Living-Deliberately.com

That’s what one young girl told us our house was, while begging us to keep it blue :-).

Our house because yesterday, after two delays and argument at the closing table between the seller and the title attorney, we FINALLY closed. We spent the night there, sort of camping out and reveling in the relief of it all.

We’re on track to move tomorrow and since I don’t have my internet up yet, I don’t know when I’ll next post. But thanks everyone for your thoughts and prayers; it was  close one but it’s DONE, hallelujah!

Wow. This was one of the hardest menus I’ve ever put together. Having to forecast for a variety of scenarios was difficult. Contrasting that, I had a lot of fun choosing a few new recipes to try from Nourishing Traditions. If you are gaining any ideas from my menu posting, but think what I’ve chosen is too weird for your family, hopefully a similar substitute won’t be too hard to find. Go ahead and ask any questions about recipes; I’m tweaking old favorites and trying new things!

Thursday:

BK: Millet w/ Butter and Berries

LN:  will be before shopping and hopefully right before closing, so catch-as-can

DN: Chicken Salad on crossants, chips, and fruit

Friday:

BK: Pancakes and maple syrup

LN: company picnic

DN: Fried Egg Sandwiches

Saturday:

BK: bagels and cream cheese

LN: feed the moving crew hopefully: chili, chips, cheese, drinks

DN: eat out in little Wartburg restaurant

Sunday:

BK: Eggs and Turkey Sausage (NT recipe), croissants, and cheese

LN: leftovers

DN: leftovers (plan to be flexible in the event we are unpacking all day)

Monday: (first day of David coming home for lunch, if all goes well)
BK: porridge with berries and nuts

LN: Fajitas and Guac

DN: Coconut Chicken Soup

Tuesday:

BK: wheat toast with cream cheese and jam

LN: Meat Loaf, Sweet potatoes, Green Beans, Ginger carrots

DN: Leek Fritata

Wednesday:

BK: porridge with berries and nuts

LN: Wheat Berry Casserole, Fruit, Sliced tomatoes, cheese

DN: Fried Egg Sandwiches, pickled cucumbers

Snacks will be Crispy Pecans, Raisins, lots of fruit, and Raspberry jam cookies. I’ll post my grocery total in the comments.

Dr. H (thanks so much), knowing poetry is one of my “languages”, picked a goodie for the order of the day. It’s in comments under “no news”. My favorite line, the one that made me gasp with it’s appropriateness, is:

“Now let the night be dark for all of me. ”

It’s more than just acceptance of the way things are. It’s more than complete trust that everything will work out in the end. Because, written in metaphor with birds, there lies a truth underneath that in darkness, birds sometimes die. Storms come. Twittering “safe” doesn’t make it so. And it’s OKAY to let sleep come, let darkness BE, let it wash over, no matter the end to come, beit daybreak or calamity.
It’s okay to say, “it’s dark”. Doing so is not wrong. It’s not faithlessness. It just IS.

“Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be, be.’”

It will come and this I swear: if it sucks, I might get angry. If it’s great, I’ll feel relief. If it just goes, I will “do the next thing” and get the job done. Either way, I’ll be. My faith will be the same. It’s faith that has borne great heartbreak and sorrow, that learned the hard way one can’t pray hard or well enough to change what is going to Be. It’s a faith that is human and weak sometimes. It’s a faith I wonder is really there when I’m scolded for not being patient or content enough. It’s faith that taught me that honesty starts in the heart. If I can’t say to myself how I really think something is, chances are, I’m a pretender. Pretending is a foundation of sinking sand. Give me solid rock, give me truth, even ugly truth. From there, we can go.

I tore out the carrots today, cramming wet-clay dirt so deep beneath my nails that it hurt. They are small and pudgy. Sweet babies picked a mite too soon but somehow, it seemed like the day to do it.

I picked every single sunflower. All the rudbekia and shasta daisies too. I kissed the pink and purple morninglory that is pulling the garden down day by day. Three cucumbers finished that harvest and I found two of the first bell peppers. They are mine.

I ripped out all the basil for washing and drying a freezing. Pulled up whole plants by the root and stripped them more thoroughly than any grasshopper could. I did the same to the cilantro.

Uncaged tomatoes trail all over the decomposing straw; I brought in several half-ripe jewels. There were others out there, red and top and rotten with bugs on the bottom. That’s what happens when you don’t lift them up as they grow. I knew that when I neglected to do so; I still don’t know why I didn’t care. The corn is turning red; I wonder why that is. The beans that remain are dry pods; I may save them for seed.

But mostly I’m going down later to take off the pottery sign that says, “Welcome to my garden”. I’ll pick up the clay herb signs and pack them up. I may strip down the dry pea plants no longer making sweet pods for snacking. I might not.

It was a sweet garden, a pretty place for a season. It’s tired and weary and overgrown now and somehow, that seems right. It stuns me, but I realize that this year, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

and sometimes is pure agony.

Our closing may fall through again. Yesterday, I finally let myself relax at 4, figuring if there was going to be bad news, we would have gotten it by then. At 4:30 David called to say the mortgage company investor wasn’t satisfied with the appraisal and wanted more recent pictures.

Huh? Like, now?!?! Why not last week? Or the week before? Or the week before that? And why can’t they use the ones that the house was listed with? They say all they have are shots from 2004 and they need new ones.

Having no other choice but to jump through their hoops, our realtor and the listing agent and the appraiser are out there doing it this morning, hoping to save our closing. We could close today, tomorrow, friday, monday, or not at all, since the mortgage itself hasn’t been AGREED TO. I think the investor is in disbelief that a house in this price range can be sound and wants further proof.
Words probably can’t describe the plummeting feeling in my gut right now. The vaccuous sensation I have when, in my anticipation, I try to take a deep breath. My core is numb, my extremeties are heavy. I vascilate between anxiety to hear something informative and utter incredulity that this still has no real end in sight.

It’s not like this is rocket science! It’s a little house in a little town. We’re average people. If today passes with no firm word we’ll have to form a contingency plan and we have no idea what to start with, what to look for. I can’t even go there in my brain because whatever we decide to do will require yet another move in close range, as it will temporary.

For me, all I can do is wait and pray. Try not to stress totally out while children bicker and strain here in the Box Pen. David is working and trying to focus and make phone calls when he can.

I thought I rememberd reading about “seed cakes” in Song of Solomon. Turns out those were Raisin cakes the lovers were feeding each other. Still, Millet Cakes could do the job. It’s just that name…well, not just the name. First the average eater has to get past the fact that millet is birdseed in this country. Little round golden grains we feed to smaller varieties. Years ago we discovered that when you toast it in a skillet with butter it starts to smell potently like popcorn, and then you can cook it with water like oatmeal and top it with berries, butter, and maple syrup. It’s one of David’s favorite breakfasts ever.

But Nourishing Traditions has another suggestion: these cakes. Last night we had them for dinner, thinking that since we were already familiar with millet a bit that they’d be a good experiment. I guessed right :-). First you soak it for several hours in warm, salted water, just like you do other grains and legumes in NT. After that, you cook it until it’s soft (about 45 min) and has absorbed all of it’s water. Then you’re good to go for these “cakes”.

They are really patties. Think salmon patties or crab cakes without the “from the sea” mystique. To make them:

4 cups cooked millet

4 eggs

1/2 c. unbleached white flour

1/4 t. cayanne pepper

1 medium onion, chopped

1 bunch cilantro, chopped (heads up Blogless Leigh!)

3/4 c. grated parmesean cheese (I used pecorino romano)

mix that all together and drop by huge spoonfulls into a skillet with olive oil and butter in it. Flatten into a patty about  1/2-3/4 inch thick and cook until golden brown on each side.

They are fahbulous dahling. The kids devoured them and snuck seconds from the stack on the counter. When David got home close to midnight, he ate them cold from the fridge and declared them “a keeper”. They’d make a great side dish to grilled goodies, fish or chicken, or something spicy. We had them as a filling main dish; I didn’t even want my evening snack. Good grain protein, high in iron, fantastic fiber, and filling.

I’m going to keep a bowl of cooked millet in the fridge so I can whip these up quickly when needed. Now to do something about that name…

Surrounded by unbelievably accessible Tennessee beauty, we drove through hills and towns to Camp Buck Toms and retrieved who we now know, is one of the noisiest members of our family. In his absense, it was a quiet weekend!

His face was full of sleepy joy sitting there on the bench with his den buddies, waiting for us. He seemed fairly clean but all his gear was wet from the storm. He didn’t have a cold as I feared, nor was he overly releived to see us or be leaving. He had a BLAST. I’m so, so glad we dealt with our hesitations and let him go!

From the weekend, he hasn’t changed his undies in four days. He slept in his clothes. Never showered, nor was taken for the chance to do so (they swam too much, said he). His tent was flooded and he borrowed a sleeping bag to make it through the overnight backpacking trip. They didn’t serve a single vegetable. He’d had nothing but processed meat, ice cream, chocolate, milk, and popsicles for four days, and with no running water or flushing toilets, hadn’t gone in 4 days. The boys took turns searching each other for ticks and saw a snake in the latrine.

They also shot targets, did science experiments, built a bridge and a closed circuit and a catapoult. They hiked a trail, took a swimming test, and boated around the lake. They stayed up late, late, late talking, roasted marshmallows on the campfire, and got to know boys from other packs. They chased a skunk out from under a tent and killed spiders and ants and shared snacks from bear proof boxes.

I’m glad my birds are all back in the nest but I’m just as glad we booted him out and he got to fly a bit. Now, convincing him he needs a nap just might be harder than letting him go!

The back end of summer is in the air. You can sometimes feel it when the wind blows and the direction has changed. Just there in the lull between gusts, it feels of days to come. And some of the leaves are changing, probably due in part at least to a lack of water, but tulip poplars in the park are shades of gold and there on the grass as well. Trees that are lush and thick look tired at the edges…and heavy. We walked under a pregnant sky today and observed how rapidly the days have gone.

In some ways our lives have been still. A holding pattern of non-progress as we wait. Our own “expectancy” and in five more sleeps we will know if the air will break or not. I crave the active transition of it all, the crowning of our waiting, and the birth of Having Gotten Through It.

We will sleep and we will sit at table together again. We will do what married people do. We will educate and learn and explore. The light will change and so will the tones. It will be a new beginning as the calendar begins to die. Autumn has always meant vibrancy to me, almost more than spring until I’d lived my first one here. We are almost there.

My little boy camped in pouring rain last night. The worst of the storm went through that area. I seriously contemplated driving out there last night to check on him. It was a restless night.

We had plans for the farmer’s market and the library book sale today. Scratched them to conserve every penny for this upcoming, sure-to-be-full week. Had whole wheat pancakes (soaked flour overnight) and coffee instead. It’s been a quiet morning.

Thanks to a friend (Read Dr. H here) I’m writing this while listening to the Wailin’ Jennys and memorizing harmony. I’ve got a letter to an editor to tone down considerably (Doug Wilson ought to stay away from the topic of waterbirth and midwifery if he’s not willing to represent it correctly) before I send it and the entire idea of “toning down” to contemplate.

How much should we tone our opinions in order to cram them into the box labeled “Polite”? That box certainly serves a purpose and has merit. It’s next to the crate named “tact”… And if we stuff something too big into too small a box, and wipe away the overflow, have we lost the effectiveness entirely? Have we just made it very convenient to rearrange the shelf so that it’s hidden behind something else and can be ignored?

And I wonder, when someone puts ideas out there, but structures the format so as to not allow true interaction over those ideas, what the point is and when it’s best to just walk away, letting the yammering go on like so much noise.

We close on Wednesday next week so I made my meal plan through that day. It felt like a good place to put the break. In our transition to eating better, as I’ve been reading in Nourishing Traditions, I’ve broken down some steps to do in manageable ways. In some areas we already eat this way (real food, real fats rather than fake, eating seasonally to a large extent, and mostly whole foods). But there several areas we need to work on. Until we move and I can really focus on it more, I’m just tweaking a few basics we do:

making my pancakes with half whole-wheat flour and soaking it in buttermilk

sprouting my grains

eliminating sausage unti the day I can find some without nitrates or MSG

cutting back on sugar

We also are having a very tight week financially so I’m going to keep us to wild salmon (on sale and currently cheaper than most beef!) and bean protein this week. On the other side of this struggle is a good steak but not just yet

Saturday:

BK: pancakes and maple syrup

LN: Lentil Quesadillas

DN: Salmon, Snow Peas, Coconut Rice, fruit

Sunday:

BK: eggs and fruit

LN: Black-eyed Peas and Cornbread

DN: leftovers or snacks

Monday:

BK: Oatmeal and berries

LN: leftovers

DN: Millet Cakes, Green Beans, Melon

Tuesday:

BK: Banana Bread

LN: Leftovers
DN: Mexican Rice Casserole, Tomatoes from the garden, cheddar slices

Wednesday:

BK: Oatmeal and berries

LN: Leftovers
DN: take snacks and fruit for after the closing

Often when parents discuss different child training techniques, they are punitive. To spank or not to spank? What kind of restriction? What is their “currency” to control so you can, uh, motivate them?

A friend recently reminded me of an idea to get on the other side of rebellion. You know, with stubborn personalities (both children and parents sometimes!) a near competition can get going on “who’s going to win”. We keep upping the ante to get ‘em to break down and often they just dig their heels in deeper.

So she said, “just keep that child with you, by your side, all day.” Now there’s a thought! At first I remembered that when bugged by a persistant child who is refuting absolutely everything you say, distance is what is really craved. As in, “go to your room”. Or to make ‘em pay, like, “you will NOT go out with your friends until you obey.”

But maybe you don’t even tell the child that staying with mom for the day is the “punishment”. Just invite them to help you with breakfast. Or go sit on the edge of their bed first thing and rub their back. Find a way to spend some good one on one time with that child, shopping or working. Engage them constantly, as much as possible, while going about your day. It changes the momentum alright. A positive way to get on the other side and change the way things are flowing.

I gave it a shot yesterday and what I got in return was: a reminder of what a neat kid I have, an incredibly more open child to what I had to say, cooperativeness, unsolicited thanks for lunch together, a return to creative thought and willingness on his part to work with, rather than rail against, being in a family, and an offering of what he’s been thinking about and pondering.
It may not seem that a day of lunch and a milkshake, special back rubs and time spent talking without siblings around listening in is a very good “punishment” or “training method”. When we are focused on how to control another person because they won’t control themselves, “coming alongside” isn’t often what comes to mind. But getting on their level, being adult enough to back out of the show down, and give them some mental space while clearing the other priorities so that you can minister to whatever need they have certainly has a powerful effect.

Taking a slight break from Chicken-Carnage may be a good thing today. I put a crate over them in their nesting box and tied string around the door handles to make sure there was no way to open them. And we surrounded the base of the coop with different objects to thwart digging. My little trio of hens were cooing softly this morning, intact.  And so I get an opprotunity to move on a little.

I’ve been reading a FANTASTIC book this week.

Nourishing Traditions is a great companion to The Maker’s Diet, for those of you who’ve read that. It does for food and nutrition what The Total Money Makeover did for finances…it’s practical and inspirational and answers the question, “but how do I do this?”

We’re going to be stepping our nutrition up a much-needed knotch and I’m sooo excited about it! One thing about this book is that it’s not a trendy diet-of-the-moment or into deprivation of taste. A true omnivores bible, it starts by looking at native people, how they ate, and how it affected their health. It questions all the “scientific” stuff currently thrown at us that fragments our eating into unrelated events such as low-fat, low-carb, supplements and presents a more holistic view of our food is designed to work together. It’s absolutely inspiring with how tasty everything sounds, how wholesome, how good. I’m encourged to discover that I can heal, or at least improve, our family’s struggle with mood swings, hyperactivity, fungal issues, chronic and uncontrolled reflux, and maybe prevent cancer and neuro diseases as well. My children can be healthy and pink-cheeked and we can all feel better in general. Anemia is addressed, thyroid issues, memory loss….you name it, so many of what modern America stuggles with can be tied to the foods (and non-foods) we eat.

And so there will be many food adventures in the days to come! I”ve never really done any lacto-fermentation of veggies, made cheese or butter, stocks other than chicken, used whey…..and I”m busting with ideas! I’m going to take them in stages we can handle; we wont’ be going completely organic anytime soon due to cost but I know I’m at the place in my heart and head where I want to place more priority upon this.  It’s easy to say “we can’t afford that” and in many cases, and certainly this particular year, that would be the truth. But more often the truth is, “I don’t want to afford this” and that’s what I’m over.

Yesterday I visited a new store (to me) while in the city. It’s an old natural foods co-op that now houses a store. Their prices were MUCH better than the natural, shiny/happy grocery store in another part of town and the environment just a more relaxed, personal, comfortable one. I felt like I could use my cloth grocery bags and be in a skirt with birks and my four kids and fit right in, whereas in the other place, I feel like the staff is bothered by children, they’d frown on my own containers, and natural is good but in that glossy-magazine way. Sure there’s a place for that and I’d still take that version over what the mainstream offers but I just felt more at home and more true-to-myself in the smaller place. And I liked that unlilke the big store’s asphalt parking lot full of SUV’s where the trendy shop, this one had a gravel lot full of cars that had that “paid for” look, if you kwim….

And so I picked up the latest version of Mothering

(which has a great article on why we need a breastfeeding culture and the constant barrage of images of babies being fed with bottles and what effect that has on us )

and some great bottled teas and chatted up the cashier about how to join.  I’d rather put my money in a membership there for bulk goodies than at Sam’s and contribute to more asphalt foot-ball fields!!

Two days ago, lost in the chicken drama, was the fact that we ate plates full of our corn harvest!! We boiled it just as soon as it was picked and it was soooo good! Not overly sweet since it’s hadn’t had time for the starch to turn to sugar (or vise versa, however that works), it was just so darned “corny” :-). The ears were small, sometimes even tiny, since I didn’t water enough and their whole month of coming-to-maturity was spent in near drought. But they dripped with salty butter and left us proud of our effort and the delicous pay off.

Over the weekend we ate at a friend’s home and came as close to a “totally local” meal as we ever have! She is the same friend who told me about Nourishing Traditions in the first place and in many ways is a fun kindred spirit. She served produce from the farmer’s market: cabbage, cantelope, squash and onions, and we had lentil quesadillas. Please disregard my earlier lentil experiment; now I know what they are suposed to taste llike I know I was no-where close!!!

She sprouts and cooks hers and then puts a scoopful on a sprouted grain tortilla with some olive oil. Topped with tomatoes and montery jack cheese and cumin, it’s then folded over and grilled on both sides. The result is  a meaty, wholesome, filling pocket of wonder. If the bowl of sprouted lentils was maintained in the fridge, it can also be a rather fast meal, helping to eliminate the overuse of fast food we’ve currently been struggling with.

And so, with the exception of the cooking oils, lentils, and tortillas, the meal was all local and seasonal. We had sweet fellowship and watched an awesome sunset and our kids played a version of soccer-basketball amid the fireflies.

Food is awesome, ain’t it? We need it to live and yet it never ceases to be a constant area of discovery and adventure.  I’ll be posting about my food-fun and how it affects my menus in the weeks to come. Life is never boring and neither should our food, in my not so humble opinion!

This morning we woke to find Richard gone and tons of yellow feathers everywhere. There are also feathers of another kind, white with brown tips, indicating whatever attacker I’m battling is fowl.

Hmmpf. Foul indeed.

I have no idea how it penetrated our fortress. The doors were locked. It can’t be lifted by anyone less than two grown adults. There are no large gaps between the coop and the ground, only very narrow ones.

This is a supreme feeling of powerlessness. It’s times like this when I am faced with a contrast of thoughts:

1-”I should probably just wait until we move to replenish the flock and cut my losses.”

2-”Imagine not so long ago, when farmers faced this problem and there were no food stores or supermarkets for back up.”

It’s not so unlike watching a little “crop” of veggies get eaten by bugs or die from drought. We are privleged so that we won’t starve in such a scenario but life is precarious for many others, both past and present.

Richard was a sweet rooster chick and already very protective of his little group of hens. I’m sure he died sheltering the others from harm. Ugh….what to do, what to do.

So the story continues….

Saturday I woke up still waiting for the lumber store to call with my completed order. David and I talked about it and he was willing to spend the day taking over working on it with me and called the store to see where the order was. They hadn’t even gotten to it and thought it might take into Monday! Jeez Louise….he cancelled the order and brainstormed for some better ideas. After a trip to home depot for 1 x 4’s we got started on cutting slats for the side panels.

But first he insisted on taking the whole thing apart. Remember I couldn’t get it to do so? Well, he bought a hack saw and cut the screws right off. We worked together getting the A-frames to square up better which was really a two-adult job. I spent a few hours with my nose in a snit, having been demoted from project designer/builder to “A-frame holder upper” but my project highjacker knight in shining armour just quietly built alongside me and waited paitently let me have my turn with the drill now and then.

Eventually I had to surrender to how beautiful the thing was turning out having two of us at it. Wow! It’s gorgeous. Sturdy and square. We painted it dark brown and I”m going to stencil a large white silouette of a rooster on the center door. It has overhang on the roof line on each end so I can hang pots or windchimes. It needs either wheels or pallbears to move (way over-engineered) but it’s the perfect city chicken ark. Our biggest problem area was the doors and that’s where it still would have been better to have an electric saw to rip it more to size. There are little gaps but they were unavoidable. And we painted everything first before putting on hardware so the job is clean and bright.

We worked until 10 last night to get it done. Andrew was inside hammering the wire to the edge rails, Celia kept baby busy, and W handed us stuff. At 10 I was making chicken salad sandwiches, chips and cookies and we were on shower rotation while our biddie babies were nested in their new house. They had a peaceful, quiet night and seem quite happy! They are much more secure at any rate and I’m bustin’ proud of das chicken haus!!

Like the orthodontist’s kid with great teeth, so I have I been with wood products. I grew up with a wood shop everywhere we lived and the craftsman running things for a dad. So I guess it’s only natural I’ve taken some big things for granted in that regard. Picture Frame? No problem! He’d whip one up in a few mintues. Box? Shelves? He’s probably got scraps to do just that. Bigger stuff like, oh say…whole kitchens? Well, he’d put me on “the list”, and sooner or later, there it’d be. He was my Geanie in the Woodshop.

While tackling my first building project, and what a big one it’s turned out to be, I’ve had to confront a few things. For instance, I wasted a good too-many years letting wood stuff be the “man thing” when I enjoy the smell of sawdust and wood glue on my hands. I’m a math-idiot but they now make tape measures for people just like me, with little fractions written right on them! I know cuz Dad bought me one ;-). I like the hands-on concreteness of solid material and how it makes sense of stupid theorems (sp LOL) that were baffling on paper. Another thing to confront: my fear of power tools.

Why in the world would I be afraid of power tools!?! I’ve been around them forever. Great big ones even. I think I have such a strong respect for their power that they’ve intimidated me. One, with the help of one tiny piece of wood, almost killed my dad 13 or so years ago. Or nearly took the use of his hand, which might have been the same thing.  They are loud, sharp, and horror film makers like to display what neat things they can do with….flesh, blood, bone….you get the idea.

This fear has gotten me out of many, many jobs on project day. My hubby has hung shelves I could have figured out myself. I’ve made a total mess out of plaster and drywall because they needed a screw rather than a nail. And I’ve not cut anything until this week. I’ve got the incredibly sore arms and neck muscels to remind me of how hard that really is!

And today was the biggie. I went to home depot and they wouldn’t cut my wood. They “only do straight cuts at the end of boards”, said they. Contractor-lady suggested the lumber store “because they make things”. Oh. Said lumber store actually has a wonderful store and wood shop. For just a few minutes I battled homesickness thickly as I walked amid the table saws and noticed their nifty ventilation systems and duct work keeping the sawdust under control. A very kind man with very crossed eyes took my order, painstakingly going over my measurements, and trying very much to talk me into better wood. And then I asked how much it would cost.

OUCH!!! (Twist and roll around on the floor in nauseating sickness). Wow. It’s not that his time isn’t worth it…..I don’t begrudge him that one second. But it sure adds into the project’s bottom line cost. I’ve never in my life paid to have wood cut. And I can tell you this honey-child…it will be the last time.

Cuz this Red Head is going to take her little “Living Deliberately” self  and learn how to use a power saw. It might be a little tiny cute one to start with and I might tremble and shake, but this is one fear I can’t afford to coddle. Maybe there’s another reason they call them “power” tools, besides how they get their energy!