2011 Goals

As 2010 comes to a close and I relfect on the year past and the year ahead I compose my goals for 2011:

I would like to live intentionally, in the moment. The two biggest things that prevent me from doing so are planning ahead and catching up. I want to be in the season at the time of the season and reap all the things that season has to offer. I want our life to be fully integrated and seemless with regards to work, play and education. I want a more natural ebb and flow to our day and I want to learn what that means and what that looks like for this family.

I would like to become a calmer, quieter and gentler mommy and wife. I find myself far too often speaking to my kids in an unkind and loud way (bc they listen then!!!) and I don't like the way it sounds. I would like to keep my focus on Jesus even when things are chaotic and especially when they are not.

I would like to continue to learn more about making herbal medicines and actually make several more things for personal use. I will educate myself with on the use of 5 more herbs, and grow five herbs I have never before grown. The ultimate long-term goal here is to set myself up to be somewhat of a local herbalist.

I would like to continue to increase our home food production by growing more intensively, adding meat chickens, and propagating berry producing plants. I would like to offset the cost of poultry by possibly growing mealy worms or sprouting. I would like to maximize this effort by documenting through journaling, labeling, and blogging. I would eventually like to compile my experience into a book on suburban farming.

I would like to do at least one randomly nice thing for someone each weekly. I would like to be quiet enough to be attentive to opportunities to help others and to give to others all the time, not just when things are going well for me but especially when they are not.

I would like to continue my work in localizing food systems by opening another community garden.

I would like to read through the Bible in one year with a great group of people brought togehter by the woman of the metamorphasing moniker. I also plan to read through Deitrich Bonhoffer's Cost of Discipleship.

I would like to declutter both the attic and the basement and set measures to prevent them from becomming akin to the great abyss again.

Resurrecting The Butterfly

The last year since I've blogged has been a year of uprooting and growth. It is now time to resurrect The Dancing Butterfly and make retrospective sense of the past many months. As 2010 draws to a close, I begin setting goals for the coming year. One goal for 2011 (and more on these goals later) is to keep a garden journal. I have been gardening for greater than a decade and have yet to wrote anything own, including labels for my plants. I actually attempted this once in the past but the journal became unusable after being left outside in an April rain. This will be the year that I write things own so that I remember what I have learned from my experience and so that I don't kill off sprouts below the soil surface by plopping another plant on top of them, so that I take the time to slow down and contemplate my experiences and write about them here. So that I can look back, laugh, cry and revel in the resurrection of The Dancing Butterfly.

and they call it progress

Every so often I peruse the headlines. Today I saw three, one after the other, that caught my eye. The first,

Hiring freeze could hurt park programs in Hunterdon

and the second:

Hunterdon's third Walmart opens soon on former Flemington Fairgrounds, will hire 300

and the third:

Foster Wheeler eliminates 50 engineering jobs at Hunterdon County location

So we have eliminated high paying jobs and replaced them with six times more low paying jobs and we think this is good? The Walmart article says that they are having trouble finding enough employees. Yet, the parks department reports that they will need to compromise their summer programming because they are understaffed. All this in light of the unemployment rate in NJ is 9.3%, and those are just the people receiving unemployment, not the people whose benefits have run out and still have not found work.

Is another Walmart really needed? Does the import of plastic crap from China really merit the creation of 300 jobs? Why on earth does this business seem to be thriving while children's education is being compromised and demand for the boiler systems used in American energy systems has gone down? Are we not consuming more and more energy each day? Well something here doesn't add up and as usual Walmart is in the middle, or the top of it.

Let the Garden Begin

Seems like a funny thing to be saying mid-August. Most people are eating the harvest, enjoying their tomatoes if the late season blight didn't obscure them from the face of the earth, and beginning to wonder when this year's first frost will be. Not I and a few others here in Hunterdon County; we have finally gotten the borough's approval to break ground on the community gardening project we started in February.

We have been given a less than ideal garden location. There is much shade, a bit wet (though everything is this year), and its tucked out of the way, not accessible by most residents without a motor vehicle. Tomorrow we begin to address our challenges.

Craving...

Okay, so its no surprise that every pregnant women gets cravings. This time around it has been black cherries. By early May I began stalking the produce manager, sure that cherry season was just around the corner. I was eating dried cherries to keep my craving in check till then but what I really wanted was the juicy red sweet cherry.

Last week I visited my midwife for the first time. The first time at 19 weeks along because I fired my doctor. She put me on 2000 mg of vitamin C daily to build collagen to strengthen my amniotic sac.

I am one to pay close attention to cravings as I always say that your body knows what it needs. Well today I had some time to look into the nutritional content of my beloved cherry. I discovered that cherries are high in vitamin C and a flavonoid called anthocyanin, which gives cherries their red pigment. Anthocyanin also builds collagen.

Piglet vs. Child

The book I am currently reading, Omnivore's Dilemma, briefly discusses a proponent for vegetarianism. The author quotes the work of another author, Peter Singer's Animal Liberation: "Equal consideration of interests is not the same as equal treatment. Children have an interest in being educated, pigs in rooting around in the dirt". I considered this and later yesterday afternoon I gazed upon this scene in my very own backyard and realized no matter how compelling to some, Singer has lost his argument with me.




Clearly, Singer has never met children like my children. Actually I wonder if he has ever met ANY children. Ever. And yet my husband has been asking me, why do you let them do that? Why are the girls allowed to dig holes in the yard and fill them with mud? I wanted to respond with some witty homeschool mom comment ala Charlotte Mason about how they were learning their place in the world by interacting with their environment. Instead I told him the truth. They are quiet when they do this and they leave me alone so that I can actually think for several consecutive minutes before being asked to hose them off.

Unnatural Childhood

The other day I was in the local grocery store and I saw two women with a group of 4 and 5 year olds, touring the grocery store with a store employee. I quickly realized that they were there on a daycare tour and that this was meant to educate them on the things they would have learned on trips to the supermarket with Mom. The store employee asked the children, "Do you know what this is?", as she held up various fruits and vegetables. The were able to recognize the apple. Beyond that, blank stares that were clearly indicative of the prepared food frenzy these children were likely served when their parents rush home to get them from daycare, feed them and send them off to bed. That thought haunted me as I continued shopping -- the majority of children don't recognize foods in their natural form. I caught up with them in the meat aisle as I unsuccessfully looked for ground turkey that did not have added natural flavoring. The store employee held up a package of beef. Do you know what this is? Its beef. Beef comes from a cow. Blank stares. Is beef healthy for you? "Probably not with all those antibiotics and hormones in it", I thought.