Life in Image.

a bee on elderberry blossoms.
volunteer summer squash with chicken rosie.
the tumble of our garden.
miss ce and i camping last weekend.
two of our rhode island reds take a break from the heat of the day.

Invisible Cleaning

The thing about having a 1-year old and not being a neat freak is that your house is not the neatest place. When it was Rafi and I and a few animals and I had pregnancy cleaning hormones the house was able to hold up appearances for a few days after I cleaned (despite not having a kitchen sink), but now that we have a monkey flying around the house things seem to fall apart rather quickly. Now I've resigned myself to that chair in the music room being a catch-all, I mean it has to be! And the basket in the hallway, well it's as designed for it to fill with things. And then the closets are a never-ending cycle of fill with items, get partially organized, fill with items, get partially organized.... you get the idea. I remember reading in the postpartum books about excepting the decline in household chores, to learn to make peace with that, but it's exhausting to live in an unorganized house! I can never find what I'm looking forward, and I know somewhere there's a blank sketchbook just waiting for me, but to access it, phooooo, that's a different story.

What I realize is that so many things that I do are completely invisible, or perhaps it's visible cleaning, it just disappears too quickly for me to revel in it.

(Stay Tuned, I'm planning on posting pictures tomorrow morning!)

staking our claim

Since I have a daughter who always wants to be outside... squawks and cries of outrage at the very thought of coming indoors away from the chickens. We have been spending many hours outside; until recently this has felt like a chore to me with a long list of Momma duties to be comfortable there... sunscreen, sunhat, fear of red ants, constant chasing of our 1 year-old... It was not relaxing for me to be outside, as I raced Cecilia away from dangers, and sitting in the yard on a sunny afternoon ought to be extremely relaxing I thought.

So I started making obstacles and boundaries for our child. Common items that were already in the yard have slowly been coming together to create a safe place for Miss. Ce. The canoe and picnic table have been moved for one fence line; the chicken pen, it's cover and our sailboat create another fence line. I have chairs and wheelbarrows strategically placed to suggest gateways. We have many sources of entertainment, our little hens run loose, the kiddie pool and sprinkler are available plus many toys to dig in the dirt pile with. We also have friends visit making for plenty of activity. I'm even able to carve out some places in the shade with my sketchbook to get a few pen lines to paper!

There is still plenty of chasing that happens, and we have plans to create some fences for our in-town yard, but until then we're going to enjoy being outside and safe! It's been an excellent lesson in being content with what we have... I'd been feeling myself thinking our yard was inferior and that we didn't live somewhere where a child could run free, but! We have so much right where we are! Just putting a little energy into our space has helped me to enjoy it, and of course sharing with friends makes a HUGE difference.

How has enjoying outside summertime helped shift your perspective?

5:40am

I am feeling thankful for the solo morning latte.

Listening to the sounds of a girl upstairs and her sleepy papa.

Can see some morning light through the wet looking clouds.

Am pleased to see an overcast sky!

And have enjoyed 2 weeks of hot sunny bliss.

Hope we have more of them for outside playtime with kiddie pool, friends and free-ranging new young hens.

Am looking forward to a weekend of peace and quiet.

And am anticipating missing my family!

Liberated by our new family schedule.

Feeling grateful for good friends you can wile away hours with on the beach.

Appreciating the new space I'm carving out in this bliggity-blog of mine.

The Local Food Lady Eats a Marshmallow with Her Husband.

You know how I feel about local foods, right? I mean it, it's lifestyle for me. We have our specialty import items...fair-trade coffee, brooklyn bagels, basic grains, peanut butter, condiments. I am constantly attempting to pair down what we buy from outside the State of Maine (I ought to add New Brunswick to the mix, considering proximity) Each meal I attempt to use as many items from in county as possible. I love that it's so fresh, I love that I could call up my farmer or producer and have a conversation about the current weather pattern, it's one of the ways I feel that our family can make a difference.

It's a different mentality though, that's for sure, and it's a lot more work! It makes for a lot more planning ahead, and as a sometimes chef I become limited by the season/availability as to what we eat. It's also more expensive there's no question, but as a family we've come to prioritize the cost of local living and budget accordingly. We feel the benefit to our health and community far outweigh the additional financial cost and inconvenience. I also feel proud of my role in supporting and helping to distribute the local food system.

All that being said, there are exceptions, there are always exceptions. Like sometimes you go on a camping trip and you have to buy hotdogs (nitrate free!) and marshmallows and graham crackers and chocolate (fair-trade!) and you have to eat them with homemade picallili and commercial celery salt and after you've eaten them with organic hotdog buns from the health food store you can admit your mistake and say that we should of gotten the commercial lack of nutrition and fiber content buns, because you're eating a hot dog, by the firside for crying out loud! And sometimes values don't weigh on the side of health and locality, but on the side of aesthetic and tradition. I love the space where that all overlaps, and walking the line, and thinking about making a beautiful Venn Diagram someday to chart our movements through food.

Space For Gardening

My garden is growing without me. Sure I weeded the whole thing once (really once) and out there the garlic is practically ready to harvest. The Shelling Peas may be in the most jumbled falling over rows, but they are producing and I have 2 tomato plants, 1 got staked, the other neglected, but I see fruit on those 2! The kale is rampant, though needing to be thinned, I had a dream of having a full raised bed bed of kale this year (that's a quarter of my garden!) I do have some turnips and chard and non germinated carrots and volunteer red leaf lettuce amongst those kale varieties, but I expect a fall abundant in kale soups and a summer of massaged kale salads.

The real issue is the weeds in the pathways that make me feel as though I'm neglecting my garden. You see this year Rafi and I made a pledge to not use the gas mower in our yard. Instead we are using human power and scything it. As you can imagine this has made for a more overgrown sense to our yard, but we feel really good about this decision. There is no 2-stroke engine creating sound and air pollution in our yard, it feels like one of the only small ways we can make a difference in energy efficiency in our lives this year. Anyways it's very difficult to trim raised bed paths with a scythe, so there are weeds around my garden, tall ones, flowering ones. Weeds I'd like to remove.

In better cared for gardening news, we have a new shrub/perennial bed this year. It is flourishing, producing blooms and medicinals and mulched with seaweed. I'm so proud of my elderberry specifically, I want the same pride in me entire garden... So universe, here's a request for some baby free, cool hours this week to work in the garden.

Wonder, explored in 3 permutations.

A summer squash grows, and I lifted not a finger.

How long should I let Cecilia play with the wrinkly potatoes from last season that in all rights should become seed potatoes?

That 2 years has passed since we slept in that tent.

Over the last month I've been noticing some suspicious looking leaves cropping up in my chicken pen. Now there's a weed up here that looks an awful lot like some sort of squash, so I was waiting it out, that and I assumed they'd never survive the pecking of the chickens, but lo and behold it seems I have 4 summer squash plants growing in and around my chicken pen! Get this, there's even a blossom and squash forming on one.

This girl can climb, she can reach and she has clear motives of things she wants to get in. I find one of the largest jobs as a parent is deciding which option is safe for her to continue exploring and which I need to intervene in. I can often help her with activities that are questionable, making them much safer, however often she must just explore on her own. There are so many scrapes and scratches and tumbles and surprises, but I feel ultimately this will help her to learn her own boundaries. (currently she is exploring a shelling pea shell she found and is trying to lick out the peas!)

It was 2 years ago that we went camping in Vermont in that very tent, the summer we discovered Cecilia was growing inside me. Life has changed! I wonder how all of this time could have possibly passed, it feels like a lifetime ago, a different era of us, a different version of myself. Woooooshhhh..... Life change in an almost instant! And this weekend we leave to camp once more, on the way to a friends wedding, this time with child and husband in tow!

A note of apology for the lack of photos on my site... Someday time/money will allow for me to have a computer upgrade, but for the time being the sllloooooww processor in my 8 year-old machine will have to do, and there will be a photo gap. If I'm always waiting until I have enough patience to upload photos then I would never post and I'm assuming some news is better than just getting pictures?