What We Ate

for dinner this week.

MONDAY

Southwestern Scramble (scrambled eggs, black beans, mixed cheeses)
Healthy Homefries (native potatoes fried in a tablespoon of oil with garam masala)
Native Green Beans

TUESDAY
(The day I leave early to teach yoga and make dinner before I go so it is historically very simple.)
Trader Joe's tortellini with TJ sauce
Big ol' pile of native broccoli
Kids get yogurt and honey for dessert

WEDNESDAY
Homemade pizza (whole wheat crust topped with Mama's homemade pesto with grown from the garden basil, pizza sauce and mozzarella)
Big ol' pile of cauliflower

THURSDAY
Brown Rice
Honeyed Tofu Cutlets (from Saving Dinner the Vegetarian Way)
Our own home grown runner beans
Spinach, arugula salad with sliced almonds and cranberries
Native roasted acorn squash




FRIDAY
Potato and leek soup with native veggies and made from scratch (including milk from Mapeline Farm--glass bottles!) recipe from the Kripalu Cookbook
Native roasted beets with lemon juice and feta
Kids cucumber and green pepper slices from our own homegrown veggies
Homemade pumpkin biscuits from a native pumpkin (that I cooked and mushed)


THIS IS A TRUE DOCUMENT. And I had to record it because it makes me look like the vegetarian Donna Reed, like Martha Stuart gone hippie, like the world's perfect mother!!! Wow! I'm awesome and I don't even like to cook. (You ought to see my kitchen when I'm done....)

Go Feminist Amish

There's a little known sect of the Amish called the Radical Feminist Amish.

They have one member.

Me.

And this is a call for new members. Anyone out there want to join?

When my family visited the Old Order Amish in Pennsylvania a few years ago, I picked up the best book on the Amish I've read to date: The Riddle of Amish Culture. The book is a fascinating exploration of the choices modern Amish people make in order to maintain the form of their life.

I loved the book so much, and it resonated so strongly with me, that I HAD TO STOP READING IT because I got so depressed that I cannot be Amish!

I suppose you think this makes me slightly crazy...and maybe it does, but let's consider that the Amish are not merely "old-fashioned" people. They are people make conscious decisions about HOW they want to live in this mixed-up, fast-paced, digital universe.

I'm reading a parenting book now, The Hurried Child, that touches on some of the same issues: our lust for speed, the pressure-cooker of achievement, success at what cost to our innocence?

So, maybe I am crazy because I think little girls shouldn't wear lipstick and childhood should be saved from the violence of the media (the only reason you don't think it's violent is because you ARE IMMUNE after watching one zillion images of people hitting/killing/destroying one another). If you can sit in front of the nightly news and eat pie, then you are officially desensitized.

All of us are making choices about how we live. The cool thing about the Amish is the incredible thought, prayer, and meditation that goes into the preservation of their traditions. It's not easy to be different in a world where sameness is a sign of success--but, hey, you gotta be who you are! Even if you're a feminist Amish on the inside!

Notice how I am wearing an apron while outside on an Easter egg hunt! Such Amish fashion! (okay, minus the pink color and the length and the shoes....)

Call Me Feminist Duggar

There are some things I just do differently.

Like how I think.

Today, in my free time (the ten minutes of it), I will have a chance to read the non-fiction book I'm absolutely adoring, HOW TO BE A WOMAN, and later, when the children are asleep, watch my favorite television program, the ONLY one I watch on TV, 19 Kids and Counting.

So let's compare and contrast.

Caitlin Moran, the author of HOW TO BE A WOMAN, writes about feminism, pubic hair, Brazilians, her first experiences with masturbation in such a hilarious, profound call to arms that one is left longing to, simply, be her.

Michelle Duggar, with her brood of 19, will not wear a skirt that falls above her knees. None of her daughters wear pants. No one in the entire family dances. They don't want to arouse any desires inappropriately.

Who is the person who can love and admire both these women?

Well, me.

And they do have some things in common.

Here's Caitlin. This is the picture from her book cover. (c. Christ Floyd)
See how she has long hair. And you can't see it in this photo, but she's wearing a dress!

Here's Michelle. Look! She has long hair. And she's wearing a skirt.

And they ARE both mothers. It's like they're practically the same person.

These are the two biggest feminists in my life right now. Michelle doesn't call herself one, but that's okay with me! A powerful woman is a powerful woman no matter what you call her, or what anyone ELSE calls her and tomorrow I'll post a picture of MYSELF so you can see how much we ALL look alike.....

Do you speak Polish?

I'm thrilled. THIS LITTLE MOMMY STAYED HOME has been bought by a Polish publisher! This makes the third country (not counting America and Canada) of publication.

If you read Polish, you'll have to tell me how it is....

Also, if you have not read the book yet, you really have no more excuses. It's been THREE years since the release. Copies in the warehouse are gathering dust; you can get the thing on ebay for, like, 19 cents. If you wait long enough, you can get a Polish dictionary and a Polish translation of the book and read the two together--but why do things the hard way? Get it from your local bookseller and then, when you email me and say, "I've read your book!" you will not be lying!! (I don't know that this has happened to me yet, but I wouldn't be surprised. Also, I haven't done any promotion in a long time, so I thought this post could count as my marketing plan for the month. For the two people who read my blog.)

Nose (Knows)

I kept walking through my mudroom thinking, it smells like a pile of mildewy wet clothes! I did this for two days over a busy weekend spent mostly outside working on a fence. I looked around the room for the source of the smell, but could not find it.

Today, I opened up the dryer to put in a load of clothes and--!
Someone (probably our terrible cleaning lady--a.k.a. me--...she always gets so distracted by the children!) forgot to push the ON button. There was the culprit of the stink. Just what I smelled, a pile of mildewy wet clothes.

So this morning while in my children's closet I said, it smells like a big pee in here. I had been smelling this for days and had already empited the laundry basket and looked around for what could be causiing the odor. I asked my children if someone had peed in the closet (because, you never know!). My daughter very assertively told me she knew the source of the smell, then she searched through a basket of toys and pulled out a soggy, old pull-up!

Such wisdom have I gleaned! Even if you cannot SEE it, if you SMELL it, believe it! Because it's there somewhere.

Well, I still want to be Michelle Duggar....

Michelle Duggar made big news again, a few weeks ago, when she outrageously, scandalously said: "The world needs more children."

The incredible response to this! The uproar, the anger, the alarm. But how could anyone aware of her enormous family be shocked by this idea? If she DIDN'T feel that way and had nineteen kids, something would be wrong. Of course she doesn't believe in overpopulation; if she did, she'd be like the rest of my friends and have one--maybe two!--children.

Here's how I see it. All kinds of people have children, people who don't want children, people who don't like children, people who don't know what to DO with children. Some children are molested, raped, abused, mistreated, used, maligned, ignored, abandoned, starved, murdered.... Other children simply suffer the usual dramas of childhood and growing up, which always includes some level of benign neglect, even if it's just that Mama can't play with you all the time because she has to do the dishes!

(I should be doing the dishes. But at least I'm blogging while my kids are asleep.)

If you see it from the Duggar perspective, the world does need more children--more children who are seen to be precious, incredible, vital, useful, gifts from God (or you may put in a more meaningful word here that you use). Michelle Duggar may be crazy, but not any more crazy than many parents I know--just differently crazy. She and her husband say that many years ago they prayed to see children they way God sees children, which, to me, is an amazing thing. It means you stop seeing children for what they can do FOR you, stop seeing them as a part OF you, stop feeling like who they are is a mere reflection of you, and see them in their own right, perfect and whole, wanted and necessary in the great world.

The point is not that there are too many children, but that there is too little love--and too little love for children. I don't mean we all need nineteen children. In fact, I am very much in favor of those who don't want children not having any! But to grow in our ability to appreciate children, to welcome them, to treat them kindly, to learn from them, to let their challenges change us into better people? That is what I understand from what the Duggars are doing. And I do believe motherhood is a spiritual practice. (Oh, how I practice, practice, practice every day!)

Sharon Lerner in her book THE WAR ON MOMS, writes, "And children are treated as something akin to puppies--cute little extras we've opted for, perhaps because we find them diverting--rather than as actual people. In what economist Nancy Folbre describes as a children-as-pets mind-set, there's little recognition of the fact that children are essential to society, or that keeping them well and ushering them into the arena of tax-paying, job-holding adulthood is in the public interest."

Two things: "children are essential to society" and "Keeping them well" is in the interest of all.

We do need more children. More children who are beloved, seen as essential, and kept well in the fullness of such an understanding, in body, mind, heart and soul, with value beyond measure, not just OUR children, not YOUR children, not simply MY children, but children of the great I AM.

I haven't blogged in a great long while, mostly because I decided I wanted to do other more fulfilling things with my time, and for whatever reason, I did not find blogging a really satisfying activity (which I know makes me uncool, unpopular and off the radar...alas!). I have always been a Luddite and it seems times haven't changed! In graduate school I refused to get an email account; I often think I might have been better keeping that committment. Real human contact is at the top of my list for what makes life wonderful; as for the written word, nothing beats a letter. If the postal service wanted me to, I'd start the campaign to bring back the letter.

So a brief reading update anyway. I've been really satisfied with some of my recent parenting reads. Here they are:

Still love to read and re-read: Mothering as a Spiritual Practice
How to Behave, So Your Kids Will To!
Children: The Challenge
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother