natural parenting center

Above All, Be Kind

fresh ideas

I'm excited to be taking this online class called Loving Discipline by Chris White...read more here as well as another e-course called Soul*Full with Catherine Just. AND how exciting is the He Said She Said parenting e-course with Natalie and Nathan? All are sure to be exceptional. 

xo

 

sisters

My sister Heidi and her son Owen left after three weeks here. I miss her so much already. Our visit was sublime. Daily bike rides to the river, the skate park, our favorite bakery. Cousins enthralled in constant play, riding swirls of imagination. Fort building, making food, knitting. And talking, talking, talking together.

I took out the garbage and came back and the new bag was already in the bin. She straightens the curtains and chops veggies. It's like that. I'm telling you, after living with friend Kelli for three weeks this August then this experience, I am feeling more than ready for village life with sister wives. My sweet friends here offer immense support and connection and...it's different because we aren't actually living under the same roof, or right next door, doing the daily dance that we mamas can do so well together.

We complement each other. I make bread and ferment kombucha while she rearranges the art work and organizes every corner of every closet. As I look around the house in her absence, I see ten thousand reminders of her...footprints of beauty left everywhere.

I want more of this. Resting in the feeling of already having it is the discipline for whatever we are wanting more of. Imagine it is here already and smile with that knowing. Hmmm...I am seeing Magical Mothering retreats....Oh yes.

thankful

Right now, I am humming with happiness for...

::a breakfast of fermented millet bread with cinnamon and cardomon fresh from the oven, slathered in coconut oil and plum butter made from our plum tree and a smoothie of goat milk kefir, blueberries and strawberries from the freezer and homemade applesauce

::my sister, in all her radiance and for many reasons, one of which is her ability to transform this little home into a sacred space, decluttered and shimmering with little bits of beauty everywhere

::the pile of dirt in the backyard...it's such a happy thing to spend money on

::this great earth and all that it gives us, this season of exploding trees and gardens

::every irritation and annoyance that I feel and how it points me to stories I am telling myself which are stale and untrue, every time

 

thankful

::for the chance to invoke tooth fairy magic for this radiant little human who got a tooth pulled, full of grace and bravery

::for these hands which open and close and stir and weave and hold and touch

::for that moment today when I made two afternoon cups of coffee while I heard Saschy call out to my sister, "Heidi...Watch me!" 

::for this earth which bestows and bestows and bestows such ripe bounty from its soils which are frozen so much of the year

::for the feel of a warm little foot pressed into my back in the middle of the night

::for being the one who gets to hold and comfort in the scary darkness

::for the big ball of orange sun setting below the trees tonite, filtering its light through the smokey air as we called out "game on" for another round of street hockey after a car passed by

::for my mom and the chance to hear her voice tonite

::for all of you and the trust you place in me to let me into your life, just for a moment. It is no small thing to read someone else's words and to let the images they share to take up residence in your mind, however briefly. 

Spending time each day purposefully slipping into thankfulness, to sow those seeds with full attention, this is fertile. These gorgeous things are always here and when I give myself to them, noticing and tending, there is a swelling open of my life as it is. Awareness is generative and creative. 

What gets created from your thankfulness?

 

More essential than accomplishing

I've had several overall wearing days in a row. There was the epic moving day where three of us hauled our entire Feeleez business one box at a time from one storage location to another. My thighs still have a string of little stepping stone like bruises where I leaned the corner of each 48 game-full cardboard beast when my arms were about to give way.

Yesterday, two of my brave and hearty mama friends and I pickled 50 lbs of dilly beans, a feat never before accomplished. It was a six hour marathon with kids awake, even. The night before was 300 pickling cukes (remind me next year to plan on maybe HALF that many!) into kosher-style brine and also gallon jugs of lacto-fermented ones. Nourishing Days describes more about that if you are interested. Some of them also got chopped into a bread and butter style from Putting It Up With Honey. 

Throw in painting one wall of the downstairs, knitting up a hat, and all the various regular happenings of each day (like making meals, pushing squishy bottoms on the swing, and negotiating near hysterical battles between one boy and one girl, I know), you could say that I've been getting lots done.

It has something to do with no longer being pregnant or holding an infant or walking around with a toddler in tow or stopping multiple times a day to nurse. It has something to do with this time of year, anticipating winter, wanting to freshen up the indoor spaces and relishing in the bounty of harvest, wanting to fill the root cellar with local treasures. 

Whatever it is, it has me thinking about accomplishments. It does feel good to get stuff done. It's easier to feel satisfying when I fall into bed at night and can list off the completed tasks for the day, rather than those days of babyhood when the entire day was spent sitting in a chair or standing and rocking and holding or those long days of early pregnancy lying on the couch wanting to throw up, weeping at the discomfort of it all. Those days are ones when, to the outside world, and as a result to our culturally trained productivity-is-everyting minds, I didn't get anything done. How strange that growing a human being somehow doesn't count. 

So now I am in a different phase. Expansive spiralling. Yet, those days of stillness grew something essential in me. Something that allows me to now see things differently. To see myself and what I do differently. I look at all this doing through a different lens, realizing that how I do each thing (which equates to who I am being as I do each thing) matters. At the end of the day, when the shelves are lined with pickles and the dehydrator full of apple slices, does it even matter if I wasn't present for each slice of the bean stem of it or if I wasn't kind to my children when their own water was boiling?

Presence is my meter, kindness is my criteria. Otherwise, it's all just kinda less sweet.

 

 

i feel happy

::there is a gorgeous stack of fabrics hanging over the back of the torquoise wooden chair i am sitting on, waiting to become skirts, curtains, pillows and shirts, mostly some variation of the vakini (bikini according to saschy) and grass above

::granola is baking in the oven made of oats, amaranth, sesame seeds, coconut, coconut oil, molasses, coconut sap, crispy almonds, crispy walnuts, cashews then they will meet up with some help seeds and ground flax

::sage and oregano clusters are hanging in the kitchen, drying

::in baskets on the counter sit apples, peaches, tomatoes, tomatillos, onions all ready to be eaten as is and dried and made into salsa verde 

::this weekend we will pick up 50lbs of green beans and 300 pickling cukes then dive in for a marathon canning session 

::the downstairs wall is freshly painted pale lime green and the can of aqua paint sits ready for the nearby root cellar wall (did i tell you that we discovered that root cellar after the basement flooded and we ripped out the dry wall in the exact spot that i imagined putting one??)

::the kids are naked under a tarp in the yard asking for me to make their third pot of tea (rooibos caramel and peppermint and lemon balm picked from the garden) for their tea party

::my mom is packing for a trip to france

::my sister is packing for a trip HERE

::we are going to the farm tomorrow

::we are about to leave for playgroup at the park

::i am almost finished knitting a hat for a friend

and, and, and...i am alive. that's the best part.

what is happening for you right now?