Joining Ginny for Yarn Along:

I’m packing for Montreal – the most important things first. Knitting, and reading. Usualyl I pack lots of food, but since we’re house swapping, we’ll have a kitchen there, plus tons of farmers markets to visit and explore. I cast on a Bulle for Ella – so sweet, and I love the different colored pockets! I’m also bringing needles, pattern, and yarn for a baby tshirt vest for the little one.
I just finished reading Alice Waters & Chez Panisse, which I loved. Our business is so aligned with Waters that you might think I’m a devoted follower, but honestly I’d never read any of their cookbooks, although we have surely been indirectly influenced.  I defintely want a bunch of their cookbooks now.  The story of their restaurant, and her passion, is really wonderful and also crazy, which gives me comfort.  I’m taking along The Art of Being a Woman, Ralph Nader’s Seventeen Solutions, and Auberge of the Flowering Hearth.

There’s a new breakfast chef in our house – Ella.  She’s been very interested in cooking and baking with us lately, although often this ends up with her trying to make dinner, while I’m already in the midst of making dinner.  As part of a general change of climate around here, I’m looking for more ways for the children to help out and take on responsibility – so Ella is graduating from setting the table and unloading silverware from the dishwasher, to breakfast chef.  The really awesome thing about this is that when I told her, she was thrilled.  I let her make what she likes (she knows that something like ice cream isn’t even an option), and so far she’s served a lot of fruit, yogurt, and granola.  Which is totally fine.  She knows how to cook eggs very well, and I’m thinking I’ll do one breakfast a week where I teach her how to make something new, like oatmeal or yeasted pancakes with freshly milled flour (a fav around here). Plus, there’s the rest of the day to balance it all out, even if she tries to serve just raisins.

The best part is that while she’s putting breakfast together, I have a few moments to tidy the kitchen, do some morning yoga, sit down and read a book (gasp!), or start a load of laundry.  In other words, I love this new part of our day.  I moved some dishes down to a cabinet that she and little brother can reach, so she can really do it all.  And after dinner the other night, I set a fifteen minutes timer (yes, I stole that idea from Flylady – I love the 15 minute timer) and told the children it was clean up time until the timer went off.  I let Ella choose washing dishes or wiping down the table, and Gabriel loves to vacuum.  All of this makes me feel more sane, and I think it’s so, so great for them, to help out more.

Hope you’re having a great week.  We’re doing a house swap in Montreal soon – so exciting! – so if you have any recommendations, I’d love to hear them.

Now she is six.  We celebrated over the weekend at a local pond with a few friends, which was simple and lovely.  I brought a big bag of popcorn, asked everyone to bring water bottles, and we brought a cake.  At first, she wanted a castle cake, but she’s obsessed with ancient Egypt, so at the last minute, we changed it to a pyramid.  We ground fresh corn and wheat from our grain share and made a simple yeasted sheet pan cake, cut out squares, and stacked them with frosting between.  (Our frosting was simply whipped butter, lemon zest, and maple syrup.)  We added a layer of strawberry “mummies” between the two bottom layers, also.  Ella decorated the outside with dried fruit. It was quite a hit.

I finished her Phoebe sweater, except for sewing in the ends and I haven’t even ordered buttons yet!  The teepee is not done.  She didn’t notice, of course, with all the other hoopla, and to my surprise, I don’t feel guilty about it – they’ll be done soon enough, and loved plenty in the months to come.

Looking back on old photos, I can see how much she’s truly lost her chubby cheeks, her baby fat.  She’s tall and thin, and as passionate and charming as ever.  Six feels like a big year, a big change, and I’m excited for it.  She has her first wiggly tooth!  She can jumprope (even backwards), weave on a lap loom, finger knit like a champ, leap from rock to rock, and I’m sure this summer will find her swimming like a fish.  Amazing changes, and a blessing to have her with us.

Have a great week, friends.  I’m not here much these days, because I’m usually at the cafe, working on the new summer menu (Arugula Tartine, swiss chard and herb soup, and other fun things), and training new staff.  Did I tell you I started a Pinterest board?  Indeed I did.

It’s been at least a month now, but I haven’t told you, because I was afraid to jinx it, afraid that it couldn’t possibly be true.

But it is true – the little baby man is totally healed, and can eat everything again!!

(I thought at first I’d post a photo of myself chowing down a croissant, since that’s what I fantasized about most often, but our simple lunch from today will have to do – green smoothie, local organic cheese, our own Real Whole Wheat Bread from Wheatberry, and some fermented veggies.)

So here’s the new deal around here: we can all eat everything again, Hallelujah!  It’s hard to describe how big a relief this is – I didn’t even realize myself how stressful it had been, until, suddenly, that stress was gone.  It’s hard to know, now, exactly what happened with the baby.  Did he try foods too soon?  Was he sensitive and just needed time to heal?  I’ll never really know.  What I do know is that he and I both went on the GAPS diet, plus we weren’t eating eggs or any diary.  His tummy troubles were better, but still not totally healed.  We went to see a lovely local naturopath, and she recommended rubbing castor oil on his belly at night, covered by plastic wrap (!), to help ease the inflammation.  She gave us some baby probiotics.  And I also, at 15 months, decided that I needed to wean Gabriel to make sure that he could heal completely, without any possible allergens coming in through my milk.  That was a really tough decision – no breastfeeding mother wants to think that her golden, wonderful Mama Milk might actually be harming her baby, but it was also the right decision for us, considering the situation.  All of these things happened at about the same time, and pretty much right away, Gabriel’s tummy troubles vanished.  He had totally normal bowel movements again, regular, with no pain at all.  I almost threw a party right then and there, but I was mostly holding my breath to see if it would last.  It did.  And then we let him try a little sourdough bread . . . . and he was still fine.  (He went crazy on bagels for a few days, he was so excited to eat them!)  We tried cheese  -still good!  Drinking raw milk, no problem.  Last of all, we let him try some egg.  To my total amazement and wonder, he can eat everything we eat.  It’s awesome.

I am grateful for this whole experience, as tough as it was at times.  I have such a deep empathy for the families struggling with food allergies and sensitivities, and I certainly learned a lot of good tricks and recipes, some of which I’ve shared here, and many of which I’ll be teaching in a class this summer.  Not the least of which is hope – which I am always grateful to be able to share.

And meanwhile . . . this girl?  This girl turns 6 in a few short days.  Which means I’ve got a teepee to finish sewing, a little bit to go on the hood of her Phoebe sweater, and her daddy has a castle cake to create.  How did all this seem like a good idea?  I’m not sure, but I do know that we love her.

(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/