Fall Garden

We nearly missed our window, with frost expected for the coming weekend, but an attempt has been made on my first ever fall garden of cool-weather crops:

Radish

Lettuce, Swiss Chard, and Spinach

Carrots

Beets

These seeds were planted three weeks ago under the assumption that, like last year, our Fall would be fairly warm.  As it goes in my part of the world, though, I should have known that mild Winters are always followed by early frosts and colder temps the next time around.  So, we shall see how these tender sprouts will handle this year's premature chill. If anything, this will be an interesting experiment and a lesson to start the Fall crops in August or early September instead of waiting until October rolls around!

Meditation, Yoga, & the Distracted Child: Slowing the Juggernaut

Yoga and meditation are a bit of a tradition in my family, with my mother leading me through guided meditations starting from around fourth grade and my aunt inspiring me to take up the practice of yoga sometime in early middle school.  Seeing the extreme levels of hyperactivity and distraction that the J-Rex apparently came pre-programmed with and knowing how well the practices of both yoga and meditation have served and still do serve me in my own life, I began teaching her these twin arts at an even earlier age than I was taught myself:

We began with a Yoga for Kids VCR tape (yes, they do still exist) when the J-Rex was five.  She liked the movements, but her visual impairment made it difficult for her to fully see and understand the instructions being given.  We weren't homeschooling yet and our lifestyle was much busier, so yoga became an occasional distraction, but not a discipline that had any impact on the J-Rex's life.

Last year, though, my mother-in-law bought the J-Rex a book, Fly Like a Butterfly, and a yoga mat after seeing the enthusiasm with which the J-Rex would imitate her grandmother's stretches in the mornings.  The J-Rex quickly took to the routines in the book, with their child-friendly descriptions of the poses and fun stories to visualize during each asana, and has been practicing her yoga and meditation with a semi-regularity every since...

...and what a difference this practice is making: I watch her focus improving on a daily basis as she finds ways to ignore and avoid the distractions that tend to plague her.  I see her ability to self-calm surpassing my own even as she goes through the emotional transitions of her seventh year. I observe as her strength, flexibility, balance, fine motor skills, and stamina steadily accelerate forward right along with her mental growth.

Cookin' Up the Harvest a.k.a. Wednesday Food Porn

I'm not what you'd call a "foodie," even though I love food and both the eating and cooking thereof. I'm not into fancy or exotic, though I do enjoy them on occasion.  What I am into is the fine art of being a household chef: You see, to me, the true measure of a good cook is the ability to work with the foods available to create healthy meals the whole family will actually eat and, hopefully, do so with gusto.I pride myself in my ability to keep the family in nutritious home-made soup stock made purely from vegetable and meat scraps we would have otherwise thrown away or my ability to whip up meals of whatever vegetables just happen to need to be eaten ASAP.  These meals may not look pretty...they may not have the delicate balance of flavor and texture you'd find in a fancy restaurant...and, yes, they may be the same four or five veggies made several different ways with little variety in the dishes other than the spices...but they'll feed the whole family for the next several days and, by golly, our taste buds will love us when we're done!

Today was one of those days where I looked in the fridge and realized most of our fresh vegetables were about to go bad, we had a plethora of stock-making odds and ends filling our freezer, and we had just enough space in the fridge to fit a few Tupperware containers of meals...  Those were my cue: it was time to have a bit of creative fun in the kitchen today!

Where's the Nerd in Nerd & Nurturer?

I realized something the other day: I have been overly concerned with turning this blog into something that appeals to a specific audience, namely the homeschooling, environmentally-conscious super-mom crowd. The problem? I am absolutely NOT a super-mom and, though at least one or two trains of my thoughts are always centered on my child and homeschooling, I'm not a one, two, or even three-trick pony.  ...and why would I want to be? I'm not blogging for money (notice there are no ads on this page - yeah, I did that on purpose because I kind of hate the corporate-driven society we live in)...I'm writing a personal blog and the majority of my audience, at the moment, is family/friends.  I would like to have a wider audience at some point because I love to write and I get an odd exhilaration from others reading that writing, but none of that matters if my writing is not true to myself...

Cultivating Health: My 21-day Fitness Challenge

On the first day of September, I was having a day of doldrums...I was feeling bored and unhappy with myself for no particular reason.  Then, I had a thought that was quite unusual for me, "maybe if I do a workout, I'll feel better."

So, I worked out - about 35 minutes or so of callisthenics in my living room - and, sure enough, I did feel better! I felt a sense of pride in myself for having done something for my body that I traditionally have hated doing (for me, exercise has always been associated with injury and feeling wimpy because I never could "keep up.").  I felt a sense of amazement at my increased lung capacity post-smoking.  Most of all, though, I felt a boost in my mood from endorphins that I'd never felt before (likely because I always used to end my workout when it started to hurt rather than push past that point).