I am taking a break from the baby saga posts to bring you this important public health announcement: sometimes, leaving your milk out overnight so it spoils with bacteria is OK! That’s how yogurt is made. And when you make your own yogurt, not only can you enjoy the delicious product of your (very light) toils, but you can also rest assured that less plastic was used and discarded!

I have been struggling for quite some time to find alternatives to our very trash intensive lifestyle. Everything comes in small, and often plastic packaging. We eat a lot of yogurt, and although I love the flavored Chobani cups, we used to have about 10 plastic cups a week (if not more). I could only use so many for projects, and they would often just end up in the trash (even recycling would use a lot of energy, plus not all recycling centers takes that type of plastic). Then we moved on to the quart yogurt containers, cheaper AND better for the environment. I would simply take the yogurt to work in a reusable container. However, even these containers started piling up. We were eating a quart a week, and again, how many plastic containers can I use during my lifetime? It’s terrifying to consider, really, how much plastic we are all putting out there.  If we were to use a quart container a week for the next 50 years we would have thrown away 2,600! Even worse, when we used the small cups, 10 a week for the next 50 years would have been 26,000 plastic cups!!

Duly sobered by my calculations, I decided to look up how to make  yogurt at home and found that it was actually quite simple! I used The Kitchn’s recipe. It has more details and such, so be sure to check it out, but here is my short version of the process:

1. Leave milk out all night, and it will become yogurt. The end.

Just kidding! You need to do a few more things, but that’s the gist.

• You need a half a gallon of milk, I used whole for creamier yogurt.
• You will also need a half of cup of a yogurt you like, the plain un-sweetened version with no flavors added. I used plain Chobani.
• You will also need a pot with a lid, a thermometer and a cup or bowl.

1. Heat the half gallon of milk until 200 F. Apparently this changes the protein structure so that it creates a solid as it cools instead of just separating.

2. Let it cool to 115 F, then scoop about a cup out and mix that with your half cup of yogurt. This seems to slightly warm the yogurt so it dissolves better into the milk.

3. Pour the thinned yogurt mix back with the milk.

4. Cover the pot with the lid and transfer to the turned off oven, with the light on. You can also wrap a towel around the pot, which I probably should have done. Between the oven light, towel and insulated oven environment, the milk will stay around 110 F. I checked every hour or so and that was the case.

5. Leave the milk to become yogurt for at least four hours, although it says you can leave it over night. I took mine out after five hours but it was still very light, so next time I’ll probably leave it in longer so it gets thicker. If you want Greek yogurt, you are supposed to strain it with cheesecloth, which we also should have done.

6. Be sure to save some of your yogurt before you add any flavoring to it to use in your next batch! Then add whatever you’d like to the yogurt. We did one quart with vanilla and sugar, the other is probably going to be honey flavored. And of course you can add fruit, granola, chocolate chips, whatever you can think of!

It was relatively simple to make yogurt, and fun too! I am saving a fair amount of money by making it, since a half gallon of milk costs about $2 and makes about half a gallon of yogurt, which would cost me $8 when buying quarts (I am rounding for simplicity). Even though we will still have waste from it, I can buy the half gallon in a carton, which is easier to recycle, and will only be ending up with 1,300 containers in 50 years. It’s not perfect, but much better!

One of the fun parts of expecting a tiny human is all the fun stuff you can play with and learn to use. Baby stuff seems to be extra complicated to use, which is an oxymoron since it’s stuff meant for a small person with the mental processing capability of a chicken (actually, that’s insulting to chickens, I think they are smarter…please no hate mail. I also assume that as a new parent I will have the mental processing capability of a cabbage, but I’ll be entrusted with operating all these complicated things!!). Among the fun items we needed, was a crib. We decided it would be easier to just put baby in the crib from the start, since they have an infant setting in which the mattress is high up (plus everyone knows the whole separate sleeping arrangement is likely to be a nice dream like a sunrise hike on Hawksbill Peak with a newborn. Nice, but not likely). Hence commenced our search for appropriate cribs.

Knowing Modern Domestica and her spouse, with past posts in which we made our own bed, you may assume we wanted to take up the satisfying task of making a solid wooden crib from scratch, ala Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec. But this is actually inconvenient, based on the scary safety info I researched and the lack of cheap and environmentally friendly solid mahogany wood lying around. In a sweet gesture, some friends volunteered to buy a crib for us. But which one? All I wanted was a safe, efficient, straightforward crib with no extra frills that would contain our child in his sleeping. Basically what I dubbed a “baby jail.” IMPOSSIBLE. A plain “baby jail” is like a unicorn, easily imagined but hard to prove its existence with facts. Like the search for a unicorn, or a satisfying grocery shopping experience, the search for this crib was a little exhausting and may have caused me to pull my hair out. Everything was expensive, very frilly, too heavy, not great materials, not in stock, dangerous looking, etc. I had liked the Gulliver at IKEA but it was basically not being sold anymore. Finally, we settled on the Sniglair Crib fom IKEA, super simple and plain but with good safety ratings and exactly what we wanted. Finding a plain “baby jail” took searching through cribs that cost $800 rai stones and shipped from the small Micronesian island of Yap in the Pacific where they train raccoons to treat the plastic mixture that is poured into the crib mold.*

And here is the fun tale of putting together the crib. Because it’s IKEA, we are contractually obligated to make fun of it.

Putting together an IKEA Sniglar Crib (ie: baby jail)

Uno. Make sure you have a drink. But if you are pregnant, you can’t drink, so make sure you are relaxed and hydrated. There’s no way to know how bad this upcoming ordeal will be…

Dos. Track down a non-pregnant person if you are pregnant yourself. It is unclear how much lifting  and jiggling will take place, but at least get someone to carry the super insanely heavy box into the room you will be building the crib in. Also, freak out for a second when you realize the crib is too wide for a doorway and hence it will have to be taken apart to be moved anywhere.

Tres. Open the box, don’t cut yourself! Look for the directions pamphlet. Open the pamphlet. Interpret the pamphlet.

Cuatro. Gather the necessary tools. This may include going into the super hot, humid garage in the middle of the afternoon. Try not to pass out. This is why being hydrated is important.

Cinco. Open the package further to find the hardware included. Count the hardware, and make sure you have a quizzical look on your face to convey the confusion of what each hardware piece is for.

Seis. It helps to lay a towel on the floor to not scratch the hardwood.

Siete. Continue following directions, only to
find they are actually super simple and easy. WHAT? Simple IKEA furniture? Yes!

Ocho. Tighten everything well to make sure it’s sturdy. I don’t recommend leaning on it or standing in it. Just jiggle it a bit.

Nueve. Take a step back to contemplate the giant crib which will house a teeny tiny person. Baby jail complete!

 

*No, this is not true. I made this up. There IS an island called Yap and they DO use rai stones as currency, sometimes, but no raccoons or plastic cribs in sight.

I’ve been thinking a lot about patience recently. I’ve had to be very patient waiting for the baby to come, not knowing when he will but also understanding that it will happen when it is going to. I’ve also had to have patience with my body and some of the physical discomfort of late pregnancy, and of course I anticipate having to be patient after birth. I will have to be patient with myself, to give myself time to recover, to not expect to jump back into everything right away. And I think parenting will require a good dose of patience (I’m not completely sure, but it’s a gut feeling I have).

I’m not a naturally patient person. In fact, being mostly a type A personality that can never sit still does not give you much inborn patience. I have tried to cultivate it throughout the years and I find mindfulness has really helped me. Putting myself in the mindset to enjoy a task, regardless of how tedious it may seem, is a good way to practice for all the upcoming tedious tasks of life (life is full of tedious tasks, and if you were to skip them all you’d end up with a very short one). A task I find tedious sometimes is sweeping, but as I wrote in Sweeping is Zen I try to be mindful as I sweep the house and take that time to clear my mind, instead of being impatient over how long it is taking. Another of my less favorite tasks is folding laundry (I’m really not a great folder of clothing). But as I fold, I am trying to practice the art of folding and giving the clothing the respect it deserves as something we wear everyday.

It is very hard to be patient sometimes, and I’m sure my patience will be surely tested in the coming months as a new mom. All I can do is practice some patience through domesticity, as I await the incoming bundle of tiny human that is on his way, maybe now maybe later (it better be soon!). Until then, I will go back to folding some tiny laundry (folding baby clothes is mostly impossible).

As mentioned in my previous post, there will be a mini-Modern Domestica running around soon (well, he won’t run much for a while yet). As such, we have purchased and mostly received large baby items that facilitate everyday tiny human needs. Of course, all these items must pass a thorough safe inspection when being made and safety regulations are being updated yearly. As a new-to-be parent, nothing freaks you  out as much as reading about these safety precautions, recalls and worst case scenarios. Did you know that a tiny human could suffocate on a sheet wrinkle? Yes. A wrinkle on the bed sheet could potentially kill your baby. A screw missing from a pack n’ play could mean the whole thing collapses on the poor tiny human. And let’s not even get into harmful chemicals, rash-producing materials, exposed wires or splintered wood. It’s like a giant, scary Ninja Warrior course in which your child is purposefully trying to trip and fall into the water (according to things I read. I don’t really know this first-hand. So far I’ve only been responsible for fish and cats).

Putting aside the fears, it is fun to read directions and figure out how some things work by playing with them. Definitely want to get acquainted with the stroller features before there’s a tiny human in it who could get folded inside. It’s nice to test the softness of fabrics by washing them ahead of time and making sure tiny lint particles don’t rub out on the poor tiny human’s face and nostrils. Testing everything out is the fun part! And what better way to do it than using your cats!

***NOTICE*** No cats were harmed in the taking of these pictures. They may have been slightly humiliated, but for the most part they volunteered their stunt-work services and were rewarded with treats and extra petting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And there you have it! Come back in a few weeks when we test out the diapers, car seat, baby food, swaddling a baby and baby bath-time products on the cats*.

 

 

 

*I AM JOKING.