where art thou newman-o's?

Lack of quick access to my few vices was of the things I was nervous about moving “so far out,” as everyone likes to say (leaving me wondering how exactly that is defined, since the closest store that sells, say, milk is less than 2 miles from us, though the closest Wal-Mart is 30 miles, and I’m certainly not complaining about that one bit). My vices these days consist of little more than coffee and sweets, especially chocolate. It’s just that I’m picky about them. They have to be organic. Oreos are off limits. Newman-o’s are devoured by the box full.

Well it turns out funny things happen when you simply cut off easy access. You don’t need the things you used to depend on. You think about them, salivate over them in your mind. You think how delicious they would be. But then, you get over it and eat something you have on hand.

It’s weird, because living 5 minutes from a store that sold all of my favorite things made my mind games play out very differently. I would think about something I wanted, and then I couldn’t quit thinking about it until I gave in and drove myself to Kroger or Graeter’s or Blockbuster, if it was a show that was catching my addictive bone.

So now that option is off the table, unless I want a 60-minute drive, round-trip, to do it. And it truly surprised me that my brain just says, OK then, not going to happen, let’s move on.

When we ran out of cookies, we ate Easter candy with nuts. When we ran out of that, we ate toast with honey. When we had no food in the house to speak of, I used what we did have to make a delicious meal that could easily become a regular part of our summer suppers. Looking around at empty cabinets, I sprouted half a bag of mung beans, roasted 2 beets, and mixed it together with a can of kidney beans, some oil, salt, honey & 2 packages of restaurant-swiped mustard. Yum.

In the city, I would have been running to Kroger since we had “nothing to eat!”

I guess that’s why it seems so much more relaxing out here. I can’t remember the last time I sat in my chair in the morning, internet-free, TV-free, with no obligations on the day’s calendar at all, and said to myself, “Hmmm….what should I get into today?”

I hope that this more relaxed lifestyle will lead to me being a devoted homeschooler next year. This year I’ve been less than disciplined, and I’ve forgiven myself because it’s “just kindergarten.” To an extent, I believe that. On another level, I’m nervous that I don’t have the self-discipline to ensure the job is done properly.

I will say the opportunities for learning are always there if you look for them, though. Sassy and I walked to the mailbox yesterday through puddle after massive rain puddle in our driveway. On the way back, we played an odd-even game. I gave her a quick primer: 1, 3, 5 – odd. 2, 4, 6 – even. It goes every other, I said. I stepped, saying, ODD, EVEN, ODD, EVEN, as each foot went down. “Time to play!”, I told her.

Each time I said an ODD number, she could jump into a puddle as hard as she wanted to.

Each time I said an EVEN number, she wasn’t allowed to jump. It was an ODD-EVEN Simon Says, I suppose.

She got it after about 2 minutes and only a handful of mis-jumps. Then we played all the way back to the house. “Do it again!” she kept begging me.

It is a wonderful thing to embrace the mud and the dirt because it’s a fact of life. It’s a wonderful thing to put into practice the adage, “If they’re not muddy when they come in, they weren’t having enough fun.”

I can’t wait to have all of our friends to visit, and I'm looking at the first weekend in June to have a big old, weekend-long housewarming party. Mark your calendars & dig out your tents, if you'd like.

And please stop by Kroger on the way and bring some Newman-o’s if possible.

happy alive again day

This is the first Easter since I’ve had children that we didn’t have family functions to shuttle between, trucking 50+ miles to pick up baskets of candy. When did Easter become the Spring Christmas, I’ve often wondered. I usually find time to attend a morning service each Easter, even in my CEO years (Christmas Easter Only). This year, we decided, we were busy enough! We were going to spend Easter on our land, in our new house, all together. We were not going to send Sassy away with Nana for the Easter Egg Hunt or with Grandpa for the morning breakfast. We would be calm, we would be together, and we would be Just Us.

So Sassy made it clear the day before that she was expecting an Easter basket from the Easter Bunny. She said something like, “I hope the Easter Bunny can find me in my new house!” Then she went on to describe the places she remembered the Easter Bunny hiding her basket in previous years. I didn’t have the heart to skip the hidden basket, so off to Kroger I went on Saturday morning.

As I was going to bed Saturday night, I was thinking (of course) that I didn’t want her to think Easter was only all about candy and a giant hiding bunny. (Though that was good fodder for jokes Saturday night, as we wondered if Sally our cat, brilliant hunter that she is, would hunt the Easter Bunny and leave him decapitated on our front stoop. Yes, we have a sometimes sick sense of humor, and yes, Sassy laughed right along with us.) And since we weren’t planning to attend Easter services anywhere, I felt somewhat responsible for her education on the subject.

I decided that Sunday morning I would take Sassy on a Easter morning walk, just the two of us with baby strapped on front. I would explain to her a more meaningful Easter that wasn’t all about candy.

So, we started with Jesus dying on the cross and coming to life again on Easter. I explained that things can die, but then come back to life. Look at the trees, I told her, see how they died over the winter and now they are coming back to life in the Spring. Look at their tiny buds (shush please, botanists, on my lack of differentiating death and dormancy on this). I explained how people in our lives have died but they have become alive again in Heaven, just like Jesus became alive again here on Earth. That’s how we know it will happen in Heaven.

Talk about simplicity! In bringing it down to a five-year-old’s level, I think I actually made Easter more meaningful for myself.

We renamed the day “Alive Again Day.” We hiked the woods and found tiny spring buds. We took pictures of some and collected others. We decided that next year, when we had an oven to bake in, we would bake a cake on Alive Again Day and celebrate all the people in our life who have died and had a second birthday in Heaven.

Here are some pictures from our walk. I hope everyone else had a very happy Alive Again Day!