Swiss Miss and My Wild Thing

I've had a lot of fun with Maggie's hair growing so long and we've loved doing braids, pigtails, "twisty buns" and every other hairdo you can think of. The other day I was tired of all our usual 'dos so I tried a new one. I think she looks like a little Swiss Miss here...but I love it!
I always knew I would love having a girl, having spent most of my life as one of three sisters, and I always looked forward to all the girlie stuff like ballet, tea parties, doll houses, dress-up, and I have to admit...it's just as much fun as I thought. In my opinion Maggie is the perfect combination of super girlie-girl but also spunky, athletic, and not afraid to get dirty (to a certain point).
When I thought about having a boy I felt intimidated and not too excited about attending millions of little league games or having to talk about GI Joe's or Star Wars a million times. I knew I would want to be involved with whatever my kids (boy or girl) would want to do but I didn't think I'd have that much interest in certain aspects of boy-dom. Well, I just have to say, I know Finn's not really old enough to be doing too many boy things but I could not be more in love with him and relish the fact that he's a boy. It's so much fun. One of the things that really made me excited about raising a boy was reading David Thomas' book "Wild Things: The Art of Nurturing Boys". It's all about raising a boy who is confident and manly yet able to feel and express a wide range of emotions. There are bits of practical advice, insights that shocked me, and a million cool things that I look forward to doing with Finn (or letting Grant do with him). I think anyone who is raising a boy should read this book, even (especially?!) if they're already in middle school or high school. All right, there's my little plug...now go out there and get this book!

More dollhouse

At this point we've put in all of the walls and all of the interior trim and wallpapered and painted every interior wall. You can see the back roof is on but hasn't been shingled yet. I built the little ladder you see in there along with a bunch of construction supplies If you look really hard on the far left room on the second floor you can see the only piece of furniture that the house currently has, which is a leftover from when I was 12. It's a dresser or hutch of some sort. I think it'll be fun to have Maggie gradually fill the dollhouse with furniture, dolls, and accessories, rather than just go out and buy everything right now. She's currently working on staying in bed during the night so we've got a chart and she's working towards going to Hobby Lobby to pick out a few little things like a miniature bag of flour or books or whatever.
Here's a close up of the attic (nursery) wallpaper. I think it's just adorable!

Welcome to the Dollhouse

So....here's the next post about the dollhouse I showed detailing of a few weeks ago. This dollhouse is so amazing, it's taken me 18 years to make it! Ha! Okay, the truth is that when I was a little girl I loved houses. I would sketch houses and floor plans, rearrange my room every 3 weeks, and build "dollhouses" cobbled together from anything I could find - shoe boxes, pieces of cardboard or wood, etc. If I was with my mom and we had to kill time I would ask her to drive me around neighborhoods to look at the houses. When I turned 12 my mom gave me this amazing dollhouse kit as a way of encouraging my interest. She had no idea (skill-wise) what she was getting me beyond what the salesperson told her and what the box said, but we were both excited about it. I started trying to make it and got as far as assembling the base and laying the hardwood floors on the base level. Beyond that point I realized I needed a few things: a framing square (still not sure what that one is), a hack or coping saw, and 18 years of life experience. It was too difficult for me to do by myself, my mom was coping with her recent divorce, and money was tight so I didn't want to ask for those additional things I needed. So I put the whole thing under my bed and that was that! After approximately 15 moves and a few big life changes, it was finally time to complete the dollhouse.
It was so much fun to pick out the wallpaper and paint colors, and that's about where the fun ended (at least for a little while). I roped Grant into helping and our marriage was tested many, many times (kidding!). He threatened at least once to catch the whole thing on fire.
Our jobs turned out to be divided into:
Grant - chief engineer/head contractor (and much of the sanding work)
Courtney - painter, wallpaper hanger, flooring expert, porch builder, ladder maker, roofer, and bricklayer
The houses was coming along but we reached a point where Grant really wanted to take a back seat in the project (ha! what's farther back than the back seat he was already sitting in?!). Would we ever finish the dollhouse? Will our marriage survive? Check back soon to see!
(I know this looks pretty close to finished but there's still the roof, the attic floor, wallpapering the attic, painting the second and attic floors, and trim and molding everywhere on the inside and outside!)

A hungry belly and a girl doing ballet

Finn LOVES to eat. It's pretty funny that he's as little as he is because the boy can put some food away! If he sees me starting to fix his bottle or food he'll start fussing and if we don't get it fast enough it turns into a full-on cry. Then, once we start feeding him, if we don't keep shoveling it in his mouth fast enough then he cries more. When we finish the first part of his dinner we better have the second part ready quickly or it's more tears. It's funny because it's one of the few times when he's not the sweetest, smiley-est boy you've ever seen.
Maggie's Grandma and Grandpa Howard gave her ballet lessons and clothing for her birthday and we've been having so much fun with it. There are about 15 3-5 year-old girls in her class and it's funny to watch them all being so "elegant". One of Maggie's best and cutest friends, Ivey, is in class with her and they are hilarious to watch. Anyway, I am so proud to watch Maggie at class every week because she really wants to learn and tries so hard to get everything right. Thanks to her wonderful teacher, Miss Heather, and the hard work Grant and I have been doing at home, she is such a good listener and direction-follower. In the photo below you can see many of the other girls goofing off and Maggie (second from the right) is following her teacher's direction as closely as possible (here she's in 2nd position about to plie). (I don't know how to do an accent mark on blogger so sorry that it looks like "plie"!)

Finn's new tricks

At 10 months of age, Finn is finally crawling! He's been so close for literally months, and he finally did it! It took about a day of little crawls before he realized he can now traverse the house and it still cracks me up to see him crawling and exploring on his own. I'm also now realizing how much childproofing needs to be done! We're so far out of that with Maggie being four, so I hope I don't forget everything that needs to be done. He's still loving standing and will stand on his own for several seconds at a time. He's started doing a little cruising, too.
He's also started drinking from a straw if we put little drops in his mouth like a baby bird. He LOVES it and I fear we've created a monster as two nights ago that's all he wanted to do at the expense of eating his dinner. He also spontaneously signed "more" to us for the first time yesterday. So. Adorable. We did baby sign language with Maggie and I think it really helped with communication (and certainly didn't slow down her verbal communication!).
Our house has also been hit with the dreaded stomach bug going around. It seems like half of TN has had this awful thing. Maggie got it first and then Finn started throwing up a few days later. Hopefully he will get the mild version. I'm PRAYING that Grant and I don't get it but I sort of feel like it's inevitable.

Grandma

(Here is Grandma (aka Sarabeth Austin) cracking up with her sister, opening her Alabama license plate at her 89th birthday).
I'm sorry I haven't written anything in almost two weeks. My grandma (the kids' Grammy) passed away early Tuesday morning, February 9th. Although she was 89 years old her death really caught me by surprise. She was taken to the hospital on Sunday due to abdominal pain but she's come out of illnesses like that so many times that I guess I took it for granted that she would recover. I miss her so much already but my heart is full of gladness for her. I'm glad that Maggie got to know her well, as we would visit her in her senior apartment once every week or so. I'm glad that I got her for 30 years of my life. I'm glad that she's in heaven! I'm glad that she was spared more mental or physical degradation (her last year she had been plagued by chronic pain in her shoulder and was having a few moments of memory loss). And I'm glad that I know I'll see her again in heaven.
She was such an amazing lady. At the viewing she looked beautiful and peaceful but she looked so different and I think it's because I'm just not used to seeing her without a smile on her face! She loved to laugh and when I think about her I just picture her with a huge grin, smiling widely at something cute Maggie or Finn had done. She loved my kids (and me, and, well, everyone in the family!) and always wanted to have one of them in her lap when we visited. She also told me all the time that she just wished she could keep them for the afternoon or overnight to give me a break (not sure if that was really more for me or for her!), but she knew she couldn't.
I want to tell you one more cute thing about Grandma. At one of my wedding showers she said, with a very mischievous look, "Do you really want to know the secret to a happy marriage?" Since there were about 20 friends there I got nervous about what she was going to say and I told her, "Ummm....maybe you can tell me later!" I never found out what she wanted to say and I wish I had had the courage to find out her advice in front of everyone! I'm sure whatever it was, it was good advice - she was married to my grandfather for 57 years before his death.
I love you, Grandma. See you in heaven.

Sweet Uncle Jim

I just found this old photo of Maggie's Uncle Jim reading to her. It must have been two Christmases ago (2008). I love how she's all snuggled up to him with her hand on his shoulder. She sure does love her aunts and uncles (all nine of them!)

Beef. It's what's (not) for dinner!

Photo by federico stevanin

I've been posting a lot about food lately and that is mostly because I've been thinking about food a lot lately. Here is a quick snapshot of my food evolution:
1979-2003: omnivore, trying to eat healthy for the most part
2004-mid-2009: When I became pregnant for the first time I decided to only eat organic meat, eggs, and dairy and some organic produce. Mostly I was worried about the hormones while I was growing a human being :) If I could have afforded 100% organic I probably would have done that but I did the best I could within my budget. Since I was pregnant for about three of those five years that covered most of the time but I pretty much ate the same way when I wasn't pregnant during that time.
Mid-2009: Due to Finn's isovaleric acidemia and the fact that he'll be on a low-protein diet for his life, Grant and I decided to cut back on the meat in our diet. My personal goal was to either be fully vegetarian by the time he was old enough to notice, or at least cut back to one meal with meat a week.

I've been reading lots of things along the way that have shaped my opinion, most significantly "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan, and "Eating Animals" by Jonathan Safran Foer. I also recommend "Food, Inc." which is practically a movie version of "Omnivore".

I've been so impacted by these books PLUS thinking about Finn's future (where it just seems less alienating for him to pick out, say, cashews from his stir-fry, rather than us eating steak and he just gets rice and broccoli) and have landed on a way of eating that feels right right now.

Here it is, for our whole family:
I consider myself pretty much a vegetarian but will eat meat about once a week. It's not a legalistic thing for me where I think, "I want chicken, but, no, I've already had meat this week." I am, however, making a conscious effort to decrease the meat in my family's diet. However I plan on only eating meat that hasn't been factory farmed (i.e. Purdue, Tyson, Laura's Lean Beef, Smithfield, etc.) and has been raised humanely (i.e. pastured, given a diet natural to its original diet, no hormones/antibiotics, blah, blah, blah).

I know this sounds obnoxious and I really don't want to be obnoxious or alienating. I completely respect your decision to eat however you want (maybe you even eat more narrowly than me?!) and I promise the way you choose to eat doesn't make me think or feel differently about you. All I can say is that I have this conviction and I have to do what I think is right for me and my family.

photo by Michelle Meiklejohn

So if I haven't lost you already may I please give you a brief explanation of why I've come to this decision? And if our dinner invitations dry up then please say yes when I invite you to dinner and let me show you that eating this way doesn't mean that I eat tofu!

1). It's healthy. There have been many studies correlating a plant-based diet to longevity, but one big one is The China Study. There's a book out by the same name by the researcher, T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. Here's a quick snippet:
“People who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease … People who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease. These results could not be ignored,” said Dr. Campbell.

In The China Study, Dr. Campbell details the connection between nutrition and heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, and also its ability to reduce or reverse the risk or effects of these deadly illnesses.

2) This guy
Like I said, it just seems so weird for us to be eating meat every night and then poor Finn just gets vegetables and grains, but for some reason it seems more inclusive for us to eat plant-based protein that he doesn't eat. This reason is the easiest for me. I know that most of the time Finn will be surrounded by people eating meat but I just want his home life to be a place where he doesn't have to feel so different.

3) The environment
As I've mentioned before, we're part of a meat CSA so we get all of our meat from a wonderful family of farmers (ranchers?) who live about 60 miles from here. It makes me feel good to support local farmers but it also makes me glad to know I'm not contributing to the huge carbon foot print of trucks shipping meat cross-country.
Secondly, factory farms are a huge violator of the earth for many reasons, not the least of which is the animals', ahem...emissions. Farmed animals produce 130 times as much waste as humans with no infrastructure for getting rid of it (from the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production). Obviously "animal waste" is natural but the amount produced by factory farms just can't be absorbed into fields and is running off into waterways and evaporating into the air. Communities living near factory farms are plagued with chronic nosebleeds, earaches, diarrhea, and burning lungs (Jennifer Lee, "Neighbors of Vast Hog Farms Say Foul Air Endangers Their Health," New York Times, May 11, 2003).

4) Ethics
If you know me well you know I'm not really an animal person so I don't worry that anyone will mistake me for the newest member of PETA but the way the animals are treated in these factory farms is just plain wrong. They spend their whole lives in terrible, terrible conditions and then die a pretty terrible death. If the cows can't walk into the slaughterhouse they are lifted up on a fork lift. Processors in chicken plants kick, stomp on, and rip the beaks off of live chickens as well as spit tobacco in the their eyes. These abuses are widespread and I'm only listing the mild ones here (yes, these are mild compared to many of the other ones).

Also, we think it is unethical for factory farms to sell chemically-altered, sick animals to people. People often speak about the cheap cost of factory farmed meat being the main reason to continue eating as they do. The fact is that cheap, factory farmed meat will cost a person much, much more the long run.

I could go on and on so I'll force myself to stop.

I don't want to end on a depressing note so I'll just offer a few suggestions if you, like me, are concerned about the things we eat. Try going meatless one day a week. You don't have to eat tofu! How about yummy homemade pizza with no meat? Once you get used to "Meatless Monday" try adding another meatless day. Your budget will thank you, too!
Join a CSA! You can find one in your area here. As my friend Christin reminded me today, Michael Pollan said, "You get to vote three times a day about how you're going to eat." So spend your money supporting meat you feel good about.

Thank you for sticking with this if you read the whole thing! As my wonderful midwife Susie said, "Your friends are just going to think you're getting more and more granola! First a home birth and now vegetarianism!" Oh well. Thanks for loving us anyway!