May 04

So, Where you moving to? Umm . . . Maine

Maine? I’ve heard it is cold there. Maine? How quaint. Maine? The fall leaves are Gorgeous! Maine? Are there actually any minorities there? Maine? Is it because of your job? Maine? Oooh Lobster!

Yep, it’s happening. We’re moving to Maine. Life has gotten crazy the last six months and I cannot believe that is only one month until we leave the southwest. Yes, big change, climate, culture, snow, Everything will be different.

Update: House is SOLD! We moved out in early Dec of 2010, all the while thanking God for selling the house. So yes, you can sell a house, even in this market. Yes, we did take a loss. Yes, we put thousands of dollars of improvements into the house . . . that we did not get back. No, we don’t regret selling, I enjoyed living in that house because of our wonderful yard and having a beautiful place for my girls to play, safe and happy. We maybe wish we had not bought in 2006 at the height of the “housing bubble”, but I would not trade all the great memories we have had with our girls (all three little ones were born while we lived there).

We are moving on! We are hoping to make new great memories in a new place. We have pared it down to essentials, gotten rid of most of our furniture and are praying and trusting in God that he will reveal to us what our path will be. We don’t have a place to live yet, renting a cottage for a couple weeks and hoping to find a place. If that doesn’t work, we can always camp out for a couple of weeks and keep looking.

If anyone knows of a place for a family with four daughters, to rent, let me know.

The last five months have been a bit trying, living in a rental on a busy road, with the usual dirt yard you see in the desert that is New Mexico. All while selling off our furniture and purging our house of the stuff that seems to accumulate. I’ve made some good trades though, getting rid of stuff I don’t need and getting yarn or fiber to support my knitting and spinning addiction.

Other things that have added some anxiety, hubby’s job says he can telecommute but are taking their sweet time getting tools and things in place that will allow this to happen. My job is fortunately already set up that way since I am an online instructor. I want to continue only working part time so I can be there with my little ones but it is possible my workload might have to increase to help pay the bills. Part of me welcomes this, (the part that would rather my husband change the diapers, do the laundry, fix the snacks, etc), but then a part of me wants to be a mama with my focus on my kids. I did try this for a couple years when third born princess was a baby and thought I would lose my mind from lack of intellectual stimulation.  I even feel selfish writing that, but really am somewhat at peace being able to work part time to help keep the brain alive and still be the mama for my girls. It is only when I have a stack of papers to grade that I think, “WHY am I working!?!” But then I remember the stress of my former profession and lack of time to spend with my daughter and thank God that I am lucky enough to work from home, even in my bathrobe if I want to.

 

Final concern, while looking at reviews of Maine on Sperling.com, a place that gives facts and figures about different places in the world, a big word in all caps jumped out at us, Racism. So, I guess I know it is out there, have dealt with ignorant people in the past, but have never let it worry me. My hubby actually seems more concerned than I ever have been about this kind of stupidity that exists in the U.S.  Anyway, I guess I haven’t had to think about how this might impact my children in a state where there is only a 1.2% hispanic population, while moving from a state where hispanics are not really a minority any more.

Anyway, I’m not concerned and hopefully this will stay true during our relocation to Maine

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Posted in Being, Life

Oct 19

More on Gluten

So, I don’t have Celiac disease according to the tests. Next step is an extensive food allergy test that will hopefully tell me what I should not eat. Of course at this point I already don’t eat soy, dairy, and now gluten. The doc says that since I tested negative for Celiac that I could still be gluten intolerant but maybe someday I could eat gluten again. Not sure if I want to test that out after the bread induced headaches I have gotten lately. I don’t eat soy because of problems it causes with the Thyroid and now that I’m learning more about it, I don’t want to feed it to my family either. Apparently soy formula is like feeding your baby birth control pills, ew. See more about that here.

Back to the gluten thing. Apparently a lot of people are gluten intolerant who don’t test positive for celiac disease. The only way to know if you are going to feel better is to not eat gluten. I’ve mostly adjusted now. The hardest part is when I go to social events and there is not a single thing I can eat there. But it has been a great diet plan since I don’t eat a lot of things that are bad for you. Surprisingly I actually have to make a point to consume carbohydrates daily, from rice, potatoes, etc., so that I meet my food needs. So eating a lot of rice, and experimenting with different ways to cook it, flavor it, luckily I love rice. Also, we don’t eat out much, once a month maybe, so I cook everything we eat.

The last two birthdays we had gluten free yummy chocolate cake. I actually just substituted gluten free flour for the all purpose flour in a recipe in my Hershey’s 100th Anniversary Cookbook. Every single recipe in the book calls for chocolate, my kind of book. Anyway, everyone loved the cake, my oldest even said she liked it better than the usual box cake.

When my parents showed up for the birthday they brought their own dessert (with gluten of course). I think my mom was afraid of my gluten free cake. It kind of hurt my feelings but I guess I have to get over that.  More cake for me, right?

MMM cake!

The doc says I might have other food issues so waiting for the test to come back so I can be even more of a freak in social situations. It is interesting the raised eyebrows I get when I say, “I can’t eat that”, as if I’m being a picky eater or something. Really I want to eat it, I love bread, and cake, and pie. I can still eat these things, just with some modification, and it doesn’t taste quite the same. I do, however, feel much better. The aching is almost gone, I don’t feel like an arthritic crone anymore. I even started working out with a Stroller Strides group here in town. I do feel a little old next to all the twenty something mom’s out there, but I mostly keep up.

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Posted in Being, Food

Oct 14

Farm Plan – Searching for Land.

Ok, so we did a big scribble as a family to think about our farm dream. Where are we now? Well, our eyes are still firmly focused on the goal of a family farm. However, the market being what it is, our house has not sold, yet.

Ba Ba Brown sheep

Lots of other things to work on in the meantime. I am learning how to spin yarn in the hopes that someday I will have sheep with fiber to market (meat too, mm lamb chops). Husband plans to focus on getting better at growing things, not an easy task here in the desert.  I would like to learn to make goat cheese as that is another possible animal we may keep.

We also have visited an alpaca farm, alpaca fiber is sooo soft and lovely,driven across the state to go to a Wool Festival, gone to the Southern NM State Fair and generally are having loads of fun teaching our kids that farming will be fun. Husband has talked to people about sheep, farming, and we love having knowledge poured into us from people who are actually living the family farm life. People should take their kids to visit farms regularly even if they don’t want to grow things themselves, it is good for you and your family to see where our food comes from.

Fluffy fun

Anyways, if you know anyone who needs a house in NM, we have a lovely home with lots of space for kids to run and play. We would stay here except we are not allowed to have farm animals here. If our kids were in 4H we could have two chickens or two rabbits, not quite what we’re aiming for.

Our lovely shaded back yard (An Oasis in the desert)

Everyone keeps asking, where are you moving to? Umm well, we don’t know yet. We’ve narrowed it down to the lower 48, yes, I know that is a lot, but we were actually considering moving out of the country for awhile. We decided being a bit closer to family was important for bringing up our children. Since we have family as far west as Phoenix and as far east as Brooklyn, that doesn’t help us pick either. So, we thought about what do we want. I would love to be near water and forest, so that is why we probably will not end up in the southwest. Husband wants enough land to have some crops and livestock, sheep, cattle, most likely grass raised. Maybe ten to twenty acres would work. That rules out metropolitan areas.

There is also the issue of work, oh yah, that. We both have been browsing for jobs a bit, but nothing has really jumped out, probably another factor of the economy working against us. I’m a college English instructor, husband is a programmer, we can work anywhere, I work entirely online part time but the school I work for is only an hour away. Not sure if they will let me keep doing it if I move further away. Husband also works from home part time but also has a full time job for the university lab.

Anyone out there have a farm that noone wants to work?  I know they are out there. If it had a house already that would be great but not a complete deal breaker.  It’s likely we would rent for a while to be sure that we liked an area before settling in for hopefully a good long time. We think raising our kiddos close to the land with an appreciation for what God has given us is the way to live. Praying that this is His will too.

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Posted in Being, Farming, Gardening, Life

Sep 14

Canning, Frugal and crazy homemade fun!

This is about canning. That old-fashioned thing your grandma might have done to save the extra tomatoes for the winter. I learned to can one year when I had a bumper crop of tomatoes and cucumbers in my tiny little garden. I had only one little baby, not eating solids yet, but surely didn’t want to waste all this food. So I bought some jars, a boiling water canner, and made some pickles. I did tomatoes, salsa, and pickled jalapenos too, that had overflowed in my little garden. I had great fun doing it but then moved to another state and did not have a garden again until many years later. I never forgot how much I enjoyed my crop of cucumbers and tomatoes.

The other day I came home from the market with a couple of giant cucumbers. The vendor told me they were Armenian cucumbers.

They were very strange looking and quite large. Since it was too much for us to eat it all, oh and I bought two, I decided to can some. Cucumbers are one of those things you have to pickle in some way to increase the acidity so it can be then canned with a boiling water canner. I pulled out my copy of “Preserving the Harvest” and flipped through looking for a recipe to try with my cucumber.  I decided to try my hand at making sweet relish.  The other day we were eating some polish sausage and we were out of relish. When I went to buy some more, I found many ingredients on the label that made me hesitant to buy the relish. High fructose corn syrup, modified wheat starch, and MSG, all things that I try to avoid for various health reasons. So when I found this lovely cucumber and a sweet relish recipe where I could control the kind of sugar and so forth in the recipe, my mission was set.

First off, while I do can, which is old school, I have a food processor, so when I had to chop three pounds of cucumber, it was done very quickly. I also chopped the onions in this way and saved myself some tears.

I had made a quick trip to the market to get the proper spices, which smelled lovely and fresh. The book said to put the spices in cheesecloth, which I did not have so I used my large tea strainer ball. Yes, I have a large tea strainer ball. I love tea. But that’s another story. So, spices in the tea ball, set to soak in the cucumbers, onions, red and green bel l peppers,sugar, vinegar mixture for 24 hours.Relish, soaking in the spices

I think I actually had to wait 48 hours to can my relish due to some other things going on, but it didn’t seem to affect the recipe since it was sitting in my fridge closed up tight.

Next comes my next favorite part of canning, going outside to do it! This may seem trivial but canning is a hot and sweaty job, probably why lots of people would just rather buy their own jelly. However, I have an outside awesome grill that can convert to a stove with three burners. On one I put my pot of relish which I had to heat to boiling before canning, this helps kill any bad things that might spoil your canned food. On the other burner I put the boiling water canner, a huge pot of water that you immerse your full jars in once they are full of yummy relish.  This was sooo much easier outside because my super hot burner heated the boiling water canner up in ten minutes while inside on my stove it takes close to twenty five to get the water boiling. Plus it turns the kitchen into a fiery sauna swamp, not fun on an already hot summer day.My awesome outdoor triple burner stove/grill

So leave the jars in the boiling water bath for twelve minutes or so, depending on your altitude, and tah- dah eight jars of pretty yellow sweet relish.

Here’s some funny and informative articles I read about canning when thinking about writing this post. I have never thought of canning as a fad, but I do my best to actually save money when I can by either using my products for gifts, yes, you might be getting relish for Christmas! OR using it at home. It has been a long time since I’ve bought jelly and I like mine better. Try it, you might like it better too!

Can it!

How does your city garden grow?

Sweet relish

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Posted in Crafting, Food, Gardening, Learning

Aug 30

Life gets Complicated

My list of things I need to write about continues to grow. This happens when I get excited about something. Right now there are various threads in my life being pursued, the one thing that links them together is a quest for simplicity, but somehow things just get complicated.

So, I’ve just got to vent for a bit and then I’ll be able to focus. We want our life to be simpler, more in tune with nature, homegrown if you will. This has led to different aspects of our life being changed, we hope for the better. We have four daughters, a teenager and three little ones, four and under. As much as we can we do things simply. They were all breastfed, and we use cloth diapers when they’re in that phase. Sometimes when traveling we have used disposables but even once as a trial we used cloth for our vacation. This is not easy when camping. However, we feel like we are saving some money and kept a few thousand diapers out of the landfills.

We shop for clothes and other things at secondhand stores, yard sales, and estate sales, this may seem horrifying to those who love to stay on top of fashion. My style is whatever fits, matches, and if it has no stains, I’m good.

We plan to homeschool our little ones as long as they will let us (the oldest tried it and went back to school after one semester), which this makes my life more complicated but in my mind the benefits of homeschooling outweigh any inconvenience to my schedule.

I cook pretty much every day and have even started to enjoy it a little. I have always hated cooking. Maybe because growing up it was one of the things that I had to learn to do. I’m glad I learned but I’ve never liked it and truly don’t “get” people who are into cooking so much. I do love it when a recipe turns out and the thing that has helped me enjoy it more is having a husband who truly appreciates every bite that goes into his mouth, and he tells me. That goes a long way toward improving my attitude toward cooking. Maybe because there are about a thousand things I’d rather be doing instead of cooking. But guess what, we have to eat. My whining aside, I am a not-bad cook. Most of what I make is edible, even good. My two gauges are my husband, who eats pretty much anything, and my oldest daughter who usually hates what I make. She manages to eat enough to keep herself alive and makes a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  Anyway, I digress, to make my life simpler for cooking I have tried to do menu planning but I am just not good at it. I also am not one who stresses too much about what I am going to feed my family. I have enough cookbooks and allrecipes.com is a great resource, so as long as I keep the basics in the house, I’m good.

Lately, I’ve been doing gluten free thing which has been making cooking a little more challenging but definitely not boring. This also makes baking very challenging and I love to bake. Some people say that’s a contradiction to my general dislike of cooking, maybe, but I mostly bake things that are sweet and yummy. But that’s another post.

We read a lot, lately about farming and all things related, which a list that is becoming quite long, from maintaining healthy grass pastures to how to milk a goat to which kind of herbs might have a good market, like I said a long and varied list.

My husband and I do actually have jobs, although mine is part time and online (yes I love that part), but that’s not the funnest part of what I like to do so I rarely talk about it. I enjoy my online teaching but I loove baking an awesome loaf of bread or trying a new cookie recipe. By far my favorite things to do are knitting and sewing

So I’m not really sure what this post is about except maybe that our quest for simplicity has gotten a little complicated, but we’re taking it slow. There are so many different directions a person can go to make their life more homemade, from making your own jam to knitting hats for your kids. I’m loving every minute though and maybe you can learn from my craziness. You also may just read this to laugh at the crazy lady who likes to knit and make relish, someday I hope to have my own handspun yarn to sell, that’s crazy right, a spinning wheel? Yep, one of the things I’m saving up for. So, my picture today is of my kids, who I hope will learn to live with passion because for me without that I may as well be pushin’ up daisies.

Happy girls

What a great big sister!

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Posted in Being, Crafting, Food, Homeschooling, Learning, Life

Aug 30

Homeschooling and Workboxes

While my oldest is still doing school the traditional way I am planning to use workboxes with my pre-schoolers. I probably will not get to this until after our family trip to the Grand Canyon!!! I am so excited. We haven’t camped since last June. We are planning to spend four nights at one of the most beautiful natural wonders of the world.
Go here to learn about workboxes.

On another topic, I started learning how to spin last night. I am doing it on my own by watching youtube videos and reading books. I would love to take a class but I haven’t found one around here and am not sure I can afford it anyway. But someday I would love to try spinning some alpaca fiber, it is supposed to be some of the softest and warmest. Someday maybe we’ll have an alpaca or two so I can spin the fiber, and some sheep, angora goat, maybe a few bunnies that will get brushed for fiber. Anyway, I’m encouraged that I could even use alpacas as a learning tool in our homeschool. A girl can dream, right?

One of the homeschool magazines I get has a couple of specials going on. I have enjoyed the magazine myself, it has given me lots of encouragement to continue on the homeschool path. I would get a student planner for my oldest but her school gives one out and my little ones can not read or write yet. I love my planner, I feel so organized when I actually use it. Hope everyone has a lovely day!


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Posted in Uncategorized

Aug 23

Moving Toward a Simpler Life and a family writing session

People have lots of different gifts for different kinds of things. My family has a lot of musicians. Out of my five brothers, four of them are very musical and play guitar, piano, bass, drums. The fifth brother who doesn’t play an instrument has a great singing voice as do many of my family, a trait handed down from our parents. I love being a part of a musical family. I used to play the saxophone myself and love to sing and help write songs occasionally, I’m pretty good at lyrics, must be the writerly aspect of me.

However, I have not pursued music with the intensity that my brothers and father have. I enjoy it and even encourage it in my own children, but my passions lie elsewhere. I don’t know why. All I can think is many different talents exist in each person but God somehow gives us the spark or flame of desire to pursue those talents that we are “meant” to follow as a life calling or way of life.

Me, I love to write and I truly believe that God would not have put the desire in me to write if there were not a way for me to pursue my writing. This does not mean that I am going to be a famous millionaire writer,  that would be nice, though I suspect I would not be any happier than I am right now. It means to me that somehow, some way, I will find a way to write that will fulfill my spirit and give some purpose to my life. Right now I have various methods to practice my craft, this site being one of them.  I try my best to write about what seems most alive in my mind, so the energy I feel when  a topic is stirring about in my mind can be felt by the reader. Usually this means I have to write daily on something to keep the ideas flowing.

Right now I am excited about pursuing another passion that my husband and I are working on, our future family farm. As an exercise for the family, to get the idea of moving to a farm in our kid’s minds, we did a brainstorming session. It was so much fun! I took out a large piece of butcher paper, some markers and we started scribbling. Lots of ideas flowed and the little ones even got involved with drawing and telling us what to write down. The kinds of animals they wanted, the things they wanted and so forth. So, our dream may be a ways off, but it has begun and some day hopefully I can post pictures of us on our little piece of land with a few goats, sheep and chicken.  For now here is a picture of our brainstorming giant doodle. It almost took up the entire dining room table. The writer in me took great pleasure in starting out a group writing activity with my family. Next step organization of ideas! I love writing! The energy was great while we were filling up the page and we all kept wandering back later and adding little bits here and there, Great fun!

Family Brainstorm!

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Posted in Being, Learning, Writing

Aug 21

Creepy Crawlies

Not sure why but we like our creepy crawlies. One morning we are outside playing in the yard and Iliana yells out “I found a lizard!” I smiled and assumed it was one of the various plastic toys we have around for playing, we have lizards and snakes and such but No! it was a real lizard and she caught it. It was sitting in the bottom of an empty planter, probably still cool as no sun had warmed it up so it was easy for her to catch.

Look at my lizard Mama!

Eventually the sun did warm it up and it reached around to bite her, then we let it go.

Another day my husband caught a toad, he knew the name of it but it escapes me at the moment, something to do with its feet or toes being a certain shape. Anyway, it is living in our yard, which we approve of most heartily as they eat lots of creepy crawlies that try to eat our garden, hurray for toads! We get toads because the irrigation ditch is behind the house, we’ve had toads and crawfish and I’ve seen fish in there, dead and alive.

Bug eating toad friend

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Posted in Uncategorized

Aug 21

Thyroid and Gluten, Who Knew?

This post is not related to homeschooling or writing but more to figuring out why I am sooo tired even though baby number four is a super easy baby who is content and takes naps and sleeps eight hours straight at night. So here is the story:
Last time I felt this way about a year ago, I was diagnosed hypothyroid and put on synthetic thyroid hormone. I immediately felt better and proceeded to get pregnant with the fourth princess. Having an underactive thyroid can effect many things including fertility. I was not surprised at the diagnosis since my mother is hypothyroid, it apparently runs in the family.
During my pregnancy my thyroid was checked periodically to make sure it was doing ok on the dose I had, no problems there. However after having the baby I started feeling bad again, even when getting plenty of sleep. We eat pretty healthy, as I cook most of our meals and try to buy healthy foods. My other symptoms were achy joints, fatigue, brain fog, headaches, and a lack of desire to do anything but sleep. Not a good situation when you have a three and two year old plus a new baby at home.
I went to the doctor, had my thyroid tested again, and she said that I was actually testing hyperthyroid, eep! But this was not too surprising since one form of thyroid disease that is an autoimmune response called Hashimoto’s, yes it sounds cool, but it’s not, the antibodies in the body can go back and forth where the thyroid is being attacked then it’s not, then it is, causing the person with the disease to go back and forth from hypo to hyper, etc. The doc did not want to reduce my dosage since she said it would probably go back again to hypo but did order a panel of tests to see if I had things like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, or some other problem.
Luckily all but one test came back negative. The one test that showed up positive was one for a non-specific inflammation (probably what is causing my joint pain), but the doc really didn’t know what was going on. Therefore, I did what any other person who wants to feel better would do. I turned to Google and the bottomless source that is the internet.
I received an e-mail ad from a health site about Gluten. Apparently a significant percentage of people with Celiac disease or the milder form of Gluten Intolerance have thyroid disease. Both being autoimmune diseases, this might make sense even. It also turns out that gluten intolerance can be lifelong and not display symptoms for many years. There are many other things that can be related to gluten intolerance, like lactose intolerance, which I also have. Looking back at my medical history I can also see other things that could all be linked to gluten intolerance. Anemia (I’ve had varying levels throughout my life), psoriasis (comes and goes but painful when it is bad), allergies, weight gain or inability to lose weight, fatigue, achy joints, PMS, yes even that. Since I’m not a doctor I don’t really know why these things happen together, however, I would imagine that damage to the small intestine caused by gluten intolerance would definitely be a factor.
For people with gluten intolerance, the body is not working properly because the part of your body where nutrients are being absorbed is broken or damaged. It also causes your body to release antibodies to fight off things that don’t need attacking, this is what happens with autoimmune diseases like thyroiditis, psoriasis, and even allergies. So maybe it is the gluten, it turns out there are few tests that can actually diagnose this problem. The best thing is to stop eating gluten for a few months to see if it helps. So that is what I am going to do. Here’s to rice cakes!
Here are some links to places where I found some interesting information:

http://www.bromleyhealthmanagement.com/health/conditions/00026thyroidproblemsandgluten.htm

http://www.thyroid-info.com/articles/glutenceliac.htm

http://www.stopthethyroidmadness.com/celiac/

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Posted in Food

Aug 21

The Gluten free Life

Well, It has been a month. A month of falling and trying again, each and every day. I guess nothing is new then. Anyway, I started eating gluten free around July 10th. I’ve been doing ok. Actually feeling sooo much better, to my delight and surprise. Then my husband started asking when I was going to bake bread again. I usually bake six to eight loaves at a time, stick them in the freezer then we eat them for about a month. They are made with organic unbleached wheat flour and whole wheat flour I get in bulk fifty pound and twenty five pound bags I got from the local food Coop. So far this has worked great. Last year I used a fifty pound bag of flour in a year, I keep it in the freezer to keep it fresh

But now I can’t eat the lovely soft smelling good bread that I bake. But I am human and weak so I baked the bread and ate a little, I felt not too bad. OK even.

Then a few days later I baked a loaf of delicious gluten full banana nut bread for the Realtor tour coming through the house the other morning. It smelled sooo good. I was strong. I held out. I sliced the bread up, left it on a platter. A big carafe of coffee and mugs and paper towels nearby for ease of eating. We went to the park, I resisted the muffin version I had made for the girls that they gobbled down at the park. Naomi scarfed down three despite eating oatmeal at home.

Then we went home. The half loaf that was left was calling to me, so soft and lovely smelling. I grabbed a piece and ate it. Sooo good. I was ok until the next morning I woke in a fog with a headache that took a whole day to go away and yet another resolution to stay away from gluten. The headache was almost worth it though. :)

Here is a picture of the gluten free bread I made with sorghum flour, rice flour, corn flour, and some other stuff. I got the recipe here at The Gluten Free Cooking School. She’s got lots of recipes I haven’t tried yet but the bread was good though no one else would eat it but me. It was springy and edible and stayed moist for a week in the fridge.

So, I am back to gluten free again after a day of possibly gluten induced yuckiness. I haven’t actually been diagnosed yet so . . .but I do feel better gluten free.

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Posted in Being, Food, Learning

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