easier.

- Midwest Mom

Oh, to be more Organized!

This weekend, we moved my office to a different part of the house. It's hard to believe that four years of carefully accumulated paperwork can be boxed up (and totally jumbled) in less than 30 minutes. But it's true. It can. And it was.

So, yesterday began the long process of de-jumble-ification. At this point I have come to one conclusion: "Psychic Filing" does not work.

Psychic filing is when you can look at the mass of piled paperwork that surrounds your desk and say to yourself, "I know exactly where everything is." You get frustrated when someone (usually your spouse) asks to see a bill or receipt or God forbid! the manual for a major appliance. "You can't just ask for that!" you say, then "Give me a minute to get it, for Pete's sake!"

You focus your concentration with the skill of a trained Jedi Knight as you think back to the last time you saw the piece of paper in question.

I had it in my hand when Primo gave me his class photo. That was the day we made paper flowers in playgroup for Mother's day. Which, of course, means I had gone shoe shopping earlier in the day for sandals to go with my green dress. I used the shoebox to hold the seventeen beautiful rocks the boys picked up for me during our walk to the purple dinosaur playground, and the shoebox was... the shoebox was... Blue! Keds! I didn't find sandals, but I picked up my summer pair of Keds!

You walk over to the teetering pile of precariously piled paperwork and pull out a single sheet of paper from beneath a blue Keds box. It is the April water bill your husband just asked for.

He is mystified. And with good reason. He has just experienced the wonder of psychic filing. (And the only time it has ever worked in the history of humanity.)

Of course, any good psychic filing system is helped by bursts of cleaning, shredding, and re-piling, which can only be performed by a trained psychic filer.

It can be completely destroyed, however, by simple things:

• a child looking for a blank piece of paper to draw on,
• unexpected "helpful" cleaning by your mother-in-law,
• wind,
• or an untrained psychic filer dropping an ill-balanced piece of child's artwork onto the top of the pile causing everything to fall.

Of course, it can also be destroyed by an office move... but that goes without saying.

I wonder, as I spend hours shuffling these papers into that pile and that and that folder, whether my move from psychic filing to something more organized can ever be permanent. I usually "resolve" to get more organized and do, from about Jan 1 until March 12th or so. But this year could be different -- especially since I just moved my office and everything.

Maybe this is a brand new starting point. I hope it is. I guess only time will tell...



"What's that honey? You need the long-distance bill from July?"

Oh, brother.


- Midwest Mom