Sunday, December 13, 2009

30. Go through baking cupboard, clean and throw away out of date products

Exhausting day today, with the in-laws having their Christmas Day with J-cub, and him having a bad day of grizzles and pain and upset all day, culminating in him hitting his head in the bath, screaming the house down and resulting in a huge lump.

Once he'd gone to bed, and between the half-hourly checks to make sure he's okay, I've been trying to tidy up, calm down, eat something, and figure out which list item to do. We were going to write the Christmas cards, and even managed to dig out the address book (we lost it for a whole year once - and found it packed in with the previous year's Christmas cards in the box of Christmas decorations), but somehow have neglected to buy any Christmas cards, so that idea was out.

I decided instead to clean out my baking cupboard (baking materials on top; cereal, jam and misc. on the bottom). This post could now be subtitled 'Oh, the guilt'. In fact...

Oh, the guilt

The above photograph shows all the out-of-date products out of the cupboard. It was practically all of it, bar 2 small bags of flour (SR and plain) and a tub of baking powder, bought since J-cub was born. In my defence, I used to do a lot of baking, but this was precluded during my pregnancy due firstly to the morning sickness, then by the general size of me, which made me feel far more like buying cake rather than making it. Since he's been born, I've barely made anything at all, other than various breads and cakes and muffins since he's started on solids.

Still, throwing away that much food when so many people have so little, made me feel so guilty. So I've made a donation to Crisis, not to assuage my guilt, but to try to atone for my wastefulness. I will assuage my guilt by not repeating the same mistake - I'll only buy things as I need them, I'll keep track of the use-by dates, and I'll use them.

I forgot to take a photo of the cupboard before I started, but here it is now, almost empty:

I think I might put the cereal back down and put all my baking trays and tins on the top shelf, to make more room in the big cupboard full of pots and pans and plastic tubs and bits and bobs. God I'm boring myself now. Goodnight.

Day 13 - Mission complete.

2 comments:

Glovecat said...

Ha ha, it's funny (and perhaps very revealing) how I found this to be inspiring. Reading about and seeing the results of another person's de-cluttering is almost as satisfying as doing it myself. Keep up the good work, and keep on inspiring your readers. :)

By the way, I also very much like your popboypopgirl blog :)

Beth said...

Thanks, and thanks. It's nice that now when I see something that needs doing around the house, I think "that's on the list" rather than thinking "gah I'm such a loser I never get anything done" ;)

And the popboypopgirl blog I am very much hoping we can do more on, it was supposed to be a collaboration between me and Jamie (me = popgirl, obv, he = popboy), however due to him falling down the stairs not long after we had Jacob, he couldn't Internet or type or anything. I was therefore writing all the posts and it was turning out to be more a 'me' blog, which wasn't its intention.

So we'll see ;)

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