little farmers

I meet a lot of new people these days. It's the nature of new resident life, I suppose, and I count myself lucky that I can play extrovert as well as I do now. It really helps in establishing yourself and your family more quickly.

Usually the first question I get when I meet someone local is, "Where are you from originally?"

The next is, "And what brought you out this way?"

Legitimate questions, but without an easy, pat answer.

I'm from NKY, sure, but the lot that I just moved from that held my little suburban home was a very different lot from the one I roamed as a child.

When my mom was alive, we lived on a little suburban lot, too. I thought it was fine. I had a best friend across the street, and I had many privileges that my children (and most suburban children) no longer have. I was allowed to roller skate and ride my bike all over the neighborhood. There really was no definitive line that I wasn't allowed to cross. We just sort of naturally stayed within about a half-mile radius of our homes. This was with no parental supervision, no cell phones. It was old-fashioned trust, I guess, that we would come home when we needed to, safe and sound, and if anything happened on the way, someone would alert our parents.

I was an explorer by nature, so my favorite place to go was the undeveloped section of our neighborhood where the woods seemed to me as a child to go on forever.

When my mom died, I moved to my grandparents' house for the rest of my childhood. They lived on five acres, barely out of the city (the C-O-V for you locals). My grandpa had been raised on a farm about 7 miles from where I am sitting this instant, and my grandma had been raised on a farm an hour south of our old home.

They were both dirt poor growing up, and their parents had many children to support. Their families did things "the old way" out of necessity as much as the cultural habit of the time. Many of these things carried on into my childhood.

My grandpa raised all kinds of food to supplement their incomes, which were sizeable enough to support us without the garden. But I saw my first example then of the old adage:

"You can take the boy outta the farm, but you can't take the farm outta the boy."

You get used to it, that kind of life. You get used to picking strawberries right out of the patch, picking your corn and shucking it before dinner, stringing the beans, climbing the apple and pear trees and snacking once you get up there.

It was then that I learned tomatoes were best off the vine, standing in the garden, eaten whole like an apple. The crowd I run with now already knows this, of course. But not everyone does. I want to be sure my children do.

We would sit on the back porch on clear, hot summer nights. My grandpa might have a baseball game playing on the radio. Nobody yelled out the window to "turn it down!" or, more accurately, nobody called the police to file a noise complaint. We had lots of elbow room around us. Nobody griped because nobody heard except the nocturnal animals roaming the woods behind us.

Many nights there was no baseball, there was just hot sticky sweat and crickets, loud, screaming at us sometimes. Other times, in the background, singing with the frogs. My grandpa would point out the tree frogs. He would imitate them, and sing along with them.

He had an old sleeping bag he loved and an old tree he loved to put it under. He would lay there with his eyes closed, not asleep, just being. Sometimes he would call to the birds and they would answer.

My grandma canned the extra fruits and vegetables. In our basement, we had shelves and shelves lined with canned goods. Some were probably so old they would have flunked any food safety test out there, but she'd open them up, give them the smell test, heat and serve. I was rarely belly sick at all.

My summers had the constant accompaniment of droning fans inside. We didn't have an air conditioner until I was nearly grown. To this day, I still am comforted by white noise...the louder, the better.

But at 35 years old, I found myself in the suburbs with 20 feet on either side between my neighbors and us -- neighbors who didn't understand the meaning of "make do" but sure did understand the meaning of "consume." We didn't buy new cars, we didn't buy big TVs, we often didn't even have cable. But the kicker? We didn't care about our lawn. We just didn't care. And we still don't.

We were out of our element, and we both felt it. So we bought land, and we moved into our element. I've never regretted the decision and I cannot imagine moving back to the suburbs now.

"You can take the girl outta the farm, but you can't take the farm outta the girl."

I've never been so confident and naive as to call myself a farmer, but I totally get this sentiment. I am a food gardener, and I am a rural person by nature. This nature is only more evident as I get older. I enjoy my land and the possibilities it represents, I enjoy my woods and the hours of exploration they provide, and I really, really enjoy my elbow room.

I could have stayed in the little house with the little lot. I could have become a different person, and put hours upon hours of energy into flowers and pretty grass. But that food garden always stole my energy. Each year it grew until I realized I wanted more -- more for me and more for my kids.



It didn't feel right to me that they weren't allowed out of our fenced third-acre, nor did it feel right that we weren't shucking corn and stringing beans before dinner.

So, I am asked: what brought you all the way out here?

There are a handful of things that I consider top priority in what I impart to my children. One of those is a true relationship with and understanding of their food. Food does not just come from a grocery store shelf. Someone's sweat and worry and fear and joy and soul gave you that food. To cherish it for the nutrition it gives to your body is expected. To waste it is unacceptable, and not because "there are starving kids in Africa."

I've seen firsthand the deleterious health effects of treating food like any other consumable, just another item to water down with chemicals and price high to line corporate pockets. And the political effects of turning over to profit-driven companies the control of the very substances we need to live cannot be understated.

I want my children to have an innate sense of the importance of their food and the power it represents. I want them to feel it without having to think it.

I want the farm to always be in my girls.

number sets

One of the concepts I wanted to introduce to Sassy this month was the idea of number sets and counting by twos.

Last month, we experimented with the concept of odd and even by walking up our long, 500-foot driveway to get the mail together. After a long rain, our driveway is filled with puddles here and there all the way to the road. I quickly told her on the way up one day which numbers between 1 and 10 were odd. Then I explained which ones were even.

"Oh!" she said. "So it's like every other number?"

"Yes," I said. "It's exactly that."

I then called out different numbers on the way back. If it was an even number, she was to do nothing unusual. But if it was an odd number, she was to jump into the rain puddle as hard as she could making as big a splash as possible.

She loved this game and begged to play it whenever she saw puddles.

I'm wondering now if the odd/even concept instigated a natural tendency for her to count by two, because she aced the game I made for her that was supposed to teach her how to do this.

Last week, she spent the day in the city with her Nana, and I sent her homeschooling activities with her for the day. One activity was a game of counting using a Hi-Ho Cherry-O game board but changing the play altogether. Here's our counting-in-sets game:

You Need:
A Hi-Ho Cherry-O game board
At least 20 cherries -- 40 is ideal, but not necessary
Two players

Game Play:
The parent (or teacher) asks the child to cover their eyes while the parent puts some cherries on one of the trees.

When the parent is finished, the child must guess how many cherries are on the tree before doing any counting. The parent should only allow about 5 seconds for the guess.

After the child ventures their guess, both players count the cherries together to see if the guess is correct.

If the child guesses correctly, the child gets the cherries. If not, they have to give the parent that amount of cherries (or however many they have if they don't have enough cherries yet).

The game continues until the child "swipes" all the cherries from the parent.

Around Round 3, the parent should begin to count the cherries by twos as they count together to see if the guess was correct.

Purpose

Many children naturally start to count in sets if they are encouraged to "guess" before they count. Orally counting by twos reinforces what they are likely already doing internally.

So how did Sassy do?

Nana said she counted by twos all the way to ten by herself, without any mistakes. Sassy then started counting by threes, so Nana rolled with it and Sassy figured out 3, 6, 9, then wasn't ready to go further. They both reported having a good time.

If you had all 40 cherries that came with the game, you could tweak these instructions to start introducing sets of ten. If you filled two trees completely plus one tree with 7 cherries, that's a nice visual for the number 27.

Along with our game, we read the book "One Hundred Hungry Ants" in our number sets week. In the book, 100 Hungry Ants separate into more and more sets to reach the picnic faster. It was perfect for this first grader.

Finally, in our freeplay, she's been working on building this week. Freeplay is always that -- free -- but she can only choose from the materials on hand. In August, she made me very proud by agreeing to make our toy collection totally plastic-free. She even agreed to redistribute her My Little Ponies, Barbies & horses. I am so touched by her empathy for her little sister and her deep desire to protect her, as that's the only reason she gave up her favorite toys. She knows plastic is made of chemicals and she knows her sister chews on everything.

So her freeplay "setup," as she calls it, was especially lovely without all that plastic. She made a pizza shop, with a little patio outside, a chicken that had to stay out because it was sick, the owners' house up on a hill above the shop, and a road that led there. I adore this child's creativity.

Here's the long view:



Then we have the dining room outside the kitchen (the kitchen was the photo up top):



Here's the outside patio with the umbrella table:



I asked her if the apple was part of the setup or just a snack.

She replied: "Oh, that was just my snack. But I got so caught up in my setup I forgot to eat it! That rarely happens to me."

bloggy breaks begone

I really hate bloggy breaks. I prefer to be writing regularly; it makes me not disappear into people's neverland list of those-who-don't-update, and most importantly, it makes me happy. But I've been feeling wiped out recently, just as my Magpie has discovered new talents of scooting across the room (note I did not say "crawling"), leaving me with adaptations to make in an exhausted state of mind. This equals sporadic updates, and I'm sorry for that.

However...I am delivering pictures today to make up for the little break, and offering a few new anecdotes of our recent farm life. I'm also introducing a new little feature because I think it will be fun.

So, we almost lost another rooster. This made me really angry, sad, guilty, and about done with our younger dog. Apparently, Maple cannot resist the temptation to get into the chicken run, no matter how many times she's scolded for it. But it's not the chickens she's after. She's after their food. Seriously! Our dog can't keep her paws off the nuggets of processed corn, soy & whatever else that makes up our colorless, odorless chicken feed and she prefers it over the fresh feathered meat around it. That part is good, I suppose, except that our rooster doesn't particularly like dogs in His Run, making His Ladies scream and roost for cover.

Our poor rooster ended up with a wing completely torn off and a stump to show for it, while our dog licked the ground for soy nuggets. I found him shivering and bloody and I cried. I didn't want to lose this rooster. I love his call, I love his color, I love his determination, and I love that when it comes to humans, his fight turns to flight. That's a good rooster, and it's a rooster I intended to breed next Spring.

After crying, and calling a friend, and crying some more, I got myself together enough to call a local vet. Now thing is, around here, he's just a chicken. Just a dumb chicken. I knew the vet was probably going to laugh, and sure enough, they did. I explained that I knew it was just a chicken, but that we did like this rooster and would like to keep him if possible. We would just like his wing to be cleanly cut if needed, and the wound dressed. But even as I was talking, I was watching dollar signs ding! ding! ding! in my head, and I was glad when the vet referred me to another clinic that takes farm animals. I didn't call that clinic; instead, Jeff and I treated his wound that night and hoped for the best.

Well, I don't know if he's out of the woods yet, but it looks like he might be. He's been crowing his early morning call for the past 3 mornings in our back hallway. We had to separate him from the ladies since they wanted to peck his wound, so we've had him in the house. Around here, I think we'd be called something like "crazy." Ah, well.

After the whole experience with this rooster and the last one, I've realized that I can be whatever kind of farm mama I want to be. Historically, it seems if you live off the land, and especially off animals on your land in any way, you're expected to get pretty hard-hearted about them.

One friend told me after the Mr. Macho incident that I was "a real farm woman now."

Perhaps. I did perform a mercy killing, and mercy killing is part of farm work, unfortunately. But my heart's not hard yet. If anything, it's softer.

You know what? I love my chickens. I look at a couple of my expired layers and think, "Man, they're fat! They are eating up a big cut of that food bill!" And I know that when I need more lard, I'll take this one or that one to the poultry farm for "processing." But I won't do it myself, and I will put them gently into the crate for transportation, and give them a fine last meal of expensive mixed seeds and nuts. And that's okay. That's who I want to be, not my grandma, not the cattle farmer grandma who lives behind us. Not even Caroline Ingalls. (gasp!)

I want to be my own kind of farmer mama, the one who spent her pre-reproducing years as a vegetarian and a member of PETA. The one who chooses to eat meat now because her body demands it, but wants to have a hand or and eye into how that meat is raised. The one who nurses a beloved rooster back to health, elevates a very fat old hen to pet status, and won't kill her own animals. And who doesn't give a darn if that labels me crazy.

We're working toward a dairy goat now. Jeff fixed the chickens a new pen right off their coop! They love it, and so do I. Speckles (our rooster) hasn't been reintroduced into the flock yet because his injury is still too exposed. I can't wait to hear his call from this new run when he's back, though.

The old chicken run will now be a run for the dogs. They needed an upgrade anyhow. The old dog run, which is very close to our back door, will be the goat's pen for now. I have borrowed an electric collar for the dogs (big decision for a former PETA member :-), and I plan to start training them to stay away from the chickens, their coop, and their run altogether. Hopefully, that can start this week. For now, we will continue the routine of chickens out = dogs in and vice versa.

And now for the new feature....every so often, hopefully once a week or so, I want to tell you about some of our homeschooling activities from that week. I know some of my family members are curious what we do when we homeschool, so I thought it would be fun to document some of our activities. It will also make a neat keepsake for us from year to year.

I'm not going to do this today. You have to wait! But don't worry, the first post is already all planned out. You never know, it might even be already written just hanging out in my drafts. :-)

I also am often asked what curriculum we are using. Well, as usual, I'm doing things eclectically. (Have you seen my house?) We do mostly interest-based learning, but I also introduce new material and have her do things she might not like but that I feel are important. One of these is handwriting, for example. Another is reading, and another is basic math functions. So I don't think we fit the definition of "unschoolers" although I give Sassy a lot of choice in how she learns and practices these skills. Sometimes she plays Starfall and I count it as her entire reading lesson for the day. Other times we go through her words for the day together. Handwriting could take place as she writes a letter to someone or as she just practices the letter "Z." She has a choice in the how more than in the what.

But we are also not sitting at the kitchen table from 7:30 until 3:00. This is the most common misconception of homeschooling I hear. My grandma, for instance, can't understand how I can homeschool her with a baby and "everything else!" (her words) She's drawing on her 10+ years of experience as a kindergarten teacher, and doesn't realize that helping one child achieve specific goals takes far less time than helping a whole classroom. So much of a classroom teacher's time is spent in group management. I've done both classroom teaching and one-on-one teaching, and having one student is far more time-efficient, much like tutoring is.

So, I think it will be interesting for everyone to hear some of our sample activities so you can see that we are not doing school at home, but instead, continuing on the learning path that started the day she was born.

I have a beautiful, smart, well-spoken, and extremely sociable little girl, and as I watch her grow, I become even more certain that it's the right choice for us. And now I want to share our learning days with you.

Now, finally...the pictures.

The Birds
One morning back in September, Sassy came running into the living room talking about all these birds!
Sofie's barking at the birds!
I can't stay outside -- I'm afraid of the birds!

Ridiculous, I thought, until I went to look out the window, and here's what I saw....

All these vultures. They would land on a post, face the sun, and spread their wings out wide. It was foggy and chilly, but the morning sun was forcing its way through the fog to the East.





All I could figure was that maybe they were drying their wings? It was an awesome sight.

Our Only Garden Pumpkin



A Visit from Dear Friends



The New and Improved Chicken Run

magpie

Beware: very pic-heavy post to follow. Please ensure adequate bandwidth. :-)

My dear friend C recently had some professional pictures done of her little family of three (just before they were to become four), that were amazing. I loved every single one, so much in fact, that I took my Magpie out a few hours later to do a little photo shoot of my own. It's been a long time since I've tried to take pictures like these, but I'm liking the results and wanted to share.

(p.s. I didn't leave Sassy out on purpose; she just wasn't home at the time!)

goodbye mr. macho

We had our second chicken casualty this week. We had acquired Mr. Macho, as we called him, from my midwife about 2 weeks ago. We were enjoying his call each morning. As I told Jeff, living in the country isn't complete until you have a rooster calling to you each morning. I miss his call already!

Before we could even snap a picture of our gorgeous guy, our dogs got to him and left him not dead, but half-dead yesterday morning. Please keep these details from my midwife if you know her and talk to her regularly, because I know they would make her very sad, but that's how it happened. Our dogs are not exactly chicken killers; instead, they think chickens are toys they can play with and pluck feathers from. So poor Mr. Macho was left lying naked and bare on a chilly, windy morning with a half-torn wing. Yes, it's sad, and very depressing, and what happened next was the worst part.

I had to put him out of his misery.

This is the first time I have ever, ever killed a living animal on purpose and it was something I hope I don't have to do again. It is not something I want to get used to, or to develop a tolerance to. I firmly believe that if we all (read: if I) had to kill our own meat, most of us (I, anyway) would be a vegetarian.

My dear friend Karen was able to console me through the freaking out part, talk me through the actual deed, and make me laugh about it afterward. That is a great friend indeed and I won't soon forget how kind she was to me yesterday. She continues to make me laugh with her rendition of the story, so if you know her, you must ask her about it. She has a flair for comedy that is hers alone, a little subtle dance she does of pushing the boundaries of appropriateness so you can find the humor in a no-good, rotten, very bad day, while holding back just enough that your heart doesn't break. For this gift, I am thankful.

On a brighter note, we had a wonderful pre-Labor day party with our friends and a nice Labor-day party with our family. Everyone admired Jeff's outbuildings and fence, and we even used his larger lean-to as a rain shelter for Sunday's lunch.

Jeff was given papers this week letting him know that he is being laid off and his last day will be November 4th. So we're trying to prepare as best we can for that. We are selling his old car to buy a tractor and pay off our credit card. Then we're giving the credit card to one of my friends to hang onto in case we need to rent a car. This way we won't be able to charge anything all willy-nilly.

Jeff will be spending his time trying to build us a pole barn between our property and our neighbor's property. He's excited to expand on his skills. We'll be doing a totally handmade Christmas this year, and I'm quite excited about that. We're trying to prepare for a Jersey cow as well, as the majority of our food bill seems to be spent on dairy products. And, Jeff is going to try to hunt us a deer. I hope that he does better with the killing than I did yesterday because I hated it. And mine was mercy killing. His could be much worse on him.

I started an attachment parenting Yahoo! group out my way, so if you know of anyone in my area, I'd love it if you'd pass along the address.

Also, if you don't subscribe to my other blog, I wanted to mention that the coupon books that are distributed at Whole Foods, Mambo Sprouts are now available to be mailed directly to your house for free. Saves me a trip to Whole Foods since I don't like to go there anyway, but do enjoy many of the Mambo Sprouts coupons.

And finally, my scratch-food blog, Supper In Seconds has a whole new look and is about to get an email subscribe button. With luck, it will be there before this message reaches your inbox, if you're subscribed here.

My scratch cooking skills have grown by leaps and bounds since I've been out here since running by the store at the drop of a hat is no longer a viable option. I've become rather impassioned of late with sharing some of my recipes and shortcuts since it's my firm belief that for most folks, scratch cooking has to be quick or it won't be a daily option.

Most of my pics this time are from our most recent park day back home. I'm really appreciative of the community of mamas we had back home and have been quite missing the easy companionship that comes from years of knowing each other's stuff. We're pretty excited to get back in the regular Friday swing next week.

Much love to everyone during these beautiful Fall-ish days!

landing the land

Since we’ve moved out here, I’ve had several friends, acquaintances & family members express interest in buying their own piece of property. I highly recommend it, for countless reasons. The number one reason is the fact that I so often feel like I’m on a permanent vacation the pace is so much slower here. Once Jeff is able to quit his city job, he can also enjoy this perma-holiday feeling. For now, he vacillates between learning how to slow down on the weekends and feeling the usual city/suburban rush during the week.

Then there’s also the potential for supplying a lot of your own organic food, keeping animals for food or pleasure, having your kids grow up without the heebie-jeebies over every single bug that flies next to them, crawls over their bed or even lands on their plate! Opportunities for exercise are abundant, as are opportunities to shop locally, learn all the different regional birds, collect wildflowers and wild edibles, track different mammals, or just sit and have sun tea on the back porch.

It can be a lot of work, and it’s certainly not always idyllic, but the benefits far outweigh the irritation. I suppose those of you who are interested in moving out to more land already suspect this.

So, I must urge you to do it now.

Recently I had the opportunity to research our state’s Multiple Listing Service to see what land prices were like in our area and I was floored to discover that the value of our lot had increased to nearly double its value since we bought it. The reason we moved “this far out” (as my family members like to say) was plain and simple: land prices. We couldn’t get the land we wanted at the price we wanted to pay unless we were willing to drive for it. And when we moved here, our land was considerably cheaper per acre than land in the other two states that make up our tri-state area.

Now, though, they say the Amish are moving in and driving up land prices. I don’t know. All I know is that when we purchased ours, we paid $3300 an acre, give or take. It’s now going for $5000 to $10,000 an acre. Back nearer to my hometown, the more rural outskirts were already at $10,000 an acre when we bought this lot. They’ve now moved closer to $15,000 or even $20,000. Farther north, I’ve not priced simply because that state has some fairly bureaucratic homeschooling laws I never wanted to mess with.

I think it’s amazing that you can still buy farmland so cheaply in this country. Obviously we still have more land than our population needs. If we were in, say, England or Ireland or France or Greece, would the farmland be this cheap? Could we have ever afforded an abundance of fertile land as a one-income family whose sole provider was a blue-collar hourly worker? I have no idea, honestly. But I don’t think it will last like this here forever. If it’s already doubled in 3 years, then act! Act now! Act as soon as you have money! I won’t mention it again, over and over. I won’t be a broken record on this -- promise! -- but you’ve been advised and urged.

Now, what have we been up to? The garden is still coming in, and we’re still waiting on tomatoes to ripen. I canned pickle relish today. I want to can hot pepper relish tomorrow. We are searching for an old hard-sided wrecked, gutted, moldy and/or rodent-infested camper that we can turn into a mobile chicken coop for the ladies for the winter. If you have any connections, please let us know!

Jeff built the dogs a pen and finished his fence, finally. He’s glad to have that project off his plate. We’re gearing up for school to start soon.

My magpie is sitting up fully without support now and she has two bottom teeth. My Sassy must have given her hers, since she has two missing.

I collected grapevines this week to make a wreath and was so pleased at how it turned out! While allowing myself to practice flowing, I finally gave into the urge to start decorating instead of putting it off to be “a winter project.” The deck looks especially lovely.

I planted fall vegetables in the raised bed in front and two herb gardens, one for cooking and one for tea. Sassy has been into herbal tea lately, so we wanted to start a tea garden.

And that about wraps up the homestead as of late. I’ve had little alone time to write lately, but Jeff starts first shift again next week, so a change in routine might allow for more me-time again soon. Enjoy the pics!

the new dog run



chubba-wubba magpie



what to do with yellow squash idea #54, fill with herbed ricotta cheese and pinenuts...bake



what to do with lots of eggs idea #37, mini sweet custards!



now for some oldies...

mom and toddling sassy on vacation at cade's cove, tennessee



mom and toddling sassy having lunch in the van on that same vacation. (oh how we miss that van!)



sassy and best friend jude at sassy's 5th birthday party

flow

We recently had a couple who lives nearby over for breakfast. Considering the fact that they are organic food activists sharing chemical farming country with us, they live amazingly nearby – 2 miles to be exact. When we met, they were scheduled to come on a Monday night, but as is our routine, we were outside most of the day Monday and didn’t receive their phone call. By the time we did get in touch, she had gone swimming and preferred to push our get together to Tuesday morning.

“She went up to the park and got in the swimming pool,” our new friend said, “and now she’s kind of flowing with that and would rather wait until tomorrow.”

Two other times, he had mentioned this flowing into this or that. I smiled. They are true hippies, I thought. But they’re also passionate about organic foods and food activism. It will be fine.

But then over the week, I sat on this concept of flowing in the back of my mind where funny ideas take shape into real, concrete realizations and learning. I realized that I am breathing again out here, really breathing. The drowning, choking, suffocating that had become synonymous with life itself in the city…it’s gone. Deep breathing is the norm now.

And I saw clearly how the people around me who still farm or in any way live off their land truly are on “country time.” It’s not a myth. There are commitments to be made, and time schedules to be kept, here and there. But most of the time people are home, there is no time schedule besides the weather-dictated one, and late, early, and on-time blur into a big window of time allowance. I am by nature well suited to that kind of schedule.

So this week I’ve been practicing allowing myself to flow based on my mood, my interests, and the needs of our family. Mama’s been happy. So have the kids.

Sassy and I are planning to take classes to join the Catholic Church this fall. She attended Vacation Bible School at the Baptist Church down the road this week. She had a wonderful time! It was so fun to watch her come home each night excited about what she had learned. I’m determined to be sure she has regular activities like this throughout the school year as well.

I went down to watch the end-of-VBS performance and slide show with the other parents last night. It was funny. It brought back so many of my own VBS memories, most happy, some stomach-churning, though I couldn’t place my finger on why. Maybe stage fright? But it also cemented my decision to pursue the conversion to Catholicism and take the RCIA (Rites of Christian Initiation for Adults) classes. The fact is, I feel closer to God and more on-track with my spiritual learning inside the traditions, rites & yes even rules of the Catholic Church than I do in the Protestant Churches. I can’t explain it better than that, and I certainly don’t mean it to disparage my Protestant upbringing and the many Protestant ministers that have meant a lot to my spiritual growth.

Sometimes, however, answers and feelings and directions are so clear, you can’t deny them, no matter how far they are outside your little comfortable box. To me, it’s always been the same God, same Bible, what’s the big deal about differences? I’m beginning to understand how different the practice of worship can be, even when it is directed at the same God. And the craziest part is that the one I grew up with isn’t the one that keeps me focused.

So we’ve been watching these little Catholic videos for kids about different saints as part of Sassy’s “Little Flower Girls” club. We’ve watched one about St. Therese and one about St. Catherine. One of the two saints told her parents that she wasn’t going to eat much of her food anymore so she could give it to the poor. Later, she went on to become a nun and dedicate her life to God, but one of her first acts of sacrifice had been to give up part of her food each day.

Well, I made roasted vegetables on Wednesday night. I cut up potatoes, onions, yellow squash, sweet banana peppers and garlic cloves, drizzled them with olive oil, and roasted them in the oven. Sassy turned up her nose when they came out and decided she only wanted the potatoes. I told her she could not pick through the serving plate for just the potatoes, leaving all the rest. But I’d be happy to give her a bowl of her own and she could eat them however she wished.

About 20 minutes later, I asked her if she was finished with her roasted vegetables. “No,” she said, “I want to be like St. Catherine, Mommy. I want to give my food to the poor.” I smiled, amused, and told her that was fine, to get ready for bed.

I went to the table to put her food away and saw that she had eaten all the potatoes out and left just her squash and onions and peppers for “the poor.”

“Hey!” I said, “All the poor get are your squash and onions? If you want to give all your food to the poor, let’s give them the suckers and Tootsie Rolls that grandpa keeps buying for you, hmmm???”

To my challenge, she replied, “Well, then the poor wouldn’t be very healthy, Mommy.”

I can’t laugh when she says this stuff because it makes her mad, but I couldn’t stop giggling on the inside. I guess she’s been listening all along. Say what you will about squash and onions, but they are healthier than suckers and Tootsie Rolls.

And our pictures for the day...

We set up our guest house to be sure all was in order:



This lovely critter was attacking my tomatoes. She's a hornworm and she had quite a vicious looking horn atop her head, well...for a bug. She's carrying her eggs on her back.



Our kindest of the new chickens, Lemon, the light-brown Buff Orpington, was the winner of the hornworm snatching contest.



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