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  • Unplugging, Pebble Tossing, Forging Our Own Path

    Unplugging, Pebble Tossing, Forging Our Own Path

    sitting by the creek's edge

    Do not follow where the path may lead.
    Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.

    ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Saturday. Time I turned off the computer and called the kids outside.

    My bones are creaky, my assprint indented into the couch cushions, my wrist and elbow stiff from too many hours of tap-tap-tapping on the laptop, the kids restless from a week at school and a morning of video games.

    Time for a nice long walk to stretch our legs and restore our souls.

    White Clay Creek winds across the bottom of our road, and untended parkland connects from the perimeter of our property all the way down to the creek, where we can pick up park trails. Up here, though, there is no path. No one comes through this way.

    We head down the hill, through the forest, trusting our instincts, taking turns leading, never going quite the same way twice.

    I love that adventure lies so close to home, that this little patch of wilderness exists. That we only have to travel ten minutes on foot until we reach a place where we hear no cars, meet no people. Where we find snake skins hanging from trees. Where the ground smells earthy and clean and cool.

    It makes this house- this ancient drafty house, with its stink bugs and carpenter ants and leaking pipes, its never-ending litany of “things to fix”- so totally worth every bit of effort.

    taking a break while hiking

    To sit in the shade on a fine day
    and look upon verdure
    is the most perfect refreshment.

    ~Jane Austen

    Eventually we reach the bottom and meet up with a bike trail, and other people out for a restorative walk. We’re always quick to greet each other– so unlike city streets, where I find people tend to avoid eye contact.

    We go to the creek and then we do something that always, always makes me feel a million times better.

    We skip stones.

    pebbles in white clay creek

    There is something about this that immediately brings me back to childhood. I took piano lessons for years as a kid, and a creek ran by where we waited for the bus to return home. And while we waited, my dad and I would skip stones.

    So I skip stones with my kids, in the hopes that one day this will serve as the same sort of immediate therapy. That when they feel frazzled, stressed, burnt out, they can go find some running water, some smooth stones with sand sticking to them. That the sound of stones hitting water- plink, plink, plunk– will remind them of cool, unhurried hikes with their mother. Of quiet, and of family in the wilderness.

    And something within their souls will slot into place, and they will feel at peace.

    Cass throws a handful of stones into white clay creek

    I know it sounds silly; I know with great certainty that it’s something I need to do.
    What do you do to hit “reset” when your body and soul are out of alignment?

  • (Mostly) Wordless Wednesday

    close-up monarch butterfly

    We must remain as close to the flowers, the grass, and the butterflies
    as the child is who is not yet so much taller than they are.

    We adults, on the other hand, have outgrown them
    and have to lower ourselves to stoop down to them.

    It seems to me that the grass hates us when we confess our love for it.

    Whoever would partake of all good things
    must understand how to be small at times.

    ~Friedrich Nietzsche

    Just wanted to share this shot of a monarch butterfly that I took over the weekend; who says polka dots and patterns don’t go well together?

    A perfect match in my mind. Fortune favors the bold.

  • Don’t Tell My Kids Veggies are Junk Food. Thx.

    carrots are not junk food

    We tell lies when we are afraid…

    afraid of what we don’t know,
    afraid of what others will think,
    afraid of what will be found out about us.

    But every time we tell a lie,
    the thing that we fear grows stronger.

    ~Tad Williams

    Carrot growers are gearing up to lie to your kids. They’re spending something like $25 million dollars to package baby carrots like chips and sell them out of vending machines. They’re rebranding with awesomely misleading taglines like “the original cheez doodles.”

    EXCUSE ME???

    This infuriates me on so many different levels.

    Let’s start with this:

    “It’s not an anti-junk-food campaign,” says Jeff Dunn, Bolthouse Farms CEO and a former North America president at Coca-Cola. “It takes a page out of junk food’s playbook and applies it to baby carrots.”

    The only way I would find this even mildly acceptable is if it were a tongue-in-cheek mockery of the junk food industry. It’s not. It’s a presumption that your kids are aware of, in love with, and mindlessly swayed by junk food packaging.

    And that you, the parent, the wielder of the supermarket spending dollar, are a spineless tool who will happily go along with the lie and trick her little ad-lovin’ bots into eating veggies, by pretending they are a form of cheez doodles.

    Ad psychologist Carol Moog, who is clearly not on our side, feels that merely lying to our kids is not enough. Physical trickery is instrumental to the deception:

    …kids may be disappointed to find all the flashy ads are really just for carrots…they need to make carrots more fun — like, perhaps, putting an orange (but natural) dusting on carrots that mimics Cheetos.

    Ho.lee.carp.

    Are you serious?

    People, I am only going to say this once.

    Teach your kids to eat healthy foods because they are good for them.

    They will help them feel better. Look better. Live longer.

    Teach them that they don’t have to fall head over heels in love with every damn thing in the world for it to be worthwhile. Not everything needs to be sugarcoated or super cool or tricked out.

    Teach them that their own immediate gratification is not the be-all and end-all motivating factor for every decision.

    I don’t have the scientific basis at hand to back this up, but I’ve seen it cited a million times so I’m assuming it’s true: it takes ten tries for a person to develop a taste for any new food.

    Not a love for, please note. A taste for. As a for instance, I never really had mushrooms growing up. I didn’t like them the first time I tried them. For the next decade or so I just didn’t eat anything with mushrooms, because I didn’t like them.

    My husband loves mushrooms, and I grew used to picking mushrooms off of and out of things. Then I got lazy and just left them in. I got used to them. I still don’t love them, but I’d venture to say I’ve developed “a taste” for them- i.e., I can eat them without feeling compelled to spit them out.

    It works. I get the nutrients. No one said I had to marry them.

    When you say, “My kid doesn’t eat (whatever),” YOU ARE REINFORCING THAT NOTION.

    If all you serve your kids is chicken fingers, mac and cheese and PB&J, than THAT IS ALL THEY ARE EVER GOING TO WANT.

    If you only give them junk food as snacks and dessert, they will grow up thinking those are the only treats worth having. And why would they eat something they don’t like if they can have a treat instead?

    Please, I beg of you, do NOT let marketers undermine your authority as a parent. IT IS YOUR JOB to say, this is healthy, you need to eat it BECAUSE IT IS HEALTHY, and you can maybe have a treat later but NOT AS A REWARD FOR EATING SOMETHING HEALTHY. You eat healthy foods to stay healthy. That is its own reward. Eating well is not a trial to be endured to get at a TastyKake.

    Eat carrots because they are carrots. Because they have Vitamin A and beta-carotene and fiber. Not because, god help me, they are shaped like freaking cheez doodles, a “food” that can’t even spell its own name.

    And while I’m on the subject, buy real carrots and cut them up yourself. It’s way cheaper. (If you’re buying “baby-cut” carrots, that’s what you’re buying anyway- carrots that didn’t meet aesthetic standards and were whittled down to baby size. “Baby carrots” are actually bred for a higher sugar content, another case of catering to your kid’s sweet tooth. Both attempt to lengthen shelf life by dipping in a chlorine solution.)

    Don’t tell lies. Don’t let marketers tell your kids lies. Ask yourself what you are afraid of.

    Is it being a hardass parent? Toughen up, sister. Parent like IT’S YOUR JOB to raise your kids to make the right choices in life. Because guess what? It is.

    ** For the record, those “Deceptively Delicious” cookbooks that encourage trickery and sneakery make me mad too.**