Raven Street Notes #11

1. I am fasting from Facebook this month, and so naturally, blogging is the next best thing for satisfying my social media needs. But truth be told, I'm a little disappointed in myself--with my craving to dialogue with five hundred people at once about my offspring, my dinner, the articles I'm reading, a movie I watched.  Since January 1, I have been on the verge of pulling out my smart phone to take a picture of Tiny singing/baking/dancing (you name it) only to remember that I don't have "anyone" to share it with, and by that I mean I won't be able to make it visible to hundreds of people with one tap.  I could, I suppose, send it to my husband and Tiny's grandparents, but that doesn't seem as satisfying.  I want the world to know if anyone's going to know. I must broadcast to all audiences if I broadcast to one.  And what this means, my friends, is that if a tree falls in the forest and I don't document it for a FB status update, it didn't really fall.
This is pitiful. And I must take measures to appreciate, witness, and acknowledge the fallen trees sans status update.

2. I need a Vitamix, that $500 dangling carrot of kitchen appliances that facilitate healthy eating.  The big girls and I are enamored with the traveling road show that pops up at Costco every so many months.  And the young and peppy Vitamix Guy in his apron, hair net, Vitamix cap, and microphone headset (to be heard over the whirr of his demonstration) is as compelling and enamoring as the machine itself. He grins, slack-jawed and loose-tongued as he peels pineapple, squeezes an agave nectar bottle with a flourish from high in the air, sloshes puree into dixie cups and twirls the Vitamix plunger in and out of the bucket of rinse water. He's got recipes on bright yellow card stock he's handing out: "Derick's Recipe Cards" is printed at the bottom in a some kind of home desktop publishing scrawl. If corporate made these, they want you to think Derick did it himself, at home in front of his MacBook making sure he didn't forget the cinnamon in the applesauce recipe for the moms who make their own baby food. I'm totally hooked on Derick's enthusiasm, the Vitamix, and having someone else make food for me.  I remind myself that the $500 does not pay for the personal chef. I also have terrible luck buying pineapple in Iowa and, therefore, the tropical green smoothie is still truly out of my reach.

3. I am most aware than ever I have been of great joy accompanied by suffering. "It matters what we focus on," I heard Heidi Baker say earlier this week. It's true; it does matter because simultaneously I'm inundated by the goodness of Tiny's laugh and the celebrations of Oldest and Middle's art projects and the sorrows of calamities in places like Newtown as well as the geographies of my children's bodies and my own, which betray us with weapons that sound like, respectively, recurring strep, ear infection, asthma, miscarriage, hotflash.  Too many times, I departed from my happy oblivion-of-normalcy for the continent of Grief, although it might be less a continent than a rugged ice floe you stand around on in the bitter cold for endless months, jumping up an down in your thin, ragged parka (no hat, no gloves), blowing on your hands for warmth until you drift into whatever land Grief is taking you too.

I put my toes on Grief this month and then shrank back from its awful death-ice. I hate Grief.  And so I've decided to turn up my nose at its hospitable arctic habitat. I'm going to find another way to--I don't know--not skirt around it, but maybe keep one foot planted on warm undrifting ground and stretch my leg out so just a little pinky toe rests on the ice floe.  Why the pinky?  Because you can't ignore Grief--or maybe you can, and I'm thrilled for you--but I can't ever seem to shake it no matter how I try.  In the old days, on Grief's floe, I questioned things I won't question anymore. I've resolved not to. Such lines of inquiry as: Is God good? If God is good, then why am I on this ice floe? But like I said, I'm not getting on (fully) this time; I've got what I think is ample evidence of God's goodness: the hope that fires away in spite of calamity, the tenderheartedness of people in the midst of deep suffering, my children's laughter, and my two-year-old Tiny saying over and over last month as if this were truly significant to her, "Christmas is coming! Christmas is coming!", a reminder of Emmanuel, that God is With Us.

Adventures with Food (& eating & the Amish & being a stricter mommy)

Hi there.  I’ve been busy not-blogging here because I’ve gotten a kick to the pants to start eating healthier again.  And all that carrot peeling, fruit chopping, and bread baking takes a lot of time.

Here's my story: December of 2011 was Chocolate Month. November was Thanksgiving. And October ushered in Halloween candy, which I never used to buy until this year. Oh, and September was Moving Month. The girls were loving how much junk food mom was letting them eat all fall.  And, alas, January came with the understanding that  I was we were fully dependent on sugar and chocolate. Along with recurring blecky feelings after eating, I had some strange new symptoms:  My hormones were all out of whack.  And I was having hot flashes many times a day. What? At 33?

That’s what I said.

Truth be told, my diet was already probably better than 75% of you readers. (I’m not trying to brag, I just know how many of my friends already thought I was a health-food nut). And so it seemed kinda crazy to me that my body got as messed up as it did. Since January 3, I’m eating different than I was, than I ever have.  Proof: I got a recipe book from the library with an entry for “Brain Omelet” (that’s calves’ brain, people).  And while I will never (in a million years) be preparing brain omelet, I am now eating with body chemistry and body physiology in mind like I never have before.  Ever heard of re-colonizing a digestive track? You can do it with kefir.  (My Iowa friends give me an are-you-on-crack face when I mention kefir. But come on, West Coast, you’ve got to be friends with kefir. I just know it.)

Did you know you might get fewer stomach aches if your grains are soaked in water and an acid for 24 hours before cooking? Yeah, I’m back to that again—soaking grains and legumes. I’m fermenting and growing things on my counter before ingesting them. I made my own wild yeast starter for sourdough, and I’m baking bread. It’s happening. Oh, and apparently, experiments with enemas help, but I'm skipping out on those.

The hard part of all this is my offspring, who nightly tell me I’m Hitler the worst mother in the world, that I’m ruining their lives with the stricter rules about sugar.  God help them, they can only have two cookies after dinner.  “In the old days, you would have let me have three!”  “In the old days” = a temporary lapse in judgment since moving four months ago.  I was busy painting their rooms--and so of course they could have ten cookies for dessert?

The upside is that I think I feel better, though it’s slow going, and the hot flash situation is not resolved. The most educational part about it all is that I bought two shares in a herd of dairy cows on an Amish farm.  It’s illegal to sell raw milk in Iowa, and so I don’t buy raw milk. I already own some (now that I bought some shares in a herd of cows).  And when I went to pick up my raw milk for the first time last week, my Camry bouncing over a muddy rutted lane, I called out my window to a little Amish boy, circa age 7, who replied to me in a the most adorable German accent that I could pick up my milk right down the lane.  As my friend Rene and I drove through the farmstead, we passed a barn with the door open. From the ceiling hung two sides of an unfortunate animal (cow, I’m assuming), just curing in the foggy January air. Clara, the Amish woman who sold me a share of dairy cows, gave me my gallon jugs of raw milk and pointed out for me the cream line a third of the way down the gallon.  These are organic-fed, pastured cows—lots of omega-3s in their milk.  Still, I had no ideas cows were this prolific when it came to cream.

There is something really beautiful and pleasing about making my own butter or cheese from milk that has never been at a grocery store.  Something really comforting about all the jars-covered-with-cheesecloth that perch on my counter in various stages of soaking/culturing/fermenting. Something unseen, mysterious, is happening in all those bottles and jars, and my body will find out what in 24-48 hours. My body will be happier for it.

Will I always eat this way? I don't know and I don't care. It’s just how I’m living now, to get up out of this hole.

Raven Street Notes No. 7

It's taken me a long while to confess this via the web, but I have become a Coupon Person.

Yes. I have a special binder, with baseball card inserts to hold the coupons. Oldest says "you spend all of your time looking for coupons now" and "why do you have to?" (But she usually only says this when she wants something from me in the few minutes each day I cut coupons or print them out).  I promise her I don't and I don't.  Really, really: I am not OCD. 

This all started with a friend who began couponing and then this website, and then that obnoxious show on TLC where people spend $.50 on a cagillion bags of cat food worth $800 in retail and they don't even have any cats.  There was one couponer on the show (I think she was the sister of the most recent Bachelorette--please don't ask me how I know this) who implied that couponing is the new wave for hip young moms who would rather spend their money on "sexy purses" and "sexy shoes." 

I guess on some level aspire to hip-ness. But I haven't bought any shoes with the money I saved from couponing. Although I did buy a purse . For 8 bucks. On clearance. And I wouldn't call it sexy.

Mostly I began couponing so that the family could stay under budget.  I used to buy only whole foods and almost never any snack foods because [organic, all natural] snack foods are more expensive.  But now it feels like Christmas: we have boxes of [moderately healthy, won't-clog-your-arteries] crackers and chips and fruit leathers galore and buying them with coupons and sales really hasn't cut into our whole-foods budget much at all. 

I will say this: the little ones are happier with crackers around.

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It feels surreal to be naming this entry "Raven Street notes" now that we don't live on Raven Street anymore.

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Tiny isn't so tiny these days.  And she's exhibiting borderline personality traits (also known as Toddlerhood).  But she is sweet as sweet can be and there are new words every day.  She's heavy on her "k" in milk and book whereas two weeks ago we heard only mil  and boo. Bottles are hot and this morning she walked up to the refrigerator and demanded a hot dog hot dog hot dog.

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I promise I am buying all natural hot dogs. With coupons.

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Kody Brown and the sister wives are almost as compelling to me as couponing.  Does anyone else agree? I am absolutely. Fascinated.  I can't quite wrap my mind around how they make sense of all the marriage relationships in the family system.

Here was my favorite quote, in reference to his wives, from Kody Brown on Sunday night's episode:

"I have a monogomous relationship with each one of them."

I was so startled that I laughed out loud--mostly because he pronounced this in the most unself-conscious and sincere way. The show's creators seemed not even to notice the irony.

Are you fascinated?