(Joining Ginny for Yarn Along)

Sometimes, you need to finish a small project. Know what I mean? I cast on this Odessa hat, um, two springs ago, and this month, despite craziness, I put in a stitch here and there to finish it. Phew.

Our cafe is closed for a few days, for renovations, installing a super-efficient AC (imagine, our customers won’t walk in and feel like they’re eating lunch inside the bread oven!), and training some new staff.  Seasons come and go, staff comes and goes – always challenging, although you would think after eight years I would be used to it.  I’m not.  I’ve been organizing, organizing, running around a little bit nuttily – until last week I brilliantly dislocated a rib while folding up the baby stroller (seriously).  Life finds a way to slow us down, and then we heal.  Amazingly, ribs just heal  – nothing to do but wait.

I’ve been reading What’s A DisOrganized Person to Do? and it has lots of good ideas.  Once you start, though, beware . . . over the weekend, while telling myself I had the day off, suddenly I was pulling every piece of clothing out of the dresser and the closet, sorting out about half of my clothes to give away (mostly to throw out because they were totally wrecked, actually).  And once the closet was emptied out, well, I found myself staring at the inside of the closet, which the people who built our house never finished, they just left it bare sheetrock.  Another project left undone.  After the little ones were asleep, I put on my husband’s head lamp and painted that closet (luckily I had a can of primer sitting around for my dozen other painting projects).

A painted closet, a finished hat.  Plenty to be thankful for.

I made some sausage over the weekend, too – I’ve been wanting to make sausage with our own pork since we slaughtered our first pig last fall (six months?  can it be that long ago?).  On Sunday I got out three packs of meat and the grinder, and ground up three big bowls of pork.  To one, I added salt, maple syrup, and dried sage for breakfast sausage.  Paprika, garlic, salt, celery seed, and a little ancho chile powder for chorizo.  And last but not least, red wine, garlic, and salt for sopresseta.  I didn’t stuff any of them into casings, just packed them into mason jars, labeled them and popped them in the freezer.  We had some chorizo made into little meatballs with dinner – I don’t think those jars are going to last long.  The silly thing is that I’ve been putting off making sausage because I didn’t want to have to handwash all the parts for our grinder.  It took me ten minutes.  Geez.  Here’s to doing the projects we’ve been keeping on the back burners.  Next read: Alice Waters & Chez Panisse.  I’m excited.

(Ella at her school’s May Fair)

To all the mothers in the world, I’d like to give a heartfelt Happy Mother’s Day today.  You work hard, you do a terrific job, and you’re awesome.  I really think so.

That being said, Mother’s Day is not actually supposed to be about mothers – it’s about mothers standing up for Peace.  I didn’t know until I was a mother myself, several years ago, that Mother’s Day wasn’t originally intended as an appreciation of mothers, but as a day when mothers from across America might travel together to the nation’s capitol to have our own congress and work together to create a peaceful world, one where we wouldn’t lose our husbands, children, brothers in battle.

I think Moms do deserve a day to be applauded – but I also think it’s important to remember that today is really a Day for Peace.  Surely we can all spend a few minutes thinking about ways to bring peace into our hearts and our homes.  I recommend reading Tonia’s recent wonderful discussion of the first chapter in the book Jesus and Nonviolence – I love the distinction that’s made between nonviolence (pacifism) and passivism (doing nothing).  Also, the book points out that:

In 1989-90 alone, fourteen nations underwent nonviolent revolutions…If we total all the nonviolent movements of the twentieth century, the figure comes to 3.4 billion people, and again, most were successful.  And yet there are people who still insist that nonviolence doesn’t work!” (p2)

Now that’s the sort of news we all need to hear, don’t you think?  I also highly recommend Pema Chodron’s book Practicing Peace in Times of War, (available from most libraries!) which I’ll be re-reading myself this week, on audio cd.

Perhaps someday we really will see a physical gathering of mothers together in DC for Peace – a nonviolent demonstration of our love and our strength, a demonstration massive and powerful, demanding action and peace for our brothers, our sisters, and the Mother of us all – the Earth. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?  Sign me up.

(Mother Earth, at the May Fair)

In the meantime, on Saturday May 26th there is a March Against Monsanto happening all over the world – follow the link to find one near you.

Yours in Peace,

Adrie

The moon.

The darkened mountains.

Need I say more?

(c) Adrie Lester 2013

I’ve spent the past week working my tail off.  Really, I thought I was working pretty hard before, but apparently not.  Sometimes, it is possible to be working hard at Wheatberry, trying to renovate our house, planting/tending the garden, and trying to sew my daughter’s birthday present before June.  I know, if I were to look back, I would see that May is always crazy.  Thank goodness we decided to take it easy on the farming this year until we get things cleaned up, because seriously, the mess is amazing.  It goes on and on.  Who made – or is making – it all?  I’m not even sure, but we’re digging in deep, trying to make it right.

Meanwhile, asparagus and rhubarb are here at last, which is such a blessing.  Gabriel loves it when Ben plays the drums – we put earplugs in him and he sometimes climbs onto Ben’s foot while he plays the high hats – as you can see, he’s delighted by it all.  The munchkins are both growing so fast and doing so many new things.  Ella is really getting grounded her body – suddenly she can jump rope (and she’s obsessed with it), do string games, and leap from one rock to another.  She’s in love with ancient Egypt and wants to go play excavating.  Gabriel spends a lot of time running around the house in circles, pushing his pink doll stroller.  He loves his dolls, too, and kisses them.  So sweet, it hurts.  He has some baby signs now, and more words every day it seems – woof woof, baby, baa baa, bok bok (a chicken sound).  We found a wonderful new home for our horse, and that is a huge blessing.  A 1,600 pound blessing, in fact.

A few stitches here and there really do make a sweater eventually.  For Yarn Along today – Ella’s Phoebe Sweater is in the home stretch – I just started the hood, which is the last section.  I spent this week listening to Pema Chodron’s The Three Commitments in the car, and I love it so much.  It feels like the best talk I’ve ever heard about how to really work with Buddhist principles in real life – what it’s like to take the vows and be human, so you know you’re going to fall short of your goals every day.  Just wonderful, and so encouraging – it was just what I needed this week!

Blessings to you and yours, friends.  By the way, are you on Twitter?  We’re tweeting now: @WheatberryCafe

Joining Ginny today for Yarn Along – always fun.  I’m still knitting away on my husband’s raglan.  It is fun to show today, since I finished the fair isle band and I’m really tickled with how it came out!

I picked up Eight Human Talents at the library a few weeks ago, and while I didn’t make it very far before I had to return it to the library, I really enjoyed it.  It’s about the eight chakras, or energy centers in the body, and how to cultivate or access that energy, and work with healing those areas in your life.  Very interesting, and with yoga postures and other exercises for each center.  Made me wish there was a local Kundalini class – anyone know of one?

I wanted to say a few more things about marriage, to continue yesterday’s Get Real post.  Each week I’ve wanted to add more, but this time I’m actually getting to it (everyone else went to sleep early tonight!).  I talked about how my husband and I work a lot with not assigning blame, and I just wanted to share a couple of other tools that we have found so helpful.  I’d love to hear your tips, too!

Gratitude.  I know I talk about gratitude a lot here – what can I say, I talk about it because I like to keep it fresh in my own mind, and because I’ve found it so helpful and life-changing that I want to share it with you, too.  Ben and I share a lot of gratitude with each other.  Especially if we are in a rough patch, and I’m having a hard time feeling loving towards him, or finding myself annoyed about every little thing, I consciously start working on this.  I just start saying thank you for everything I can muster – thank you for clearing the table, thank you for working at Wheatberry today, thank you for being so nice to me this morning, thank you for  . . . whatever it is that he’s doing, I just start saying thank you.  Honestly, I don’t know if Ben thinks about it like this, but he definitely does it.  Every night when I make dinner, he very sincerely and with great pleasure thanks me for the meal I’ve made.  And even though that might seem very small, it means a lot to me!  (He also thanks me for lots of other things, that’s just one example.)

One other tool we use is just plain old support.  When one of us is having a hard time, even if it seems silly that we’re having such a hard time, the other one almost always just backs us up.  We take work off each other’s plates if we can – doing the other’s chores, trading work days at Wheatberry, doing the onerous task that’s been hanging over all of us.  If we’re both really dreading making a certain phone call, and Ben’s having a rotten day, I choose to ignore whose “job” it might be, and I just make the call.  And vice versa – if it’s my night to cook dinner, or we’re committed to take Ella somewhere, but the baby’s sick and crying and I’m ready to tear my hair out, Ben does what needs to be done.  This is tremendously helpful – not keeping score of whose turn it is, or who owes who a favor, just dropping those ideas and moving forward together.

I’m lucky to have such a positive marriage, and we say that to each other all the time – we are so lucky.  We make a lot of effort to make time to spend together – not only working, but also just enjoying each other’s company.  When the kids go to sleep, we sit and talk – often, I knit, but sometimes even that is too distracting and I put it away so we can really be present to each other.

I’m glad to be knitting him a sweater, even if I could’ve made three children’s sweaters in the same time.  I’m about halfway through, and only have the hood to go on Ella’s Phoebe sweater – I think I’ll finish them by next winter!  Which means it’s time to start dreaming about what to knit next . . .  I think I need to finish my Odessa, and then perhaps a Baby T-Shirt Vest for Gabriel.  And this adorable squirrel turtleneck - how could I resist?

Oh, and I wanted to say that I think I’ve been torturing myself a bit lately about the fact that my family’s woolies always get so, well, lived-in looking.  Sometimes I see other people’s handknits and they still look so perfect.  I was quite pleased to see a photo of Ginny’s with her girls wearing two of her sweaters that were clearly well loved and broken in.  Silly, but it made me feel a lot better.

I met my husband Ben when I was a month shy of my 18th birthday, and I married him when I was 19.  (The photo above was taken the day after our wedding – I love this photo.)  This summer, we’ll celebrate our ten year anniversary.  I wouldn’t say that getting married so young is a great idea for everyone, but for us, it was perfect.  We met, we fell in love, we decided we wanted to make a life together.  We got a lot of negative “advice” and criticism when we were engaged, and I imagine most people thought we would be divorced in a few years.  Instead, we went on to slowly build this life we had envisioned – learning about growing food, cooking food, creating a business together, and then having children together.  We’ve worked together almost every day for the past ten years, and that’s how we prefer it.  We do also have friends, I swear, but mostly we like each other’s company.

This is not to say that we don’t argue, disagree, act crabby, and all the other normal human things that people do to other people.  We spend a lot of time together, and we have been through very challenging periods together, and said our share of mean words.  Our main work together as a couple has been not to blame each other.  We don’t always succeed, but since we at least hold on to that as our guiding principle, we do pretty well, and it has gotten easier over the years.  I spoke about marriage with our mother’s circle one month, and when I asked Ben what he thought I should say, that’s what he said – Life is hard, don’t blame it on the people around you (spouse included).

I think many of us feel that we’re having to learn how to have a positive marriage, and how to create that model for our children.  It’s a dangerous myth that in a good marriage there’s no arguing, or you always say the right thing, or you never disagree.  We disagree all the time, but we don’t think it makes the other person bad or wrong, we don’t think it means there’s something wrong with our relationship, and we don’t blow it up into something bigger.  The phrase we use the most is, “I’m sorry we had a crazy thing.”  I also think that working together is a big advantage – we have a lot in common, and a lot of shared goals and visions.  We each have our separate passions, too, but our biggest dreams are the ones we’ve dreamed up together.

Be sure to check out this other mamas versions of Get Real:

http://plainandjoyfulliving.blogspot.com/
http://www.shivayanaturals.com
http://www.hullabaloohomestead.com/
http://ourashgrove.blogspot.com/
http://oldrecipe.wordpress.com/

http://thisblessedlife-aubrey.blogspot.com/

Thank goodness Friday is here at last!  What a tumultuous couple of weeks this has been, with so much terrible news between the Monsanto Protection Act passing and Keystone still looming over our heads.

On the other hand, over 1 Million Americans wrote public comments asking the President to vote against Keystone – THANK YOU!

The days have been sunny with cool breezes,meaning we’ve had our first dinners outside.  Wheatberry has been bursting with wonderful customers loving the true food we serve them.  I’m grateful for our small part and the good work we do.  Grateful to watch my daughter sew flowers on a felt May crown for her cousin’s birthday present, and to see her each time she takes her brother’s hand to start a game with him.  Grateful for a beautiful post like this one from Ginny.  Grateful for the beautiful cabinet Ben made to use at Wheatberry (and grateful, yes, that our house is no longer covered in sawdust – for the moment, at least).  Grateful that we’ve found another farm where our horse Cole will be moving, a place he’ll get to work and be with other horses, too.  Grateful for some free menu planning inspiration from Holistic Squid, since I can’t seem to come up with any good ideas for dinner these days!  The veggies we saved from last summer have all been eaten up, we’re totally sick of roots, and only salad greens are available locally so far.  Asparagus, we’re dreaming of you.  Please come soon.

Wow, there’s so much to say here, and so many ways to put my foot in my mouth, lol.  Our plan has always been to homeschool our children – both my husband and myself feel strongly about the state of our industrial school system, and our desire to find a different way.  From testing to Grade D meat served at lunch to a lack of real-world experiences and the high ratios of children to adult role models, we have a lot of reasons for our choice.  But, as I mentioned in my post about Work, my daughter has spent this half of her kindergarten year at our local Waldorf school.  After this, she will be home again, which we are all (even her!) excited about.  I think every family needs to choose for themselves (and some families don’t have many choices), and that children learn a lot and find their way, and are shaped by their experiences no matter what.

Given the choice, I choose to (with the support and participation of my husband) teach our children, using Rudolf Steiner’s (Waldorf) educational guidelines as a light to guide the way.  I found Waldorf, actually, mostly through the blogosphere – one of the unexpected things I’m grateful for.  I feel very strongly that there is a lot of wonderful insight, truth, and beauty to be found in the Waldorf system, and I also believe (as Steiner himself did) that as the teachers, my husband and I have to decide how to use those guidelines in our teaching, with our particular children.  Teaching and learning are alive, and must remain living and fresh and changing, if they’re to have any chance at all.

I think a lot of homeschoolers hesitate to post details about what they do or don’t do, for fear of being judged.  Which is pretty funny, frankly, considering how much time is wasted in school walking in halls, doing worksheets, on the school bus, etc . . . I have learned so much from Steiner’s teachings already – I believe in going to the source, so I am reading his lectures, including Kingdom of Childhood, Discussions with Teachers, and Rhythms of Learning.  In my daughter’s early years I used guides from Christopherus, A Little Flower Garden, and Little Acorn Learning to help me learn about bringing Waldorf home to small children, and to give me ideas to use with her for songs, stories, games, and crafts.  Mostly, I try to keep things very simple, especially since she is still so young.  Next year she’ll enter first grade, and things will get more serious!  We did some of her letters last year, but next year we will learn them all, and more.  (I plan to use Christopherus’s First Grade Curriculum, as much as I think it’s amazing when homeschoolers put together their own – at this stage in my life, I am very grateful to have a guide that I can edit and expand as needed.  I also always get a lot of inspiration and ideas from Carrie at the Parenting Passageway, and I’m on Mrs. M’s yahoo list, waldorfhomeeducators.)

One of the things I am most excited about with homeschooling is the opportunity to learn with my children – to learn again, as an adult, and in a whole different way, about history, geography, math, literature, nature . . . all of it!  I’ve already learned a lot about how to create flow in my days, watercolor painting, seasonal festivals, drawing in a way I had never done before, etc . . . My husband and I are both passionate learners, who definitely don’t believe learning stops when school does, and that is one of the things we most want our children to “learn” – how to love the pursuit of knowledge.  By being home with us, they get to watch us learning new skills like knitting, shearing sheep, pruning fruit trees, sewing a dress . . . they also learn how to scrub toilets and how to make lunch!

Ben wants me to add that one amazing thing about homeschooling in our current age is the access we have to so much knowledge, mostly for free.  And it’s true, that we have so much at our fingertips, which is really incredible.  This daily rhythm, which I made this winter before Ella started going to school, is what our school days have looked like in the past, and what they’re likely to look like again in the future.  When I sat down to make this, Ella came over and wanted to help – so she drew most of the illustrations, and wrote some of the words, as you can see.  I think knowing how the day will look is crucial for everyone.  Balance between outside and in, activity and quieter times, balance between days at home and days out in the world, all of these are elements I consider.

I think that’s all, although I could surely go on!  Feel free to ask questions, and have a great week, friends.  Make sure you read the thoughts from these other awesome mamas:

http://plainandjoyfulliving.blogspot.com/
http://www.shivayanaturals.com
http://www.hullabaloohomestead.com/
http://ourashgrove.blogspot.com/
http://oldrecipe.wordpress.com/

http://thisblessedlife-aubrey.blogspot.com/

What a week. Starting with the scary events at the Boston Marathon and containing, for me, all of the following:
visits to help a friend with a newborn baby
a stomach bug for myself and my toddler (oh yes, did I mention that he’s walking now??)
sheep shearing
hiring new staff at Wheatberry

an (accidentally) smashed car window
Boston events, again
a niece’s birthday party, which we had to miss, due to above stomach bug
spring break for my daughter from school
cleaning up trash outside (after foolishly thinking we had cleaned it all up)

By Wednesday, it felt like several weeks had passed already. Anyone else? Our house looks like it was hit by a hurricane, but hey, the sun is shining on this chilly day, and I am grateful to be healing, safe, and home with my sweet ones. This week is bound to be better, right? Right.

For now, listen to some Lake Street Dive and get your groove on.  Better already.

When Tonya and I created the idea for Get Real, I think hearing about how she fits work & creative work into her day was one of the topics I was most interested to read about.  Sitting down to write my own story here, my mind was a complete blank at first.  How do I fit work and creative work into our family life?  The answer has changed so much over the years, and we’re in the middle of a change right now, so the answer doesn’t feel very solid.  Maybe that is the answer, actually – that my work is ever-changing and evolving, but that I usually try to find space for it in my life.

My husband and I started our bakery (Wheatberry) the year before our daughter was born, so it was my first baby.  We started baking out of our rental home kitchen for farmer’s markets, then took on wholesale accounts with cafes and restaurants, and by the time I was hugely pregnant we desperately needed to move into a commercial space.  We signed a lease that spring, and started building the kitchen.

Our daughter was born at the beginning of June, and after a few weeks at home, she and I rejoined Ben in the construction work, working to get the cafe open as soon as we could, while continuing our wholesale accounts. After the endless inspections, permits, and meetings were through, after hiring and speed-training more kitchen staff and counter staff, we were as ready as we would ever be to open.

What can I say about those first days?  Madness, bliss, chaos, insanity, warmth, euphoria, rapture, exhaustion.

Ben, our newborn daughter, and I came in with the early morning bakers, helped try to manage the wholesale baking and also a line of customers who stretched out the door.  We would pause to eat dinner in town, come back to make sure everything was properly finished for the day, drive home, and fall into bed.  I woke in the morning, set my throbbing feet down on the floor, and wanted to cry from the pain of them, but it was time to go.  I wore our daughter in a baby carrier, and while she slept and nursed, I worked.  Ben worked double, trying to do his job as well as the jobs I had always done, which we naively thought I would still be able to do with a baby.  We were learning a tremendous amount about how to manage our staff, and learning how to be parents, too.  Our family vision has always been to keep our children with us – working and learning together, and we count ourselves very lucky that we have managed to do that.

As I said, the daily details of working together as a family change from year to year, season to season.  When our daughter was a baby, she was super attached to me, and I worked while she was in the Ergo, and when she was awake, we walked around town and played at the library.  Eventually, one of our bakery crew was able to take her out sometimes so I could work without a toddler attached to me – what a relief!  As she grew older, we also let her start playing with the flour and spices, making her own creations.  She and I also spent more time at home.  Being at work with your child, having them throw temper tantrums in front of customers is not my idea of fun, and there were certain ages where the cafe was very overwhelming for her (and for me).  My husband and I cherish those times where the whole family comes in and the children play peacefully while we work – but those are rare, beautiful and lucky moments.

Usually we trade off caring for the children while the other parent works.  Once my daughter was about 18 months old, she would stay home once or twice a week for a “Daddy day” and I would go to work, race around like a madwoman trying to fit several day’s worth of work into a half day, and then head home.  As she got older, I was able to go in for a full day, and sometimes she would go out with a babysitter so that Ben and I could work together, which was wonderful for us.  We have not had great luck with babysitters, honestly, so that doesn’t happen often.

Currently, my daughter is about to turn 6, and my son is 16 months old.  This morning they’re both home with my husband for the very first time, so that’s pretty exciting.  They have gone out with him to the playground or the library while I’ve worked, and the baby has gone out with a sitter for two or three hours while I work.  I decided that this year, for my Gift of a Year, I was going to Write the Book.  Ben and I have been planning to write about our journey opening our bakery, making real food for customers, and recipes and other goodies, for years now.  I realized that this was the year – while I can still write during the baby’s naptime.  So in January my daughter started attending a Waldorf kindergarten (more about that in the school post), and I use the time while she’s in school and the little man is sleeping to work on the book, and also to do other Wheatberry & Pioneer Valley Heritage Grain CSA work.  (The book is called Love Real Food, by the way, just to get you excited ).

As for creative work, I’m very lucky that my day job is creative.  A lot of my work at Wheatberry is management – working with staff, training, hiring, overseeing, typing procedures, doing paperwork, etc.  But some of it is wonderful fun – making new recipes, taking photos, designing the appearance of our space.  Writing has always been my main creative outlet, and after my daughter was born, I discovered blogging as a new way to do that.  I really enjoy this space, and especially all of the connections it’s allowed me to create that I never would have otherwise.  I only post once or twice a week, though, because I usually work on it after the kids go to bed, and most nights I choose to spend that time with my husband.  Sometimes I get up early to write, especially if I’m feeling really fired up about sharing something.

I carry my knitting with me everywhere I go, and I really love working with fiber.  I usually have one “easy” project going that doesn’t require much counting or thinking, just knitting round and round, so I can knit while I watch the kids play at the library or the playground.  And I have one more challenging, fun project going that requires me to pay attention, and creates something especially beautiful.  I sometimes knit when my husband and I talk together at night.  I love to sew, but I don’t do it very much because I can’t carry my sewing machine to the park!  It’s something I’m hoping to make some more space in my life for, though, especially as the baby gets more independent and learns to play more by himself.  I’m currently working on a quilt for our bed, and I really do love it.

I find that for myself, making time for creative work, and work work, is really important.  For years I felt very conflicted about this – was I a stay at home mother or a working mother?  Didn’t I need to choose?  I think I have finally made peace with this question, and the answer is that I’m both.  I’m a mother who loves the business she created with her soul mate, and a mother who loves to be home sometimes, hanging laundry outside and painting watercolors.  I get very cranky, frankly, when I do too much of either of these, and I find that the balance benefits our whole family.  Creative work, like knitting, sewing, and writing are sometimes hard to make priorities, but I find that expressing that creative energy gives me more energy for everything else, so I am paying more attention to nurturing this area of my life.  When the baby goes down for his nap, I try very hard to ignore all the tempting miscellanous to-dos on my list, and go straight to writing.  Hard, but I feel great when I do it!

Can’t wait to see what everyone else has to say!  Be sure to check out these awesome mama’s posts:

http://plainandjoyfulliving.blogspot.com/
http://www.shivayanaturals.com
http://www.hullabaloohomestead.com/
http://ourashgrove.blogspot.com/
http://oldrecipe.wordpress.com/

http://thisblessedlife-aubrey.blogspot.com/