Today we spent a gorgeous summer morning picking blueberries. Jason has the day off so we got up early, tossed the kids in the car and headed over to Betty’s Berry Farm to pick tons of blueberries. It was such a fun family outing!

Betty’s blueberry bushes were huge, most of them towered over Jason’s head making them well over 6 feet tall, and they were heavy laden with delicious ripe berries. Jeremy did a great job picking from his level down on the lower branches and Jesse snagged a few from his perch up on Jason’s shoulders. Altogether we filled 2 buckets in about an hour, plus the several handfuls we ate while we were working out in the field.

When we weighed our haul, it turned out to be over 10 pounds of berries. We only had $13 in cash and forgot the checkbook at home, so we had to put back a pound or so. Betty’s farm is only about 30 minutes from our house and you pass a beautiful lake on the way there. She sells her berries for $1.50 per pound if you pick them yourself or $2.50 per pound for some that she has already picked for you. At the grocery store yesterday blueberries were priced at $2.99 for a 1-quart container. The 9 pounds that we came home with measured at 8 quarts, they would have cost us about $24 plus 10% tax (yes, we are taxed on food here in Alabama). At Betty’s we paid $1.62 per quart, and no tax, plus we had a great family outing that was tons more fun than going to the boring old grocery store.

9 pounds of handpicked blueberries

Simple things such as picking your own blueberries with your husband and children, enjoying the warm summer morning and getting some sun…. I think that’s a Finer Thing!

We will definitely head back over there next week so we can stock up for the year before blueberry season ends on July 15th. I’m going to fill my freezer!

Jeremy came in to the laundry room to find me and said “Mom, I need your help.”

I follow him into my kitchen and saw…

I asked Jeremy, “Why is my flour out of the pantry?”

He opened the door and showed me…

“I need a place for my stool.”

Before I could get the next question out of my mouth, he showed me why his stool needed to be in the pantry…

He needed the extra height to reach the M&Ms. Then Jeremy said to me (I swear this is as close to word-for-word as I can remember) “I wanted M&Ms, but remembered to ask you first. Mom, is it okay for me to get the M&Ms?”

How do you argue with a question like that when an almost-4 year old gets everything ready and could have easily sneaked some chocolate, but then confesses that he remembered to ask first. Sure, it was only 10 am, but I had to reward his good behavior with a small handful of M&Ms.

A little bit of chocolate before lunch is definitely a Finer Thing!

Congratulations to Amy on your new addition. I imagine your baby boy is just as gorgeous as your first three children. Hope to see pictures soon!

Anyway, Jesse went back to sleep as he always does after gorging himself on his early morning pre-breakfast. I began scouring the Breastfeeding sub-forum on Coastie Chicks to find some answers. It was so bad that I couldn’t even rest my left arm against my body. I had to hold it out to the side a little like a chicken wing. I couldn’t hold Jesse with my left arm (where I usually hold him, since I’m right handed) which was incredibly inconvenient.

Everything I was reading led me to believe it was a plugged duct and that the best thing to do would be to keep feeding him from that side as well as gentle massage and warm compresses before feeding. We did just that. For every time I fed him on the right I put him on the left side twice as often. He was getting frustrated after about five minutes on the left side and wouldn’t feed as long, assuming because the clog was keeping him from getting as much milk as usual from that breast. Since the lump was deep in the left underside, the football hold especially helped because his little chin was pointed toward the lump and basically massaged it as he fed. We don’t normally do it football style, we prefer cross-cradle, so Jesse was kind of confused when I set him up this way a few times throughout the day.

At one point in the early afternoon it got worse because half a days worth of milk was now added behind the clog and I was hurting pretty badly. I took a nice warm shower and rubbed the hell out of that side. The shiatsu masseuse I used to see had nothing on my mad skills yesterday. I was getting in deep, rubbing down to the ribcage!

During his after-dinner feeding around 7:00 I could tell that the lump had shrunk some. Thank goodness! I thought that if I slept lightly I’d be able to keep myself from rolling onto my left side and tomorrow we’d be able to work on it some more. Jesse woke up from his post-dinner cat nap and was starving, so I skipped his bath (which we normally do around then) and fed him from the left again. I can distinctly remember when I felt the clog clear. It was like a second let-down from just the one side (I usually let down on both sides at once no matter which I’m feeding from). Jesse unlatched and gave me this bewildered look, smiled, and I could see all of this extra-thick creamy milk in his mouth. He latched back on and went after that boob like I’d never seen. I was kind of taken aback. I’ve never been “motor-boated” by my son before, it was funny and a little weird. He stretched his neck toward me, mashed my breast with his free hand, and moved his little face back and forth.

When he was done he popped off and laid back on the boppy pillow with this fully satiated grin, milk dribbling from the side of his mouth, and huge round belly straining the snaps of his pajamas. Jason took him to his crib and I started feeling around – the lump was gone! The clog and the pain were both completely relieved! Jason was laughing at me because I was bouncing a little on the bed telling him over and over how “Oh my God, honey, it’s gone!”

Thank you everyone who contributes regularly to the breastfeeding threads on my beloved Coastie Chicks. Special shout-outs to Becca, Sue, Sarah, and Yogini (sorry, I do not know her real name). I figured that if the clog was still giving me issues after a day of working at it that I’d go back and post some questions of my own, but there is already such a wealth of knowledge there that all it took was reading through some existing threads to find the answers I needed. Those ladies are fabulous and wonderful and all the good adjectives that I cannot think of right now because I’m so overwhelmed with gratitude. If I could, I’d send them all some big huge bouquets of flowers:  Love you!!

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Even though I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting three of the four women I mentioned above, they are all near and dear to my heart because anytime a mom has a breastfeeding question they are always spot-on with their advice. Having knowledgeable people willing to help even though you’ve never met in real life is certainly a Finer Thing!

No, I will not wait for the breast! I want formula now!

Lesson Learned #1: Make sure you are not so heavily medicated during or after childbirth that you are not aware of what’s going on with your baby. I had such a strong epidural (which slipped in my back and turned into a full spinal block like they do for c-sections) and I was completely numb from the chest down for the entire birth and for six hours following. They gave me some medicine to help me sleep off the exhaustion and medication.

Lesson Learned #2: Inform the nurses that you want to breastfeed your baby immediately following birth and that they should give him no bottles at all. While I was sleeping off my overly-strong epidural the pediatric nurses gave Jeremy bottle after bottle of formula. They said that he needed to eat because he was slightly jaundiced. Absolutely, of course I want my son to eat when he’s hungry, but I wanted to give him mother’s milk. “Well, you were sleeping and we didn’t want to wake you.” To me, that is not a good enough excuse. They could have woken me up. Also, they wouldn’t let me have him room-in with me until I was un-numb. By the time I got my baby out of the nursery he had had 4-5 bottles of formula and was completely confused by my nipple and the fact that he’d have to work a little and exercise some patience for breastmilk. He had already become accustomed to instant gratification of the readily-available formula and wouldn’t stay at the breast long enough for my milk to let down.

Lesson Learned #3: Don’t give up on your *girls* too early. Since breastfeeding wasn’t working out I just gave up altogether. My milk finally came in fully a couple of days after I brought Jeremy home from the hospital, we were already resigned to our bottled formula and I let the milk build up in me. Both sides became severely engorged and developed into mastitis. That was an incredibly painful stretch of days while I tried every home remedy I could find. Finally the cabbage leaf trick worked and my milk went away. Had I not become so discouraged in the beginning I might have realized that I could have pumped my breastmilk and given it to him in bottles. Nipple confusion and impatience are not the end of the world. Bottles are fine, just change what you put in them!

Lesson Learned #4: Make sure your partner is aware of and supportive of your plan to breastfeed. Jeremy’s dad went home while I was asleep and Jeremy was in the nursery, so he wasn’t able to stick up for my breastfeeding plans on my behalf. This time Jason was not only aware of my plan to give breastfeeding another shot but he was very supportive of my plan and has continued to be. In the hospital he read the brochures with tips so that he could help Jesse and I with our setbacks. At home he’s been great about keeping Jeremy entertained while Jesse and I take our time with breastfeeding so that we don’t have to rush. While it is a natural instinct, it takes a lot of practice for both mom and baby to get the hang of breasfeeding – you need time to work on it.

Happy sleepy breast-fed baby Jesse.

This time around, I had a really fantastic online community of lactation consultants and seasoned breastfeeders (including a few exclusive pumpers). They have been an incredible wealth of knowledge. I read everything they had before I even brought our Jesse home so I was prepared for any problem we could encounter. In our first two weeks we overcame the excruciating cracked nipple, painful shallow latch, low production of one side (due to little use while the crack healed), and over supply of the other side due to exclusive use while the crack healed on the other side. Without the experience and support of that group Jesse might be downing Similac just like his big brother did and suffering the extreme reflux, ear infections, horrible gas, and stomach aches that poor Jeremy had to endure.

What am I celebrating as a Finer Thing in Life this week? An extremely positive breastfeeding relationship! Link up your thoughts over at Amy’s Finer Things.

Disclaimer: Jeremy grew up just fine on formula. He is a very smart and strong 3 1/2-year old who is quite large for his age (the size of an average 5-year old). While I strongly support breastfeeding for a bunch of reasons, I do not at all look down on formula-feeding. How to feed your kids is a very personal choice and everyone is entitled to that without prejudice. This post is about my two experiences.

I am blessed with a double sink, but when I have a heavy cooking day topped with last-minute baking, even those sinks get filled up pretty quick and overflow onto the counter and stovetop. Yikes! Last night I noticed that I’m coming down with a cold and was just completely wiped out. I made the executive decision to let the dishes wait til the morning.

First thing this morning, I made some hot tea to give brief respite from my stuffy nose and sore throat and groaned at the mountains of dishes piled up all over my kitchen. Then I rolled up my sleeves, put on my big-girl panties, and got to work.

Happy day! After shifting a few things to make a space in one of the sinks to wash I quickly realized that there really weren’t as many as it appeared. The problem was merely a matter of poor haphazard stacking. There was an upside-down collander in one sink (reaching almost to the rim of the basin) on top of which a large frying pan sat with a couple of handfuls of silverware. In the other sink sat my two largest mixing bowls. Sadly, one had been clean before being shoved into a sink with dirty dishes (thanks to my 3-year old baking “helper”) and a short stack of plates were perched atop the bowls.

Once the real damage had been surveyed, it really wasn’t much work. Half of what was there went directly into the dishwasher and the other half was made of large baking items which are a quick clean.

Though letting the work sit all night made some of the washing require a bit more elbow grease, realizing that a previously insurmountable amount of dirty dishes merely looked that way and wasn’t so bad after all is definitely a Finer Thing.

Sorry, there was absolutely no way I was going to snap a few photos of my dish mountains, so this is yet another visual-free post.

Jeremy and Jason snuggling.

I won’t forget this night for the rest of my life. Having my son back in my home for the first time in close to 12 weeks in most definitely a Finer Thing.

I took ten minutes to toss this post up and now I’m going back to enjoying the last of the evening with my family.

Tomorrow, Mommy & Me class on the Coast Guard base. Saturday is flea market day at which we hope to pick out a puppy. Sunday is church. And Monday is library day!

After I finished tweaking my recipe about a year ago, I started reading Amy’s Finer Things and one of the first recipes that I read on Amy’s blog was Cheesy Potato Casserole. How coincidental is it that we both came up with almost the exact same recipe starting from completely different sources, living in totally different states, without a single thing tying the two of us together?

I’ve made Amy’s recipe, and it is really delicious, but I keep falling back on my own because I love the extra peppery kick and the slight tartness that comes from the cottage cheese. Kudos to Amy for a fantastic casserole, but there’s always room for two!

Step 1: Stir together the following:

• 1 thawed 2-pound bag of frozen O’Brien potatoes (with the peppers and onions included)
• 2 cups of shredded cheese (I use mild cheddar or mexican blend, whatever I have on hand)
• 1/2 cup of sour cream
• 1 cup of cottage cheese
• 1 can cream of chicken soup (half of Tammy’s homemade recipe works perfectly in this casserole, or you could always fall back on the canned)
• 1 1/2 tsp. black pepper

Step 2: Spread the mixture into a 9×13″ baking dish.

Step 3: Bake at 350° for 45 minutes. Transfer to broiler for 2-3 minutes to crisp up the top.

Step 4: Allow to cool for 10 minutes before serving.

This casserole makes a whole lot and is so rich that a small portion is great as a side dish alongside beef, chicken, or pork. When it was just my husband and I enjoying this dish, we’d heat it up for days later. It’s one of those few meals that heats up for lunch without tasting like leftovers. Yum!

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This post is linked to Amy’s Finer Things Friday. How is that? Well, I think it’s a real finer thing to have two really fabulous cheesy potato casseroles coincidentally created by two different ladies at different times that turn out equally tasty.

The Thursday that we signed the lease we met one of our next door neighbors, Jerry, and one of his sons (about our age). They saw Jason and I struggling to unload his motorcycle from the truck bed and came over to help.

The Friday we moved in Jason met the neighbor couple across the street from us. He can’t recall their names, but he said they were very nice as well and the man offered Jason use of his tools.

On Saturday Janet from the other side of Jerry’s house came by to say hello and bring us a gift of some bottled water along with a flyer from her church. We had a very nice chat and she seems like a sweet lady. She’s just a couple years younger than Jason’s mom and has children our age. We had thought about visiting her church the following day but then found out first thing Sunday morning that we are pregnant and decided that we needed another day to ourselves to let that sink in.

On Monday I went for a short walk after dinner with my mother-in-law. A few doors down from us there was a dog out in his front yard and we stopped to say hello. Next door to the dog was Jack (“Jackie”) out edging his lawn who told us all about a few other neighbors and chatted us up for a bit.

Then, when Carol and I returned from our little walk around the block, Janet’s husband Ronnie and a fellow church-goer Kenny were on our front porch talking to Jason. Ronnie built the four houses on our cul-de-sac and has lived here on this street for almost 20 years. Ronnie and Kenny prayed with us right there on the porch and we promised to see them this coming Sunday.

Neighborliness, especially during the first week in a brand new place, is a real Finer Thing.

Visit Amy for more at The Finer Things in Life.

This pie is created in three layers: crust, cream, lemon curd (with a little whipped cream for garnish).

Layer 1: A Simple Pie Shell, 9″ or 10″.

You can use a boxed mix, your grandma’s recipe, (LifeasMom’s Gramma John’s Pie Crust is really fantastic), prebaked, or the refrigerated kind that you unroll and put in the pan. Whichever crust option you choose, just make sure you let it get completely cool before adding the next layer.

Layer 2: The Cream Filling.

- 8 oz. of softened cream cheese

- 8 oz. of frozen Cool Whip

- 1/2 cup of granulated sugar

First of all, please please please do not use light or fat free cream cheese or Cool Whip. You need the full fat versions of both of these or else your cream filling won’t set up correctly. I’m not pretending this is a diet pie, so just go with the full fat stuff. Read to the end of this post to see why I caution you here.

Beat the cream cheese and sugar in your mixer.

Fold in the Cool Whip until just incorporated. Do this by hand to keep from overmixing or it’ll get too thin. Just get the big lumps out, it’ll all come together and be delicious in the end.

Spread the mixture into the baked and cooled pie shell.

Layer 3: Lemon Curd.

- Zest and juice of 3 large lemons

- 1 cup of sugar

- 4 eggs

- 1/2 cup of melted butter

Whisk together all of the curd ingredients. (Yeah, my butter wasn’t completely melted. It’s alright, the little pieces will all melt in a minute.)

This is how is looks at first. Notice the very light smear of liquid and zest on the edges of the bowl. Continue whisking and cook over a double boiler for 5 minutes or until the mixture is thickened.

This is how it will look when it’s finished cooking. Notice the shiny smooth surface and the much thicker coating on the edges of the bowl. Perfect.

Allow it to cool for 10-20 minutes on the counter before moving to the refrigerator. Once it is completely chilled, spread the curd over the cream layer.

Refrigerate the entire pie for at least 15 minutes (longer is better if you can stand to wait) before serving.

I also like to add a ring of whipped cream rosettes around the outside of the pie. It dresses up the edge and creates a nice finished look.

Gorgeous, just gorgeous!

This is how it should look inside with a nice heaping slice now residing in your belly. See how the cream filling is all set up and beautiful? This is right, very very right.

This, however, is wrong. All wrong.

Remember when I told you that you absolutely must use full fat cream cheese and Cool Whip? Well this is exactly why. Without enough fat in the cream layer, the filling won’t set up correctly no matter how long you refrigerate it. As soon as you take out a slice, the curd will slide down due to not enough support from the cream layer and your whole pie will be a smush. It tastes just fine, but it’s not pretty. If you’re going to try for a low-fat version, you might as well just toss some vanilla ice cream in a bowl and top it with the lemon curd because that’s exactly what your pie will look like. Now, the curd tastes just delicious on some ice cream, but we’re making pie here.

I hope you make my favorite pie and enjoy it as much as I do. It’s been fun chronicling the how-to for you.

This post is linked to Amy’s Finer Things Friday.