clean floors, dirty paws

The weather has been shifting between Winter and Spring lately and the need for change in present in both myself and my children.  Every year around this time I get a deep desire to wander, to move furniture, to deep clean things that aren't even dirty, to purge the old and bask in the new.  Every day I meander around the yard and observe the changes.  Tiny leaves emerging from the trees, weeds poking up all around, camellias blooming.  I count the blossoms on the fruit trees and notice that nearly all the citrus is gone.  As I walk I am reminded of the variety of Spring bulbs that grace our yard with their different colors and smells.  Flowers of Spring are quick to blossom and quick to wilt, but I wait anxiously for their show each year.  This is the time of year that I want to sell it all and move into a tiny house in the woods.  To dig my hands into the cool soil and to feel the sun on my bare skin.  I notice that Caches especially is f...

This morning I gave the obligatory "time to go" warning to a Lego building boy.  I asked him if he had everything he needed for school and he assured me he did as he walked out the door to put on his shoes.  "Did you get your lunchbox and your snack?"  "Yep!" I walk outside next to him and poke into the small front pocket of his backpack that is open just further than half way.  I see no snack.  As he's adjusting his sock I repeat, "did you grab your lunchbox and your snack?"  "Yep!" Humm, I look info the big pocket of his backpack.  "Oh I see, your snack is in with your lunchbox. Here I'll put it in the small front pocket for you so it's easier to grab at school."  I remove the granola bar and zip it securely in the small front pouch.  Then I zip up the big pouch for good measure.  He's finishes putting on his shoes, grabs his backpack and jumps in the car.  Seems like a pretty typical exchange, but I have a p...

I've promised myself a hundred times that I will make time to write and a hundred times I have betrayed myself.  Each time I have stories whirling around my head that never find safe landing on paper, I betray myself.  Each time I convince myself that nobody cares what I have to say, or that it's already been said a thousand ways by someone else, I betray myself.  Every time I sit down to write and delete it because I just isn't quite flowing how I want, I betray myself.  I have betrayed myself over and over and now there is a lack of trust going on between the voices in my head and what I know to be true.  The voice in your head isn't you, by the way, it isn't truth!  But more about that another time. The stories I tell myself on one hand are encouraging; you aren't writing for anyone but you so who cares if nobody reads it.  You have something to say, say it! These ideas and words that come to you are like songs and to silence them is to take away ...

This is another one I started about two years ago that I decided to add onto and post.  It could use some editing, okay a lot of editing, but as you can tell from the overall lack of posts, I don't have make the time to write so I definitely don't edit! September 2016 I've spent most of my life thinking that I was broken, that I was a person who needed to be fixed.  I was convinced that I was the only one who didn't have this life thing figured out.  Why did I cry all the time?  Why were seemingly simple tasks like making a phone call so difficult?  Why was making small talk with people so hard?  Why did other peoples emotions effect me so deeply.  Why was my inner voice talking ALL THE TIME?  Why did I pick up on other people's energy so intensely?  Why wasn't I just normal!  Like seriously, what the fuck is wrong with me!  To be honest I still often feel this way but there has been a shift over the past few years and it all sta...

Okay, here it is, the last and final resting place of my health journey.  It took all of that messy climbing and falling and climbing up again to get to this place of a completely plant-based diet living in alignment with my core values and lots of self love and compassion.  But before we go on I feel like I should preface this with what is swirling around in my own head and perhaps yours. I feel like a hypocrite!  How can I sit here and shout from the rooftops that a plant-based diet is the best diet for your body, the planet, all other humans and animals when I was eating meat just about 18 months ago?  That feeling of hyprocracy wants to hold me back.  It tells me to stay small and quiet and just go about my own business.  But I wont' listen to that voice anymore.  I made a mistake but that doesn't mean I can't change and it doesn't mean you can't either.  So many of us stay in the same old routines day after day and even worse, we expect dif...

Now it is about 18 months ago and I am feeling very disconnected form my body.  My body feels weak and frail, sick.  I can't do a lot of things with my hands.  I spill things and need to take breaks when cooking dinner or shampooing my hair.  I can't really hold a hair dryer for long or stir when I cook.  Holding my kids is really difficult and walking the dogs seems daunting.  I am also packing up an entire house to move in with my mother for 7 months and then move 2.5 hours away from everyone I know and love. But I'm digging.  I won't give up.  Something isn't right Then one day while packing up food items and cleaning out the fridge I pick up a block of frozen beef and for some reason it looked different.  It actually looked  dead.  And there I sat with my laundry list of symptoms, my borderline fatty liver, my insulin resistance, my higher than ever cholesterol, my higher than ever weight, my high inflammation markers, my ar...

And so I made bone broth and bone marrow.  I added pastured meats to my recipes.  I poured collagen into my coffee and pretty much forced my toddler to take fermented cod liver oil.  I made gummies out of beef gelatin and cut way back on our grains and fruit.  I added grass fed butter and egg yolks to everything.  And somehow through all of this I was able to disassociate enough to see meat as food for the first time in 18 years.  Somehow I was able to block out everything I knew to be true and right for myself.  Somehow...and that somehow was fear.  Fear is SO powerful!  I thought this was for the health of me and my family. Okay, so now Arlowe is born and I am overwhelmed with a toddler and an infant.  I am not sleeping well or eating well or taking care of my body in any loving way.  Again due to some gastro issues with Arlowe I gave up all gluten, dairy, eggs, soy, corn and nuts but I continued to eat meat.  Arlowe's firs...

Okay, I have a lot to say today and I'm not really sure how to organize it all into one blog post so I will probably summarize and then go back and elaborate on specifics, particularly if anyone has specific questions. Today I want to talk about health, specifically my own healthy journey and where I am currently on my path to whole body wellness.  I want to share a lot but I don't want it to be confusing so maybe I will make this a two part post or maybe I'll just start writing and see what happens.  Lets do that... I am going to take you way back, like 20+years ago when I first became a vegetarian.  I honestly don't remember the exact  year but I think I was about 13.  Growing up we didn't eat much meat but I do remember thinking that it was normal, everybody does it.  I remember hearing in school that it was an essential part of a healthy diet and provided protein etc.  Then one day, this is a vague memory so bare with me, I recall looking at my...

Recently I've felt a deep yearning to be more authentic.  To live my life in a way that lines up with my core values and moral compass.  To be unapologetically ME!  Is unapologetically even a word? The real me doesn't care so I'm not even going to look it up, HA! Anyway, I have been reflecting on my life the past few years, like A LOT!  Thinking about the person I am verses the person I put out into the world verses the person I want to be.  For me this has always been three different people!  This is not okay! I mean we all learn to adjust to our environment and sometimes being who we are will get us punched so we tone it down.  This is natural and a good thing.  What I am referring to though is different because it is based on fear.  Fear that I wouldn't be accepted.  Fear that I wasn't good enough or smart enough. Fear of confrontation.  Fear of crying in front of someone or you know shitting my pants because of anxiety.  ...

Here is another post that I started years ago and really would like to finish.  I won't edit the original material I'll just add on. original... "Parenting is a journey.  Parenting a high-need child is a journey where you unwittingly end up in uncharted territory.  Before your baby's birth you imagine what the journey will be like.  You buy guidebooks.  You listen to friends who have taken similar trips.  It's exciting.  Your baby is born and the journey begins.  Suddenly your trip isn't going as planned.  Your child is not following the guidebooks.  He takes you on a different journey, one that you might not have chosen and certainly not the one you had anticipated.  Initially, you resent this change in travel plans.  The road is bumpy.  It is lonely.  And it's costing you much more energy than you had budgeted.  But you've purchased a nonrefundable ticket, so you must go on.  While your friends are see...

As you know I recently started writing again and part of that was going through all of my old posts and rough drafts of posts that I started but never finished.  A lot of them I deleted because they are really no longer relevant or so unfinished that I would need to be in that current time to finish up properly.  But this is one I want to finish. I must have written this in 2014 when Caches was about three and a half and Arlowe was about 11 old.  Here is what I had started... Every year since Caches was one year old I have written a post about breastfeeding during world breastfeeding week.  Well, world breastfeeding week was almost 6 months ago, so while late to the party, I'm still going to participate. Because yeah, still doing it.  And breastfeeding an almost 3.5 year old is so very different than breastfeeding an infant, a young toddler or even a 2.5 year old. If someone would have told the 18 year old me that they were still nursing their 3.5 year ol...