Playful Rooted

Hey, gang! It’s a rainy Monday morning around here, and I’m loving it because it means I won’t have to go water my garden today. I know, I know, I am #gardenergoals. But my not having to water reminded me of a cheap and useful purchase I’ve been wanting to share, and I figured while I’m at it, I’ll share a few other cheap and useful purchases I’ve made lately, too. Each of these items costs less than $30 and has significantly improved my day-to-day life!

Hose splitter ~$10 – Sometimes I think I’m a smart, accomplished person. Then sometimes I realize I’m a huge idiot. We planted a pretty fantastic garden in our backyard this year; we also have a bunch of potted plants and things growing in containers upstairs on the deck. For weeks, every time I needed to water, I would first use the hose downstairs in the backyard and water the garden. Then I’d disconnect the garden hose from the spigot and connect the upstairs deck hose. Then I’d go upstairs and water the plants on the deck. Then I’d go back down to the spigot, disconnect the deck hose and reconnect the garden hose so I’d be ready for the next time. Oh my life. So much unnecessary hassle. There is such an easy fix for this: a hose splitter! This tiny piece of brilliance allows you to connect two hoses to the same spigot simultaneously. With some models (like the one we got), you can leave it connected to the spigot and flip a little lever that turns the water on or off if you only want it running to one hose at a time. So simple. So cheap. So seriously life-changing for this water weary gardener!

Silicone stove gap covers ~$7 – Tell me if this has ever happened to you. You’re cleaning the kitchen. You’re wiping crumbs off the counter. Instead of neatly falling off the counter, though, they land in that little gap between the countertop and the stove. GAH. So annoying and gross because you know you’re not going to be getting in there to scrape them out. You’ll just wait until you pull the oven away from the wall, what? Once a YEAR? to clean behind and underneath it. (Or is that just me? Do people do this more often? I’m a terrible housekeeper. It’s fine.) Well. I knew there had to be a better way. One VERY quick DuckDuckGo search showed me dozens of options for silicone covers to close that gap and eliminate gross crumbage! Such an obvious and effective solution.

Silicone muffin pan ~$14 – Here’s another scenario: You bake muffins for your family in your average metal muffin tin. The muffins go quickly. The muffin mess DOES NOT. Even though you greased it before baking, every little cup is covered with leftover muffin guck. You try scrubbing it off. Ineffective. You soak it in water. That does nothing. You’re at your wits’ end. Enter the silicone muffin pan! Otherwise known as magic. You can literally pop this thing inside out to scrub muffin guck off. It is SO EASY to clean! Three big notes:

• Whatever you bake on a silicone pan won’t get as much rise as it would on a standard metal pan. So if that’s important to you, stick with metal, I guess.
• If you need things to be super stable (like if you’re baking a very runny batter), you may have to slide a metal cookie sheet underneath the silicone pan.
• You must wait until the pan is FULLY cool before trying to get muffins out of it, otherwise they’ll stick to the sides and you’ll lose half of them (learned that lesson the hard way).

Three small prices to pay, in my opinion!

Kid’s electric toothbrush ~$15 – Does your child hate brushing his/her teeth?? For mine, it’s a form of daily torture. Or it was until I heard about this electric toothbrush! There are lots of different options out there, but this was the one that was recommended to me, so I grabbed it right away, and both my kids LOVE it. It’s has a 2-minute timer, and it vibrates every 30 seconds, so the kid has a cue for when to move it to a new spot. It also lights up, and you know kids and lights. It’s nonsensical how well this keeps them entertained and happy when they’re brushing their teeth. It used to be a huuuge screaming battle every day! So much better now.

Rice soaker bowl ~$6 – If you eat a lot of quinoa or other grains that need to be rinsed and/or soaked before cooking, this thing is a game changer! I used to use a fine mesh strainer to rinse quinoa, and while it worked, it would also collect TONS of tiny quinoa grains that I’d then have to poke out. Annoying. With this genius invention, you can rinse your grains and then just pour the water out through the little vent at the top. Sometimes quinoa still does get stuck in there, but it’s such a small amount compared to the strainer! I know not everyone rinses their quinoa first, but it really makes a huge difference in the taste and texture. Rinsing removes the saponin, which is what can make quinoa taste bitter (and it can give some people a stomachache). Ben also uses this to soak sushi rice before cooking – an essential step! Using this one bowl reduces the soaking bowl + strainer mess by half. Fewer dishes? I’ll take it!

Lightning to SD card camera reader ~$30 – This has seriously been THE BIGGEST IMPROVEMENT TO MY LIFE. It rivals my children, really. Here’s the workflow I used to use to get photos from my DSLR to my iPhone:

1. Take photos on DSLR.
2. Wander around the house looking for the cable to connect DSLR to computer.
3. Find a cord that I think is the right one. Attempt to plug it in. It is not. Keep looking. Find the right cord.
4. Make sure camera battery is charged enough to import photos. It is not. Charge camera battery.
5. Import photos from DSLR to computer. (This takes forever.)
6. Receive popup from Dropbox asking if I want to import photos there as well. Panic. Do I want to? Won’t that use up all my storage space? But what if something goes wrong with this import and then I don’t have any of these photos??
7. With photos (finally) imported into the Photos application, figure out which ones I want to send to my iPhone.
8. AirDrop photos to iPhone (sometimes one at a time is the only way that works).
9. On iPhone, accept the AirDropped photos (again, sometimes I have to do this one at a time).
10. Cry at how much of my life was just spent on this endeavor.

With this handy little device, here’s my new workflow:

1. Take photos on DSLR.
2. Plug cord into lightning port on iPhone.
3. Remove SD card from camera and plug it into reader.
4. Select photos to add to iPhone and click Import.
5. Take a nap. (Hahahah. I mean chug some more coffee to make it to bedtime with these wild animals.)

But okay seriously. I don’t know what I did without this thing. I mean I do! I do know what I did. And now I have my life and my sanity back. Praised be! The greatest greatest greatest thing about this is that you can simply select “Photos From Today,” and it will import only the photos you took, wait for it, today! So if that’s all you want to deal with at the moment, it’s incredibly easy to do. I should have purchased one of these YEARS ago, seriously. I’m taking a million more photos on my DSLR these days simply because it’s so much easier!

Okay, that’s my roundup for today. If you have any cheap, useful purchases that have improved your life in any way, I’d love love love to hear about them!

xo!