Winter thaw, wordless Wednesday

Defining Moments

Look closely at any invention and you'll find some form of community behind it. Invention happens when we're interactive, self-expressive, alert, and willing to enter into change.- John H. Lienhard

When I was 33, I became a mother of a special needs child. The moment he was born I fiercely loved him. He was my third, the only boy with two sisters, a house full of noisy joy to welcome him. He was quiet and sleepy and sweet. Isaac has 22q11 deletion syndrome. He does not have some of the major problems associated with 22q, like heart and palate defects, but he is little and has hypotonic muscles. He looks and acts physically about half his age. Cognitively he's just fine, as far as we can tell from his use of sign language and communication at 21 months.

Months before he was born, as if God was preparing us for this path, our community began to form. I was suffering through a rotten social situation/ power struggle and while I was floundering, several women stepped up and caught me. My oldest daughter was not dealing well with the stress of my pregnancy, our move across the state, and our financial situation. She was lashing out in public and it wasn't pretty. I know now that it was normal, a normal healthy reaction to a stressful time. Like a hug and a warm cup of coffee, these friends surrounded us and loved us for who we are. It all started with an email to someone I had met and talked to a few times, but I knew she had more knowledge than I had dealing with specific behavior challenges in children. I reached out and every day I count that blessing. Instead of being angry at the world alone, I moved forward and took to my books, asked questions, and most of all stayed true to who I wanted to be as a mother.

I never had a chance to feel alone. When I got Isaac's diagnosis, they were already there, with willing shoulders for me to cry on, to talk to, and to vent my rage at the difficulties of medical beaurocracy. We are also followers of natural health and parenting, but that community just doesn't get what it is like to walk on the edge of medically fragile and natural health. The special needs community can have something like Stolkholm Syndrome when it comes to their medical providers, those folks can do no wrong ever.. We occupied a middle ground, one that was pretty empty and foggy. Then one day I got an email from a lady I had never met in real life.

"Let's start a group," she said. That is how Natural Parenting for Children With Special Needs was born. She gathered up everyone in limbo like us and the group flourished and grew. We connected, shared stories. It is more than that though, through this group, I have healed.

I cannot emphasize how important that community is to a family with a special needs child. Even so, we felt people distancing themselves from us. Awkward silences when we shared our news about his progress, or our difficulties with managing his care, became the normal in social situations. People would guess his age and be off by a year or so and not know how to respond.

Now I know how to respond when someone give him a withering or confused or disgusted look. I wrap him up in love, I show him how fiercely I love him. I beam with pride so the looks of strangers can not darken him with shame.

I am a better mother to my girls because of it too.

Winter Bees

Open letter to my friends turning 30.....

30 is wonderful, but not as wonderful as 31. 32 is even better. Look at yourself in the mirror, really look. Now is your time.

It isn't too late to realize your dreams, in fact it is never too late right up until you die. Each step you take can be one closer to your dream or one away. That's your choice.

Wear the funky heels. Dye your hair purple. Sing out loud with the windows open. Dance when you feel like moving to the beat. Even if it is the toilet paper aisle at the local grocery store and your ring tone is awesome.

Love. Love yourself. Love the children in your life. Love your partner. Love your neighbor. Even the annoying ones. Do it.

If you hate running, don't.

If you hate "working out", don't.

Eat the cake.

Give up diet soda. It doesn't help and it tastes like crap. Eat the cake instead.

Cry sometimes, but also forgive. But don't ever cry on the phone with strangers. It will never help.

Stop the car sometimes to look at things. Shooting stars, sunsets, children laughing. Sometimes you have to stop and look them in the eye, let them know, let the universe know, "I am listening. You are beautiful." Breathe that beauty in and it becomes you, mixes with who you are, and is released back into the beautiful world around you.

You are not old. You are ancient. Gilded. Embrace it and release the folly that is a bad thing to grow old,  release the fear of growing. Grow.

That is all.

Too Busy

You would think that with as busy as we are, there might be post after post of all the things we've been doing. We have reached maximum capacity overload though and first to go was time to write.

Otherwise known as officially too busy.

Here's some cute pictures to go with an apology and a promise of an update.

Someone asked me to post this week's meal plan

Refer to this post for more detail.

Here, by request, is our menu plan for this week.

Sunday: Roast chicken, from our farm. 6lb bird. I used an upright cast iron roaster (it has a stand in the middle to mount the bird on) and surrounded the bird with mushrooms, carrots, onions, and potatoes, seasoned with Swamp Fire, and stuffed with butter (instead of olive oil).

This chicken will be used for dinner tonight, leftovers shredded (2.5.lbs), and the carcass made into broth. 4 meals. This chicken was $24, but that equates into $6 per meal in meat. About $1.25 per person for meat.

Side dish with the chicken tonight is jasmine rice with the veggies mixed in and a cream sauce. The result is like the rice in "chicken and rice" casserole. Heavily buttered.  Some of the vegetables could be set aside to make a soup, but I am not doing that.

Monday: Lamb chops (6$). Sweet potatoes on the side. Leftover rice is there is any, peas if there isn't.

Tuesday: I take salad (with chicken $1.25 see above) for lunch or dinner, kids eat pizza with dad. I work a 12 hour day.

Wednesday: Steak (3$ that's right, from our farm too) broiled. Roasted turnips. Asperagus.

Thursday: Ham ($3.50) and beans with corn bread. I use black eyed peas, carrots, onions, and braising greens. Lily will make the cornbread from a mix into muffins. Uses 1 quart of chicken stock.

Friday: Curried chicken (using the leftovers) over jasmine rice. Variety of vegetables cooked in. Veggie egg rolls on the side.

Saturday: Beer batter fish (5$ on sale from Hy-vee) and chips. Salad on the side.

I will also make a batch of chili (beef $3) at some point for the freezer.

Lunches:
Cheese noodles
Ponyo Miso (with chicken, broth, veggies, and rice noodles).
Peanut butter and jelly sandwhiches
Pancakes
Grilled cheese and tomato soup

Breakfast:
Farm eggs and sausage x2
Fruit and cheese plate, maybe with venison summer sausage
Oatmeal
Muffins (that Lily makes)

Snacks: yogurt, fruit, venison sausage, chips and salsa, popcorn.

We will also make rolls and pizza dough for next week. Some chicken gets carried over by freezing it.

$45 in meat for the week. $20 in veggies. 20$ in dairy. $20 in bread and noodles and rice.
Time? 15 minutes prep for each meal. 20 minutes if the kids help.
105$ total but most of it is paid in bulk once a year. So really, just $50 at the grocer for food.

All real, most local, most from our farm.
No desserts. We only do desserts on holidays or special treats. I know, I'm a mean mean mommy.

That's the plan. I don't beat myself up if we veer off it or sub in other stuff. 

Rider in the Wind

Lily loves horses. She loves horses almost as much as the colour purple. I love how she comes out of lessons sore and utterly happy. I love how she asks to share the last part of her hour giving her sister and brother a turn. She is a wonderful big sister to them, always. Little gestures of generosity remind me of this. She is usually tired and sore, but when Holly is done with her turn they commiserate.  Isaac is in awe of the horse too. He gets quiet and watchful and then touches the horse with what looks like reverence.

Jessica really understands my kids too. She works Lily hard, but also respects her as a person. It took a long time to find a teacher that was just right, that met this relationship criteria.

I love Thursday mornings.

Ballet Dancers

Last year Holly hated art class. She hated it so much she would try and make herself throw up in the car to avoid going in to class. So I stopped asking her to go in. She relaxed a lot when I finally told her art class was done. I finally got out of her why she hated it! It was because the teacher asked her to use colours other than yellow. I should have known as much. That girl LOVES yellow. 

Lily wanted to do art. Lily loves art. The reality though is that I can't drive them to both. We can't afford it. So I asked Lily if she would try ballet. She likes it enough. I did tell her that next year she could go back to art. Maybe we can arrange that as soon as January. We'll see. Lily also takes riding.

Still, Holly practices 3 hours a day. She lives in her tutus and dance dresses, sleeps in them too. She is all things ballet. She bounces out of the car for classes. I have never seen her so excited over something, except maybe the colour yellow. ;) I love seeing her so engaged!

Fixer Holly

Since moving to the farm, Chad has mostly done the small mechanic jobs on our cars. This delights Holly to no end, because she is "Fixer Holly" the princess of fixing cars, houses, trains, toys, and broken hearts. Of course she has to help and of course she insists on doing so in her Tinkerbell ballet dress.

So cute. Holly is really growing up. We started her ballet classes this week and she was a hoot. She's really, really loving it. Every day this week she dressed in a tutu and even put one over her jammies every night at bedtime. She's pretty into it.

I'll see if I can get a picture this week of her in her actual real ballet clothes.

Preface/Background to Our Chinese Unit Study, Unschool Style, plus an introduction to newbies to "strewing".....

We homeschool. We unschool as a philosophical approach. For those who are unfamiliar with that term, it is like Montessori without the large class management of other people's children aspect.

Our classroom is our home, our farm, our community- you get the idea. Our home is filled with books, seriously thousands of books. No less than three bookcases hold "kid" books, the rest are all over- history, science, literature, classics, antiques, newest editions, science fiction. We love books.

In our dining room, at kid level, I have art supplies. I do keep the higher quality paints and inks up high but only so Zap doesn't eat them and Holly doesn't take up Interior decorating- again. They can have them down when they ask, just not when I am in the shower or on the phone. You know? This.

I have a whole huge bookcase with kid history, math, and reading books. Whole curricula..

"Hold up, lady, you just said you unschool!" Yes I did. That doesn't mean we don't learn things or enjoy using books. We all do. Especially me.

That's where something called strewing comes into play. Strewing is where we make available items of interest and leave them in accessible places to be found and explored at will.

So I thought about how we will handle school this year, since I am going back to work away from home a couple days a week and fall is pretty busy with deliveries and craziness of farm stuff. My kids have been begging to learn more about China, love Chinese food, music, and art. We've also fielded some questions from them about why we don't buy Made in China products (we actually do though), especially packaged food and art supplies (which end up as food unintentionally toddler style). A really negative bias has crept up in our whole culture regarding products from China, mostly from teh massive lead poisoning issues that have happened. Plus we like to buy local, as local as possible in all things. But that doesn't mean we have to bash a whole culture, you know?

And I realized too that I know very little about China. I mean, I have seen Mulan a million times with the kids, and I know I like crab Rangoon, and I can point to China on the map....and that's about it really.

So what better way to organize our lives and learning than to have mama learn some more about China? And that's how we'll do this, I will learn and do projects and if they are interested then they can too. I plan on creating a syllabus, with books and supplies provided for each mini lesson, here on the blog, in case anyone wants to replicate what we are doing. Label will be China, Dragons, and Yummies.

A brief summary of items we will cover in the groupings:

Art: watercolor, calligraphy, kite making, origami, paper making
Culture: Tea ceremonies, religion, etiquette, medicine, agriculture, puppetry
History: Time lines
Geography and cooking are paired. We'll study regional cuisines and cook them every week, in reference to regions and types of ingredients. Food can really be a good way to teach other aspects of culture. Plus, YUMMY. Oh, and animals. Geography=animals to my kids. Maybe a zoo trip.
Science: inventions, building, medicine, agriculture, earthquakes
Math: fractions in cooking, calculating for science, abacus, money measuring, weighing
Reading: stories and books from China, about China, writing to a pen pal, writing messages in cards, creating fortune cookie messages, calligraphy
Dragons. My kids like dragons a lot.
Chinese New Year and holidays.
We plan on attending the Asian Festival here this year too.

Things I have purchased so far:

• A calligraphy set, a real one with ink and stone and hair brushes and bone chine dishes. Not expensive and yes, made in China.
• Toy dragons. Yes I did.
• Paper dragons to hang from the ceiling.
• Real stainless steel chopsticks and bone china spoons
• Cast iron tea service
• Tea
• Books on calligraphy, craft and building projects, books on Chinese history for kids, Chinese mask book
• Pandora, Traditional Chinese station
• Netflix, Wild China and Studio Gibli movies. Dress up clothes with Chinese theme.

We'll start this October 1st ish. Expect lots of cute pictures of kids doing stuff and cooking. These items are on the shelves and ready to explore. We already listen to the music every day. At the end of the week, we'll have lunch at the local Chinese buffet (yay rural Iowa!). We'll cook from the recipe books twice a week, maybe more at lunch time.

Each time we do an activity, I will post book and supply list with links to Amazon.com isbns, mostly because that is where I shopped for the stuff.  I'll also post a reflection on what worked, ect.

I'd love additional ideas to work in too.....and that's about all of it. The ideas of it all will unfold as we live it. The girls want to trade out our dining room table for a lower standing coffee table so we have to sit on pillows to eat meals. Is that even how people eat in China? Where did they get that idea?

Mystery Find- What is This?

Lily and her friend dug this up today. It was about a foot from our foundation. Weighs about 10 lbs, not kidding, maybe 20. It is seriously heavy.

Lily says of course it is a dragon egg. What else could it be?

I told Chad I was pretty sure it is a cannon ball. He gave me the face like, "Yeah, ok crazy lady, a cannon ball? Buried in our yard? Riiiiiiight....."

Then I showed it to him.

That's what he thinks it is too.

What else could it possibly be?

Learning to French Braid

 

 

 I am learning to braid the girls' hair. It is finally long enough and one of them is patient enough to sit still long enough for me to fumble through it.

Snapshots of little bits of our day. We did a reading lesson, constructed words and sentences with letter tiles. molded modeling clay into pizza, read books, turned shipping boxes into to race cars, into drive in movie box/cars, into cozy reading boxes, pretended to be a girl pretending to be a vampire, played more dress up, cooked a new Chinese rice dish and baked chicken, registered for gymnastics (jumping class), dealt with a bath time crisis/fall injury/bloody nose, test drove a new to us car, kept the downstairs picked up and clean, and did laundry.

Oh and video chatted with newly moved to CA friends.

Today (despite the bloody nose crisis) was good and full.

*These pictures were taken with my new iPhone that can do video chat, take credit cards, and enable me to be on facebook more than I need to be all the freaking time. There is no focus or zoom. I think I like my SLR camera better, but the phone is super convenient.

Zippy Zippy Zap

I peeked out the window at the kids playing and saw this. It was so cute. I thought he couldn't reach the "go" pedal. He can't while seated, but he sat down like this.....

Hold ON!!! His sisters were worried and surrounded him to show him the ropes. So cute.

We visited with his endocrine team today. They are fascinated with our lifestyle, especially the nutrition aspect.

His number were good, even in April, so we'll retest and compare.

We discussed retesting the FISH test to verify 22q with a new sample. We decided not to do that in January when Isaac was mostly deaf because the insurance only covers hearing aids for genetic deafness and without the dx of 22q we'd have to pay 9K$ out of pocket. Yikes. Well, now he's not even a little bit deaf so the talk of retesting is now on the table again.

Endocrinology could not order it though, they said ask at our fall well baby check. Will do.

We can still do more at home to make our nutrition even better. Talk of cast iron tea kettles for the woodstove came up with a friend and they are not expensive! In December we'll retest Vit D and decide if we should use fermented cod liver oil and what dosage, but right now his levels are probably sun shiney wonderful and last winter (March) they only got as low as 18.

Good news, good news. We still have to go in for blood draws next week, on a Tuesday or Wednesday morning but Isaac is tough as nails and the lady who does the draw is really good at her job. That's why we insist on doing them at our local hospital, because of her. When you are in the midst of the chaos of special needs and medical care....finding those few people that are really there for you or your kid, that take time and extra attention, that is pretty special. Hang on to them. Let them know how very much appreciated they are.

Lucas County Fair 2012 & My Little Sprouts