Homeschool/Farm Update July 18th

We had days rolling around playing with Holly's new trumpet. Lily taught Isaac all about grubs in the play area, how to blow bubbles, and how to really shake it when he dances! Isaac figured out how to climb up and into the sink, turn on the water, and wash dishes with his feet. We found a wasp pinned to a tree with a tiny fairy arrow. Probably another wasp's stinger, but it looked like a fairy arrow and the girls spent a long time examining the dead wasp up close, touching its wings.

This week was fun. We got peahens and named them Ann and Beyonce. Lily cooked up the first peahen egg. I was offered $15 for a peacock egg and I will never get sick of how funny that is. Peacocks don't lay eggs! When people as what they taste like I answer, like duck eggs but more pretentious. Oh we are soooo funny sometimes. These ladies are never ending sources of beauty and laughter and joy for me. I love them so much. I shall have a fowl army of peahens and peacocks and bring up the rear with Muscovy ducks. I shall rule the farm with my fowl army!

A new cafe opened in the local to us town and it is fantastic. I love the food. The kids are enamoured with one of the servers who told them he had eaten dandelion fritters just like they do.

Holly has been playing Ben Ten Mega Dragon all week. She also almost dreaded her hair. That's fixed now. It was not intentional. The girls learned more about electrical current via the electric fence. There was a lot of tree swinging. We worked together on chores quite a few times. Lily practiced first aid too. The calf is growing.

That's pretty much it in a nutshell. Now onward to the weekend!

Dinner Fail.

Sometimes my best intentions are just that, intentions, and everything goes wrong.

I lost my phone and camera so I could not take pictures.

I broke a 1/2 gallon glass jar while washing it and sliced my pinky finger. Blood, drama, mess, rescue.

The package of meat I opened was not the cut I wanted.

Still can't find camera.

Something in the sink was gross and started to stink.

Missing ingredients for the thing I planned to make.

Kids getting frustrated that I asked them to reorganize the art supplies. They start arguing.

Isaac wants to go outside but at 95 degrees that is not an option.

The AC vents start dripping water onto the beds upstairs.

Just not a good set up for a recipe post.

So, I fried up the bacon ends I found, chopped up the stew meat that was supposed to be steak, browned it all in butter. Added crushed tomatoes and some black pepper. Boiled pasta. Easy peasy dinner. Tasty too, but nothing to write home about.

No pictures.

Sometimes life does that, gets in the way of the perfect thing you want to make. Dinner, blog posts, art projects. All of it. I am posting tonight anyway because of my personal challenge to write everyday and sometimes my days are like this, not perfect. Not anywhere near.....but in all of our imperfection is joy. We go with the flow, smile, and cherish each other. None of the kids had any idea I messed up dinner, they gobbled it. My frustrations were not even noticed. At every meal we eat together we share what we are grateful for in the day: Lily was thankful for her calf starting to wean off the bottle, Holly was thankful for her whole family, Chad was thankful for his potato crop, and I am thankful that human beings are technically capable of sleeping. Isaac was asleep (I am hoping later that I will be too....).

This is Lily, trying out writing with ink paint and a peahen feather. See? The issues I had and frustrations didn't even touch her day. She had a great day.

I hope you all did too.

The Girls in the Locker Room

This is an open letter to the four girls in the locker room at the public pool last week.

I live in a small, rural, Midwestern town so even though I do not know their names, I know that this will get back to them, their parents, and their friends eventually. I hope in some small way, or even a big way, that this messages changes them.

You are beautiful. You are exactly what our society holds as our ideal of beauty! Youth, slender frame, shiny hair, and health.

When you came in from pool side my eight year old and five year old girls had just finished changing from wet swim suit to play dresses, I was still getting my jeans on, and the baby was trying to take his diaper off. At first my girls were confused by the idea of bikinis and thought y'all were in your underwear.

Then one of you stood in front on the mirror and started pinching your tummy skin and twisting to look at your own butt.

The word fat was used. The words I hate the way .... looks  were used several times by all of you. My girls stood confused waiting for me to try and button my mother loving jeans over my post Cesarean section, three baby, scarred and squish belly. Before that day, they thought that belly was a miracle of life and beautiful. They hoped to have the same belly someday, fertile and life giving, stretched and well loved. I grew them inside that belly.

Fat.

Fat with all that our society weighs and burdens that word. 

Oh, but it gets worse. Then you all started talking about the sunburn, the lobster look, one of you had acquired quite severely. I turned to look out of concern, it was a very bad burn. Painful. It had to be.

The discussion between you all turned quickly to tanning and burning. Each of you said the burn and pain was totally worth it for the tan. That one of you does it on purpose. Then all nodded. This kept going.

Let me put this in context.

1) A spray on tan looks the same. The look is the goal right? Normally I am all for the natural look, but if the choice is between self harm and spray on? Go to the salon. Seriously, I beg you.

2) How is this different from cutting? This is self harm. Serious self harm. Here are four lovely young girls hurting and causing intentional self pain just to, what, look brown? Burning. Intentionally burning. Laying poolside covered in products SOLD to them to amplify the effort full of cancer causing chemicals, have any of you ever looked at tanning lotion?

And this is the crux, the process you are using is socially acceptable. This is your cover story, your alibi. Children who cut do not have this. They bleed, hide the cuts with long sleeves. You wear this burn and pain, even brag about it, and no one bats an eye.

I am calling you out.

Normally I would let you off the hook, what you do to your self, your own body, is your business. This time though, there were my little girls in the room. This time they took in every word of your self hate, every grimace, every pinch.

They both refused dinner that night and the next. Over the next few days they asked about their own bodies. Are they fat? Are they the right colour? Are they pretty? They stood, each on their own in the bathroom or in front of room mirrors copying your pinching, your critical looks, and your.....self loathing. What they saw changed their world view.

One of my girls asked if I was going to try and make my belly not fat. My beautiful squishy life giving belly is now just fat. 

When I was teaching for a local college last semester, I designed for Women's American History all about body image and advertisements, I found article after article stating that eating disorders are a mental illness and not caused by outside influence like ads or peer pressure, that they are based in an OCD type illness.

No. That is wrong. I call bullshit. I don't care how many textbooks tell us this. It is bullshit.

We do this to each other everyday, to our little girls when they see the people they look up to hate their own bodies. I can fight off the ads, shelter them from magazines and television ads for as long as I can, but I cannot hide them from the people we live with in our own community. Their aunts and grandmas shoulder this burden directly because I know them and they know my intentions on this subject. My friends know this too. My girls will know the variety and beauty of all human bodies, that we are all different and changing. They are beautiful, even by society's messed up standards of expectations. They are gorgeous.

You girls do not know this. I hope that when this letter gets to your parents that they hug you. That they see you for who you are and love you unconditionally. I hope that they see past whatever excuse you try to use to hide your self harming. I hope that everyone in your life sees the beautiful you and takes time out of your every single day to tell you about the things you are good at and what they like about you.

Here is an example of what I whisper to my girls at the end of every single day....You are loved. You are brave and capable and kind. You are clever enough to ask questions and slow down when something is difficult. You are sunshine to the world, lighting up the darkness with your smile and your laughter. These things make you beautiful.

I hope your boyfriends are man enough yet to tell you you are beautiful without hurting yourself this way. That they are the kind of men who will be strong and kind and love you when your body changes with age and with all the turmoil of life.

I hope your neighbours shower your doorstep with organic sunscreen. I hope that someone offers to take you to a salon that does spray on tanning. I am all for changing your own body to look like what  you want, after all, and I know this will verify for you exactly who you are and I am, I have bright pink hair and I am a midget and yes, I heard one of you call me a living troll doll. Mama, you look nothing like a troll, don't they know what fairies look like?

These are the beautiful children you changed the world for, and I will fight like hell to set it right.

I realize now that I cannot do that in a bubble. So this message is for you, you are beautiful. People are more attracted to confidence and a bright smile than what colour your tan is or your BMI.

This message is for everyone in your life. Someone changed your world at some point. Maybe a babysitter or a friend or your own mother crash dieting and lamenting that these jeans make my butt look big. What you all say about yourselves is soaked up and internalized by little girls all around you.

Fat. Ugly. Too big. The only ugly here is heartbroken little girls who at some point said those words to themselves after hearing everyone else say it to themselves. My girls also heard what you called me. That will actually help them recover from the blow faster, I think. They fiercely love me and that is because they have been so loved all their lives. We have enough to share with you. Please stop inflicting burns, stop pinching your skin looking for imperfection, please stop thinking there is anything wrong with your growing bodies (that includes starving yourselves, because my gut tells me that at least one of you is also doing this). Stop.

There. The living troll doll has said her piece.

Sample Sunday

Lily has leveled up. She is my new partner at booth for markets.

Today she took over grill duties. She grilled the links, checked for doneness,  cut them up (with scissors), toothpicked, and then walked around talking to folks while offering samples. That was all we discussed her doing, it was her idea.

I step away for a moment and come back to her taking money, making change, and packaging product. We have never once done formal math lessons with her, she made correct change. We had friends at neighbouring booths keeping on eye on her, so I wasn't worried, but I did not expect her to take on this part of running the booth!

Proud mama, but more important that how I feel about it.....proud of herself Lily.

 

She prefers to have her own product though. She was very clear about this on our drive home. I love doing this with her, the one on one time we get. I was sad when she fell asleep with an hour left to drive home, because she is a very lovely companion and storyteller. 

This is my Lily. Bright and effervescent, strong willed and confident. This child made me a mother and makes me earn that title every day, gladly.

I shared a story with guests to our farm yesterday that I realised I never shared here, at least not that I could find in the archive search. 2 summers ago Lily went to and was kicked out of her first 4H day camp. I was very proud of her that day.

Wait? What?

That's right.  I was proud of her.

Enthusiastic belligerence is what they informed me when I picked her up.

She was rude to the teacher, that was wrong. But Mama, she was rude to all of us telling us wrong things! Wrong things about food!
That's my girl. She stood her ground when the teacher told them to choose fat free options. Human bodies NEED fat to use vitamins. Also the term chemical shitstorm may have been used. She refused to eat the veggies and fruits from China, because that country cannot be counted on for safe gardening and not spray poison. She was/is right.

Then when the teacher told them they should eat less meat, only 3 times a week, Lily asked, You mean 3 times a day, right? Because 3 out of 21 meals? Who is this lady? The camp tried to serve a vegetarian lunch. Guess how that went? Yeah. Lily refused to eat and warned them she gets cranky without protein in a meal. Yes. She did.

Lily never backed down. Lily stands her ground. That will serve her well in life if she can polish that skill, so far she is really blooming and growing, understanding better how to politely refuse and politely educate and be a light in the world sharing what we know and live.

Shiny. My shiny Lily. She was 6 at the time.

*She did later apologise for being rude to the teacher, but never once apologised for the content of her words. I am so proud of her. How hard it is for a child to stand up to adults, in front of peers that she really wants to like and accept her, to not back down? That is a life skill. Think about it. This child, if we nurture instead of oppress, will never have the experience of regretting not saying something, of not standing up for herself. How often I sit in my car in tears and then eureka think of the perfect thing to have said, after the moment is lost. This leader, this sassy wonderful child, will not suffer like that if we are careful to keep this spark alive in her.

What do you think? Have you ever had to stand up for something you knew to be factually correct in the face of authority telling you and others something else? Under the pressure of peers?