Photos

I have been trying to get caught up on organizing the photos from the last few years. I finally completed Ravenna's baby book in November and wanted to tackle the photos from 2008-present as my next project. I got 2009 completed and got a great deal on a photo book from Shutterfly. I have to say that going digital saved me a great deal of time. With 2010, though, I am stuck. I cannot fathom why looking at the pictures from the summer of 2010, the summer I was last pregnant, leaves me with so much pain. I find myself looking at myself in those pictures and wondering "Do I look pregnant? What about me was different?" Then I see how much my daughter has grown since that time and I think "I am wasting her childhood...what am I doing?"

With our foster baby leaving in a few weeks I find myself feeling quite hopeless. We had hoped to adopt him; we hoped that he was the answer. My daughter is going through a developmental rough patch and I am plagued by thoughts of "What if...?" It is hard not to blame myself for our misfortunes regarding our family size. I often think that it is my fault my daughter is having such a rough time. If only I had been able to give her a sibling sooner, or if we hadn't chosen this very stressful route of foster care in order to grow our family. "What if I had just kept trying to get/stay pregnant?"

I am in desperate need of some peace; the questions are driving me insane.

Knitting A Sock

Making the Heel Flap While Knitting in the Sunlight

Three weeks before Christmas the conversation went something like this:

Me: I am going to knit [unspecified person] socks for their birthday.

Father-in-law: Great. Sounds like a great gift.

Me: Would you be interested in some knitted socks, too?

FIL: I don't know. I have never had knitted socks before.

One Week Later:

Me: I finally got my sock yarn and needles in the mail so I am going to start on making the socks for [unspecified person] right away.

FIL: Am I getting socks for Christmas?

Me: Ummmm...I wasn't planning on it.

FIL: But you said you were making me socks for Christmas.

Me: Wait! What?! I was planning on making you socks for your birthday!

FIL: Why would I want wool socks in June? 

The second conversation occurred five days ago and until yesterday I had been feverishly knitting a men's size large sock in the hopes of completing them in time. I love my father-in-law and he is notoriously hard to gift to so for once he wants something that I can make and I was determined to do it. Now, you must understand that this was my first sock knitting experience with tiny gauge yarn and needles (it is like knitting with toothpicks) and my father-in-law has big feet. I was making great progress until I dropped a stitch right after turning the heel. I tried to correct it but to no avail. The project began to unravel, very literally, right before my eyes and I had to "frog" it i.e. pull out all the knitting that I had spend 10 tedious hours on.

At that moment I had an epiphany: I was close to tears of frustration for all the time I had already spent only having to start all over despite it all. Four days of a semi-neglected home and family all in the name of a knitted sock. Had I not made the mistake I would have been able to complete the pair before Christmas and been able to happily gift them, but it was seriously stressing me out and taking the joy out of the knitting. I love to knit and I love the challenge of a new project but it was like the "sock that stole Christmas" since my presence was missing from my family.

This year I have had such a strong desire to simplify. Perhaps it is having a foster child and the busyness that brings, or maybe it is a consequence of reading Simplicity Parenting, but I did nearly all my Christmas shopping in November, said "No" to party invitations, and did the very minimum of holiday decorating choosing instead to try to concentrate on spending time with my family. The sock project kind of killed the simplicity bubble.

Right now Ravenna is singing a song that she created whose lyrics primarily consist of "Can I watch the little Merlaid?" She certainly is creative in her requests but I am going to have to say "no", not just because she has watched "The Little Mermaid" a least a dozen times since she got it but because it is time that I got off the computer and spent some time with her. That is what family is all about, right?

If You REALLY Loved Me...

Look At This! It is gorgeous!

You would buy me some of this tea! I recently discovered Teavana, A Heaven of Tea at our local mall and boy am I in trouble! This tea is so delicious but pricey. Andrew and I like drinking either herbal tisanes or Rooibos daily during the winter so unfortunately we can't afford to drink Teavana teas all that much. But, oh, seriously...nothing compares to a freshly brewed cup of fresh loose leaf tea. There is seriously no comparison to the tea bags you buy in the store. Right now I am in love with the dessert teas like the Cocoa Praline Tart you see above but I am also enjoying the herbal Citrus Lavender Sage.

IKEA Riklig Teapot

I use the IKEA RIKLIG teapot to brew my teas. I have found that in order to get it to brew correctly you need to have at least 24 oz. or 3 cups of water in there. According to Teavana, a 2 oz. bag of tea is between 20-30 tsp. Each serving of tea for the Cocoa Praline Tart is 1 1/2 tsp so you would get between 13-20 servings of tea in each 2 oz. bag.  It truly is delicious, though, and totally worth the premium price. So, who loves me?

Things To Do Before I am 30

This is how I look to a 3-year old.

My senior year of high school I took a class entitled "Agriculture Business." At the time I wanted to go to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and get a Agribusiness Degree and go work for some big time monster Ag corporation like Monsanto, gags. In any case the class covered my Economics graduation requirement. I can't remember most of my assignments there except for a competition I went to (and WON!) about agricultural cooperatives but one silly assignment stuck in my brain: we were required to make a poster illustrating what we wanted to accomplish by the time we were 30. I wish I had kept that but alas, I am not a pack-rat. I can remember most of what was on it, though, and with the big 3-0 only year-and-a-half away lets review:

• Graduate High School, check
• Graduate College with a Bachelors Degree, check
• Get a high paying power job
• Find a Hottie and get him to marry me, double check!
• Own my own home, yup
• Travel to Foreign lands
• Speak a Foreign language

I can't remember having anything on there about having kids but I was pretty sure that I never wanted to have them when I was 17 and the second eldest of 5 children. So looking at that list one might say that it is pretty shallow. Yup. Many of the things also didn't hold up to reality: I only held one job out of college and it was neither high paying or powerful (I will forever call it my "soul sucking" job), I haven't traveled and I stopped learning French after 4 years because I married a German speaker. But hey, I still have a year and a half so let's see what I can accomplish!

In June Andrew and I will be chaperoning a bunch of teenage German language students to, you guessed it, Germany. Aha! Travel!!! Ding ding ding! But I also need to speak German in order to go on the trip. I have around 7 months to get to about a German 3 level. I started learning at the end of October and finished German 1 with a 94% on my final the third week of November. I sped through that puppy but it was exhausting and now I am struggling with serious Deutsch burnout. I am allowing myself two months, until the end of January, to do German 2 and the deadline for German 3 is June 1. If I can get that all done I will have completed nearly all of my shallow high school goals! Woot!

It got me wondering though, how many of us remember what our dreams were when we were 17? I find mine pretty practical considering my age but also most definitely influenced by the TV shows and movies of my teen years. The things that I listed showed what my 17-year old self  believed the pathway to success to be: Education-->Awesome Job --> Money --> Travel, House, and a man to love me. While education is still important to me, having a high paying power job certainly is not. With time and experience I certainly still value certain things on that list but for different reasons. Like traveling for its own sake, rather than to say that I had traveled; Speaking a foreign language to broaden my horizons and work my brain rather than just to put it on a resume. And how about having kids? Being a good wife and mother have taken top priority on my life's list of "To Do's." I think my 17 year-old self would have scoffed at the notion of domestic happiness being my chief desire, and yet, ten years later, it is.

Life is wonderful. Life is harder than I ever thought it would be. Life is better than I ever imagined.

Retracing One Year

It is now just over one year since I went on my grain-free, soy-free, sugar-free, starch-free, preservative-free, processed-free etc. diet in a quest for healing. To recap my year, I started with a very strict diet/supplement regimen and did that for about seven months before switching to the GAPS diet and have been much happier since. When I found Bee's Candida Control diet it sounded like the perfect solution for me, and it may have been at the time, but then she started to change things, becoming more inflexible and wandering into the uncharted territory of what I have since learned is Scientology. The over-reliance on supplements (I was spending $170/month on supplements) and the seemingly random diet altering decisions made by Bee propelled me in the direction of the GAPS diet. GAPS is actually based on science and is a healing program involving certain steps vs. Bee's diet which consists of very strict food restriction based on someones (She never explained how she came to this) ratio of fats/protein/carbs. I did heal on Bee's diet but I also think I went through unnecessary suffering and deprivation as my body struggled with the toxin overload. While the GAPS diet does have supplements (mainly strong probiotics) it isn't necessary to take them if you can't afford it. Food probiotics such as fermented veggies, yogurt, kefir etc. can also give you the same benefits. At this time the only supplements I am taking are Magnesium Citrate, Zing Piccolinate and fermented cod liver oil and my cost is down to less than $35/month.

The GAPS diet has been less challenging in many ways but I have still had my setbacks. In March when I switched to GAPS I decided to add dairy and added it much too quickly which gave me an itchy eczema/detox rash around my eyes and it wasn't until I did the GAPS Introduction diet, removing all dairy, in early September that the bumps went away and I saw very serious improvements in my digestion. The GAPS diet is supposed to take around two years of healing but the second year is supposed to be the best as far as seeing results goes. I am hoping that by June I will have been able to have slowly added dairy again to the point that I can eat cheese. At this point I am only eating ghee with small amounts of butter every so often. Coconut yogurt (homemade) has become a food staple and as soon as I can get a culture I am going to add coconut kefir.

So, how about my symptoms? This last summer was very stressful for me with being a foster parent and I think I suffered some setbacks because of that. In June I think I even had a hysterical pregnancy but that was probably not related to the diet at all so much as the frustrations of having a newborn in my home being raised by a 14 year-old. One thing that has bugged me was that my cycles have been a bit off since June varying between 28 and my usual 33 days with the flow being much heavier. I have also been having really intense PMS symptoms, the most irritating of which is extremely tender breasts for a week or more each cycle. Ugh. BUT the yeastie-beastie's have mostly gone. I get a flare every so often but it goes away in a few days. It seems that my body is switching to detoxing through the skin which I have read is a good sign because the skin is the body's largest detox organ. Once I stop detoxing through my skin so much it should be a sign that my endocrine/lymphatic systems are up to par. 

One of the anecdotal natural healing signs is called "Retracing." This means that your body will "retrace" injuries/illnesses that you have had in an effort to heal itself. For example: If you had a major episode of illness years ago you will have the ilness again sometime during your healing, albeit less severely. I am not sure how much credence I can give to this theory but I was wondering about it this morning. Last week I was horribly sick for over a week with Bronchitis/Sinusitis, which is much longer than I am normally sick, and it really kicked my butt. I had a thought this morning that I could be retracing an episode seven years ago when I had my very first combined Bronchitis/Sinusitis which held me captive for two months and left me with damaged lungs and sinus' prone to infection. Now every time I get a cold I often get both and end up quite miserable. It would be nice if that was a healing episode because if it was it most likely won't happen again (so the theory goes) unless I let my health go. By the way, I treated the infection with raw apple cider vinegar; 2 tbsp. in 6 oz. of water as often as I could stand it. It worked quite well.

So that has been my year. It hasn't been very exciting or fun but I am glad that I am doing something to try to get my health where it needs to be so that I can conceive and carry another pregnancy. It is nice that I feel much better most of the time and as an added bonus, the food is seriously so good.

Post Title

When I started this blog I certainly had high expectations. I really wanted to be able to share who I was and all my thoughts and the crazy/fun stuff that I do but then I go to write it down and it just seems silly. Nearly every week I sit down to write a post, get a paragraph or two down, read it over and then delete it. So I think I might end up deleting this blog. This seems to be the way of my life right now starting with getting rid of Netflix, then Facebook and now blogging. I think I might just be casually climbing my way out of the interwebs.

Farming in September

The Monster Carrot! 1 Pound!

September was wet and nasty. We had massive flooding in our area but luckily, being that we live on a hill, we were spared. Unfortunately the wet weather has made my strawberries go to rot inviting a fruit fly infestation. I would have much higher yields and BEAUTIFUL large berries if it weren't for these horrible beasts who eat the ripe berries from the inside out. I can't find anything on the interwebs about how to get rid of them.

Meat: 4; We have decided to be done with the bird business; we didn't have the time anymore to dedicate to caring for them. We sold the other 5 birds to friends of ours who are happily enjoying their new pets.
Eggs: 70; Equivalent to just over 1 dozen large chicken eggs.
Produce: Food prices courtesy of a food co-op in New York State.

• Cucumber: 2 lb. 1oz.@ 2.49/lb= $5.13
• Chard: 2 lb. 5 oz. @ 3.74/lb =$8.65
• Radish: 2 oz. @ 2.31/lb= .29
• Paste Tomato: 18 lb. 6 oz.@ 1.02/lb= $18.74
• Strawberries: 3 lb. 9 oz. @ 4.70/lb= $16.74
• Green Beans: 1 lb. @1.44/lb= $1.44
• Sweet Pepper: 1 lb. @2.28/lb= $2.28
• Sungold Tomato: 13 oz.@1.51/lb= $1.23
• Principe Borghese Tomato: 7 lb. 5 oz. @1.51/lb= $11.04
• Spaghetti Squash: 15 lb. 7 oz. @1.07/lb= $16.52
• Brussels Sprouts: 5 oz. @ 2.13/lb= .67
• Carrots: 2 lb.@1.61/lb= $3.22
• Kale: 13 oz.@3.74/lb= $3.04
• Kohlrabi: 8 oz. @1.00/lb (local farmers market price) = .50

Grand Total: $89.49