Just In Time

I made this jaunty little jacket to wear on my trip (and 'cause I needed a spring jacket):

(Photo by Z)

using the fabric and pattern I bought last month. I'm actually quite impressed with myself for getting it done (I even figured out how to machine-sew buttons!). It did come at a price. I had to be extra-b*tchy Mom all day last Saturday (Z and M kept coming in and asking me for things, "Mom, do you have any thread?" "Mom can you tie my shoe?" "Mom, do you know where X is?" After about a dozen interruptions from each of them, E, who had been outside, minding his own business, came in to ask me something, only when he shouted, "Mom!" from the bottom of the stairs, I had heard that word one too many times and snapped, "WHAT!!!" Poor kid. I had to go outside and toss him the wiffle ball about a hundred times to make up for my meanness.

Have a great week. When I get back, I'll have a guest post and giveaway from Kim of The Motherhood Muse as part of her blog tour. So do come back for that, and in the meantime, check out the other blogs on the tour.

Leavin

Early tomorrow morning I'll be flying out of Augusta on a jet plane (at least I hope it's a jet plane...the Augusta airport is about half the size of your average Old Navy...I keep envisioning sitting in a sardine can on the back of an albatross!).

I'm heading to Denver for this conference, and to spend some time with family and friends, no boys allowed (well, I suppose, in a city of a few million, there might be a few boys, but I did not give birth to or marry a single one of them, so they are not my responsibility). I keep whip-sawing between being two states of being. On the one end of the saw I am wicked excited to escape--escape from the constant drone of gratuitous noise that emanates from all four males in this household; escape from the steady hum of the word "Mo-o-om!" (the only time I will hear that word for a whole entire week will be in reference to my mom!); escape from our daily routines, which I have begun to think of as "rounds" (as in a boxing match); escape from in-laws who think hazardous waste makes an excellent child's toy; escape from the tyranny of the computer and the havoc it is wreaking on my wrists, shoulders and eyes; escape, even, from myself (sometimes I hover over my own head, listening to myself talk, and I just want to smack me). Maybe I should have scheduled a week at a spa, or a monastery, or in a sensory deprivation chamber.

On the other end, I'm consumed with guilt and anxiety, and a little bit of an urge to just stay home and give the kids haircuts, clean out the filing cabinet and pull out the hand-me-down bins to find the boys' spring and summer clothes. I have a little bit of a sensation that all hell is going to break loose after the plane takes off. There is some basis for this sensation; every imaginable (and unimaginable) scheduling conflict that could possibly arise has presented itself for the upcoming week: C has a class in Portland two mornings that starts at 8 a.m.--M's bus comes at 7:30; E and Z's school opens at 7:45; Portland is an hour away. M's school scheduled the spring concert for Thursday night. The boys are invited to a birthday party Saturday afternoon. M has baseball practice Saturday morning. C has agreed to give a workshop at a home and garden show Saturday afternoon, at the same time as the birthday party. E and Z are on snack duty at school this week--two snacks per kid per day for 24 kids all week. M has a project due at school the day after I get back. And a film crew is coming to our house to film C for a "Hardest Working Man in America" movie. Don't even ask me about that one. I have the sinking sensation that the occasional barking cough E has is going to blow up into some major illness (I'm in the middle of reading Hope Edelman's The Possibility of Everything, so I may be somewhat influenced by that book; at least our resident imaginary friend, Tom Lighthouse, hasn't made an appearance in a while, so we should be all set on the "child possessed by demons" front). Oh yeah, and my boss's, boss's boss--the head honcho--scheduled a meeting with me for 9:30 the morning after I fly in. Talk about hitting the ground running.

I keep trying to remind myself about the time last year when C went to his grandfather's funeral in Florida, and it was really, really cold, and snowing, and Z, my febrile seizure baby, had a fever and we were all out of children's ibuprofen, and all we had was an old bottle of infant Tylenol that had come out of emulsion into a grainy soup, and I had to help M make a model of an avalanche out of cardboard and cotton balls for a school project. And there was another time, when Cwas away, and I had to drive around with Z, who had stomach flu, in the back of the car, taking all of our returnables to the bottle drive at the soccer field, and into town to get ginger ale and crackers. And I survived. And they'll survive. And I'll resume where I left off, perhaps a few paces back in the Red Queen's Race. I'll have to pick up the pace a bit to get back where I am now, which is barely in sight of where I want to be.

Easter

Whew! Another holiday successfully celebrated and done. Now we have a bit (a very tiny bit) of a lull until Birthday Season.

We keep our Easter festivities simple, and though I have cooked Easter dinner in the past (no, not a ham--spanikopita!), every time I thought about the effort involved, my body went into spasms of anxiety, plus the weather was predicted to be very nice, so we decided to continue last year's tradition, of going for a hike and eating out.

But first, a little decorating. We refreshed the nature table for Easter.

It had gotten a bit crowded with all our hand-painted wooden eggs, so it now we have overflow onto a nature windowsill.

I knitted a few Easter eggs from Kendra's pattern in Rhythm of the Home. Super easy. They live in a bowl I knitted for a decoration last spring, but didn't get finished until this Chrismas (when a friend with a top-loading washer and lots of wood-heated hot water felted it for me. Maybe I'll have her felt the eggs before next Easter).

Saturday afternoon we dyed some eggs.

I tried using red cabbage, beets, turmeric and paprika, which I know I have done successfully in the past (including last year), but I guess the stars weren't aligned this weekend, or because I decided to wing it, and only got out directions after it wasn't working out, but all I was succeeding in dyeing was our stovetop,

so I added a few squirts of blue, yellow and green food coloring that I found in the back of the cabinet (we were already out of red, and I used the last drops of green and somehow lost the blue, so I won't have that for an out next year!).

I can't bear to let anything go to waste, so we dyed some scraps of muslin with the leftover egg dye (the beets worked much better on the cloth than the eggs!). Not sure what we'll do with these, but they were fun to make.

Like with our Christmas Traditions, M just wasn't into egg dyeing. He dropped a couple of eggs in, then headed off to do his own thing. It makes me kind of sad that he's growing up so fast! I can picture myself alone in the kitchen dying eggs like some lonely old spinster in a couple of years when all of my kids are off doing more interesting things.

I went a bit overboard with the Easter candy this year. I think I feel the need to follow a period of deprivation (e.g. Buy Nothing month, getting the plastic out, etc.) with a period of over-indulgence/consumption. It must date back to a childhood of giving up candy every lent (NOT voluntarily, I'd like to point out) and then pigging out on Easter. Anyway, after eating all of the first batch of Easter candy, I ordered some chocolate bunnies from this organic chocolate place my friend was putting in an order to (they came wrapped in bubble wrap! Grr.), bought some jelly beans at the health food store, some yogurt-covered pretzels and chocolate-covered pretzels from the bulk bins at the grocery store and re-stocked on jelly bellies, fruit slices and Dutch mints at the place I went to the first time.

We have about a million plastic eggs which are apparently offspring of the original 12 I bought when M was little, that spend the rest of the year reproducing in a box in the basement. C filled them with jelly beans and yogurt raisins and hid them around the living room and kitchen. The boys got up early to go on the hunt (E was ready to go at 2 a.m. and we both lay in bed, wide awake, for a couple of hours, waiting for morning)! Amazing how much fun such simple things can be (Z kept saying he wants every day to be Easter).

I also got each boy a book and a small notebook. I was trying to resist buying any "stuff," but they've gotten a book every Easter their whole lives, and I'd already gotten one of the Beatrix Potter books at a discounted price from a used/overstock bookstore (M got Charlie and the Chocolate Factory--that's what Easter is all about , right?)

I also made some little bird nests with peanut butter, chocolate chips and rice cereal. Mostly these are for me.

I was going to make brioche for breakfast, but decided at the last minute to make challah instead (yes I do see the irony there), because I'd made it a few weeks ago, and knew it turned out well. Unfortunately I'd forgotten that it had taken all day to rise, so that when I put the dough in the fridge Saturday night, I fully expected it to have doubled by morning, but when I took it out at 5:45 a.m. nothing had happened. So I put it in a warm oven for an hour, still noting. I kneaded it and put it in a warm oven and an hour later it had risen a bit. Finally, after another hour and a half, dough nowhere close to double, I gave up, rolled and braided and let it rise on top of a warm oven. In the meantime we at hard-boiled eggs, fruit salad and candy for breakfast. The bread came out of the oven just at almost 11, and we took it on our hike, eating torn-off hunks with pieces of cheese and apple for a snack. It was delicious and very Heidi-esque. I think a loaf of fresh bread will be a hiking staple from here on out.

We headed to Dodge Point, fully expecting the warm weather to be tempered by breezes off the water as it usually is, but the air was still and sunny and beautiful. I felt something I haven't felt in a long time--hot. It was incredible.

The boys did the whole three- or four-mile loop with little complaint (E and Z were ready to "be home by now" for about the last half mile). We took lots of breaks to explore beaches.

E and Z found a horseshoe crab shell, which I had the thrill of carrying for about a mile before they decided they didn't want to keep it. And Z found a smoothed-out deer antler to put on our nature table.


This big root mass was the highlight. I think if we weren't all already tired out by the time we got to this point, the boys could have played in this for hours.

The Motherhood Muse and April One Small Change

The Spring issue of The Motherhood Muse (Secret Gardens) e-zine is available today!

This issue includes my Mother Nature's Muse literary reflections column featuring Louise Erdrich's wonderful book, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year, and many more great pieces of writing. I admittedly have only had time to read half of my advance copy, but I've enjoyed everything I've read so far. You can purchase this issue for $4 or subscribe for $14.

April Change

My One Small Change for April is to recognize that hoarding is not the same as recycling, and find homes or recycling options for many of the things hanging around our basement that I'm not sure how to recycle, but that I can't bear to throw in the trash (a bag of toothbrushes, vinyl zipper bags, 3.5 inch floppy disks, etc.). I kicked it off earlier this week, taking a one-gallon (plastic) Ziploc bag of plastic cutlery to the kitchenette at my office. Most of the forks and spoons came with an apartment we rented like 15 years ago (the rest came in with various take-out meals), and while I never use plastic cutlery (and if I do I wash and re-use it), I for some reason never offered them up to anyone who does--because then they would get thrown away. But now at least they will get to fork up a few bites of cake before their final demise. Even though this is the final month of the official challenge, it's never too late to make One Small Change. In fact, I'm thinking about keeping it going all year.

Getting the Plastic Out: Kitchen Edition, Wrap-up

Part I: Dinnerware and Storage

Before I start telling you about my efforts (i.e. frustrations) in reducing plastic food packaging, let me tell you about my big, falling-off-the-buy-nothing wagon purchase in February. One morning last month, C broke Z's sapphire blue Fiesta cereal bowl. Z was, understandable, upset. However, I assured him that I could get him a new one. While I was at it, I figured, why not order three additional cereal bowls and three more tumblers, so we can get rid of all of the plastic bowls and cups we use when the ceramic ones are in the dishwasher? And maybe get M a dessert-sized plate to go with his set, and E and Z each luncheon plates? With shipping and handling, it all added up to over $70. But if I spent $100, shipping would be free. So I threw in three more tumblers and three more cereal bowls and a cake plate for myself, which tipped the total to just over $100. Now if I had just driven down to the Cook's Emporium in Bath, I would have seen that the cereal bowls cost $2 more in the store than they do online, and I would either have bought only the bowl or nothing at all. Isn't it amazing how easily the Internet can trick you into spending way more money than you ever would in real life? The worst part is that the dishes came in a huge box full loaded with foam packing peanuts (despite my request for non-plastic or recycled packaging). I did drop them off at a mailing center for re-use, but so much for eliminating plastic!! (But don't they look purdy? And I have to say those tumblers are the best! Very heavy-bottomed so you have to try pretty hard to spill your milk, unlike plastic cups that tip over if you breathe on them!)

Here's the bag of plastic plates and bowls--destined for GoodWill--they're going to replace. I put the plastic cups in the bathrooms for tooth brushing and saved out a few cups, plates and bowls for outdoor dining and picnics. (The yogurt containers I'll save for freezing strawberries and other garden produce this summer).

I am keeping most of our plastic storage containers. They are handy for lunches, and since they're all #5 (polypropylene), I'm not too worried about chemicals leaching out of them (I know there have been some reports of chemicals associated with #5, but I spend all of my work days reading about chemicals in consumer products, and that's not an area where concern has risen above a few blogs). Plus, we never heat up anything or put hot foods in them. And, from a solid waste perspective, I think it would be unconscionable to just toss perfectly good items such as these:

When they do finally die, though (many of the lids are cracking already), I want to replace them with more of these:

I do love my Martha Steward Every Day glass storage containers (despite their plastic lids). Though I suppose I'll need to get more of the glass-lidded types. I'd love to get more antique ones like that blue Pyrex, but C hates them because they're not dishwasherable. For portable food (can't exactly pack glass in school lunchboxes), I bought E, Z and M each one of those LunchBots. I really like that they're rectangular(ish), rather than round, and this model has a divider so I can send them two things in one, but the paint started to chip off the lids, so I was not going to even consider getting more, until last week they (completely unsolicited--I hadn't gotten around to emailing them yet) sent me replacement lids. Apparently one batch had bad paint jobs. So if the new lids work out, I'll probably be buying more in the future.

And we do use some plastic bags--we don't buy them, but they make their way into our home in various ways, and we make use of them until they begin to fall apart. Here's our bag-drying system:

Part II: Food Packaging

I must say that trying to reduce (I don't even consider elimination an option at this point) the in-flow of single-use, disposable plastic in the kitchen department has been, for the most part, an exercise in frustration. I received this comment from Lone Star Ma on my previous kitchen post:

"I really don't get how you do all this stuff while working and raising kids. I would be impressed if you were an at-home mommy, but as it is, I am just baffled. I have one less kid than you do, and mine are girls, and so probably can go longer without getting hurt/fighting and I already get much, much, much less sleep than I truly need to, not to mention practically no exercise except in the summer/other vacations resulting in my dangerous fatness, and I cannot imagine forgoing all of the convenience crap that is sending me to hell for sure because I just don't think I can function well enough or drive my kids around if I cut the sleep allocation down to three hours a night. Are there two of you?"

Amen, Sister. No there are not two of me, and no I sure as hell do not make homemade crackers and cereal every weekend. That was, truly, a one-time experiment. Though the cereal was not difficult to make, it was time-consuming and it only made enough to fill one small (plastic) container--about two cups, I think, or, in other words, four bowls of cereal (M wouldn't even touch it because it looked soggy). No way in H E double hockey sticks am I doing that every weekend. So it was back to granola, which, I may have mentioned, I don't really think is all that healthful (all that maple syrup! And are partially-cooked grains even digestible??). One evening last week, as I was sitting down to sew, I remembered, "Oh, sh*t, I have to make granola!" And once I started making the granola, I remembered that the homemade deodorant that had been almost gone for a month was really and truly gone and since I was in the kitchen already, why not make more? And my commentary on all of this: "My life sucks!"

To really and truly eliminate incoming plastic from the kitchen would be a full-time job, and while I greatly admire what Beth at Fake Plastic Fish and Kyce at Old Recipe for a New World have done and continue to do in this realm, I am not ready to take on another full-time job. I can handle baking bread every week--I've been doing it for a couple of years and it is by now almost a mindless task (though I was cooking two other things in the kitchen last week while making bread, and I kind of forgot about the loaves, which deflated by the time I put them in the oven, so a bit of mindfulness would be helpful). In a pinch, I mix, knead and raise the dough in the evening and put the loaves in the oven to rise overnight; as long as I remember to get up early enough to put them in the oven, we can have fresh hot bread that morning. I can also handle making yogurt--if I make two jars at a time, I only need to make it every-other-week; and with out farm-fresh milk, it is completely plastic-free, as long as I don't run out of old yogurt before I start new. Beyond that, we make most of our food from scratch (pasta sauce, tortillas, soups, etc.). C even makes homemade pasta once a month or so (him being the one with the Italian genes). But still, we need ingredients for all of these things.

There are not a lot of bulk-buying options around here, but I do get many things through a natural foods co-op (or buying club). I buy flour (white, whole wheat and pastry whole wheat) in 50-pound (paper) bags and rice in 25 pound (paper) bags.

Coffee, though, comes in 4- or 5- pound plastic bags and tea (green and black) in one-pound Mylar bags. C is the coffee and green tea drinker; I only took up black tea recently.

Canned tomatoes (for our sauce and soup) come on a flat, shrink-wrapped. Next time, though, I think I'll buy the BioNatura pureed tomatoes in a jar. Even though there are 4 ounces fewer and the jars cost nearly a dollar more each, it will reduce our BPA exposure (the lids of glass jars still have BPA), and my plastic. I had already switched to glass ketchup and oil bottles last year, so that (other than lids and tamper-evident seals) all of our bottle things come in glass.

Spaghetti comes in a five-pound box, with a plastic bag inside. Ditto quinoa and red lentils. And cheese--we buy in five-pound blocks, you guessed it, wrapped in plastic.

And "splits"--where we break down a big case of something into smaller portions for people, usually get bagged in plastic, depending on who is doing the breakdown. At our co-op meeting, I quietly suggested we go plastic-free, but I think I need to get more assertive in may campaign.

I have also started buying a few bulk items from the limited selection that I recently discovered at a local grocery store. At first I agonized over how to package them--reuse old plastic bags? No, they get lost in my car and usually already have a different price label on them. Make cloth bags? No time, no time. Finally, I remembered one of C's relatives, for some reason, gave us a package of 100 brown paper lunch bags. The boys have reusable lunch bags, so they were just languishing on the craft supply shelf. Now I keep a couple of them with me, so that I can fill them up (and reuse them if I don't buy something greasy) when I'm at that store. The only problem is I usually just end up buying snacks instead of staples (and I do feel bad that I'm taking business away from the small, locally-owned health food store...which prepackages all of is bulk foods in plastic bags)! I have also found that the grocery store has the following unpackaged organic produce (most organic produce is bagged or shrink-wrapped on Styrofoam trays, which kinda defeats the point of it being organic, doncha think?): collards, Swiss chard, beets, lettuce, fresh herbs, scallions and sometimes oranges (though they cost way more than the ones at the health food store). I put these into a nylon grocery bag (which doesn't stop the moisture from leaking through, but who cares?).

The Bottom Line

The problem of our oceans becoming a soup of plastic bits is a global environmental crisis of ozone-hole proportions, and is going to require international action of the Montreal Accord stature if anything meaningful is to be done. But I don't see it as an issue that has even made a bleep on the radar screens of our world leaders. Which sucks, because plastic right now, for the consumer, is the default option. It is just too much to expect consumers to "vote with their dollars." Especially when, as far as I can tell, most people don't even get it, or care. And most of those of us who do, can't make a full-time job of avoiding plastic.

As for me? On Monday I sent C to the store to buy a (plastic) bag of breakfast cereal.

New Furniture!

Sunday morning, after writing group, I popped into a nearby antiques mall and picked up this little sewing cabinet--on sale!

It came stocked with old polyester thread of Styrofoam spools, a bag of ribbon snippets and various old notions--bias tape, yellowing elastic, ancient zippers.

There were a few wooden spools, though, and a velvet strawberry (a friend of mine tells me these are stuffed with emery, for sharpening dull needles),

and these little "cotton mushrooms," made in West Germany, which tells you how old they are. I don't know what one does with cotton mushrooms, but they're pretty darn cute anyway.

I cleaned it up with some strong black tea (I rarely listen to advice from my mother-in-law, but she tells me she learned this trick from the Antiques Road Show, and it seemed to work well--I could smell years' worth of Lemon Pledge lifting away), and replaced this mess:

With this:

Don't you think it looks especially classy next to the giant Rubbermaid container of fabric? Oh well, baby steps.

Craft(ing) Versus Writing

I know lots of people expecting babies in the imminent future, so I've been working on this pile of baby shoes. They're from this tutorial at baremaked. Very simple, very easy and a bit miraculous the way they come together. I have no idea how people come up with these things, because I've already finished four shoes and I'm not altogether sure how it works. It just does.


Anyway, the outside is this super-cute Japanese print of The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids (thanks to our Storytelling efforts, I now know what the heck is going on there) that I bought last Thanksgiving. I only know that one baby is for sure (as sure as anyone can be about these things) a boy, but why can't girls wear adorable powder-blue shoes, hmm?


Right next to my sewing table, above my "writing table" (a.k.a. old telephone table), I have posted this list, "10 Methods to Find More Time to Write." The first item on the list: "Prioritize your time. If writing habitually ends up at the bottom of your priorities list, you can hardly expect to accomplish much."

Sitting there, sliding tiny elastics through tiny casings one night after work last week, I wondered about this. Should I have been spending this precious quiet hour, between lights out in the kids' room and lights out in mine, writing, instead of turning teeny tiny shoes right side out with a chopstick?

Why do I choose to spend my quiet moments crafting (yes I have finally broken down and turned that blasted noun into a verb...I never thought it could happen to me) instead of writing? My skill level is not, and never will be, above "intermediate," so it's not like I'm churning out one-of-a-kind object d'art that the world would suffer without. After thinking it over for some time, these are the reasons my hands more often find their way to handwork than computer work in my downtime:

--I spend eight hours a day, five days a week staring into a computer screen. My eyes get tired. My wrists ache. The last thing I want to do when I get home is go anywhere near a computer.

--I spend all day working with words--one day last week I had open in various windows five documents on one topic, ranging from 60-odd to 900-odd pages; I read them all and gleaned enough information to write, oh say, a paragraph in my own document--when I get home I want to work with something I can touch: color, texture, cutting and putting together, a final product that is real and solid. It's less of a right-brain/left-brain thing than a language-centers/tactile-centers thing.

--It's cheap. I cut all four pairs of shoes from one fat quarter, and even though it was a pricey fat quarter, it comes down to less than $1.50 per pair, if you count the thread and elastic (which I already had; the flannel I used in the lining was destined for a dumpster and given to me free).

--It feels good to give a handmade gift (even if it is obscenely cheap), and nice that the labor was sweatshop-free.

--It gives me control. I imagine what I want, and then I make it to my specifications, limited only by my tools and skill level. I like being in charge.

--I love beautiful things, and if I can surround myself with beautiful things I made myself, so much the better (especially since I can't afford beautiful things that other people have made).

I guess this means that I have prioritized my time, and writing, unfortunately, does not rise to the top. Right now it hovers around the 5 a.m. timeframe (I can face the computer before I've been at it for eight hours). I am taking another writing class this summer, which I'm very excited about (the advanced version of Mother Words), and for a while, at least, I'll rearrange my priorities so that writing sits in the place of honor.