2014 in Review

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2014 was a fun year. We didn’t move. It’s the first year I haven’t moved for a long time. Looking back through my calendar, we spent lots of time with family and friends. We visited ice caves, fairy gardens, water parks, hiked a waterfall, wind caves and biked around a lake. We took road trips to Wyoming, Nevada and California to visit cousins. We went with my brother to Bear Lake, and with my sister to Yellowstone. The kids did preschool at home with mom we invited other friends to join us. The kids took swim lessons, and PB did t-ball and karate. We visited parks, went swimming, took the raft out on the lake and played disk golf. At home we played cars and enjoyed the sandbox. We raised nine chickens, lots of tomatoes, and started to renovate our landscape. The biggest event was the birth of baby H right before Christmas.

Here’s some of my favorite pictures from the year:

For my goals, I finished a Permaculture Design Course, volunteered with a community garden, read 40 books, started to go to the Temple twice a month, and started a new blog. I grew a baby inside me and had a natural birth. I also started to meditate and use hypnosis more, which really helped me emotionally.

PB learned to read incredibly well for his age. He likes pepperoni sandwiches, find-it books, Wild Kratt’s, hiking and his favorite color is red. His favorite activities are playing cars and in the sand-box.

C loves trains and chocolate peanut butter. His favorite activity by far is playing in the sandbox. He learned how to talk better and sing songs.

Christmas

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Due to a certain adorable little baby, I was dead tired for most of Christmas. It did provide a wonderful opportunity to ignore chores and spend the whole day playing or reading. The boys had a great time and enjoyed all their presents. They ate mainly candy, woke up early, and then crashed for an afternoon nap.

brother

first christmas

stockings

toys

Excuses

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It’s easy to think of reasons to not do something: it’s cold, I’m tired, life is hectic, etc.

But sometimes it is a lot nicer to make excuses to go and do something.

We went on a little hike. It’s not necessarily great hiking weather, and there aren’t fall leaves to see, or spring flowers or even snow. I was very pregnant, the kids aren’t always easy to get out of the door. But we went anyway.

bridge

brothers

pond

stream

We walked slowly and didn’t go very far. But all of us were happier because we went.

Birth Story

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I went into my 39 week appointment and was 6 cm dilated. I wasn’t in active labor, but because I was so far along my doctor was willing to send me over to the hospital when ever I was ready. I went ahead and planned on going in the next morning. I didn’t want to be induced at all, but also knew that labor could be extremely short once it started, and didn’t want labor to be anymore stressful that it was.
We dropped off the boys at Grandma’s and went over and got checked in. The doctor came in and broke my water: I had progressed a tiny bit from the day before. Then we sat around. I still wasn’t having regular contractions, but they checked me at lunch and I was progressing slowly. Finally at about one, my contractions started to pick up. I hated it. But the relaxation I had been practicing helped, and I was able to work through them. Just at the point when I was about done with it, I felt that I was ready to push and called in the nurse. They got everything ready, and with one more contraction and a whole lot of unpleasantness I had my baby. He was born just before 3:00, six hours after my water broke.
mom
I held him for a long time right after and was even able to get him to latch on. He loves to nurse and suck, and has even managed to find his thumb a few times.

Test-Tube Agriculture

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I remember watching an old cartoon, set in a classic futuristic space setting. For food, they ate a single pill, full of everything needed to survive. It is a concept repeated other places as well: test-tube food. Just figure out the basic necessities of life pack it into one package and then have no worries about nutrition.

It is a reality that has fringes in our current standard diet: Ensure, formula, vitamin packed powders, and breakfast cereals packed with extra vitamins. Recently, the real food movement has pushed away from this overly simplistic science, acknowledging that we often can’t replicate the variance that our diets require, variance only found in the natural world. For the most part we still eat a wide variety of foods, and a varied diet is encouraged.

I watched this video, and started to wonder again about that test tube food. Modern mainstream agriculture is striving for that test tube approach. Figure out the right balance of nutrients, add it to crops in chemical fertilizers. Our food is becoming the result of too ridgid science, focusing not on the hundreds of nutrients in the natural world but a handful that are the most prevalent.

What we put into our food production is also what comes out. And if we are striving for test tube agriculture, the food that comes out is test tube food. It might look like a varied diet, but really often is the same  test tube grains processed in ways that simply look different. I realized at one point that  sometimes the various processed food I was eating was the same exact food, just flavored and colored to appear different.

When I produce my own food, I don’t use chemical fertilizers, or try to figure out exactly what a plant needs. I focus on natural systems, and let them do the too complex work to figure out myself. And I can see the benefit, in the yolks of my free range eggs, the taste of homegrown tomatoes, and feeling more healthy than ever during the height of harvest season. Test tube, over simplified science shouldn’t be the base of our diet, and so it shouldn’t have a place in our agriculture as well.

Dinovember

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I ran across Dinovember last year, but didn’t do anything. This year, the dinosaurs had quite a fun November in our house. Here is what they were up to.

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The kids enjoyed it as well as the adults. PB even had suggestions for things the dinosaurs could do like pillow fighting and playing cars. It helped C when we woke up a bit grumpy to go find what fun things the dinosaurs were up to.