Sara Galley's Profile

I think it depends a lot on the child's sleeping style. Both my very tall kids slept in toddler beds until they were nearly 5, but they both tend to be the scrunch-in-a-ball style of sleeper -- not sprawlers unless they're in _my_ bed.

$600 per pancake definitely takes this from "FTW!" to "WTF?". But it'd be a neat project with some foam, tan canvas, a sponge, and some brown fabric paint.

I love making bento for my kids, but I'm not enamored of this container. It's too big for most grade-school kids; even the smaller size is pushing it if you really are making bento, rather than packing standard American lunch foods in a fancy box. The big box is really big -- more than a foot tall, 3" thick -- and that's a lot of backpack real estate (much of which is actually being occupied by the space between compartments). There's also no place to put an ice pack in it, so unless you're putting it into a fridge or packing things that don't need chilling, you'll need to enclose it in a separate bag. And I wouldn't like being limited to just one shape -- I have a bunch of different styles of bento box, and the different shapes lend themselves to very different packing styles, which increases the apparent variety of the lunches and reduces the kids' tendency to get bored (mine too!).

I use a scrub made of sugar and enough olive oil to make it be a scrub. Sugar actually neutralizes the capsaicin -- in fact, that's what the Scoville (pepper hotness) scale is based on: how much sugar is required to neutralize a particular pepper. You can also use this if you've eaten a pepper that was unexpectedly hot -- dump a packet of sugar in your mouth and swish it around until the burn is gone.

I have a big kitchen, but relatively few drawers (I have 42 things which open with a knob -- 4 of them are drawers), and all of the ones I have are small, so a lot of things that people traditionally keep in drawers I've had to put elsewhere. Most of my utensils are in two utensil vases on the counter. Measuring cups and spoons are in a cabinet; the cups are in a hanging basket suspended from a shelf, and the spoons are in a shallow clear container that sits under the basket. My foil/parchment/baggie things are in another cabinet, in racks that keep them organized and let me fully use the space (I hate short things sitting on a tall shelf!). The traditional "junk drawer" is instead a "junk box" with a handle that sits in the cabinet next to the phone. For my linens, I have a plastic chain with little clips on it, which hangs from a ceiling hook; it was originally intended to hold caps or stuffed toys in a kid's room. The drawers I do have are ruthlessly organized, with custom dividers that go all the way to the top of the drawer so I can fully utilize all the space instead of having either a jumble (no organizer) or a shallow layer (most organizer trays).

A good soaking, followed by a blast from the sink sprayer (turn the pan upside down, spray up into it, so gravity helps get the stuff out), has always gotten mine clean, but mine isn't as fancy as the one depicted. If that didn't do the trick, I'd go get my Waterpik; I've had to use it before to get bits of cheese out of a cutter I used to make decorative cheese bits, and the needle-like spray works great -- not surprising, since getting the last little food bits out of small crevices is exactly what it's designed for!