Wavy Hair in All Its Glory

9
Oct

Two People (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When I had my third child, my hair went cuckoo. I had heard the legend of straight hair that turned curly because of pregnancy, but I thought it was one of those super rare occurences. But my hair went from being straight with a little bit of a cowlick (what a word!) in a couple places, to being full blown wavy all over. It has also gotten long-ish, and this has led to various comparisons.

Such as Steven Tyler from Aerosmith.

Such as Eddie Vedder.

Such as Christopher Lloyd playing Doc Brown in Back to the Future.

Such as a male lion.

Such as a late-1980’s Tina Turner.

I wish I could argue with any of these comparisons, but they are all spot on. The funny thing about it is…

I don’t mind.

I am a child of the 1980’s so for me, the bigger, the better. I can’t deny my roots, my foundational years when the pop idols were men with long hair, rockin’ Hair Bands and the female band Heart. Come on, you expect me to flat iron this puff of wonder? You want me to undo what previously would have taken me an hour of work, or the trouble of sleeping with braids all over my head, a rat-tail comb and a cloud of Aqua-Net? Puh-leaze.

In honor of hair kooky-ness, here’s a clip that discusses various hair styles (I can only vouch for the first minute or two). Enjoy.

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/zach-monologue/1207090

P.S. If you have wavy hair, feel free to chime in with tips to subdue or tame the beast, but don’t trouble yourself with any flat iron techniques because they will be wasted on me. 🙂

Are People Unaware of Breast Cancer?

2
Oct

http://whitehouse.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/01/pretty-in-pink-the-white-house-is-lit-for-breast-cancer-awareness-month/

This may come across as callous, but I’m getting kindof tired of hearing about breast cancer.

And I’m a woman, so I can’t even imagine how bored men must be.

Granted, I haven’t had it, nor have I recently known anyone close to me who is “battling” it, (it’s always called a “battle”) so I am writing from a privileged position. My grandmother had it, though, so I’m not completely untouched by it. But my grandfather has had multiple kinds of “minor cancers” and you don’t hear about anybody giving out pins the color of scabby melanoma. Gross.

Keep in mind that in the past 30 years, more people have had skin cancer than all other cancers combined, and each year there are more new cases of skin cancer than breast cancer, prostate, lung and colon cancers combined. (I got my impressive stats from the website of the Skin Cancer Foundation: www.skincancer.org) It begs the question: has the United States been made aware of breast cancer yet?

I’m thinking the answer is yes.

But there’s an entire month dedicated to breast cancer. I feel that’s excessive. It makes me want to know more about how it happened, how much lobbying it took and how much money changed hands, and how many women running how many 5k races it took? I mean, they lit up the White House in pink lights last night! I hope it was only for a night, but either way, have they done this for other cancers or causes? Is this a campaign gimmick? (Turns out it’s not, since they lit it up in 2010 as well…unless you think people in government are always campaigning, which may be true. I couldn’t find out if they lit it up last year.)

I’m just going to say it: is breast cancer the cause we want to be most going after? What about domestic violence? Or what about the institutionalized demeaning of the breasts people are trying to protect through the objectification of women in the media? What about homelessness? What about finding the causes of autism or what about the treatment of the elderly or other at-risk members of society? Are you telling me that boobie cancer is the cause behind which we are all to rally? Even football players wear pink all month: pink shoes, pink sweat rags, pink undershirts, pink doilies, pink tea cozies, pink hair binders (okay, I might have made up a few of those things). Are we to believe those players make a measurable increase in anything breast cancer? There’s a joke in there somewhere, but I can’t bring myself to type it out (think of a t-shirt emblazoned with “portable mamogram”…or something).

[Just for the record, the NFL has lots of charities it supports, and you can find out about them here: http://www.nflcharities.org/, and the Vikings page shows they support a Children’s Fund and an environmental effort: http://www.vikings.com/community/index.html I should also mention that people much more interested in football than I have differing opinions about this: http://1045theteam.com/sports-illustrateds-peter-king-complains-about-nfl-wearing-pink-for-entire-breast-cancer-awareness-month/]

I’m curious to hear your perspective on this. It seems taboo to say anything but positive things about the awareness effort, but when you read that lung cancer is the thing that’s on the rise and is particularly lethal, it makes me wonder if people’s efforts are misplaced (http://progressreport.cancer.gov/trends-glance.asp).

Is it because there are boobs involved? They seem to have a real power over people, men and women, and probably because of the importance that’s been placed on big ones, to have anything happen to them threatens a woman’s womanhood. I can wrap my head around that, I guess, because it is a physical distinction between men and women.

But are our breasts where we get our womanhood? Is our intrinsic female-ness tied up in our chests? And let’s not even get started on talking about female attitudes towards their bodies and where those attitudes come from. Let’s just leave it that not all people have a great love for those extra couple pounds (or less) of flesh — not to imply that anyone would willingly undergo a mastectomy if it wasn’t medically necessary. Don’t go twisting what I’m saying, you rascal!

Lots to think about today, and I welcome any comments, but try not to get too mad at me for sharing a dissenting opinion.

Tomatoes: So Many and Yet So Few

1
Oct

Our vegetable garden has done pretty well this year. I learned a few things along the way (who knew that kale got SO HUGE?!? one plant would have been plenty and I had to go and plant FOUR of them!), one of which is that it takes TONS of tomatoes to produce a can of tomatoes — I have a new appreciation for the great bargain I get at the grocery store.

We have plenty of tomatoes and no one in my family appreciates them raw, so I thought it would make sense to freeze the abundance to use later.

Brilliant idea.

What planning, what foresight.

Let me show you what I learned.

I started with a stockpot about half full of tomaotes, which seems like a lot, way more than my family of five would eat in a week.

This is gonna make tons of sauce, for sure.

Before I did any boiling, I prepared an ice bath, just a big container of water with some ice cubes to make it even colder. The goal is to get the boiled tomotoes to quit cooking, so you dunk them in this ice water.

I boiled the tomatoes for just four minutes so I could get the skins off.

Since I boiled them only four minutes, does that qualify as “blanching” them?

Then came the ice bath. This all sounds putzy, and to be honest, it is. There are a lot of pots, a lot of water, and then you have to clean up all that stuff.

Let them sit a spell until they’ve cooled down.

Now comes the most severely putzy part. Make an X at one end of the tomato, and peel off the skin. This should be pretty easy. What’s not easy is squishing out all the water, seeds and tomato innards. Sometimes all I had left was a palmful of tomato run-off. Here is one picture of peeling skins (which just sounds gross).

Most of the skins should come off easily, like this one.

So after all that effort, I was left with this amount of stewed, skinless tomatoes to use in whatever way I want:

Makes you really think about all that goes into that can at the back of your cupboard!

On the one hand, I grew these tomatoes from little plants and there is definitely something very gratifying about being able to produce your own food. I know where it has been. I trust my dirt. I know how the labor has been treated…since it’s usually me!

On the other hand, this is plain inefficient. I can’t be doing this with every batch of tomatoes that ripens throughout the season. So I’m left with a couple options: start eating more raw tomatoes, cook with more raw tomatoes, be generous and share more tomatoes, plant fewer tomatoes, break down and admit that sometimes a good thing doesn’t have to be efficient. I’ve got a long way to go before our family is self-sustaining, and that’s not even the goal, but it is fun to know we’re able to do it.

What do you do with all your garden harvest? Do you can it, freeze it, sneak it into your neighbor’s mailbox? Help me out with advice so I can work smarter next year!

Replacement Chickens

23
Sep

These chickens have a thing for Cher-hair.

New chickens as they scurry away. Man, they’re fast!

Introducing new chickens into a “flock” is something that presents challenges, no matter how small that flock may be (say, like, two chickens).

We read up before we accepted the replacement chickens (they are replacing two chickens which, over the span of a couple months, were injured by a neighbor dog who developed a taste for chicken). We found out that there can be problems bringing in new chicken pals and they can get picked on quite a bit. Here’s how we did it…

First we put a dog kennel inside the chicken coop run. Then we put the Silkies into the kennel so they could be close but not in danger.

Then after a day or two we let them go into the coop after it was dark and the other two chickens were already roosting for the night. In the morning we tried to open the coop earlier than normal so there would be limited amount of “play time” for the two sets of birds. We kept the Silkies in the coop so they’d learn where home was.

At the end of the day we opened the coop and our other chickens returned home. There was a bit of pecking at this point, but nothing too harmful. We repeated this cycle for a few about a week. Then we let all the chickens out and left the door open so they could come back in when they wanted.

So far so good! Everyone is still alive and we haven’t seen any pecking that’s been anything more than posturing. I’ll have to check in here in a couple months and see if things have continued to go smoothly.

I should mention that the Silkies were laying eggs at their former location but they have yet to lay any for us. We think they are stressed out and need a bit more time to adjust. Our other chickens should begin laying within a month or so, so it is possible that we’ll have four eggs a day for a while, until it gets too cold. Should be fun!

Plants and People Need Roots

8
Sep

It is nearly fall for real and I must admit a secret pleasure: I love to buy ragged plants at the end of the season at a deep discount. Gimme your wretched refuse yearning to be free, and I’ll take ’em.

I scored a few small shrubs for a spot that has felt lonely and abandoned. It desperately needed my attention. When we moved in, there were a bunch of dogwood trees that had inexplicably died, but I chalked it up to their need for more sun. Really, I promise, I did not kill them; spring came and I could pull whole dead branches off from the root. Today I got into the project and assigned rock picking duty to one of my children (believe me, he deserved it). We discovered that, true to their behavior in other areas of the yard, the previous owners had laid down industrial strength black plastic under the thin layer of rock mulch.

No problem, right?

I got my scissors, cut through the plastic and made a surprising discovery.

Styrofoam.

My first thought was that I must have found a place they discarded an old cooler or something, or that it was there to keep an invasive plant in its place. We cleared rocks and plastic for the second shrub and found…

Foam.

This was getting ridiculous.

Because up to that point we’d been digging very close to where the old shrubs had been, I tried a random spot and found the same, consistently created, inedible layer-cake of rocks, plastic, foam, plastic and MORE FOAM. It appears that the entire raised bed that runs the length of the house holds less than three buckets of dirt, all told. It’s crazy.

When I was clearing out roots of the old bushes, I was struck by the fact that until I started, I had no idea that the garden was essentially a facade. The decorative rock cover made me assume there was dirt underneath, dirt needed for growth and development.

There are still two barberry shrubs that stayed alive, but ultimately their limited root system will keep them from growing any bigger. So regardless of how lovely they could have become (and the dogwoods especially could have been pretty along the back of the house), they will be stunted because no matter how nice they looked on the exterior, they had weak roots.

Have you ever known someone like that?

Someone who looked right, knew the right things to say, but when difficult times came they proved to have a weak spiritual root system?

Have you ever been that person?

Have I?

If we’re honest, I think we’ve all been there, been in a place where our faith was not deep enough, where we acted out of selfish motives rather than the best interests of the other person, when we acted petty or in an unkind way and may not have connected the dots until many years later.

It made me think about Jesus’ story of the farmer tossing seeds into different types of ground. I know there have been times when I didn’t do or say what I should have, and that demonstrated a weakness or blind spot in my development that I might not have had the maturity to address appropriately at the time.

Some weird plastic foam. Excellent shock absorber. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It reminds me that I should not be quick to make blanket statements about the condition of someone else’s faith. Maybe they’re in a rocky patch. Maybe the faith they have is all that’s left after the birds came and scavenged what they had. Maybe they’ve been scorched by the sun and maybe what they need is the cool water of a kind word. Someone’s lame behavior may just be a blind spot or an area they are working on, and don’t I have those areas myself? Sometimes we are quick to point out other people’s weakness and even quicker to defend our own. Maybe instead, we should spread on some grace and sprinkle a little sugar on top, unless we are in a special relationship with that person or if we are specifically asked by the person. Let’s not underestimate the workings of the Holy Spirit in conviction and in the active work of growing a person’s heart.

I love you, man! 🙂 Let’s go get another round of scraggly plants and some more dirt!

Do You Need a Vacation from Your Vacation?

2
Aug

Have you ever taken a long road trip? Gone a great distance on an airplane? Travelled to the grocery store with small children?

My husband and I once combined two of these activities (not the grocery store part, but the small children part and a long road trip) as a summer vacation. Why we deemed it a vacation rather than a crash course in anger management and patience building, I don’t know. We drove in a minivan from Minnesota to Wyoming with a three-month-old and a two- and four-year old. The baby was nursing. The carseat laws were enforced. It was madness.

Good thing we brought hats. Summer in the mountains is tricky!

When you combine all of this (roadtrip, children, mountain driving, long distances, road construction, unfamiliar sleeping conditions) it could have been a stress filled week. But looking back on it now, I don’t remember the whole thing being stressful. Am I using memory suppression in order to block out this traumatic experience? I don’t think so. I think it was just the way it was. One must accept a certain amount of craziness with three kids ages four and under.

When grandparents or people no longer “in the trenches” of parenting young children talk to those who are still in the thick of it, I think they go to two default positions: one is to romanticize those years as being leisurely time spent lolling in the grass, counting the leaves on four leaf clovers. The other is to demonize that time as being constantly harried, maxed out, never leaving the house, and handling disciplinary nightmares. Certainly there are moments of both, and sometimes immediately back to back, but I think the reality is somewhere in the middle.

If you’ve been a parent for any length of time, and have ventured out in public, you’ve probably been greeted by someone who holds one of the two extreme memory positions. There are those who shake their heads sympathetically and say, “Are you ready for school to start yet?” And there are those who get all quivery-lipped about the kids and dab their eyes while saying, “Cherish this time. It goes so fast.” Without fail, I run into the person who acts the exact opposite of what I feel at that moment. I’m friendly and make a brief comment about leaving a trail of baby socks or toys behind us so we can find our way out of the store, but rarely can I agree with them.

The reality is, life continues. You can’t stop doing all interactions with others once you have a child. You can’t pile an entire cupboard of dirty dishes into the sink while you stare in amazement at the little person who can now sit up for three minutes without falling onto the pillow you have placed behind her as a spotter. (I mean, you can, but eventually somebody has to make dinner around here, right?) The reality is, sometimes you just do what needs to be done and you can’t get caught up in how much work it is or how much patience it involves or how little you’ll actually get done in a one hour period if you bring the kids versus what you could get done in that same period WITHOUT the kids.

(You don’t get an hour without the kids? Well just wait. Once you do, you’ll be flabbergasted at all the things you can cram into 60 minutes.)

Keep pressing on, all you parents! Bust out the sunscreen and the bug spray. Don’t forget your water bottles. Live it up! Enjoy the children you have in your family, even in those moments when the only positive thing you can think about the baby is that she is a human gas decoy (go ahead, use the baby to disguise your own gas. Silently toot then make a comment about how gassy she is, she’ll never know). Even you who are at the point of looking back with astonishment that you made it through, you probably aren’t done being a parent, even now. You just get to be at a different stage of parenting, when it looks a lot more like mentoring or friendship (or heckling — it all depends on your strategy). If you abandon all outside relationships and activities, you might regret it later, either for your children or for yourself.

So take that vacation, even if when you get home you need another vacation just to recover. Luck favors the prepared, dahling, and vacation is for making memories, if only the memories you’ll have to laugh about later if it was a disaster. At least you will have the memories together. Hooray for summer!

Greener Grass: The Endless Search for Better

19
Jul

picket fence (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Lately I’ve been on the hunt for some used, reasonably priced fence sections. This is not a need, this is a want, and I’m trying to be careful to keep that in mind as my hunt takes up more and more of my mental free-space. It is hard not to get single-minded about the pursuit. And Craigslist changes frequently, sometimes even in the span of a couple hours, so it is tempting to check it every 30 minutes or so. But I’m not obsessing about finding a fence, no not me.

Unless you count yesterday, because yesterday the fence wasn’t for me, and it was FREE so how can you put a price tag on the time it takes to find a place across town in rush hour? I went with this lady:

She’s ready to be shot out of a cannon.

Maybe she’s where I get it from, this deep satisfaction from a good deal. She found a vinyl picket fence on Craigslist and it was free. The only catch is that it was waaaaaay over in New Hope (that’s at least 30 minutes from me in good traffic) and she doesn’t have a truck. That’s where I come in.

It ended up fine and we found it eventually. It was in good condition and it all fit in the back of my/our truck. I even got a free dinner out of the deal, plus some fun time with my mom, so it was worth it.

But it got me thinking about how often we assume there is a perfect something out there: the perfect lipstick, a better deal on an appliance, faster service, a more immediate result. And in looking for the better whatever, do we miss out on something that is really really good because we’re waiting for that something better?

We know it happens in romantic relationships but does that ever happen in friendships?

How much of our lives are spent in the search for “perfect” stuff/deals/services and how much is that time worth?

How much of our days are spent surfing the web (read: Pinterest) for a DIY idea and how much of this makes our own attempts look like kindergarten art projects? What does that do to a person after a few years?

What is a healthy balance between aspiring to the better and being happy with what I have or what’s available to me? Does it feed into a spirit of discontent when we watch shows that focus on makeovers, renovations and projects that have a staff of 15 to pull them off then claim you could do the same thing on your own in a weekend with just some velcro tape and a bucket of paint?

I’d love to keep thinking about these things with you, and I think there are some things we can all do to help ourselves be happier and more content by limiting ourselves, but I have to go online now and find a better price on a set of decorative pinwheels.

The Grand Unveiling: New Chicken Coop

11
Jul

Since I’m sure you’ve been dying to know if I’ve been forcing the chickens to continue living in the cupboard on the back of my garage, I’m here to set you at ease, Dear Reader. My wonderful husband of almost 13 years has constructed a chicken coop to beat all chicken coops, and he did it without a kit or set of plans. Look, and be amazed…

We acquired a used frame, added the nesting box area and it immediately started to look like a rough version of a coop.

Using boards and wood we found lying around, he closed in the sides. We happened to have old cedar shakes in the attic, and they worked great as shingles and would eventually become the siding as well. He used the bottom tray of a dog kennel for the floor (underneath the tray is wire so nothing can sneak inside). It’s coming along!

We don’t know why, but there were boards in the ground that formed a square. This is a big reason why we chose this spot — it is shady and we could use the square for the chicken run instead of having to sink boards or wire into the ground ourselves. A real timesaver (critters who like to eat chickens can dig under a wire edge if it isn’t sunk into the ground quite a ways). We usually let the chickens run around wherever they want, but if we are going out of town, it is nice to have a safe spot they can be outside. I read that chickens won’t just wander off once they know where their food and water is, and that has proven to be true.

This one was taken with my phone after the lens fell off my camera. The final product!

We used cabinet doors we had in the basement. Overall, it costs us around $100 in materials and a couple weeks of working on the project after work. I did nothing except offer moral support and the occasional glass of water– my wonderful husband did it all himself. It has enough room for five chickens.

He did a fantastic job and I love the way it turned out. It’s a little bit rustic, and I love the way we used things we had available around our place. It is both practical and attractive, and he did it all free hand. He’s amazing. The chickens love it too, and have settled right in.

There you have it. Do you have chicken experience? How did it go? Tried building something yourself? How did it turn out? I’d love to hear from you. Until next time, happy summer adventures to you!

Coming Down from a Trip

2
Jul

The title of this post has connotations that can be misinterpreted. I’m currently coming down from a trip to Michigan to see my almost-niece get married, not from some wild weekend rave (do they still have those?) with bubbles and glowsticks. The bride is the daughter of one of my dearest friends, one of those special people who are too close to be called a friend any more; she qualifies as family.

The cool thing is that I travelled out there with another cross-over friend/family and her young son. He did great, the conversation was deep, there was laughter, tears, and often the two quickly followed each other. There was a celebration of friendship, faith, love and redemption. It was wonderful.

The reality of coming home is at once overwhelming and endearing, and if we’re being honest, a tiny bit of a bummer. I mean, where’s the adrenaline? Where are the high emotions and significant life moments? I’m home with three young kids and while there are definitely moments of high emotions, most of the time they ain’t that significant. They’re more emotional “I stubbed my piggy toe!” and “He won’t let me have that toy!” moments.

And the dishwasher stinks.

And sand in my bed.

And dog poop in the yard.

And a sick child who has to go to urgent care.

It takes me a couple days to reacclimate and shake off the starchy, pop magazine, sugar-induced fog from the airport and hotel room. It goes without saying that I miss my husband and kids when I’m away. A good friend liked to say to her kids, “If I don’t ever go away from you, I can’t miss you.” A little break is a good thing, even if the re-entry give you a minor case of whiplash. It is good to be reminded as a mom that the family can carry on without you. But it is nice to know that they notice when you’re gone, or maybe that you can tell when you’ve been gone.

Moms of the world, don’t underestimate your value. It takes a lot to keep a household running. See it as a good thing that things are a disaster when you return — this is the tidal wave you hold at bay every day. We matter, and it is nice to have our absence noticed…even if it is only noticed by us. 🙂