encouraging happiness through a love of children, a love of the earth and a love of being frugal…
Katie Allison Granju, author of Mamapundit.com has had her baby girl – a tad early. It appears, according to this post by her, though, that all is well with mother and daughter.
After the tragic death of her oldest son Henry, it is so nice to see this family get a blessing or two! Please send them your good wishes and visit her blog.
-Mish
I’ve struggled with my weight since I was about 14 years old. At 14, I was 5 feet 7 inches tall (the height I am now) and when I weighed in at the varsity sports physical (held in the library in front of everyone), I was 150 lbs. I’ve never been a skinny waif, but I was never considered “fat” either. I was athletic and muscular and well, big-boned! Nevertheless, the shock on the athletic director’s face when she saw how much I weighed was enough to make me cry!
Since then, I’ve dieted and exercised and over-dieted and over-exercised. I’ve had seven babies and been pregnant with two others (for a brief shining moment), and so have had the hormonal and weight changes that go along with that. I’ve never been extremely happy with my body, but I’ve never been so unhappy either that I’m willing to starve or have some kind of eating disorder.
I’ve recently lost two pants sizes. I have no idea how much weight I’ve lost because I don’t own a scale. But I definitely needed to lose some, because I was wearing a pants size that I’ve never had to wear before! Rather than starve myself and sign up for a gym (I hate to spend money on stuff like that), I decided to take a more God-given approach.
First, I really hate to exercise. I don’t mean that I like to sit around all day, but I like my exercise to have a purpose. When we lived in Vermont, I used to stack wood and carry wood into the house and haul water down to animals. I lived on the side of the hill, so even getting to the mailbox was exercise. I live in the city now and still have a large garden that needs hoeing and weeding, but the other activity simply isn’t there. So I had to adjust.
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I’m still trying to find a purpose for lawns…other than golf. I really can’t. I mean, it’s nice for my kids to have a grassy area to play soccer on, but other than that…
In fact, lawns are pretty new to America. According to American-Lawns.com, “Green, weed-free lawns so common today didn’t exist in America until the late 18th century. Instead, the area just outside the front door of a typical rural home was typically packed dirt or perhaps a cottage garden that contained a mix of flowers, herbs, and vegetables.
In England, however, many of the wealthy had sweeping green lawns across their estates. Americans with enough money to travel overseas returned to the U.S. with images of the English lawn firmly planted in their imaginations. Try as we might, it wasn’t as easy to reproduce a beautiful English lawn. After all, they couldn’t just run down to their local hardware store and pick up a bag of grass seed. Grasses native to America proved unsuitable for a tidy and well-controlled lawn, and our extreme climate was less than hospitable to the English grass seeds.
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Just wanted to post a prideful note (I know, pride’s a sin, but I can’t help it) showing the third full harvest of lettuce and spinach I’ve gotten from our urban farm. It gives me a thrill to know that not only do I not have to purchase lettuce from the store, suiting the frugal me, but also that I know exactly how this lettuce was grown – without any chemicals or fertilizers and with a slight donation to the rabbits before the fence went up!
I’m still trying to get most of the kids to eat salad, but I’ve been putting fruit in our salads lately and that seems to help! Although Jack’s propensity for ketchup is slightly disturbing…
According to the USDA, the monthly THRIFTY plan budget for the groceries of me, my husband and our 7 children is, wait for it…$1217 a month! Holy cow! That’s the cheapest plan they can come up with. If I was LIBERAL with our spending, according to the USDA we could spend $2400 a month! Is there anyone who spends that much per month on food? If so, we need to talk.
I was also reading over at the Jeub Family about a recent NPR article that said it now costs $222,360, on average, to raise a child. One Child! No wonder people get freaked out about having kids. If I listened to stuff like this all of the time, I’d be afraid to have kids too. Seriously, how much do people think car seats cost? And really, soccer was only $35.
Would you believe that we spend less than $600 a month on food for our family? That’s less than $3 per day per person. I’ve done it on even less than that – less than $100 a week – but in the summer we buy more foods to grill than we probably should. Winter is where I really save money.
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How? Tear up your lawn. No, seriously.
I hate lawns. I hate green grass, sitting there, doing nothing but waiting to be cut. And then cut again. We have a huge lawn at our new house. So much in fact that the house came with a lawn tractor. And it’s not even nice, golf course style lawn. It’s ugly, cabbagey lawn. So, as part of my urban homestead plan, I have been bidding as much lawn as I possible can “goodbye.”
What’s the point of a lawn? No one knows. I can’t find anyone who can tell me why having lawn is a good thing. In fact, a History of Lawns in America, published by American-Lawns.com tells us that it wasn’t until the American Garden Club “decided” that Americans should have nice, neat little lawns – to go along with their nice, neat “little boxes on the hillside made of ticky-tacky,” that most Americans started to grow them: “Through contests and other forms of publicity, they convinced home owners that it was their civic duty to maintain a beautiful and healthy lawn. So effective was the club’s campaign that lawns were soon the accepted form of landscaping. The garden club further stipulated that the appropriate type of lawn was “a plot with a single type of grass with no intruding weeds, kept mown at a height of an inch and a half, uniformly green, and neatly edged.” America thus entered the age of lawn care.”
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Add another mark to the “Mean Mommy” post, because I have thrown our TV into the garage! Yes, my friends – now my children must suffer without cable TV AND a microwave oven! Oh dear Lord someone call social services – how will we survive?`1
I have had a love/hate relationship with the television for quite some time now. When I was a child, it was a love/love relationship. I would have watched all day everyday. I will say, I was addicted to television. I’ve done a lot of research on TV. And I appreciate its benefits, really I do. I believe that there are some very interesting programs out there. As a dedicated unschooler, for the past year and a half I followed the “go ahead and watch what you want when you want philosophy (obviously, with some guidelines for younger viewers). And do you know what I discovered? Not that my children were turning it off and going to play with their Legos or do other things (although often they did), but that usually, they would just watch it. Once, I turned it off and they still sat there and watched it. Waiting.
We turned off the cable TV. We hadn’t had cable TV in many years due to our rural location in Vermont and only watched DVDs and videos there. That was better by far. I still found, though, that even with ample library books, playground equipment – heck, they have a climbing wall in the play room – they still preferred to watch movies ALL OF THE TIME. I would even watch with them sometimes, so used to having the TV on was I. Kiara couldn’t get through a morning without at least 2 episodes of Dora and a Ni Hao Kai Lan. Jack was starting to watch everything Cartoon Network had to offer. Once the cable was gone they found every movie we owned and watched marathons. Unbelievable. This has to end, I thought. While I appreciate that TV can have its place, I also appreciate that it can be a severe addiction.
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I watched an ABC “news” report on the Martin family of New Hampshire. Mom Dayna Martin is the unschooling mom of four. What I found so interesting about the report was that despite Juju Chang’s pointed questions about “shouldn’t your kids know who JFK and FDR are?” Dayna’s replies were, while confident, not what people want to hear. I think this is where the misconceptions about unschooling begin. What point I wish Dayna had made (and really, I’m a fan of hers, I love a lot of her stuff), is that we unschoolers do know who FDR, JFK and all the other presidents are. We know who Shakespeare is and we know all about Nathanial Hawthorne and Goethe and all kinds of stuff. We just don’t sit down at a desk and “study” them for hours a day.
We go to the library. We get real books and documentaries and then we talk about the things in them. We talk about who these people are and how their actions in their day affect the current events we are facing now. I subscribe wholeheartedly to the Sandra Dodd notion of strewing. For example, I subscribe to the newspaper and while it’s not the greenest thing I could do (we do use the newspaper for numerous other projects however), it is a good way for the kids to see national and local events and read about what they are interested in.
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As many of you know, Katie Allison Granju lost her son Henry yesterday. You can read all about his struggle with addiction and the horrible physical assault and overdose that occurred after. He was in the hospital for quite some time struggling with the neurological effects. Unfortunately he lapsed into a critical state and lost his battle. I have been a fan of Katie’s for quite some time and occasionally we chatted about being writing mothers online. I don’t know them well, but I feel like I do. Katie is pregnant with her 5th child and I hope, if you can, you will send something along to help with their medical bills in the wake of this awful tragedy. Also, take a look at the “Rest in Peace Henry Granju” page on Facebook – so many people loved this boy!
Click here to find out how to help. Thanks and may you all hug someone you love a little more often from now on, I know I will!
I don’t really control what my kids eat. That’s not true. I control what comes into the house. I am very label conscious. I won’t buy anything that has high fructose corn syrup or BHT. If there is an organic version, I’ll buy that. I don’t buy prepackaged foods. I don’t buy pre-made cookies and other treats. Although the occasional bag of Oreos does work its way into our house. We also eat frozen, pre-made pizzas if I have forgotten to make dough in the morning!
I buy a lot – and I mean a lot – of fresh fruit, cheese, all-natural granola bars, applesauce, frozen fruit for smoothies, milk, juice, some types of crackers, carrots, and cereal.
And then I do this crazy thing – I let the kids eat it. Pretty much whenever they want and in whatever order. I’ve had kids who have requested peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast, cereal for dinner and all kinds of stuff in between.
Why do I do it? Because I still can’t take more than two cookies out of the cookie jar without feeling like I’m doing something bad. Because I still need to “clean my plate” even at the detriment of my own weight (and I’ve had some issues there) every night at dinner.
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