Our air conditioner has been thinking of dying for a while. Last summer, it quit working, and we had a friend of the family out here who has a heating and cooling business. He got it running, saying it was a simple fix. I don’t remember what was wrong with it.

A few weeks ago, it started getting warmer and warmer in here. We figured it was related to the several days of 100+ degree weather. Well, that, and the sliding glass door that is a huge heat/air loss. The temps went down and things got better.

Then a few days after that, it started making this weird popping noise in the middle of the night. It turned out that it had frozen up and the popping noises we heard was the ice on it cracking. We turned it off to thaw it out.

We called someone the next day to come fix it, but found out that while it seems to be a rather straightforward fix, it was more money than we had in the bank at the time. So we decided to wait it out.

Today I noticed that the air wasn’t blowing very hard. . .again. . .so I checked the unit. Sure enough, it had frozen up again. I called Stephen and told him.

Tonight, the phone rang. It was someone that Stephen had spoken with today, telling him that he was going to give us the money to get the air fixed.

Stephen had only made an offhand comment – more mentioning that we needed to go ahead and get it fixed. But God laid it upon this man’s heart to give us the money.

So. I don’t know when the a/c guy will be out here to fix our air, but I’m thankful that it’s only supposed to be 86 here tomorrow instead of 95 or more.

Isn’t God good? It is SUCH a blessing to me when He answers my prayers in ways I’m not expecting!

I was in the other room tonight while S was taking a bath. All of a sudden, I heard him shout,

“Hey Daddy! Come look at this! I laid an egg!”

I didn’t go look to see what he was referring to – I was sitting there laughing my head off. What was funnier was that Stephen didn’t even realize that’s what he’d said!

This week is looking way too busy already. We have a church fellowship on the 4th that looks like it’s going to be a blast. Thursday night youth choir practice was canceled because of it, but that puts 3 lessons on Wednesday as a result (two of my students’ lessons are right before youth choir). Oh well. Busy isn’t all bad – everything should be pretty fun!

The salmon on Sunday was a real treat. I couldn’t find the tilapia at the grocery store, and since the salmon was only $.40 more a pound, that’s what we bought. It’s been a LONG time since we’ve had salmon and we all enjoyed it. I sauteed it in some olive oil and a bit of soy sauce. YUM.

Here’s our dinner menu:

Sunday – salmon, broccoli, cucumber salad

Monday – chicken parmesan, green beans, fruit salad

Tuesday – cheesy beef and rice, carrots

Wednesday – ginormous tossed salads

Thursday – chicken artichoke casserole, green beans

Friday – Fourth of July – fellowship at church – hot dogs and hamburgers, basically picnic food

Saturday lunch – vegetable egg bake of some sort/breakfast for lunch

Saturday supper – leftovers or hamburger patties and squash, potato, and onion stir fry

Breakfasts – grits, regular oatmeal, baked oatmeal, overnight oats, and/or eggs

Lunches – leftovers, salads, tuna, or wraps

Sides – fresh veggies

You can read more menu plans over at Heavenlyhomemakers.com.

We were at my mother in law’s house yesterday, so I took the opportunity to weigh myself.

I am down 4 pounds. That made me very happy. I’ve been working really hard at trying to make sure the carbs we eat are healthy ones. Well, not just carbs, but everything in general. It’s good to see an improvement.

Overall, we’ve been eating TONS of fresh veggies. That is one of the things I LOVE about summer. I love how available produce is. Our garden is doing GREAT (Thank You, Lord!), and I’ve been doing a lot of research about the best ways to preserve what’s growing out there. It would be wonderful to have a good bit of veggies put aside for this winter.

I’ve also been reading Nourishing Traditions. It’s an interesting book, though it’s much more technical than I anticipated when I requested it from the library. Heh, for that matter, it’s a lot longer too. :O) But that’s ok. The only problem is I’m on page 47 and it’s due back on Tuesday. There are 674 pages, or something like that, and no renewals because I got it through interlibrary loan. Hmph. I’m really not sure what I think of it – some parts of it make sense to me, but I’m not 100% convinced about all of it yet. We’ll see. I told Stephen that the first part is so informative that it’d be worth keeping it in the house, just for the intro. It is on my Amazon wish list now. . .but it might be a while before I end up getting it.

The other day I was looking around allrecipes.com looking for new ways to use some of the produce from our garden. This recipe for zucchini cookies stood out to me, so I tried it yesterday. I made just a couple adjustments though – I used part whole wheat flour and omitted the raisins.

Oh wow. They were the softest, moistest cookies I’ve had in a LONG time. They were absolutely delicious. I’d love to try them with pumpkin sometime. Mmmmm. The problem is they’re way too good for the amount of willpower I have (i.e. none). The recipe only made 21 cookies, and Stephen took the rest to work with him this morning. I can’t believe they’re already gone, but on the other hand, that’s a good thing.

I’m hoping to dehydrate some of our zucchini this summer, which would make these cookies great come winter. There’s a couple zucchini out on the vine that should be ripe in the next few days, so we’ll see.

Here’s the recipe, as I made it.

Zucchini Cookies

* 1/2 cup margarine, softened
* 1 cup white sugar
* 1 egg
* 1 cup grated zucchini
* 1 cup all-purpose flour
* 1 cup whole wheat flour
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
* 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

1. In a medium bowl, cream together the margarine and sugar until smooth. Beat in the egg then stir in the zucchini. Combine the flour, baking soda, salt and cinnamon; stir into the zucchini mixture. Cover dough and chill for at least 1 hour or overnight.
2. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Grease cookie sheets. Drop dough by teaspoonfuls onto the prepared cookie sheet. Cookies should be about 2 inches apart.
3. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes in the preheated oven until set. Allow cookies to cool slightly on the cookie sheets before removing to wire racks to cool completely.

This week was interesting to plan. I tried to plan around what’s already in the house. I’d like to try and stretch what we have to last us until next week.

Figuring out sides and veggies is probably going to be an interesting adventure. I’ve found some recipes for yellow squash and zucchini (picked the first zuke last night) that sound good and am wanting to try some of them. The recipe for zucchini cookies sounded good (kind of like carrot cake in a cookie) but they’re just high enough in carbs that I’m not sure if I’ll make them or not.

Snacks around here are cheese, popcorn, yogurt and veggies. I might make some oatmeal cookies again this week (oatmeal is supposed to be a good galactagogue). But as much as I like them, having them in the house might be counterproductive, even if they are made with whole wheat and splenda.

Carb-wise I’m trying to keep the carbs we eat restricted to whole grain. For the most part, it’s not that bad, but since it is a pantry week, we do still have some white, refined foods still floating around on the pantry shelf.

Here’s our dinner menu:

Sunday – chicken, mashed sweet potatoes, corn
Monday – octopus and seaweed with seawater to drink
Tuesday – crockpot country-style ribs, yellow squash somehow
Wednesday – mini meatloaves, carrots, not sure what else
Thursday – taco or teriyaki chicken and whole wheat tortillas
Friday – tuna patties and sweet potato fries if we stay home, pizza if we go to mother-in-law’s
Saturday lunch – vegetable egg bake of some sort/breakfast for lunch
Saturday supper – hamburger patties and squash, potato, and onion stir fry

You can read more menu plans over at I’m an Organizing Junkie.

We got a little creative with dinner tonight. We had octopus, seaweed, and drank seawater.

Obviously my mustard-drawing skills leave something to be desired. . .

Just a couple drops of food coloring made everything so much more fun. I’m not a big fan of ramen noodles because they’re so high in sodium, but we had three cups of them. What I ended up doing was opening the cups into a mesh colander to sift out the powdered boullion. Then I rinsed the noodles a little bit before cooking them to remove a bit more of the seasoning. When I cooked them, I dumped in a can of mixed veggies (frozen would have been better but we’re out at the moment) before adding the green food coloring. Our glasses of milk all got a couple drops of blue coloring and was renamed seawater.

S and I argued the whole time I made supper – he kept trying to convince me I was cooking hot dogs. I kept telling him that no, we were having octopus for supper. It sure was fun!

Oops. Stephen informed me tonight that he took squash with him to work today. That was before I counted. So I guess that puts us up to 55 squash. Wow.

That’s how many squash we’ve picked in one week. Fifty squash.

So far I’ve canned 5 quarts (and opened one to see how we like it – it’s a definite YES). We also sent some home with one of my piano families. We cleaned out the back closet on Saturday so we’d have a place to store all the produce we’re hoping to can this summer. Lord willing, we’ll be able to put a LOT up for this coming winter.

I picked a real monster today that had somehow gotten overlooked. I’ll cut into it tonight or tomorrow, but it’s probably too big to be any good.

We’ve been picking about a gallon a day. Oh my. At this rate, I’ll be canning 5 quart batches 2-3 times a week.

Good thing we like squash!

I doubt I have any male readers, but just in case, I’ll warn you now. You probably don’t want to read about breastfeeding. So go away. Bye!

Ok, now that the men are gone. . .ha ha. . .

What surprises me is that people don’t tell you it’s work. Don’t get me wrong – I LOVE breastfeeding. Those are some of my most cherished moments with my little ones. Well, ok, when they learn to say “I love you” ranks right up there, but I digress.

I induced lactation and did adoptive breastfeeding with S. It was a tremendous amount of effort but was worth it. Not all women think it’s worth the effort, but it was for me. There were many times when I said that I wished I could have just become pregnant and then breastfed because it would have been so much easier. It had nothing to do with adoption – just that I thought it would be easier.

It was, to a point. But I wasn’t prepared for breastfeeding to still be work. And I’m not complaining – it is still worth the effort. It just isn’t as easy as I thought it would be.

I fully believe that a lot of my problems with nursing stem from my PCOS. I knew from the beginning that women with PCOS often have milk supply issues. I wanted to do my best with nursing, but I wasn’t going to beat myself up if I couldn’t. Well, that was my goal, but I didn’t realize just how important it really was to me.

After C was born, it took a full five days for my milk to come in. He was getting hungry, and I was getting discouraged. I was just starting to wonder if it ever really would come in. But then it came and things got a little bit easier. The pain from just getting used to it went away after about a week and a half. That’s another thing people don’t tell you – that just getting used to nursing can be painful. I was SO sore! C had latch issues at first, but once I learned how to deal with them things started getting better.

Things went great for the first month or so. C had just started sleeping through the night, and I was thrilled. Then I noticed that he was getting fussier and fussier, for no apparent reason. I made an appointment with the lactation consultant at the pediatrician and went and talked to her.

Just a note about lactation consultants – a good one is worth her weight in gold. They are invaluable.

It turned out that my supply had dropped, and my milk wasn’t letting down even when it was there. Stress was (well, still is, really) a factor, but the low supply played a huge part. I started to do the things I had done with adoptive breastfeeding to bring up my supply (taking fenugreek, drinking Mother’s Milk tea, and nursing/pumping as often as possible). C was happier, and started gaining weight faster again.

Things were going well again. I had him into the doctor for a well baby visit, and found out that his rate of weight gain had slowed again. I started watching how he nursed. S was complaining about his ears this week (he has a history of recurrent ear infections), so when we were at the pediatrician’s office (he’s fine, by the way), I asked to have C weighed. He had dropped an ounce – from his visit three weeks ago. He was really sick last week and hardly ate, but that’s still too big a difference.

Once again it appears that my supply has dropped. I started doing research about PCOS and breastfeeding. I read that a lot of PCOS nursing moms do well taking metformin, so I called the lactation consultant at my ob/gyn to get her opinion. I wanted to see what she thought about everything; I called her because my questions were more PCOS/IR related.

She is wonderful. She called me at almost 7pm last night, and spent close to 35 minutes on the phone with me. She told me several things to try (which I will be doing). Lord willing, my supply will go back up and things will go well again. I don’t want to look back and wish I’d tried harder, but on the other hand, I don’t want to try so hard that it’s miserable either. But her recommendations make sense to me so I’m trying them.

It hasn’t been easy. I don’t know how much of it stems from PCOS, though the LC said a lot of my problems are common. Doing my best is all I can do. . .but with the Lord’s help. . .I’m thankful I don’t have to do this alone!

She also reminded me of how carefully I need to be eating (for the PCOS, not so much for the nursing). It was that one final reminder I needed of how I need to eat. It’s not just a suggestion – it’s something I’m going to have to do if I want to keep things under control. So, off we go.

This was a lot longer than I intended. But I wanted to be open about my struggles breastfeeding. It seems like you read everywhere about how lovely and easy it is, but don’t see so much about how it can be a challenge. It is a challenge, but it is worth it.