the squibix family blog

Christmas ended on Saturday and we had a very nice low-key party to celebrate; yesterday we took down the tree (and the awesome decorations Leah put up on the fence). I think we're all glad for the transition, not least because being rid of the tree frees up a bit more floor space in what we're now calling the playroom. Whether thanks to New Year's aspirations or just in response to Christmas stress, we're working on cleaning and organizing and even a little downsizing of household possessions. We'll never make good minimalists—we need stuff to make stuff!—but immediately after Christmas our little house sure felt crowded. New Year's is a good time to think about fixing that a bit.

Besides being crowded out by our material possessions we've been dealing with some other stressors as well: sickness, avoiding toxic parenting, things like that. Zion hasn't yet become accustomed to this thing we call winter and thus doesn't want to play outside; Harvey's happy to hang out in the yard or the street as long as he doesn't have to go anywhere else (though, in his defense, once we do manage to drag him out somewhere he also doesn't want to come home). And when they play together inside fights are, if not inevitable, then at least distressingly frequent. I'm working on creating a pro-social curriculum for them, once I come up with some vocabulary on the subject that might be grasped by a 20-month-old.

I have plenty of ideas for improvement, both personal and corporate, but the trouble is finding a moment to implement them—the same problems keep getting in the way! Oh well, I suppose that's how life works.

radical: I think what we're going for here is a combination of dictionary definitions number two and three. That is to say, extreme in how we live our own life and in the solutions we imagine for the world. So far, I think we're doing... ok. We're poor, thanks to some conscious decisions we made about where we want to focus our energy, but we still manage to be fairly generous to people and causes who need our help—and credit for that goes mostly to Leah, who is totally on top of the tithing. We share our veggies (and our cookies, which proved to be a little more popular); I've got big plans for the farm stand next year. We have only one car, which doesn't sound too amazing—but I guess it is in this day and age. I bike to work almost every day, and weather and children permitting we bike or walk to most destinations in town. We think a lot about how we can give Harvey and Zion a healthy blend of autonomy and security, trying not to fall into the trap of unthinking authoritarianism. We don't buy much.

But we could be doing much better. Stress keeps us from doing too many of the things we want to do—for example, now that it's cold we've been driving a lot more, just because it's so much easier than convincing the boys that they want to get bundled up in the stroller. The hard parts of parenting also keep us from reaching out more to people in our community: we have lots of great friends who we're lucky enough to spend tons of time with, but speaking for myself I feel like I need to do a better job reaching out to people and explaining our values. Lately I think I've either been ignoring the world, or mad at it.

hippy: I think we've got this one nailed. Just the fact that we stopped using any commercial bathing products gives us tons of hippy points—and, of course, that distinctive hippy aroma (what?! I'm talking about the rosemary and tea-tree oil in Leah's home-made deodorant!). No shampoo, no toothpaste, no kitchen or bath cleansers... generally we keep our distance from factory-produced chemicals with long names. We still do use commercial dish soap (albeit from Seventh Generation, a fake hippy company) and laundry detergent (Tide, gasp!), and wash the kids with good old Johnson and Johnson, so there's some progress to be made, but I think we're doing alright. Our food, on the other hand, is only mildly hippyish, and we haven't done very well at getting to thrift stores to clothe ourselves in the appropriate fashion. But I think the soap thing—plus, of course, Leah's dreads—have us in very good shape hippy-wise.

christian: Another good one, at least if we get credit for going to church every Sunday of the year, except when we're camping. Plus we both teach kids' church, and Leah prays for people, and we have two nights a week devoted to Christian fellowship, and... that's probably enough. I would like to pray more at home, especially with the kids, but Zion is a little too young and Harvey currently views prayer for the most part as a tool of the cruel bed-time routine, so there's still progress to be made on that front; but I'm not in any way concerned.

homesteading: I think it was some ladies looking for homesteading blog content that brought the wrath of the "toxic parenting" group down on our heads, and in addition to critiquing our child-rearing they also complained about the lack of information on the subject here. Which is probably fair. In our defense, almost everyone who talks about "homesteading" is not actually doing it in any meaningful sense—including us. But we're not actually looking for self-sufficiency; instead, we mean the term as a shorthand for making as many things as possible ourselves. To that end we've got soap; bread; beer; hats, mittens, and sweaters; clothes for the boys; and, you know, the whole home-made Christmas thing generally. Add in the chickens and the garden and I think we're doing fine. And just wait until we get bees!

And of course, we are totally, undeniably, living in the suburbs. As much as we sometimes wish it weren't so.

So all in all, not to bad. We're generally on target but with ample room for improvement, which strikes me as a pretty good place to be at the start of a new year.

We only go into our attic to put things away or get them out, and it's only accessible via step-ladder and trap door; clearly, when the last batch of Christmas decorations went up I failed to shut off the light. Oops. At least it was only one bulb.

This is not exciting news to anyone except perhaps any neighbors of ours who wondered what vital project was afoot amongst our rafters (sorry to disappoint, guys!). But since the issue took up a small but significant portion of my first- and last-thing brain, I though I would share it here. We'll have something more interesting next time.

My honey wasn't super-local—it's from all the way out in Athol, wherever that is (we got it at the Lexington Farmers Market). But it could have been! Bedford also has a honey producer, Townsend Family Honey, whose product is also carried at Chip-In (and which has nearly zero web presence). Now all we need is somebody in town to start growing wheat for my bread and we'll be all set for the New Localization, or whatever we're calling the next step after globalization.

There's no getting too excited, of course, because who knows what this bizarro winter will bring next. At least the extreme thaw let me finally get the hoses inside, a task I entirely neglected earlier thanks to our lack of real snow experience over the last 20+ months. We're told there's a little snow in the forecast for tonight and tomorrow, so we will see.

Even if all my outdoor plants are extinguished, I must say I won't be unhappy to see more snow. It turns out I don't have that much taste for arugula in the winter anyways, and struggling all the way through the winter probably wouldn't give the kale that much of a head start over seeds planted in early spring. And I actually enjoy snow in the garden: besides insulating the soil, preventing run-off, and even delivering a little bit of nitrogen from the atmosphere, it also looks pretty. If you ask me, nothing is nicer on the winter farm than some well-trodden paths.

You can see that I was so excited about making paths that I had that one quite well-trodden before we had even filled the next bucket of compost. Here's hoping tomorrow's snow will give me more treading experience.

And including sweet potato wasn't the only wild experimental step, either! Alternative sugars, whole grains, (relatively) low fat—these cookies are healthier than most of the breakfast food I make! Given my family's tastes, though, I just couldn't leave out the chocolate chips. Here's the recipe.

Sweet Potato-Oatmeal-Chocolate Chip Cookies

In a large bowl, whisk together:

1 cup oat flour (made from chopping up rolled oats in the food processor)
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup no-sugar-added dried coconut
1 teaspoon banking powder
1 teaspoon salt

In the stand mixer, cream together:

1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup brown sugar

Add and mix until smooth:

1 egg
1/2 cup sweet potato puree
2 tablespoons maple syrup
2 tablespoons applesauce
1 teaspoon vanilla

Add the dry ingredients to the wet and mix on low speed until combined. Add and mix until evenly distributed:

1 cup chocolate chips

Drop the dough on a greased cookie sheet—whatever size you like. Smush down each ball of dough, to about 1/2 inch tall, or else the middles won't get cooked. These cookies don't expand much during baking so you can get them fairly close together.

Bake at 350°F for 11 minutes or so.

Makes... um, not that many cookies. We didn't count, though, before a significant number of them were eaten, so I can't give you a solid number. Maybe the next batch!

The power-line right-of-ways have "no trespassing" signs at the entrances, but not where they connect with other trail systems.

Since this was all on my poor road bike, I had to ride some roads too. The farm country is quiet this time of year.

I did make him put on PJs before he went to bed, and he's also piled under two fleece blankets and two comforters. It's going to be a cold cold night, but that doesn't mean we're going to turn the heat up. If you want to raise kids who don't mind the cold, you can't coddle em! Nope, when it gets chilly we put on another blanket, just like Laura and Mary. We do let Harvey go outside in the winter, though—it doesn't do to follow literary examples too closely. After all, he needs to put that great cold-tolerance to good use.

There's only one reason I like to have pumpernickel around, and that's for cream cheese and olive sandwiches. Which I don't have very often! So I was super-excited on Saturday to make the first one in well over a year, but ran into my first disappointment when I cut the bread. Despite its fine dark brown color and roughly pumpernickel-like aroma, it was as soft and squishy as Wonderbread—and indeed a glance at the ingredients showed, in addition to high fructose corn syrup and caramel color (no molasses here), the dreaded "dough conditioners". Now, I'm not looking for traditional German pumpernickel here, but what good is bread so soft that it can't be spread with butter, never mind cream cheese?!

And then we didn't have any green olives, and I tried opening a can of black olives (from the food pantry; again, we'd never buy canned olives) only to find that they tasted like nothing more than vaguely salty rust. Alas. I put the sandwich together anyways and even ate it, but I was in no way pleased. And my discontent still lingers—thus this blog post!—although it was assuaged a little bit this evening when we picked up a half-dozen honey whole wheat bagels at this week's pantry.

So quick does childhood language development proceed, however, that those sorts of names are already starting to be replaced. He says "eh-fant" too, especially when he's talking about a toy one; and "baa" has been abandoned in favor of "doat" and "reet" (how he came up with those consonants for "sheep" I have no idea). Dogs, for their part, were always "doddy", cats "tat", and pigs something I can only render as "pubby", if you imaging that collection of letters being spoken in a low tone by a toddler with a mouth full of marbles. And of course, his favorite animal of all—in a ballet context, at least—is "mysh", with the almost-s sound drawn out as long as possible for emphasis. His language really is delightful; it's too bad that, as the second child, he's very rarely captured on video.

Us, though—we have the opposite problem. I aim for some pretty concentrated agriculture in our little garden, so I'd really like to be able to fill up the big four foot by four foot compost bins I built a couple years ago. While we produce a considerable amount of food scraps (it turns out, for instance, that children occasionally waste vegetables) it's nothing like enough to make a sufficiency of compost to enrich the beds we have, let alone the new ones I want to create. Then there's always the hope of making enough finished compost to be able to use some in planters and for seed starting... you get the idea. The chickens are doing their part, especially since we realized that they add about an inch of dirt to their run over the course of a few months, and that we can—nay, must!—remove it if the coop is to continue to function. That's five cubic feet of high quality composted manure! But we still need more.

So I bought some five gallon buckets with lids and started passing them out to friends. The Stevenses were our first takers; we picked up the first full load last Friday and left them with an empty bucket. Oh, how happy I was dumping that rich mix of squash rinds, coffee grounds, and spent brewing grains onto the frozen pile (I also was a little envious of how pleasant life must be chez Stevens!). I think the VB Family will be joining the program soon as well. Do you live within 10 miles of us and wish you could be diverting some of your food waste from landfills, but don't have the time or space to deal with composting yourself? We may be able to help!

Of course, any time you complain you need to provide an alternative solution, and I've got mine all figured out: when the roads are slippery, everyone should stay home. Relax. Read a book, or do some dusting if you need to keep busy. Or, if you must go out, drive slowly and carefully; I'd bet it would take a lot more snow than we've had this winter to actually stop cars—to say nothing of the giant SUVs that half the population drives—from getting where they want to go if their drivers are willing to adjust to conditions.

More complaints! We have a skating rink (and other associated athletic facilities) down the road from us; it got put in a few years ago, replacing a perfectly fine stretch of woods and marsh. Alright, people need to ice skate and since we've ruined the climate the ponds aren't reliable any more. But the facility has recently been expanded, to the tune of two outdoor artificial-turf fields, and since it's winter one of the fields has been covered with a gigantic white plastic bubble tent. For some reason, said bubble is illuminated many evenings with the lights all around the field—I can only imagine that some of the light shines through the plastic to light the games within. Some: a whole lot of it gets reflected right back up to create literally the worst light pollution I've ever seen in my life (not counting those stupid movie-theater waving searchlight thingies). It's bad enough on clear nights to drive over the hill and see it there like an alien landing site or enormous crime scene, with the branches of all the trees in a half-mile radius lit up in stark relief; still worse are evenings like this one where low clouds bring the light right into our bedroom windows. Last night we had to close the shades, otherwise it would have been too bright to sleep.

The solution to this one is easy: make people who want to play sports play seasonally-appropriate ones, outside. And maybe during the day, too. There's a connection between my two complaints, because to my mind they're both caused by people determined to do the things they want to do regardless of the conditions around them. It's slippery? Melt the ice. It's cold and dark? Make a big plastic illuminated cocoon. No harbor in Alaska? Detonate some nuclear bombs (thankfully someone with sense pointed out the potential flaws with that last one, and the plan was never carried out). Yes, living in the future as we do we have the power to alter our environment in enormous and profound ways. But maybe, more times than not, we shouldn't.

Harvey and Zion certainly felt that way on our walk yesterday. After he saw Harvey jump in a puddle Zion had to jump in it too, and also every subsequent puddle we came across; just like when Harvey put his hands in one Zion had to do the same, again and again. Never mind that he had wool mittens on. Because of this delight in the watery world it took us a half-hour to walk maybe a quarter mile, and when Rascal and I were forced to desert the rest of the party in the interest of getting him some actual exercise they were moving still slower, distracted by Elm Brook, which is like a puddle but much bigger and moving. Thankfully they didn't jump in that one, and contented themselves with throwing sticks. Zion did get himself all wet anyways, by lying down in a puddle, but since that was part of a tantrum at having to go home rather than warm-weather playfulness it really should be part of a different story.

In short, while it's already cold again now—thank goodness, since it's not even quite February—the brief spring preview was very much appreciated in the proper manner, and we look forward to the real thing at the appropriate time.