image by The Sly Gentleman

There are lots of great tips on the web and in books about things you can do to save money and reduce your impact on the environment, but today, sitting around in the lovely May sunshine I’ve been thinking about the wonderful side effects of laziness.

There are so many worthwhile things I could do today other than sit around in my pajamas reading a book I borrowed from a friend, napping and working on my writing, things that on other days hold real appeal to me, but not today.

I could go to the Green Living Expo at the State Fair grounds and find out all kinds of new and interesting information about green technology, local foods and environmental initiatives happening in my area.

I could be responsible and do my laundry, which is beginning to pile up after a week of mud-pies, baked goods and bonfires.

I could take my kids to The Festival of Nations and expose them to all kinds of interesting cultures and foods, expanding their horizons and having good quality family time in the process.

I could go to the garden center and get started on my garden for the year. The forecast is frost-free for the foreseeable future and it would be the perfect day to garden.

I could go to lunch with a friend and catch a movie.

But all of that would require me to change into my real clothes, leave my sunny lounge chair on the deck and participate in life and today doesn’t feel like the day I will save the world.

Still, I am doing some good by doing nothing. I will use no fossil fuels in my travels today from the lounge chair on the deck to the kitchen to refill my water glass, or to the restroom, or to my bed. I will forgo the comforts of modern electronics in favor of solar heating and lighting obtained the old-fashioned way, by sitting in the sun. I will save money by eating stuff I already have on hand. I will even reduce my need for water and laundry detergent by not bothering to mess up yet another outfit.

Sure, it doesn’t seem like much, but over the course of the summer lazy days like this add up. I’m not saying I’m bowing out of society completely. I’m just saying that days like today are good for balance, good for the soul and, in a small way, good for both the budget and the planet.

Reduce, Reuse Recycle. We definitely try to live this in my family, although we’re not as hardcore as I’d like to be. In an attempt to make reusing and recycling more appealing to my kids, I’ve been trying to work on projects and point out items in our house that have been “upcycled” in some way.

The kids see us putting the recycling out at the curb on recycling day, but that’s a very abstract concept to them. I wanted to give them some concrete examples of what recycling and reusing looks like in our everyday life. 

I made this cute little shrug for Cheyenne from a boxy old t-shirt that was somewhat worn. It was a hand-me-down that she wasn’t particularly fond of in its original form. Now, as a sweater, she wears it all the time.

I love this lamp. My grandfather had both a passion for stained glass and a tight budget, so he and a friend of his took to making these bottle lamps in their retirement. The glass comes from various coloured beer and wine bottles he salvaged from friends and neighbors. This one used to hang on his three-season porch above the wrought iron nesting tables next to the couch. At night it gave off the prettiest coloured light patterns. He’s been gone for over 10 years now, but the lamps are still here, reminding me of summer evenings spent with my grandparents on their porch.

This is a skirt I made from a pillowcase. It is possibly the easiest garment I have ever sewn. Essentially all I did was cut the pillowcase to the right length and sew an elastic waistband at the top. I’ve made several of these now and the girls absolutely love them.

I used the scraps from the pillowcase skirts to make stuffed animal skirts. Don’t Marjorie and Mr. Fix-it (who is a girl in spite of her name) look ravishing?

Our next project is going to be recycled crayons. I found some huge bags of crayons at the thrift store for $.50 each and thought this would make a great project for my little artists. 

image by geishaboy500

Nearly two years ago now, I accomplished one of the biggest feats in my adult life. I successfully lost 100 lbs. And here’s the kicker, the part that makes me sound like some infomercial quack selling snake oil supplements—I did it without significant pain and suffering.

Lately, at 7 months pregnant, I have been feeling frustrated by my limitations while at the same time driven by those lovely nesting hormones to make a better world and a better life for the babe I am about to bring into the world and his charming older sisters. 

All I can see lately are the things I am not doing well. I look at my lovely vintage bike, my anniversary present from my darling husband, and despair that things I could easily do last summer, like riding my bike or walking instead of driving, now range from difficult to an exercise in insanity. I end up driving everywhere. I peruse aisles of the garden center and reflect with sadness that this year’s garden will have to be a scaled back, simpler version of last year’s. My quest to eat a more local and sustainable diet, difficult anyway at this time of year when last years preserved bounty is running low and nothing new is growing yet, seems half-hearted in comparison to other times. 

As I lay awake at 3:00AM this morning battling heartburn and fondly recalling the days I didn’t feel quite so much like a beached whale, I thought about my weight loss journey and how it the lessons I learned from that experience correlate to the other big changes I want to make in my life.

When I first started my weight loss project I had a brand new baby girl, a colicky one at that, and a very active 15 month old. Initially I felt much as I do now, hampered by so many obstacles that the road to victory seemed nearly impassable. But my energy was flagging, I knew, in part because of the extra weight and I was determined that I would get healthy. I had gained a lot during my back-to-back pregnancies and I knew the only way to feel better was to lose the weight. 

Prior to this, every diet I had attempted had been of the rigid, form-my-life-to-this-plan type. I’d set out with lofty goals of eating nothing but tofu and vegetables and exercising an hour a day and I’d crash and burn a month later when the exhilaration I get from an initial rush of self denial wore off. This time it was obvious to me that, even if I had wanted to, that kind of hard-core approach wasn’t an option. 

The first thing I did was to stop focusing on what I couldn’t do and started focusing on what I could do. At that time, I couldn’t find long stretches of time I could easily devote to exercise, so I stole time here and there. 15 minutes while both kids were sleeping, a 15-minute walk when my husband got home from work, some crunches done while the kids played around me. I set my minimum exercise requirement at 10 minutes a day for the sake of building a routine. I could almost always talk myself into 10 minutes and once I had done 10 I frequently did more. 

Next, I set about seducing myself to health. I bought and made healthy, easy to prepare foods that actually appealed to me. I treated myself, and I made sure to look at it as a treat, to things like lovely ripe tomatoes or strawberries from the farmer’s market, salad mix from my urban homesteader friends, good cheeses and fresh breads from the bakery. The kind of stuff that makes junk food seem like the unappealing garbage it is. I sliced lemons from the backyard lemon tree into my water and drank it out of one of my pretty crystal goblets. I garnished my salads with pretty edible flowers and indulged in the occasional square of dark chocolate. As the quality of my food increased I found I craved more of the right stuff, the tomatoes and the salads. The flavor was so intense, so inviting. I also found that I ate less of more fattening foods like butter, cheese and chocolate because a little packed a powerful punch.

Finally, I made a habit of forgiving myself. Mistakes happen and long-term changes, if they are going to be successful, have to ultimately find their place among the other important things in life.  The key is to keep coming back to center. For instance, the night we took Bella to the emergency room, I had a dinner of Cheetos and soda from the vending machine, but the next night we were back to normal, healthy food. It’s OK to put even worthy causes on the backburner for a little while if you need to focus on something else. Needless guilt only distracts from the tasks at hand. 

It occurs to me that these lessons could help me a lot in my current situation. Maybe this isn’t the year for biking, but maybe, when the weather is nice and I am craving some fresh air, I could walk to the store. No guilt, no pressure, just an enjoyable stroll in the spring air.  Maybe we can cut back on outside commitments and just stay home more, laying out on the deck and enjoying the fresh air, or skipping rocks in the pond.

Maybe this isn’t the year I plant a crazy variety of veggies and finally figure out a way to make my husband like sautéed greens, but maybe we can enjoy picnics with our homegrown tomatoes and farmer’s market cheeses or enjoy some homemade meusli for an al fresco breakfast. 

There are lots of things I can’t do, but so many more I can—like finding great thrifted stuff for the new babe or making cute skirts from vintage fabric for the girls. Maybe it’s OK to let this amazing time in my life be what it wants to be instead of feeling guilty that it isn’t something else.

image by House of Sims

I was very nervous when I walked through the glass doors of the elementary school on my first day as a mentor, as I almost always am when I start a new project. When I signed up to be a KidsHope mentor I was gung-ho. It sounds like such a fabulous thing, setting aside an hour a week to help a child who needs it.

I love grand, abstract concepts. That’s why I love writing. I could sit here at my computer all day long and play armchair philosopher. It’s fun. Sometimes, though, when it gets down to the reality of actually doing something with all of my lovely ideas, I get a little panicky. Who am I to think I can accomplish anything, to make a difference? my brain says to me.

Once that thought takes hold a million others flood in after it. What if the kid doesn’t like me? You hear so much about how kids are jaded and hate to learn. Of course I don’t believe that when I’m alone with my pie-in-the-sky thoughts, but what if it’s true? What if this kid finds having a mentor embarrassing or thinks it’s a stupid waste of time? What if I don’t make a difference? Failure and I are mortal enemies, so much so that I have been known to avoid trying to avoid failing.

As I walked through the standard-issue locker-lined halls of the school I felt all of my old school aged insecurities flooding back to me. I suppressed them. I’m 30 years old, for the love of Pete. I don’t need to be intimidated by 10 year olds, but for a minute I was.

Then I met my student, who I’ll call Stacy for the sake of anonymity. Immediately I liked her. She has a bright smile and what my mom called ‘sparkly eyes,’ a sure sign in my opinion of a kindred spirit. I relaxed a little and remembered that, one on one, I actually get along great with most kids.

Stacy is curious and smart, qualities I hold in high regard. In spite of all of the stereotypes I’ve heard of “kids these days” she is cooperative, friendly and loves to learn. We start out most weeks with a task at hand, studying for an upcoming test or working on a project of some sort. She applies herself willingly and diligently to the task every time, but the mentoring goes beyond that. She asks questions about all sorts of things that crop up as we work. A discussion about industrial Michigan turns into a discussion about cars which turns into a funny story about a friend. It flows easily. I learn more about her and she learns more about me each time.

It turns out that all of my flaws and insecurities are part of being a good mentor. I know what it’s like to be nervous about a test. I know what it’s like to be worried about being liked or to devour a book in an evening and forget to do my chores. On a deeper level, I know what it’s like to experience loss or fear or separation and I know how to listen.

In three weeks I have seen the impact that mentoring can have, both on the child and the mentor. The biggest surprise to me came when I was standing in line waiting with Stacy waiting to get her lunch.

“Who is that?” another child asked her, pointing to me.

“That’s my mentor,” Stacy explained.

“What’s a mentor?” the other child asked.

“Someone who helps you,” Stacy answered.

“Don’t you have a mentor, Sam?” another kid piped up. “You need to get yourself on the list. Ask them for a permission slip. Having a mentor is great!”

“Yeah,” a fourth kid chimed in, “my sister has a mentor and I am on the list. She says it’s so much fun! I hope I can get one soon.”

The suspicion on Sam’s face turned to envy and for the first time I can really see the impact the program has had on these kids. For a moment my grand, abstract, do-gooder dreams were fulfilled before, fish sticks and string cheese in hand, we returned to the library for the hands-on fun of the actual work.

image by WordRidden

I love DIY. As I mentioned in another article, I have been hand making a lot of presents for my kids. Last year I had been eyeing the beautiful wood play food at one of our local toyshops, but at $2-$10 apiece I could really have only afforded a couple of items.

I did some searching online and discovered loads of knitted and crocheted play food on Etsy. Of course, that was out of my price range too, but I do know how to knit and crochet, so making some was in the realm of possibility.

I started with something simple, a pancake. I took some light brown yarn from my stash and crocheted a simple flat circle. I was initially intending to make two circles, stuff them a little bit and sew them together, but Cheyenne discovered me while I was crocheting and when I told her the circle was a pancake she ran off with it and started playing. I decided that if a simple circle worked for her as a pancake, it was good enough for me.

I went on to make some brown squares for bread (knitted with thicker yarn), some curly green circles for lettuce and some red circles for sliced tomatoes. I knitted some yellow squares for sliced cheese and crocheted some simple strips of bacon, just alternating between a light brown and a darker reddish brown yarn to make the stripes. Finally, I made some sunny side up eggs by making an asymmetrical white “circle” with a more symmetrical yellow circle sewed on top. Eventually I may attempt the amazing pies, cakes, sushi and other goodies I’ve seen on craftster and Etsy, but for now my kids are happy with their simple play food. I’ll never forget the day I was knitting a pink scarf and Cheyenne walked up to me and asked, “Mommy, are you knitting me some ham?”

Kits can be a fun thing to make and they don’t require any craft skills at all. Every year I look through catalogs like HearthSong, Rosie hippo and others and see kits for making all kinds of fun projects. Many of the kits are pretty expensive and could be made cheaply at home. Jewlery kits, embroidery kits, tied fleece blanket kits, knitting kits, sock monkey kits and cookie-decorating kits can be assembled pretty easily.

I saw a kit once for “snow painting” that was essentially just spray bottles with food coloured water. A box of food colouring and some $.99 spray bottles would accomplish the same goal. Add a list of instructions and you have yourself a fun, inexpensive gift.

Another fun item I saw was an ice cream maker in a ball. The idea is that you put the ice cream mix in the center of the ball and fill the outer ring with ice and rock salt. Then you roll it around until you have ice cream. The same thing can be accomplished with two coffee cans, one smaller and one larger and some tape. If you live in the frozen north, like me, you can just roll a coffee can filled with ice cream mix down a snowy hill. You could even include a sled for the kid to chase after the ice cream can.

Homemade books on MP3 or CD can be a fun gift if you have a digital voice recorder, or voice recording software. You can make up your own story or packaged with a copy of a picture book so you can “read” to your favourite far-away niece, nephew or grandkid.

One of my children’s favourite gifts from their paternal grandfather was a homemade book. He began with a letter to my girls telling them a little bit about their family’s history. Behind the letter was children’s book of his own creation about the life of his mother when she was a kid. He left blank spaces for the girls to colour their own pictures and imagine what her life must have looked like. It’s a really special gift that cost him nothing but time. If you are an artist, you could add some drawings of your own, or even work in the reverse. Draw a series of pictures and have the child write the story.

Kids thrive on creativity. They love knowing that something was made especially for them and they usually don’t care how much you spent. What they really want is time, thought and love.

image by ercwttmn

I love good toys, the kinds of toys that inspire kids’ imaginations and foster a love of learning. Childhood creativity inspires me. There is something so free and natural about it. I love the way children imagine and combine ideas without all of the limits of reality and fear of failure that adults impose on themselves.

I get a lot of ideas from reading through the natural toy catalogs I get every fall and wandering the aisles of the natural toy stores we have here in Minneapolis. Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of money to spend on toys. In spite of financial challenges I think we have managed to pull together a really nice learning environment for our kids. Since many of us are tightening our belts a bit more this Christmas I thought it would be fun for us to talk about fun, inexpensive and environmentally friendly gifts.

Thrifting

I have found so much great stuff at thrift stores and yard sales it is unbelievable. Last year for Bella’s birthday I found a very sweet car and train for about $2 each at the thrift store by my house. Two days later I found a wood doll high chair at a yard sale for $3. Those items get almost daily use in our house.

Books are easy to find used. I’ve found Beatrix Potter books, Richard Scarry books, Max and Ruby books and several other favourite children’s books at thrift stores and used book shops, usually for a dollar or two. For older kids I know I’ve found classics such as Roald Dahl books (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, etc.), The Chronicles of Narnia and Treasure Island, again for a dollar or two.

Building toys like blocks, Legos and tinker toys are another great thing to find used. I frequently find building toys in bags, too small to be a collection by themselves, for a dollar or two. It doesn’t take long and these $1 bags amass into quite a collection. This has particularly saved us money on Legos. I like the open-ended play of a big box of random Legos rather than the structured kits, especially for younger kids. Unfortunately I have discovered that the box-of-random-Legos I grew up with is hard to find these days. The lego store at the Mall of America was selling “mix your own” Legos for $12 for a cup the size of a cocktail shaker. It’s outrageous.

Dress-up clothes are easy to find at thrift stores too, especially around Halloween. My kids mostly inherited their dress-up clothes from me, but I usually check out the costume aisles, accessories and dressy dresses just in case.  Many cool costumes can be assembled from thrift stores.

Surprisingly enough craft supplies are pretty easy to find at thrift stores and garage sales too. Probably about half of my crafting stuff is second hand. I have jars of beads, jars of buttons, embroidery thread, fabric, lace, ribbons, ribbon roses, twine and even a small loom all purchased second hand. Kids love the open-ended nature of craft supplies. I once found a complete calligraphy set for my nephew at a church rummage sale for $2.

You may also have gifts already in your possession. My nephew is the king of ‘80s movies. His favorite movies are the same ones my sister and I loved as kids, Goonies, Indiana Jones and Gremlins, to name a few. While cleaning out the basement I found a collection of McDonalds books with records from the movie Gremlins. Not only will he love the books himself, there’s a sentimental attachment because the books once belonged to his mom and aunt. Plus, the book-with-record aspect makes it fabulously old-school and my nephew appreciates vintage. Gremlins on vinyl is right up his alley.

image by pingu1963

As I have rolled the concept of Enough around in my head I have come to realize that it isn’t just material things my family has enough of. My family has a pretty solid base of love and stability and for that reason alone we are lucky. We have strong family ties, a roof over our heads, a nurturing environment for learning and growing and all of our physical needs met. That is an abundance that so many people in so many places simply do not have. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. I think a lot of the over-consumption that has gone on in recent years is a result of human’s need to create beauty. From the smallest children to the elderly there is a strong desire to create beauty and function for us and for others. What if we channeled that need for beauty, functionality and creation into making this world a better place to be?

It’s a lovely idea and a good one, but when you get down to brass tacks it can be difficult to know where to begin. That’s a huge challenge, making the world a better place. What is better? What does that look like? What makes a real difference and what is a band –aid or a crutch? How do we meet others who are working towards the same goals? If there are no organizations filling a need we perceive, how do we go about starting one? What are the potential pitfalls involved in such an exercise and how can they be mitigated? This is what I am struggling with. I don’t really know where to begin.

Practical Minnesotan that I am, I am starting out with what is right in front of me. I am not personally going to be able to save the world, but by starting out and trying to make a difference in my own community I am at least doing something. My church has been the easiest place for me to begin because it contains a lot of really positive, service oriented people. I’ve talked in other articles about the children’s mentoring organization I have signed up with and the chapter of the Community of the Cross of Nails that others and I would like to start at our church.

In addition to those volunteer opportunities, a friend and I are putting on a Christmas tea on the last of the Twelve Days of Christmas as a fundraiser for the children’s mentoring organization. The tea will be held on the Sunday after Epiphany and for the entertainment we have lined up a couple of elderly women who are history buffs to tell us stories about the old days in our town and in our church. The idea is that in the spirit of the gifts of the wise men (that is what Epiphany remembers) we are receiving the gifts of history and wisdom from our elders and giving the gift of hope and encouragement to the youngest generation.

I also think that moving beyond enough is about more than just volunteer work. It’s about seeing the needs we meet in everyday life. It’s calling a friend who’s having a tough time, or smiling at a lonely older person who’s waiting for the bus. It’s treating all people, no exceptions, with dignity.  It’s having real and respectful conversations with people, especially those I disagree with. Those are things I can do right now from right where I am on my journey.

image by pingu1963

I love how, in this article, Stella progresses from recognizing that her family has enough to sharing the overflowing abundance of love and energy with those outside her family. Instead of working to make our own individual dreams of come true, what if we decided to come together and dream bigger dreams? I see so much possibility there ... -ed.

Every November, before the post-Thanksgiving rush I take a day and wander my favorite toy stores trying to get ideas for my kids for Christmas. I love toys, especially the kind that foster creativity. Children’s creativity inspires me with its limitlessness and freedom. There’s something so pure in the way they imagine and combine ideas largely unchecked by self-consciousness and reality.

Still, as I strolled the aisles of the natural toy store fingering beautifully hand crafted wood animals and looking at all kinds of interesting games and playthings I began to realize that, really, my children have enough.

Play is learning for children, and I have always approached it in that way. I can see in my kids, and I vividly remember from my own childhood the absolute joy of discovery and learning. I’ve tried over the past couple of years to provide the kids with good solid toys like blocks, a dollhouse, a play kitchen, a train set, books and art supplies. I’ve scoured yard sales and thrift shops, enlisted the support of family and friends, and in the end I think we’ve done a pretty good job. My children’s days are filled with enriching, creative play.

Abundance is a wonderful thing. Overabundance is not. Overabundance kills creativity. It fills in the gaps that imagination and resourcefulness would otherwise fill. I have always wanted a crazy big dollhouse—something sprawling and castle-like, or a Victorian manor with secret passageways and cozy libraries with roaring fires and lots of little busy people running to and fro. I never got it and now I’m glad I didn’t. Instead I filled notebooks with stories and pictures of my wonderful imaginary dollhouse. I made extra rooms for my regular dollhouse from shoeboxes and the underside of the table and beds from napkins and even socks. I think I learned infinitely more from wanting that dollhouse and not getting it than I would have learned from the actual dollhouse.

Enough is a really beautiful thing. It’s the goal, isn’t it? To have what you need and enough of what you want that you really enjoy it? So the question now is what to do with our enough?

On the practical, everyday level I’ve been thinking about how Enough will affect our plans for Christmas. I love holidays and I want my kids to have a magical childhood experience. I don’t want to end gift giving all together, but I do want to scale it back and refocus our attention on the non-material things that bring us joy.

I want it to be a season of experiences instead of a season of stuff. I want them to remember baking cookies with friends and family, decorating the tree, attending the Santa Lucia parade and the amazing Lessons and Carols choral service at our church as much as they remember opening the gifts. I want the gifts they do open to be meaningful even if they are spare.

Instead of creating an unfulfillable expectation of more, I want to find a way to emphasize our gratitude for being some of the lucky ones who do have enough. I think it is time to channel our energies into making a difference in the world instead of just focusing on our desires and ourselves.

Tomorrow’s article will discuss the broader implications of Enough and how we can use Enough to focus our energies on creating a better world.

image by maluni

Stella’s pieces on how to live the good life outside the current spend/consume paradigm constitute an amazing resource. When creativity takes the place of credit, I find myself enjoying myself more, building deeper connections, and really thinking about what I’m doing. This is how a new world is made—by consciously deciding how we want to live and relate with each other. -ed.

I know a lot of articles about frugality suggest curbing socializing and entertainment and paint them as frivolous activities, but I see them as essentials. Just like a marriage, you can’t have a strong and lasting community if you don’t take care of it. In good times, a strong community is a joy, and in times of crisis, those relationships become critical. It’s worth it to devote time and effort to creating and nurturing community connections.

At the same time, we need to remember that entertaining doesn’t have to be nerve-wracking. Something that has struck me in the last few years is how much more formal entertaining seems to have gotten—it’s become synonymous with having a party or an event. We don’t just have a friend over for a cup of coffee at the kitchen table anymore. Even our kids have “play dates.”

I can’t help but wonder if this is because our relationships with other people aren’t as close as they once were. When I am in that first stage of getting to know someone I am much more likely to fuss over a big meal or fuss over the state of my house. Once I get to know people better I don’t sit around worrying, “What would they think?” anymore. When my close friends come over I might take the laundry out of the living room and down to the basement, but I’m probably not going to apologize for it if I don’t.

Entertaining at home can be a lot of fun if you take the right approach. My biggest obstacle to having people over to spend time together is perfectionism. A couple of years ago I decided that I had to overcome that. I was feeling really lonely and I just couldn’t afford to be meeting friends out for coffee or a movie as often as I would have liked.

I would love to have a Martha Stewart-like clean house, a fabulous three-course dinner and a beautifully set table, but that’s not my reality and it’s not worth isolating myself or confining my socialization to dinners out to keep up appearances.

Don’t get me wrong, I love putsy gourmet meals and good wine as much as the next person, but they aren’t necessary to have a good time. I’ve decided that people are just going to have to take me as I am. The result has been amazing. I have developed more friendships and deeper friendships than I had in the past and I am beginning to feel like I have a strong, caring support system.

Activities

The first thing I have tried to do is dispense with the idea that having people over necessarily means having people over for dinner. When I was younger my friends and I thought nothing of going to each other’s houses for a few hours for activities that had nothing to do with food. They’d play guitar together and I’d listen or occasionally sing, we’d make a stupid movie with someone’s parent’s video camera or we’d build a luge track in the backyard. One friend had a “read your favourite Robert Burns poem” night at her house.  I even hosted weekly tea parties for my mostly male friends at my first apartment. That’s the spirit of fun and camaraderie I’m looking to recapture.

If you’re not going to have a meal it can be fun to have gatherings centered on an activity. Crafts are always fun and this time of the year it’s nice to have an excuse to work on gifts or just stuff to keep you warm in the winter.

I used to go to a knitting group at my friends Anais and Jordanne’s house. We’d knit in the garden when it was warm enough and in the house when it got chilly. Everyone brought an appetizer, dessert or beverage and we’d chat and learn from each other. That knitting group is where I learned to knit in the first place. Last winter a friend of mine had a similar party at her house here in Minnesota.  The gathering started at 7:00PM and by the time any of us bothered to look at a clock it was after midnight.

Another thing we’ve been doing lately is getting together to play Rock Band or Guitar Hero. I know a lot of people are really against video games and I think some of the claims that video games isolate people have some merit, but sometimes they are just good fun. I don’t actually own a gaming console and I probably won’t ever buy one but I really have fun playing at my friend’s houses. It keeps the game social and interactive and makes it a treat versus an everyday activity.

The options for activities are as endless as our imaginations. I’ve been thinking lately about hosting a poetry slam later this winter when we’re all bored and it’s too cold to go outside. On Halloween we went to a friend’s house for trick or treating and it could be fun to sit around the bonfire telling scary stories with the older kids once the little ones are sleeping.

My friend Mari wants to have a card-making party to make interesting, unique Christmas cards. My dad has been attending something called the Argument of the Month club where people get together, have some beers and discuss a pre-selected topic for argument. How’s that for getting over the culture wars? Come on over. Lets have some beers and some pigs in a blanket and chat about climate change. Sounds like a good time to me. These kinds of gatherings are at least as much fun to me as your standard dinner party.

Food

When a meal is the focus of the gathering there are lots of options for making a fun and inexpensive time of it.

Lately we have been getting together with some friends of ours on a weekly basis to share dinner. They bring part of dinner and we provide the rest. For example the first night they brought quiche and I baked some bread and a cake. It is inexpensive for everyone and it is even better than going out to dinner. There is no pressure to hurry up and clear the table and when the kids get bored they wander off to play. For a while after the meal my friend and I go for a walk and my husband and her husband go off to play video games or watch a movie.

The potluck style of the gathering really helps keep things informal and saves everyone some money. Since my friend and I are both really fond of cooking it’s also a fun chance to try new recipes out on each other.

I’ve been thinking that in addition to potluck style gatherings it can be fun to cook together. I’ve done this once or twice in the past year and I’d like to do more of it. We could find a recipe we’d like to try and assign each person some of the ingredients to bring or we could make it more spontaneous. We could visit a cool ethnic grocery store or a farmer’s market, see what ingredients call to us and devise a menu on the spot—our own version of Minnesota Iron Chef. By splitting the cost we’d still be saving money and it would be a lot of fun. This would be a great time to try a recipe that calls for something I’d usually be hesitant to buy. Maybe that $5 jar of horseradish jelly I’ve been eyeing is worth a shot if there are 5 of us willing to try it.

Another thing to consider is that you don’t always have to host people for dinner. Some friends of ours had us over for breakfast a while back and it was just lovely. They had monkey bread, scrambled eggs, pancakes and bacon. I brought some of my homemade apple syrup and a jug of apple cider. Breakfast is usually pretty inexpensive. Coffee or tea and a treat, or beer and appetizers are always fun too.

The point is to enjoy each other’s company, have some great conversation, and laugh—we don’t have to convert a barn to a dining hall or put up 1,000 votive candles a la Martha Stewart to make that happen. Community is about reality—real relationships built on discovering, helping, and sharing with each other. When we get beyond the desire to superficially impress each other with our clever consumption, we can build these real connections and interact on a deeper level.

image by KitAy

Ever since I moved out on my own in my late teens my life has been busy, but recently it’s gotten to be even more so. I’m working two part-time jobs, I’m home with the kids part-time, running the oldest to and from school, volunteering, writing for The Sunny Way and trying to keep the house running smoothly. I love it, but it is definitely presenting some new challenges.

This is the kind of schedule that frequently throws people off and sends them running for fast food and convenience foods and I admit there have been some stumbles. Twice this week I have used my 30th birthday as a lame excuse to order take-out because I was tired. I’m realizing that it is once again time to reevaluate my food shopping and cooking routines.

I have a love-hate relationship with grocery shopping and food sourcing. When I have the time for it I love perusing the aisles of the grocery store, or better yet the farmer’s market, taking my own sweet time dreaming up recipes as I go. I love visiting farms and picking and freezing fruits and veggies. I’m lucky because in the summer my schedule allows for that kind of thing and it’s kind of a nice distraction for the kids and me.

Now that fall has come I am dreading every trip to the store and it’s only going to get worse as winter, snow, ice and sub-zero temperatures set in.  It’s one more thing I have to do.

I’ve decided for the winter to take some cues from the restaurants I have worked in. Restaurants keep larger quantities of staples and prepare a lot of things before hand to keep food prep fast and easy.

First of all, I am stocking my pantry with staples. Thanks to a busy summer putting up fruits and veggies I have a lot of local foods easily at hand in my freezer and pantry. I am giving cold storage a shot storing apples and squash in insulated coolers in my garage to protect them from extreme cold. If that works well I’ll probably try storing some root veggies next year, but I thought it would be prudent to test my method on one or two things before I invest a lot of money in stuff that could possibly go bad.

I noted this year what I did and didn’t use of last year’s frozen produce and I have tried to keep only the stuff I’ll actually use. We did use spinach, leeks, tomatoes, berries, peppers, shredded zucchini, rhubarb, freezer jam, frozen fruit sauces and frozen apple slices. We didn’t have as much success with green beans and many of the stronger greens. The green beans were mushy and I am really the only one in the family who likes most of the greens.

After that I sat down and thought about things I use on a regular basis like flour, peanut butter, honey, butter, maple syrup, dried beans, rice, oats, dried fruit, nuts, pasta, Parmesan, and mayonnaise and took a trip to Costco to stock up. I added a few other things, like cans of tomato sauce, black olives and a big container of organic animal crackers for an easy snack item.

Now when I go to the store I buy for a couple of weeks. I get a couple of gallons of milk instead of one, a few dozen eggs, some ripe bananas and some green ones and all the cheese I need for a month.

As I have for a long time, each week I come up with a list of meals I am going to make. In the summer the list is based on what is in season and in the winter it’s based on what I have easily on hand and what needs to be used up. I hesitate to call it a menu since I never make the meals in the order I plan to.

Tonight as I planned my menu I noted that I had half a jar of pasta sauce, half a family size package of chicken (local, family farm raised, antibiotic free), two heads of romaine lettuce and some potatoes to use up so tonight’s dinner was baked chicken and rice and salad with apples, dried cranberries and blue cheese dressing. Wednesday is potato leek soup and popovers, Thursday is my actual birthday so we are having dinner with my dad and Friday will be homemade pizza and salad.

Since I had some time and energy tonight I prepared as much as possible ahead of time. I made the pizza dough and shredded the cheese so that all I have to do on Friday is assemble the pizza and bake it. I chopped up the lettuce for salads and made the potato leek soup so all I have to do Wednesday is make popovers and heat up the soup. By doing those things now, when I have time and energy I will make it easy for me to make dinner on nights when I will probably be tired or strapped for time.

What kinds of methods do you employ to keep meal prep simple, frugal and environmentally friendly? Share your ideas with us in the comments.

image by hikikomorix

When I was thinking of topics to write about concerning frugality and environment the one thing that kept cropping up was community.  I really think that one of my biggest assets in working to live a frugal, environmentally friendly life is my strong and helpful community.

It’s a hard one to quantify. I can’t look at my monthly expenses and easily say, “my community saved me $200 this month,” but they provide me with so many tangible and intangible benefits I can hardly count them all. It’s amazing to me what people accomplish when they pull together.

As strong interdependent relationships with our neighbors have become less and less common we have had to fill the gap with money and things. We buy things instead of borrow them. We pay for services instead of trading for them. We buy things to make us feel better instead of getting together with a friend to commiserate. I really think that gradually, without even noticing it we as a society have replaced community with consumption.

In my community, we are turning the tide the other way. One of the easiest ways we help each other out is by passing along stuff we no longer need to others who could use it.

It’s the change of the seasons and here in the frozen North that requires a change of the wardrobe. Perfectly usable clothes that fit my kids have been packed away in a box for next summer, when they probably won’t fit, and perfectly usable clothes from last winter that may or may not fit are being pulled out of boxes, washed and evaluated. If I were to buy new clothes every season it would create a lot of waste and cost a lot of money.

Luckily, every other mom I know is engaged in the same ritual. Some have daughters older than mine and some have daughters younger than mine. Naturally, I’m going to offer the clothes Isabella (my youngest) has outgrown to my friends and neighbors with smaller girls and my friends and neighbors with older girls have offered their clothes to me. When I’ve sorted out what I have that still fits, what can be passed from older sister to younger sister and what I’ve received from friends I can usually fill in the gap at thrift stores, garage sales, from my sewing stash and, if necessary, Target for about $30 for both kids.

When I do get new things for the girls, often from my mom or my grandma, I know that if I care for these items they will probably last through at least three kids, maybe four or five. It’s not just clothes either. The crib my girls slept in as babies was originally their cousin’s and when we moved to Minnesota I passed it on to my friend Michelle. The odds are good that when Michelle was finished with it she passed it on to another family.

When we reorganized our house we passed on several pieces of unwanted furniture to friends. Most of those pieces had originally belonged to someone else. The heated leather recliner chairs that were perfect for my empty nester parents’ Nintendo battles were cluttering up what is now our kids’ playroom so we passed them along to some friends of ours who needed some good chairs for their living room.

We don’t really do it to be virtuous, although I’ll admit I feel better knowing that the things I no longer need aren’t clogging up a landfill. There’s a natural flow of goods to those who need them when you have a strong community. It’s a wonderful sort of efficiency. There’s no tit-for-tat, “I gave you this now you owe me” stuff because, really, what did we need with clothes that don’t fit the kids and furniture that doesn’t fit the space?

At the end of the day, the stuff we didn’t need found it’s rightful home and everyone was happy and grateful. Our homes are more comfortable and our kids have all the cute, seasonally appropriate clothing they need to get them through to the next change of seasons. Everyone wins.

Obviously, if I hadn’t given stuff away to my friends I would have donated what I could to a thrift store, but that can be hit or miss. They wouldn’t have taken several of the pieces we have given away, like the crib and a queen size mattress. Other things like clothes may have ended up being sold at the thrift store or it may have ended up in the dumpster. This way I know for sure that the goods will be used.

Lives change. Needs change. People change. All of these things can make items we own obsolete or unwanted, but as the saying goes, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Have you been able to build up a community where you can share the things you no longer need with others who do? Let us know in the comments.

One of the areas I feel I could do a lot better on both in terms of money and the environment is transportation. I am pretty much glued to my car. I don’t actually drive all that much, not having a commute, but I do drive everywhere I go. I think I could save myself a chunk of money on both gas and wear and tear to my already old and well-loved vehicle. Both reducing my emissions by not driving and extending the life of my vehicle will be good for the environment.

At the beginning of the summer I was doing fairly well walking to the store and the bank and other nearby businesses, but then I accidentally crunched the bike trailer/double stroller with the car and it’s been pretty much downhill from there. Finances don’t allow for the purchase of another bike trailer this year, which has sent me back to my car.

My new house is within walking distance of a grocery store, several salons, several restaurants, a coffee shop, my bank, an ice cream place, a liquor store, and a Wal-Mart. (I don’t much like Wal-Mart but I’m conflicted between shopping there and walking or driving to Target.) As I sit in my office and type this, I can also see a bus stop that goes directly into downtown Minneapolis, and another one ¼ mile away that goes to several other useful destinations.

I have decided to give the bus and my own two feet a fair trial. I anticipate that weather, time and exhaustion will be my biggest challenges. I live in a harsh climate and as it is I already have to budget my time and energy carefully. The big thing that will keep me going is that I really dislike driving. I’m the car ahead of you that you are sure is being driven by some little old man, only to discover disbelievingly as you pass me and flip me off that I am actually a young woman. There’s no excuse for my grandpa-like driving. I just hate it. It stresses me out.

First experiment

Last week I performed my first experiment when a friend of mine was visiting from Los Angeles. She agreed that it would be fun to have a little “public transportation adventure.” Early in the morning we filled a backpack with a lunch, some water, a $20 bus card, and some sun block and headed for the bus stop with my entire family.

One bus took us directly to the Mill City Farmers Market in downtown Minneapolis. The bus trip downtown was fun. Cheyenne started chatting with an elderly man who in no time was telling us all sorts of interesting stories about his travels and his amusing Irish mother. I was almost sorry to get off the bus. He was quite an entertainer.

The Mill City Farmers Market is an all-organic market. While there isn’t quite the selection of produce as the St Paul Farmers Market, it is a really fun place to go and the stuff they have here is all really good.  We had a great time. We got some produce for the week ahead, split a bottle of really good chocolate milk and a blueberry buttermilk tart and the girls got to color some free sunhats.

From there we took the light rail to Minnehaha Falls Park. This was my first ride on the Minneapolis light rail, which is only a few years old. In California we lived very close to the Gold Line and used it frequently. The Minneapolis light rail line was just as clean, comfortable and fast as the Los Angeles light rail system, although significantly more limited in scope.

Trains vs. busses

I have to admit that I feel differently taking a connecting train versus a connecting bus. I usually give up on public transportation if I have to take a connecting bus. I think it’s the fact that trains run about 10 minutes apart and busses can run as much as 80 minutes apart. Those 80 minutes in a possibly unfamiliar area gives me a feeling of being stranded. It’s silly, I know, but it’s how my brain works.

I also find that light rail stations are usually well-lit and well defined. They usually have a place to sit down while I am waiting and it is usually at least semi-enclosed. Bus stops can be anything from nice, well- defined, enclosed, well-lit, heated stops to a sign by a busy road with nothing but a small bench. As a woman and a mother the light rail stations make me feel more secure.

The train dropped us off across the street from the park. We took our backpack full of lunch and hiked down to the bottom of the falls, walking a little further to a field next to the creek for our lunch. It was just beautiful. The girls played in the creek while my friend and I chatted and my husband relaxed at a picnic table. After while we decided to start the trip home. We took the train to Nicollet Mall, a car-free street in downtown Minneapolis known for its shops and restaurants. We had to wait 45 minutes for the bus home so we stopped at a bagel shop for some coffee. The ride home was relaxing and quiet. The girls were tired so they snuggled in and we watched the scenery out the window.

Success within the limitations of system

We arrived home around 2:30 in the afternoon. There had been no meltdowns by kids or adults and we had all had a really nice time. The method of transportation didn’t in any way inhibit our fun that day. It was actually kind of freeing because I didn’t have to parallel park the car or find a parking spot in a crowded ramp.

I know, however, that I might feel differently if it was a weekday or I had somewhere to be or if the kids outnumbered me. That day I picked the destinations based on their proximity to public transportation rather than attempting to use public transportation to get to a predetermined destination. Still, I needed my first outing to be a successful one, and it was.

I suppose the fact that I chose my destination based on its proximity to public transportation isn’t cheating as much as it seemed to me at first. There are lots of fun and interesting places I could get to by public transportation and choosing them once in a while over the places I’d have to drive to is a start in the right direction. Almost half of my driving is done on the weekends in pursuit of a good time. We could probably have a lot of fun just picking a weekend now and then and having another public transportation adventure.

(image by JoePhoto via flickr)

Food is probably one of the first things people think of when they are trying to save money and when they are trying to save the planet. It is probably the largest of our easily controlled expenses and with food prices rapidly rising a lot of people are looking for ways to eat a healthy, more sustainable diet for less. You can have some serious impact on your wallet, your waistline, and the planet, but you need to be flexible. Eating like royalty on a budget really does call for some compromise.

The Early Years

When I moved out on my own in my late teens I was pretty much completely broke. I had grown up in a family of foodies and for the first month or so I felt pretty sorry for myself.  I ate a lot of plain rice and Amy’s microwave burritos and quickly realized that I was going to have to figure out a better plan.

I already knew how to cook, but I didn’t really know how to budget. I recalled something my dad had said to me years before while he was cooking some gourmet dish. “The funny thing is, Stella, that a lot of the most delicious food really originated as peasant food. People took whatever they had available at the moment, vegetables, meats, eggs, some leftover wine and made it into something wonderful.” This made sense to me as it always seemed like the best recipes in the world belonged to someone’s grandma.

That was a big mental shift for me. Before that I had always decided on what I wanted to eat based on what I was hungry for at the moment. I had grown up in a world where you could get anything at anytime and I had only ever briefly considered that this had not always been so. I had some exposure to the idea of eating seasonally through my parents and my good friend Geneva’s mom who had a bountiful vegetable garden, but I didn’t have any hands-on experience. My usual method of menu planning had been rolling out of bed hungry, realizing there was nothing in my fridge but ketchup, hitting the store hungry and hoping that the check I wrote for the food wasn’t going to bounce.

I started researching ethnic foods and peasant foods. I’m a list-maker, so I made a list of all the kinds of food I enjoyed: French, Italian, Spanish, German, Chinese, Thai, Indian, Eastern European, Middle Eastern, Greek, Mexican, Scandinavian, British, etc. and started checking out cookbooks from the library. I also checked into some local cookbooks, some vegetarian cookbooks like The Moosewood Cookbook and some historical cookbooks. I’d bug everyone’s grandma for their best recipes, which they were usually happy to share.

I learned what kinds of foods were staples in which cultures and what kinds of foods had a sort of universality to them. Many cultures, for example, have something resembling a pancake. Familiarizing myself with the similarities and differences of various kinds of foods has really helped me learn to be a flexible cook. I find that flexibility is really key to eating a varied, interesting diet even under restrictions such as budget constraints and in-season produce. I can make eggs, for example, once a week and never feel like I had a repeat. Mexican egg scramble, potato frittata, Dutch pancakes and cheese soufflé have similar ingredients but taste nothing alike.

From there I made a list of basic herbs, spices and condiments that I’d need for basic cooking as well as pantry staples like flour, pasta, rice and beans. I’m not going to lie. I had some help purchasing these. I told my parents my plan to try to eat better and save money and they were sufficiently impressed and took me to the grocery store. I’m not ashamed to admit I had some help. I think I’d do that for my kids too if they took the time and effort to research all of that.

Another big lesson from those cookbooks and grandmas was the value of simplicity. A good recipe doesn’t necessarily contain 20 different items. A simple carrot soup or tomato salad with buttermilk dressing can be really satisfying.

At that time I wasn’t really big on organics yet. I wanted to be, but I really didn’t see how I could afford it. I was just trying to eat a healthier diet for less money. I started going to the farmers market in the summer. I’d ask questions about how to prepare various things and tried to use things that were in season. I gained a lot of knowledge there and learned about a lot of fruits and vegetables I had never seen on grocery store shelves. The Hmong farmers in particular used all sorts of unusual vegetables and parts of vegetables I didn’t know were edible. The old-time Minnesota farmers had all kinds of recipes and ideas that would never have occurred to me: a fruit salad with purple curly leaf basil, or a potato leaf stir-fry.

In the winter I hit the ethnic markets. These often have the most inexpensive prices around on things like produce, rice, beans, spices, condiments and even meat. They don’t spend a lot of money on advertising and they usually reside in humble buildings on humble streets, so the prices are much lower than the grocery store, and frequently the quality is better.

The other bonus at small, ethnic grocery stores is that they sometimes sell scratch-and-dent grocery items at a discount. I once got an entire box of overripe bananas at the Italian grocery store for $3. I was swimming in banana bread, banana cake and smoothies for quite some time. Smaller markets aren’t usually as bureaucratic as larger ones and aren’t compelled by corporate policy to let perfectly good food go to waste. Sometimes you can even score a free loaf of bread at the end of the day.

Also, I have to say that I have had some of the best customer service of my life at ethnic grocery store. That Italian grocery store, for example, had the cutest little old men on the face of the earth. They could sell ice to Eskimos. They’d offer me ice cream or a cannoli and when I’d decline because I was watching my weight they’d wax poetic, tell me how beautiful I was and eventually I’d buy the ice cream in spite of myself. Not so frugal, I know, but then I guess it was a pretty cheap ego boost. Considering I remember it a decade later, I think it was probably a bargain.

Another money saving thing I did at that stage of my life was potlucks. I know, it’s terribly quaint, but these potlucks weren’t of the Lutheran church basement variety. No “hot dish” (that’s Minnesota for casserole) allowed. Mostly I’d hold tea parties or dinner parties and have my friends all bring something to share. For the cost of a batch of rice pudding, some hot wings or some hummus and pita we’d have all the fun of eating out. When I lived by myself one of the biggest challenges of cooking was the difficulty of cooking for one. I’ve often thought to myself that if I ever live alone again I’m going to start a meal co-op with some other single people and just rotate meal preparation between all of us. The potlucks we had served the same purpose.

The Gypsy Years

My post college years were my gypsy years. I moved a lot and lived in strange and inconvenient places like a semi-communal artist’s warehouse and a tiny, tiny, tiny apartment in old town Pasadena.

I think the lesson of those years was all about flexibility. A lot of articles on frugality or sustainable food really assume that you have ample food storage space and a full working kitchen. Yes, it would be fabulous to have a grain mill to grind all your own homegrown organic wheat and corn, but it’s not practical for a lot of people. There’s nothing like cooking on a hot plate in a studio with a dorm fridge to drive that home. Still, small spaces and small fridges or no fridges are common in many parts of the world, so it is still workable. You do what you can with what you have.

Simplicity is king in these situations. If you try to cook 7 course dinners on a hot plate you will give up cooking in short order (pun not intended) and end up at White Castle, and that isn’t good for anyone. In these situations it’s best to take a cue from the Europeans. Shop daily or at least every other day. Buy things that can be prepared simply and stored without refrigeration. That’s much easier in the summer than the winter. In this context, pre-prepared food from an ethnic market or co-op is a perfectly reasonable compromise. A container of tabouli from the Middle Eastern deli or some pirogis from the local Polish church ladies is definitely the lesser evil when compared to Burger King and Pizza Hut.

Banishing Guilt and Perfectionism

I spent many of the gyspy years feeling bad that I wasn’t able to do more. I urge you not to follow suit. Dispense with the guilt. If you live in a space the size of my grandmother’s bathroom, you are allowed the odd container of take-out.

In fact, even years later, now that I have good, workable, frugal methods of shopping for, preparing, and storing wholesome, largely local and organic foods (which I will share with you over the coming weeks), I still think that letting go of guilt and its cousin perfectionism is the first step in making positive changes in our lives. Whether we are trying to save money, save the planet, save our health, or all of the above, nothing good can come out of beating ourselves up—it works much better to move forward with no shame and no blame. We can’t change the past, but we can change the present and the future, so that’s where it makes the most sense to focus our attention and efforts.

(image by kamaru via flickr)

Ever since I moved out on my own I have been doing a balancing act between my resources (money, physical energy, time), my values and my dreams. It has not always been pretty, I can tell you that. There are days I feel like I’m not doing very well at any of it and days where everything clicks along happily, but overall I feel like I’ve made some pretty good progress on all fronts.

The good news is that in many ways my efforts to live frugally and my environmental efforts go hand in hand. For example, not turning on the A/C is good for both my pocketbook and the earth. In other areas, like food, it requires a lot of compromise and a lot of incremental adjustments. Admittedly in some areas both frugality and the environment end up taking a backseat to some other priority, like my drives to the country to visit an elderly relative. Family is really important to me.

Things are getting tight for a lot of people right now. With the increased costs of just about everything lately a lot of people are feeling pinched. I know we are. We moved to a more centralized location this year and my husband got a nice raise, but all that extra money has been eaten up by increased prices. We live on one seasonal income so things were tight to begin with.

Saving money and helping the environment are on a lot of people’s minds lately. The U.K. government has even called for a return to wartime frugality. In spite of my family’s jokes that a return to wartime frugality wouldn’t affect my lifestyle at all, I’m feeling inspired to pinch my pennies a even little harder than I have been. I’m stretching my food a little further, trying to use less gas, growing my own personal “victory garden” and trying to squeeze more fun out of less money.

This series will combine my chronicle of my efforts to do more with less and also share with you a few things that have been working for me for a while now. Let us know what you are doing to save money and help the environment, or share your tips in the comments. We’re all in this together!

(image by Craig Hatfield via flickr.)

I am feeling so much better about the garden. I got some really encouraging responses from friends and e-mail buddies. Thanks guys! It really helps me to hear about everyone else’s experiences.

I finally beat back all of the weeds and replaced some of the plants that failed. I added some peppers and another cucumber. I took Victoria’s advice and finished my weeding on a morning when I knew it would be hot. Hopefully that helps. Many of the plants that survived the attack of the killer weeds are looking pretty good. I’ve been able to harvest some lettuce, dill, chives and lemon balm. The lemon balm is especially healthy. I’m going to dry a bunch of it for tea. I have some orange mint and pineapple mint at my house that are both doing pretty well. I think that combination would make a nice herbal tea.

My container garden at home is doing pretty well too. My tomatoes have flowers on them and seem to be pretty healthy. Last week I planted a few things in some extra containers I had lying around. I figured they may or may not work, but extra seeds and extra pots weren’t going to do me any good unless I combined them. Some lettuce, lemon cucumbers, and summer squash have popped up and are looking very healthy.

Most of my herbs are doing well. The sorrel, which I thought had died, seems to be staging a comeback. The Chinese herb whose name I can’t remember is thriving. The Chinese herb, some basil and maybe some orange mint will make lovely spring rolls this coming week. Maybe I’ll even have enough cilantro by then too. The tarragon I planted is doing well too. I love tarragon in chicken salad and eggs.

This afternoon I ran into my friend Athena outside. Athena has been a friend of my family’s since I was a little girl. She invited me over and told me she had a pot of basil to give me. As she was showing me around her spectacular container garden she pointed to a beautiful, healthy fig tree that was actually bearing fruit. I had no idea you could grow figs here. I expressed my disbelief and she pointed to the patio of a neighbor, “Do you see that small fig tree he has there? He got 64 figs off of it last year. You just have to cut it back and winter it in the basement.” I am definitely going to try that next year. Fresh figs are one of the things I miss most about California.

All in all I am getting pretty excited about my garden. I feel like it is really starting to take off. The support and advice I’ve been getting from other gardeners has been invaluable. I feel like this garden experiment is bringing me closer to the land and closer to my community, both online and in real life.

(image from thebittenword.com via flickr)

As my three year old is fond of saying, I’m feeling crabby right now. I’m just being honest. It’s been a long week and I really didn’t want to deal with the garden tonight, but I knew I had to. I left the house after dinner armed with my gardening tools and my kneeling pad and set off for the garden. I consoled myself with thoughts of women in WWII tending their victory gardens while their husbands were away at war. At least my husband was just sitting at home nursing a stomachache and watching our kids. Sometimes it helps me to think about how much harder life would be for me if I were born pretty much anywhere else or at any other time in history. Sometimes. Sometimes it just makes me feel like a weakling and exacerbates my crabby mood. Luckily tonight it helped.

The garden was a virtual forest of weeds. Seriously. It is disheartening. I spent an hour and a half weeding tonight and I’m just over half done. I’m going to have to go back tomorrow night. My inner perfectionist hates this. I don’t like being bad at things, which makes the early stages of learning new things hard for me. I was one of those kids who never had to study for anything and still got the highest grade in the class on a test. My bratty inner child doesn’t like to have to work hard to get results. I can tell that gardening is going to be very good for me.

The good news is that my tomatoes, lettuce, leeks, carrots, peppers, summer squash, zucchini, lemon balm, cilantro and dill are all fine. The bad news is that my parsley, Thai basil, peas and possibly my ground cherries and cucumbers have been overrun by weeds. I say possibly with the cucumbers and ground cherries because I’m just not sure. I think I may know which plant is the ground cherry after looking it up, but there is a weed that looks similar to a cucumber plant that I found on the website Megan linked to in the comments of my last update. I think I’m going to rip everything I’m not sure of up and just get some plants at the farmer’s market or the local garden center. A lot of them are 50% off right now anyway. I think I’m going to just chalk this up as a learning experience.

The other good news is that I have a very nice plot neighbor named Konstantine. He introduced himself today and offered to water my plot if I need some help. He works in the building next to the garden and he knows that I have two little kids. He gave me his number so I can call him if I need help. I really appreciated his offer. It was just what I needed to feel better. Nothing makes me glow like meeting genuinely kind and helpful people. Now the trick will be getting past my reserved Minnesotan personality and actually asking for help when I need it.

This experience is turning out to be challenging in ways I didn’t expect. I think that’s really a good thing. I think this experiment will be a success even if all I manage to grow is myself.

(image by Sassy Gardener via flickr.)

It finally stopped raining this week, or as Cheyenne put it, the sun isn’t broken anymore so I was able to get out to my garden. It had gotten pretty weedy since I planted and I began to realize that with some of the plants, I really don’t know what is a weed and what is a seedling. The mesclun was obvious. The entire square is carpeted in small, pretty lettuce leaves. The summer squash, zucchini and carrots were pretty obvious too. After wandering around the garden looking at other people’s stuff I figured out what the pea shoot looked like and rescued it from a tangle of other vines.

I’m honestly not sure that any of the cucumbers sprouted and one of my tomatoes died. The same is true for the cilantro, Thai basil and parsley. I just can’t tell. I pulled up the obvious weeds and left the rest for this weekend. If I still can’t tell I’m probably going to pull everything and just plant something else.

I was finally able to plant all my seedlings at home this week. The girls helped with that. They were so excited. What looked like a lot of plants when they were in my kitchen doesn’t appear to be nearly enough on the patio, though. That is a good thing. I really have a lot more space here than I thought. I am planning to hit the farmer’s market this weekend to find more plants.

I don’t think I’ll do more than break even this year financially, but it’s a great learning experience.

(photo by sleepyneko via flickr)

Delayed gratification is not a concept that conjures up pleasant images in most people’s minds. I know it’s odd, but the image those words bring up for me is me sitting at the breakfast table as a kid eating all the boring cereal out of my Lucky Charms and saving the marshmallows for last.

It’s not a concept we like much in our culture. We want what we want and we want it now. Want a new TV? Put it on a credit card. Want fresh strawberries in Minnesota in the dead of winter? Sure. Why not?

It’s easy to point out the downsides of an “I want it now” attitude—for example, the credit crisis, foreclosures, the negative environmental impact and the crazy number of hours people have to work to afford that lifestyle.

Yet, we still persist in our belief that more is better and sooner is even better that that. I think this is because we tend to think that the only upside of delayed gratification is the avoidance of negative consequences. We’d rather just think of a way around the consequences.

But this view of delayed gratification as a hardship is not accurate—spacing out treats can be a path to intensified pleasure. As G.K. Chesterton said, “The real pleasure-seeking is the combination of luxury and austerity in such a way that the luxury can really be felt.”

When we get what we want immediately and frequently, it loses its charm. It removes the fun of anticipation and turns the experience into an unsatisfying fix that leaves us wanting more. It’s a hollow imitation of real enjoyment. It reduces things that were once enjoyable and exciting to the realm of the mundane and monotonous.

When I was a kid we weren’t allowed to have soda very often. In the words of Cookie Monster, it was a “sometimes treat.” My dad watched us two evenings a week while my mom went to her part-time job and once in a while he’d get some root beer and some ice cream and make root beer floats. He’d always tell us, “This is a secret. You can’t tell your mom.” Of course she knew, but it made it more exciting to think that she didn’t.

When I was up at my friend’s cabin we’d spend entire days playing in the woods, hunting for mushrooms or helping her parents with chores. Now and then her mom and dad would let us ride our bikes to a local restaurant and get a soda. After the long bike ride a soda felt like a real reward.

Once I became a teenager and soda became an everyday habit instead of a rare treat it lost its magic. It was no longer special because it was no longer rare.

There’s intensity to the pleasure derived from a thing you enjoy occasionally that isn’t there when you can have it whenever you want. For the last few years, I’ve been making an effort to eat produce only when it’s in-season, and that first taste of real, ripe strawberries or blueberries is like heaven.

Delayed gratification slows us down and helps us appreciate things in a deeper, at once more subtle and more powerful way than is possible with instant gratification. Think of how exciting it is to see a loved one after a long absence or how good it feels to get outside in the sunshine on those first beautiful spring days. Things you may usually take for granted suddenly become objects of great pleasure, and small treats become magnified.

It begins when you start to miss or want the object of your desire. At first it creeps quietly into your thoughts and rolls around in your head in delicious daydreams. The volume begins to heighten and your excitement mounts. Eventually the desire reaches a feverish pitch, a close kin to suffering or deprivation. When at last you are united with your object of desire it is almost a sort of relief.

I have felt that way about everything from peanut butter pie to the birth of my children—waiting for our desires to be fulfilled increases their wonderfulness. And the enjoyment of the experience outlasts the experience itself—talking about a great meal a few days later can bring it alive for you again, as much as anticipation did before you ate.

Is there anything you have had to wait for that was made better by the thrill of anticipation? Is there anything you used to enjoy, but no longer do because it’s always available? Tell us your story in the comments.

(photo by Trinity via flickr)

It was a gloomy and rainy week here in Minnesota, so the garden planting didn’t happen until Saturday instead of Monday as I had hoped. I guess that’s the thing about nature. It doesn’t really care what your schedule is.

Saturday morning the girls were overtired and I needed a break so I decided to plant the garden myself. I decided to use the square foot gardening method since it seemed easier for a beginner like me and good for a small plot like mine. Here’s how I laid it out. There is a fence on the back of most of my plot, so I put the climbing veggies there. The only small thing I put in the back row was a couple of marigolds and that is because that particular square was a bit irregular in size and I knew marigolds would fit.

There is also a patch of lemon balm growing in the middle of my path. I left it because it isn’t in a spot that will be too in the way and I like lemon balm for tea. The chives, dill and flowers were left from last year’s tenant and they were in almost perfect square foot garden formation, which makes me wonder if that person used this method too.

It took me about two hours to plant it, but that included a lot of time pondering what should go where. I tried to think about what we like to eat when deciding how much of which vegetables to plant. We eat tomatoes like they’re going out of style, and I want some for canning and freezing, so I planted more of those.

The lemon cucumbers were a favorite of both my girls when they were smaller. I am friends with the Dervaes family of Path to Freedom and we would sometimes buy lemon cucumbers from them. They would usually be eaten within 5 minutes of getting them home. We also like regular cucumbers and pickles.

Cheyenne is going to freak over the purple carrots, so I planted more of those than I did of the orange carrots. We all like leeks, so I made sure we had quite a few of those. I may have more Thai basil than I need, but I do like to eat a lot of spring rolls on hot summer days. I limited the summer squash and zucchini as everyone has told me that they are supernaturally prolific here.

The garden as a whole is looking really pretty. The lilacs are in bloom and the perennial garden near the street is blooming. It’s such a nice little oasis in the city.

(image by Lorri37 via flickr)

When I first picked up Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv, I was a little put off by the author’s use of the term “nature deficit disorder.” Just because something is bad doesn’t make it a disorder, but he did acknowledge that the term is not a medical diagnoses, but a way of explaining a phenomenon. I get that. Sometimes you need a concise way to convey a concept and “Nature Deficit Disorder” does get the point across.

I heartily agree with the basic premise of the book, that children spending time in nature is critical for both the development of children and the preservation of the environment. You don’t have to be an expert to realize that time spent in nature has a profound effect on children.

I wasn’t raised in an outdoorsy family, and yet memories of my experiences in the natural world rank as some of the best, most vivid memories of my childhood. They introduced in me the concept that the world was much bigger, more intricate and amazing than I had ever thought possible. They inspired awe.

To me this was the most important concept in the book. The amazing sense of wonder, awe and curiosity that children are introduced to through their experiences in nature are invaluable—both essential components of happy, successful lives and cornerstones of ingenuity.

While it’s easy to see how time spent in nature is good for children, it may be harder to see how it is good for the environment. The basic idea is that if you love something, you will strive to protect it. You will want to understand it better. You will care for it. Only firsthand experience can foster that kind of love and passion. It’s all well and good that you and I are passionate about protecting the environment, but it can’t stop with us.

It’s cheesy and cliche, I know, but today’s children are tomorrow’s leaders. If we lock them away in our homes and schools, we make “saving the environment” an abstract concept like “saving the starving children” was when you were six and didn’t clean your plate. You may pay lip service to an abstract concept. You may even donate a little money to an abstract concept, but you don’t alter your life for it the way you do for something you love.

The one thing I felt this book lacked was concrete ideas about what you can do today to get your kids out in nature. There were a few mentions of fishing and camping, but most of the solutions were about organizing our urban landscapes to include natural areas. That is a worthy goal, to be sure, but I think parents need solutions that work within our existing framework too.

My husband and I do a decent job of getting our kids out in nature, but this book inspired me to want to do more. I checked out the website associated with this book, but I didn’t find much in the way of ideas there either.

In my search I stumbled on a few other sites that seemed to have some great ideas. Here are a few to get you started:

Green Hour is a campaign by the National Wildlife Federation to give your kids one hour a day of unstructured interaction with the natural world. Their activities, Discovery Journal and forums had some great ideas.

The National Resource Defense Center’s link page for kids has lots of fun stuff to check out here. I especially enjoyed the Environmental Club Projects on the EPA Student Center website.

EcoKids Canada is a great site with homework help resources and online games for kids to play (although the games might be counterproductive to the goal of getting your kids outside!) The coolest things on this site are the Eco Field Guides, where kids can learn about insects, fish, mammals, birds, etc. It would be a lot of fun to read about creatures and plants native to your area, then go outside and find and observe them.

Even though Last Child in the Woods left me wanting more, I’m inspired to make the commitment to get my kids outside as much as possible. And so far, we are doing great—living across the street from a gorgeous park helps a lot!

What are your favorite ways of getting outside with or without kids?

(image by CLMinc via flickr)

Today was our second garden workday and our second attempt at tilling our plot. There was a problem with the tiller so the garden coordinator rented one to use for the day.

Cheyenne is a natural born gardener. She is really getting to a new, much more independent stage and she is eager to help in whatever way she can, sometimes too eager. Today she decided to be her Daddy’s assistant. She and Zach immediately grabbed shovels, headed to the woodpile and started shoveling woodchips into the wheelbarrows of the other gardeners to help make new paths. When she had enough of that she borrowed a child-sized wheelbarrow from an older child and started hauling woodchips to the paths. The very patient older boy assisted her in her efforts. She’s eager to learn and eager to help. I love it.

Isabella was not as excited. It was a very windy day and she was a little overtired. I decided that she could be my buddy for the day. While we waited for the tiller I put on her little gardening gloves, gave her a trowel and put her to work helping me fight the Creeping Charlie at the edge of our plot. Once she realized that I was going to let her play in the dirt and pick the purple flowers she cheered up a bit.

Bella and I chatted with our plot neighbor, a very nice woman named Elaine and her baby Elizabeth. Elaine helped me identify some plants in my garden that were useful. There was the patch of chives I recognized, but also quite a bit of dill, a patch of lemon balm and some sort of flower she described as looking like Einstein’s hair if it were dyed. I’m curious to see what that looks like.

Bella, Cheyenne and I ended up having brunch at the cafe next door to our garden while Zach did the tilling. I thought Cheyenne’s helpfulness might be slightly dangerous around the tiller and the girls were ready to eat. The cafe is a funky little locally owned place that Zach and I have been to before. I saved half my food to take to Zach for his lunch. Unfortunately Bella decided she wanted to grow Daddy some more biscuits and gravy, so she tried to plant them in our freshly tilled plot. She was kind of sad when she learned that not everything grows when you plant it in the ground.

We were about to leave when Zach began chatting with an older guy who apparently had just had a stroke. As he was not fully mobile yet, Zach offered to till his plot. As a thank you Lisa the garden coordinator gave us a really nice, sturdy tomato cage.

Our garden is now tilled and ready to plant. We’ll probably do that Monday as we are expecting severe thunderstorms tomorrow. Zach and Bella are planning to take a break from the garden that day, so Cheyenne and I will have some mom and daughter bonding time.

I have never seen a plant sale like the Friends School Plant Sale. It was like a cross between a plant sale and ticket sales for a hot rock concert. The sale started at 11:00AM and my friend Martha, her baby and I arrived at the State Fair grounds by 9:00AM, by no means the first to arrive. We brought my bike trailer/double stroller to hold the plants. We walked up to the entrance and were given wristbands with a group number. “You are Blue 10,” the lady told us. “Plan to be back here around 11:15 to be admitted with your group.”

We hung around with all the other excited would-be plant buyers for two surprisingly fast-moving hours eating fair food, chatting and admiring the interesting contraptions people had brought to hold their plants. There were wagons with milk crates held on by bungee cords, homemade carts and even a tri-level PVC contraption with sleds for shelves. These people meant business!

Before long the man with the bullhorn ordered the Blue 10s “into the chute.” We would be the next group allowed to enter the building.

The sale was worth the wait. The entire Minnesota State Fair grandstand was filled with plants of every type. There were perennials, annuals, native plants, grasses, bushes and shrubs, herbs and vegetables. Martha and I were primarily focused on vegetables, herbs and shrubs, so we stuck to those areas.

I was like a kid in a candy store. My mom had sent me $100 to spend on plants, so I was feeling free with the money. They had aisles of tomatoes, peppers and basil and odd herbs and vegetables I had never heard of. Martha and I decided to split a few packages of things we wanted to experiment with.

In the end we left with a cartload of plants. I got three kinds of tomatoes, two kinds of peppers, three kinds of basil, lavender, thyme, rosemary, pineapple mint, orange mint, tarragon, epazote, oregano, sorrel, ground cherries and an unusual purple Asian herb I had never heard of before. It’s supposed to taste kind of like cinnamon. They recommended it for spring rolls, which I love to make. I may be forgetting something, but that was the bulk of it. The best part is that I didn’t spend anywhere near the entire $100 I had to spend.

This is definitely going to be a tradition from now on.

One of the challenges I am facing in the wake of my recent move is to balance my desire for aesthetically pleasing surroundings with my concern for the environment. I don’t want to go out and buy a lot of new stuff just to decorate my space, but I want my house to look like a home.

One of my big “needs” at the house, decoratively speaking, is artwork. This place has a lot more wall space so the artwork I had at the old place wasn’t really enough here. I’m trying to come up with secondhand and handmade solutions instead of going out and buying all new artwork. Here is what I have found so far.

I found this in the basement and I love it. My mom says it is the only needlework project she has ever finished. I believe it is older than I am.

I found this black and white drawing of a tree at a thrift shop for $10. It really struck me. I already had the grillwork piece and the gargoyles on the desk were in the basement. Incidentally, the desk originally came from a neighbor’s garage sale when I was about 8 years old. It was school bus yellow and hideous, but a little black paint cleaned it right up. I need to find some lovely old books for the gargoyles to hold up.

My grandma bought these from a street artist in Paris in the 1960s. These are some of those fabulous pieces that have a story behind them. In the early 60s, my grandma and grandpa decided to take a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Paris. Back then traveling by plane was a big deal (at least to them) and my grandma was nervous, so she had a couple of White Russians to calm her nerves, and a little more alcohol on the flight. She got to Paris feeling pretty tipsy and immediately went to the hotel to have dinner, with wine, of course. Anyway, to make a long story short the wine flowed freely the whole trip and she doesn’t even remember how she got these paintings. This is especially funny to me, as I don’t recall ever seeing my grandma have more than half a glass of wine with a holiday dinner. I eventually plan to reframe these. I’m not really into the cheap diploma-style frames they are in.

First of all, please ignore the wall patching behind the pictures. We are planning to paint this room, but it hasn’t made it to the top of the to-do list yet. This dresser and chair belonged to my grandma. The larger painting came from my church’s garage sale and cost $1. I bought the smaller pictures from a street artist in Quebec City when I was in middle school. The frames originally belonged to one of my grandparents.

I found these trays at the citywide garage sale last summer for $6. I love them. I also love my dining room table, which I got for $20 at a garage sale in Pasadena. It’s sturdy, kid friendly and simple.

Finally I am planning on making three pieces of needlework for the walls.

I am not finished with it yet, but I think this peacock embroidery piece is going to be stunning in my kitchen. It needs a fantastic frame, so I am keeping my eyes peeled for one. I have a lot of faith that the right frame will find its way to me if I look hard enough.

My mom started this crewelwork wall hanging when she was pregnant with me thirty years ago. I am determined to finish it. Eventually it will grace my entryway, just above the shoe bench. I love the idea of having a thirty-year mother-daughter embroidery project.

Finally, I need a large piece of art to go above the library table in the living room. I have a huge wood frame, but nothing to put in it. My current plan is to buy some canvas and freehand embroider a large, swirly, whimsical tree in red thread. It will be fast and easy, but add a lot of drama and interest for very little money.

Originally our first garden workday had been scheduled for April 26, but nature likes to play tricks on us here in Minnesota and snow forced us to reschedule for the next Saturday. Friday brought cold, dreary rain and I was beginning to think that our garden workday would be canceled again. I checked my e-mail before I went to bed, but there was no word. I woke up Saturday morning to a bright and sunny, if chilly early May morning.

I wasn’t sure what to expect on our first workday. I didn’t really know what we would be doing, or how many people would be there, but I figured it would be hard work, so I made us a nice brunch of French toast, fruit and some fantastic bacon from a local sausage shop. Then my dad took the kids out for the morning and Zach and I headed out to the garden.

Lisa, the garden organizer, and Terry, the workday leader, greeted us. We were the first to arrive other than the two of them and we got right down to work. I picked up trash while Zach and Lisa laid plastic down for the paths and Terry hauled woodchips to the paths in the wheelbarrow. Over the next half an hour another 20-30 people showed up ranging from small children to people in their 50s and everyone just dug in and started working. I ended up hauling wheelbarrows of woodchips and Zach shoveled woodchips and later compost. We got a chance to talk to many of our fellow gardeners while we worked, all of whom were interesting, friendly people. It was fun to see so many people pulling together to make the garden a beautiful, functional place.

The result was amazing. In the course of two hours we cleaned up the whole garden, weeded the compost, removed dead stuff from the flowerbed, moved two large compost piles, spread compost on two plots near the street that were in need of some help and created all new paths. It’s incredible what you can do when you pull together.

Last year our plot belonged to the owner of a local restaurant. He mainly used the space to plant herbs. When we checked out our plot I noticed that there were garlic chives already coming back from last year. I picked some to use in scrambled eggs this week. I was ridiculously excited at my tiny first harvest. This far north anything that smacks of spring can set your heart aflutter.

The bad news in my community garden adventure is that most of my tomato seedlings have fallen victim to tragedy. I left them by a window that was accidentally left open on a night that turned quite cold. In the morning I found them all lifeless. The peppers that were planted next to them seem to be OK, though. I’ve decided that this is not the end of the world. I am going to the Friend’s School plant sale next Friday, so I will just have to replace them. Well, some of them anyway.

Most of the materials I’ve read or discussions I’ve seen on the topic of kids and commercialism are along the lines of “when I was growing up things were different.” I was tempted to say the same thing, but I don’t think that is entirely true. I think my generation was the beginning of a society that views children as little more than a target market.

We have always had television and while I remember getting cable and the Internet, I was still pretty young when it happened. Kids my age grew up on licensed characters and Nintendo. Two days a week our school hot lunch was served by Taco Bell or Pizza Hut, who also sponsored a reading program at my elementary school. I’ve been the target of advertisers since preschool and it is only getting worse.

Billions of advertising dollars are spent each year shilling everything from junk food to cheap plastic toys to kids who are not old enough to distinguish a lie from the truth. It’s pervasive. Everywhere a child looks there are advertisements, including in many cases at school.

The Center For a New American Dream has had some success in fighting a company that made radio advertisements for school buses. I can see the logic in it. Kids on a school bus are a captive audience with a limited ability to tell fact from fiction. I can just picture some evil-genius advertising executive salivating over that plan. What I can’t conceive of is the Superintendent of Schools who would agree to something so blatantly bad for children.

Can you tell that this bugs me?

The lines between who we are and what we buy have become blurred. We judge others and ourselves on whether or not we have what advertisers tell us we should have. We believe that “if I just had this one more thing” then I’d be happy or cool or beautiful.

I had parents who fought it, at least when we were young. They restricted how much TV we watched and we weren’t allowed to have a Nintendo. My mom was a preschool teacher and she always had some project for us like making wrapping paper out of butcher paper and potato stamps, or making a periscope from a milk carton and some mirrors. My dad took us to every historical site and museum in the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin. We were one of the last families at my school to get cable. We were allowed to have “cool” toys like My Little Pony or a Cabbage Patch Kid if my mom saw some creative value in it, but “I want it because everyone else has one” was never a useful argument.

Now that I am a parent I can appreciate how hard this is to fight. Right now my kids are little so I have a lot of control over what they see and do, but that won’t always be true. It’s a scary thing when you realize how much influence other people have over your children.

I have talked a lot with other moms about this issue. Many of us are feeling the same way. There’s a sense of desperation. “What do we do? Hide them under a rock for 18 years and hope for the best? Give in and admit defeat?”

I think the solution has to be two-fold. First, we have to teach our kids how to navigate this culture effectively. As tempting as the hide-them-under-a-rock idea sounds, that kind of isolation isn’t going to prepare them for the real world. The real world will hit them eventually. As a mom, protectiveness comes easily to me, but what I really need to do is to give my kids the tools they need to succeed when I am no longer there to protect them.

I need to teach them to evaluate their purchases against their wants, needs and values. I need to teach them to ask lots of questions. Do I want this because it would really improve my quality of life or do I want it because it is bright and shiny and right in front of me? Will it bring me real enjoyment, or just status? Can I picture myself pulling this out of the closet a year from now and I still interested in it or would I send it to a thrift shop? Am I buying this because I need a little novelty in my life? Could I meet that need by checking a book out from the library, creating a piece of art, or seeking out a new experience instead of a new possession? Can I learn to appreciate the beauty of an object without having to own it?

I need to be honest with them about my own struggles. I am a full-grown woman who knows that advertisers and businesses do not necessarily have my best interests at heart. Still, I sometimes walk into Target, feel my eyes start to glaze over, and suddenly feel that “if I just had this” life would be easier.

I need to help them keep their focus on what is important. There’s something about spending time together as a family, getting outside and playing or spending quiet time alone with a book that naturally makes bling look less appealing. The more you appreciate what really matters to you the more contented you are. The more contented you are the less you are likely to believe that you “have to” have something just because someone tells you that you do.

The second thing concerned parents need to do is to find each other and speak up. There are probably other parents in our communities who feel this way. By speaking up we make it easier for others to speak up, and the more of us there are the more effective we can be. These are our communities and our children. We do not have to accept the status quo.

In another Sunny Way article Megan said that we are “the environment.” We are also “society” and any change in society is going to have to come from us.

This week I met with Lisa, the woman who runs to community garden this week to get a plot assigned to me. It was a cold and snowy day, so the meeting was brief, but informative.

As we wandered through the garden Lisa explained to me that the land the garden is on was up for sale last year, so they thought it would be their last year at the current location. In the meantime the market for development in that neighborhood has sagged, so it looks like we may be there for a while.

I chose a plot that has possible room for expansion. Lisa said she had 10 people on a waiting list, but a lot of people get on the waiting list and then flake. The plot I chose is next to another empty plot, so if there are more plots than gardeners I can take both of them.

My plot belonged to the owner of one of my favorite restaurants last year. Lisa said he planted a lot of herbs and I may have some of them come back this year. There’s a fence at one end of the plot for climbing plants. I think I’ll leave that there. It makes more sense than buying a new one.

The meeting made this all seem very real to me. Spring is here! I am so excited I could burst.

We moved this week, so I have accomplished a ton of stuff on the organization front, but I feel more disorganized than ever. The first week after a move is always tough for me. In this case it was even a bit tougher. Without getting into unnecessary family drama, for the next month or two we are storing all of my dad’s belongings at the new house as well as our own. That has made organization a little bit difficult. OK, a lot difficult, but I have promised myself I won’t complain. We have been amply compensated for the inconvenience.

I have kept our kitchen functional the entire move, which I am very proud of. Aside from one incident involving a KFC buffet (ick!) and a pizza party at Cheyenne’s preschool we have been eating at home the entire week.

We also got the compost bin set up. It is unbelievable how much that has reduced the amount of trash we create. I never even realized how much of our trash could be composted. I keep a little container by the sink and when it is full it gets taken out to the compost pile. The girls have claimed this as one of their chores. It took Isabella a few times to realize that the container doesn’t go in the bin with the scraps, but I think she’s getting it.

I also set up my clothesline this past week. I bought a simple clothesline at the local hardware store for $2.06 and four brackets that were $1.99 each. Zach put two brackets on each side of the patio and I tied the line in a knot and strung it between them to create two lines. When I am done with the line I just pull down the whole thing, wrap it up and store it in a dresser that sits right by the patio door. I bought a very cute vinyl bag with cherries on it at the thrift store for $3 and I keep it hanging on the patio door.

The clothes have been drying very fast on the clothesline. Actually, in about half the time it takes the dryer to do the job. One of my big challenges with laundry is to keep up with it. When I get overwhelmed with laundry I tend to use the dryer. This is an ongoing issue I need to address. I have been cracking down somewhat on Cheyenne’s thrice daily costume changes, but with two little kids and a construction worker DH laundry can get a little out of hand. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

My other laundry issue is that I hate putting it away. It’s silly, I know. I should do it while I’m watching TV or talking on the phone, but for some reason I just don’t. Zach hates it too, but he’s agreed to take care of the cat litter if I take care of the laundry and I feel like I am getting the better end of that trade. I am going to work on my resolve. If I can just get myself in the habit of it, I think I will be OK.

G.G.B., my aforementioned Swedish grandmother has promised to come out to visit me in June and help whip this house into shape. That gives me hope. I will keep fighting the battle the best I can and await the coming of the cavalry in June.

Tomorrow I have my meeting with the leader of the community garden to have my plot officially assigned and learn the basics about the community garden. I can’t wait! Seeing the garden plot is going to make it seem so real.

Today my friend Martha and I went thrift store shopping for garden pots. Unfortunately we didn’t have a lot of luck. I did manage to find this cute little tin-ceiling-tile pot for $.99, but that was it.

My other garden related score was 10 large sized canning jars I found for $.40 each. Since Tuesday is Customer Appreciation day at this particular thrift store I got the whole lot for $3. In my early twenties I did a lot of home canning using farmers market produce and I am hoping to start that up again. Unfortunately I left all of my canning jars in my ex-boyfriend’s parent’s garage when I moved to California so I need to get a new batch.

I’m going to try to make a lot of pickles. My kids can eat a jar of pickles a week, so I think that would be worth canning. We had this exact conversation almost every morning last summer, “What would you like for breakfast today girls?” “Ummmm, Popsicles and ice cream.” “Popsicles and ice cream aren’t breakfast foods. What else do you want?” “Pickles, tomatoes and cheese!” “OK, pickles tomatoes and cheese it is, then.”

I generally freeze tomatoes and pasta sauce, but I am going to try canning salsa and a tomato relish this summer. I love tomato relish on good crusty French bread. I am also going to try my mom’s recipe for dilly beans, which are pickled green beans. They are really good. In fact crusty French bread, tomato relish and dilly beans sounds like an excellent lunch.

Martha and I have made plans to attend a huge plant sale at the State Fair grounds next month. The Friends School in St. Paul puts on the sale every year. It is supposed to be huge and full of really interesting plants. I think it will be a lot of fun.

Last week we got a ton of decluttering done at the new house. I got several closets and dressers cleaned out. There’s more to do, but I think my dad needs the space to himself for a while, so we are taking the week off from the house and focusing our efforts on our old place.

Inspired by Megan, this week I am working on eating at home. The kitchen is usually the one area I am really good at organizing. I am really good at meal planning and pantry management, but the move has made that more difficult.

I made a batch of bran muffin mix for breakfasts. I am keeping it in the fridge and making a batch each morning to be served with a piece of fruit and a small bowl of cottage cheese or a hard boiled egg. Normally I like more variety in my breakfasts, but I’m not feeling picky this week.

I made a batch of granola bars for snacks. I have a lot of dried fruits to use up, so this helped make a dent in those. They are healthy, portable and everyone in the family likes them. If we get bored of those we can have popcorn or strawberry smoothies.

Lunches will be tuna salad sandwiches, chicken salad (made with leftover chicken cooked for Tuesday’s dinner) with dried cherries and tarragon and good old peanut butter and jelly served with either carrot sticks or fruit.

I made a dinner menu for the week that mostly uses things I already had in the pantry, fridge or freezer. When I plan ahead I am much less likely to eat out. Here’s the menu.

Monday: Scrambled eggs with cheddar, toast and fresh fruit
Tuesday: Noodles, chicken and veggies with spicy peanut sauce
Wednesday: Dinner at church (this is a weekly thing)
Thursday: Potato leek soup, popovers
Friday: Cheese and spinach enchiladas, Mexican slaw
Saturday: Navy bean soup, cheddar garlic biscuits
Sunday: Pannekoeken with strawberry rhubarb sauce

Probably the only thing I will buy for this menu is cream for the potato leek soup and to whip for the pannekoeken.

How are you all doing with your challenges?

(Apologies for the punny headline; I couldn’t resist! -ed)

I’m getting incredibly excited about the garden experiment. I’ve been officially accepted as a new member at the community garden and I have marked the first workday on my calendar. I think we will be tilling that day.

The plot will be $10 for a 10 x 20 plot. I busted out the tape measure this morning to get an idea of how big that is, and I am very happy. It turns out to be larger than my living room at the apartment. I had it in my head that the plot would be smaller than that.

Almost all of my tomatoes have sprouted, as well as most of my bell peppers. That’s going to be a lot of tomatoes. It’s a good thing my girls like them.

I am really looking forward to meeting my fellow gardeners. I’m still firmly a gardener wannabe and I have so much to learn. I also just love meeting new people.

I’ve also been working on ideas for my garden at home. I don’t have a lot of space at home, and I want to make it attractive. It’s mostly going to be a container garden. I won’t be limiting myself to edible plants, but I definitely want to include edible plants in my home garden. I’m thinking of replacing some dying bushes in the front of the house with raspberry bushes. I’ve been told that they are pretty easy to grow. I am also planning on having some edible flowers and of course plenty of herbs. I thought it made more sense to grow the herbs at home, since they grow well in containers and it’s nice to be able to use them as soon as you cut them.

I want my back deck to be my oasis from the world. I think it is going to take me a few years to realize my vision for the back deck. The reality is that I have only so much time and money to go around this year.

We got a secondhand outdoor table to replace the one my parents had. The old one was older than me and much to big for the space. Eventually I’d like to build a pergola over the table. I think it would be nice to have the additional shade and I think it would be really pretty. We have some leftover lumber that can eventually be used for that project.

Next week I am going to start hunting for free and cheap containers for my home container garden. I’m sure between craigslist, freecycle, thrift stores and garage sales I’ll be able to find something.

A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate enough to score an invitation to my great-aunt Beulah’s. Invitations to Beulah’s are an exciting thing for many reasons, not the least of which is the food.

“We’re not going to fuss, sweetie,” she always says, “We’ll just throw a little something together and keep it simple.”

And yet the food is always to die for. The secret to Beulah’s cooking, she and I agreed recently, is that everything is made from scratch. The bigger secret is that cooking many things from scratch is easier than it seems.

And, of course, when you cook from scratch, you know what you are eating! We care about the environment, our health, and the health of the workers who grow and harvest our food, so we are eating more and more organics, something we’d never be able to afford if we relied on organic convenience foods. Knowing how to cook is key to being able to eat well on a budget.

I have been cooking for as long as I can remember. As soon as I could stand on a chair I was in the kitchen “helping” my mom and dad. I was eight when I attempted my first solo cooking experiment, a memorable batch of brownies that I made with olive oil. The recipe called for vegetable oil, and olives seemed more like vegetables than whatever “canola” might be.

By the age of 12, I was planning and cooking whole meals. For extra credit homework in Home Ec, I made petits fours for the whole eighth grade class. That was memorable too. As I made the first batch of icing, it fell on the floor, directly onto the dog who was begging at my feet. The food coloring from the icing dyed his fur blue for a week.

In spite of these occasional mishaps, I learned a lot from my childhood attempts at cooking.

Indeed there was a time in our history when learning how to cook was a part of growing up. As families got busier, and convenience foods became an increasingly large part of our food culture, fewer and fewer kids learned basic cooking skills. Without these skills, people now rely on prepackaged foods, fast food, and convenience foods, which are hard on their health and on the environment.

Benefits Beyond the Obvious

I’d like to see us reverse this trend and raise a generation of young people who know their way around a kitchen. Teaching kids to cook has benefits beyond the obvious.

Involving children in food preparation is a great time to talk to them about where food comes from, and the environmental and social impact of our food choices. It’s the perfect opportunity to explain the benefits of eating organic, locally-grown, or fair trade products in a way that actually means something to them.

Kids have an easier time understanding a concept if they have hands-on experience with it. When they are allowed to help in the planning and preparing of a meal it awakens their interest in a way that simply talking about your values does not. Without some concrete connection to the subject, these conversations can become little more than the modern day version of “eat all your food, because kids are starving in China.” It goes over their heads. When a child feels like there is something concrete she can do about a problem, she is much more likely to take an interest.

Another benefit of letting kids help with the cooking is that it makes them more likely to eat a wider variety of foods. A kid who regularly turns his nose up at peppers might happily eat them in a dip he has helped prepare, or as the smile on smiley face pizza.

Getting kids in the kitchen

My kids are small, but they have been helping me in the kitchen for quite a while now. They love to do simple things like dumping ingredients into bowls, stirring batters and mixes, and putting toppings on pizza. They get so excited when I ask them to help me cook. Cheyenne was two years old when she made her first batch of salsa. I chopped up the veggies and put each one, plus the herbs and spices in separate bowls. I let her dump it in and stir. Ever since then she eats salsa all by itself. She doesn’t even need the chips.

Pizza is another good first project. Younger kids will get a kick out of choosing different foods to top their own pizzas. Older kids can do everything from kneading and tossing the dough to spreading the sauce and topping the pizza. You can make smiley faces or designs on the pizzas using the toppings for some extra fun.

Salad is another thing kids can help make. Cheyenne likes to help me pick out veggies for the salad and Isabella likes to toss it. I’m not sure either of them would eat salad if they hadn’t made it first, but being involved in the process makes it fun for them.

One of my favorite rainy-day projects to do with my kids is to make pretzel or bread dough shapes. My mom used to do make these with my sister and me when we were younger and I just loved it. I tried this project recently with my 12-year-old cousin and we had a blast. We both agreed that kneading bread dough is very therapeutic when you are feeling squirrelly. You can make pretzels into snakes or hearts, or make bread dough animals with raisins for eyes. My cousin and I made cinnamon raisin turtles. Yum!

In addition to cooking, it can be fun to involve kids in the planning of meals. Take them to the farmers market and let them pick out some new fruits and vegetables to try. Getting to try new and interesting foods is one of the best things about farmers markets. Last year we got hooked on ground cherries, yellow doll watermelon, water spinach, and smoked trout. It’s tough to find those kinds of foods at the supermarket. You could also pick a theme, like an ethnic cuisine or a color, and let your kids come up with menus based around it.

Food is such a wonderful thing. It nourishes us and bonds us in so many ways. I can’t tell you how many friends I have made by bringing over a basket of muffins or inviting someone over for dinner. We use food to express caring, like bringing soup to a sick friend or a casserole to a loved one who has had a baby. It gives us an easy starting point for conversation with people we don’t know, or don’t think we have much in common with. My mom was at a meeting once with a group of people from all over the world, who had never met before. Halfway through the day they discovered that each of their grandmas had a good recipe for rice pudding.

Our world may comprise a multiverse of different cultures and religions, but we all like to eat. That shared passion is something I want to pass on to my kids.

I had a stellar week with the organization challenge. I have remembered my cloth grocery bags and coffee mug every time. I even remembered the grocery bags when I was out getting non-grocery items, which is when I am most likely to forget them. I have one of those bags that folds up and I have been keeping that in my purse. That way, if I run to the hardware store or the garden center I have at least one bag with me.

I also did better at combining my errands, although I still feel like I could use some more work on that one. This week I am going to break out the white board. Then when I realize I am running low on something I can write it down immediately instead of trying to remember it later when I am making the grocery list. That is a big downfall of mine.

I also need to work on not running errands on a whim. I ran out of cinnamon today. I like cinnamon sometimes in my coffee or on my oatmeal, but really, it’s not a pressing need.

I have a new rule of thumb for myself. If the errand is for something small and non-urgent, like cinnamon, I am going to ask myself if I would be willing to walk or bike it. I don’t mean that I necessarily will walk or bike it. If the weather is bad I will still take the car, but by asking myself if I would be willing to use my own energy to get that item I should cut back on a lot of silly little errands. Hopefully I can eventually make these errands a thing of the past through planning ahead, but I think this will work as a stopgap measure.

Over at the new house, I am working on clearing out my parents’ unwanted clutter. They lived in that house for 20 years and now they are both in small apartments with no room for most of their junk, I mean belongings. We are trying to find homes for as much of it as possible and dispose of the rest in the proper manner. We have literally taken truckloads of stuff to Goodwill and we are still not done. Next week we plan to list their outdoor table on craigslist. I also found a home for their silk flowers. Cheyenne’s Japanese dance group is going to take them to make hair ornaments for performances. That one makes me feel particularly good as silk flowers are hard to give away and this will guarantee they will be used.

So, slowly and steadily we plod ahead. How are things going for all of you?

I’m pretty sure I went a little overboard buying seeds today. It’s another gloomy early spring day and the garden center had me under its spell—it was like grocery shopping hungry. Also, I had the girls with me and they kept pointing to seed packets and saying things like, “Look, they have purple carrots!” or “Can I plant these pretty flowers?” I don’t even know how big my garden plot is but I splashed out anyway. I did get mostly compact and container-friendly varieties of vegetables, though, so I could always keep some at home.

As I pored over the seed packets I imagined myself in my gardening hat gathering the harvest. I imagined Cheyenne and Isabella eating veggies straight from the plant. I imagined the luscious, amazing meals I would make from the bounty of my garden, and the tranquil peaceful setting the flowers would create on my patio.

Then I got home and all of my insecurity kicked in. I don’t know why, but I am kind of nervous about failing at this. Ever since I was a kid I have wanted to be good at gardening. The Secret Garden was my all-time favorite book when I was younger and I loved to imagine myself as Mary, coaxing things to life and caring for my “bit of earth.” I think I’m afraid I’m going to shatter that daydream or something ridiculous like that. I need to turn off my inner perfectionist on this project and just look at it as an experiment.

When we got home I sorted the seeds by when they needed to be started. The anaheim peppers, black cherry tomatoes (I know, I already said I had too many tomatoes), violas, delphinium and some white flower I got for free needed to be started today. A few others like the zucchini and basil need to be started a few weeks before the last frost and the rest can be planted directly in the ground. I also got some cat grass for the kitties that can be started indoors at any time.

The violas were Cheyenne’s pick. She is obsessed with the color purple. They are an edible flower, which makes me happy. We found a pretty yellow flower pot in the garage and together we planted the seeds. I think the purple flowers will look very cheerful in their yellow pot.

I planted the black cherry tomatoes, anaheim peppers, and delphinium by myself as Cheyenne had run off by then. I used the electrical tape marking system I came up with on Sunday. The white flowers were Bella’s choice so I waited for her to wake up from her nap, then we planted them together.

Finally I planted the cat grass. the package said to plant it in something flat like a bowl, so I dug out an old roasting pan that we found in the garage. I’m not comfortable using it for cooking, but it made a cute container for the cat grass. I considered getting catnip too, but my cat Anakin is a recovering catnip junkie and I was pretty sure it would be destroyed almost immediately.

In case you are curious, here’s a list of the seeds I got that haven’t been mentioned already: Cucumber, Lemon cucumber, Summer squash, Basil, Thai basil, Mesclun, Italian Parsley, Cilantro, Mint, Chives, Two kinds of nasturtiums, Leeks, Snap peas, Carrots, Purple carrots, Daisies, Forget-me-nots, Marigolds—I told you I went nuts!

Some are for the community garden and some are for the house. There are a few more plants I want to get—a type of pumpkin meant for smaller spaces, tomatillos, purple curly leaf basil, chervil, and more flowers and herbs that I won’t know I need until I see them. I’ll probably hit the farmer’s market for some plants later in the spring.

As everything in my apartment is being torn apart and packed into boxes, I have been thinking long and hard about this organization challenge. I’ve decided that for me this is going to boil down to three major points: my habits, arranging my physical space in an efficient way, and getting my family on board.

Adjusting my habits will help keep laziness and poor planning from derailing my efforts. This is a problem for me. When the girls were babies I fell into some bad habits out of exhaustion and they need to be broken.

Arranging my physical space in an efficient way will make it easy to do the things I need to do. Having things laid out poorly wastes time and effort that could probably be spent more efficiently elsewhere.

Getting my family on board is crucial. My girls are old enough to put things away and help with chores. The responsibility is good for them and I have better things to do than pick up their toys all the time or put away clothes they pulled out of the drawer for no reason. Zach is more than willing to help, but when things are disorganized he gets overwhelmed. Having him help with organizing things he uses everyday will make the system work for both of us, not just me.

Deciding which to tackle first feels like a chicken-or-egg sort of question. All of these factors are very much intertwined. I have to start somewhere though and I am starting with my habits. I can’t tackle the new space until my dad has moved out of it and I think the kids have enough on their plate right now just adjusting to the idea of moving.

I’m going to start with three simple things this week.

• First, I am going to make sure I put the cloth grocery bags back in the car when I’m done. This will prevent me from getting to the store and realizing that they are still at home.
• Second, I am going to rinse out my travel coffee mug when I am done with it and stick it directly in the diaper bag so I don’t forget that either. I always have the diaper bag with me, so that should prevent me from forgetting it.
• Third, every time I leave the house to go somewhere I’m going to ask myself if there are any other errands I need to run that are on the way there or back. I got a good start on this today. I planned ahead and did my grocery shopping after work.

How are you doing this week?

Inspired to daydream by the snowiest Easter I care to remember, I began my community gardening adventure by starting some seeds. I picked the girls’ room at the new house to be my potting shed because until we have entirely moved in it is the least disturbed room in the house. I didn’t involve the kids in this part, mostly because they were so sugared up on Easter candy they couldn’t stay focused long enough to be useful.

I used one of those plastic “greenhouse” seed starter kits. I know, I know. It’s not the most eco-friendly way to start seeds. You’ll have to forgive me. I’m nervous about this gardening thing and the last time I was able to grow some really solid plants from seeds was in elementary school using one of those seedling kits. You have my word. When I get more experience and more confidence at this gardening stuff I will find a better way of starting seeds.

After I had planted the first row I realized that if I didn’t find some way of labeling them I’d never remember which plants were which. I improvised a labeling system using some of my husband’s electrical tape. It comes in several colors to help you to tell electrical wires apart. I taped a different color on each row according to the type of plant and made a key using a sheet of notebook paper.

I planted two rows of a compact sort of tomato I am hoping to grow at the house, two rows of mixed heirloom tomatoes and three rows of mixed bell peppers. I was going to plant the packet of cucumber seeds that I had until I read the seed packet and realized they didn’t need to be started indoors. I was also going to plant the rest of the Early Girl tomatoes we used at my daughter’s birthday party until I realized there were none left.

It’s probably just as well that I was out of the Early Girls as I think I probably have more than enough tomato plants already. Of course I could always give away the extras. That would probably be a nice way of meeting the neighbors I don’t know and reconnecting with the ones I do.

I took a photo of the birthday tomatoes we planted last week. As you can see we have a couple of sprouts. Hopefully that is a sign of things to come.

Half of the greenhouse kit is still empty so sometime this week I am going to take Cheyenne seed shopping. If she’s come down off her sugar high by then I will even let her help me to plant them. Wish us luck!

Birthdays are a wonderful rite of passage. The joke in my house is that my birthday lasts the entire month of October, with the exception of the 13th, which is my husband’s birthday. I love a good party. Life is a gift to be celebrated. Eat, drink and be merry, I say.

Still, the reality is that kids birthday parties can easily turn into stressful, bloated affairs. Between the junk food for 20 kids, the disposable, licensed character cups and plates and the blinky-light toys, birthday parties can be more of a paean to the Gods of consumerism than a celebration of the life of a child. The first time I went to Chuck E. Cheese as an adult I felt an immediate urge to call my mother and apologize for ever dragging her there. As long as I can, I am going to try to avoid that kind of birthday party, if only for the sake of my sanity.

Up until this year my kids’ birthday parties have been family affairs. Last year I asked Cheyenne what she wanted for her birthday and she told me, nearly bursting with excitement, “A birthday cake and a birthday hat!” I knew I was getting off easy. This year she has friends and ideas of her own and I can tell we have entered a whole new ballgame. My challenge this year was to come up with a birthday party that was fun, but still as simple and eco-friendly as possible.

After some discussion Cheyenne and I came to an agreement on the theme of Garden Tea Party and a guest list of a few kids. Especially at four years old, I think a small party of children helps to keep things simple and fun. The guest list was small, so I didn’t really bother with formal invitations. I have a casual circle of friends, so e-mails, word of mouth and scraps of paper with my address written down were my preferred means of communication. Little kids really don’t care about the invitations anyway, so why waste the paper?

For the menu I decided to stick with easy, homemade foods. By skimping a little on convenience I could afford to use higher quality organic and local ingredients. Considering there were only six kids, including mine, it wasn’t much trouble. To make the menu more fun, I made everything bite-sized—kids love that. We had bite sized tea sandwiches, cheese and crackers, cookies, banana bread bites, fruit, gingerbread orange tea and bite sized cupcakes with white frosting and sprinkles. We would have had scones with homemade jam, but I forgot they were in the oven. By the time my nose had reminded me they were literally toast. Still, we ended up with a pretty great spread:

I used real plates and cups instead of disposable. I found some old demitasse cups at my parentss house that worked as teacups. We spread a picnic blanket on the floor of the living room and served the kids there, so there wasn’t much chance for them to break anything.

I wanted to come up with party favors that were a little less disposable than the average bag of cheap plastic toys. Since the theme of the party was garden related, I decided we would all plant our own tomatoes or lettuce. I found some white ceramic pots at IKEA for $.50 apiece and bought a package of Early Girl tomato seeds and a package of French-style salad mix seeds.

It was actually above freezing that day, so we bundled up in our coats and headed outside. The kids were really enthusiastic about planting. “So this seed is going to become a tomato? That’s awesome!” Even the little ones were excitedly scooping dirt into their pots. Who doesn’t like playing with dirt? When we were done we wrote each kid’s name on their pot with a dry-erase marker. Here’s the birthday girl with one of her garden tools:

The whole thing cost me about $50. Most importantly, it was a hit. The kids loved the novelty of having something “grown-up” like tea and they really enjoyed the food. Surprisingly, the cucumber sandwiches went as fast as the cupcakes, so I at least feel like the kids got something healthy to eat that day. They had a blast planting their seeds and I felt good about sending them home with something that would remind them of the party for months to come.

Everyone had a lovely time. It wasn’t a big, noisy stress-fest, but a simple celebration of my sweet little girl. The focus was on the people, not the event. I like that. At the end of the day that is what memories are made of.

I am in the midst of my 11th move in the last 12 years. It’s been a fun and crazy 12 years, as your late teens and twenties often are, but I am ready to be settled. This will be the last move for quite a while and Zach and I are very excited. As we box up all our worldly possessions one more time, we have been talking and daydreaming about our life in the new house.

It’s funny how many small details come up in our conversations. “Just think, Stella, you can put a laundry basket right under the laundry chute off the kitchen and finally have a good place to put all those cloth rags,” or “I want to put the bikes somewhere out of the way, but easy to get down so we will actually use them.” “Maybe we should put a little chalkboard or whiteboard in the kitchen to write down stuff we need as we realize it so we don’t have to make so many emergency runs to the store.”

We believe that every little action helps, but, like most of us, sometimes we lose focus. One of the big obstacles to living more in line with our values has been organization. I start out with the best of intentions, vowing to bring my stainless steel water bottle, my cloth grocery bags and my travel coffee cup everywhere. I resolve to ride my bike for errands and only use paper towels for really yucky cat or baby messes. Then life intervenes and I am dashing out the door forgetting my water bottle, or taking the car because I’m 5 foot 2 and my bike is hung too high for me to reach, or reaching for a paper towel to clean up a juice spill because I haven’t washed the cloth rags.

I suspect that I’m not alone in being derailed in my efforts to be green by disorganization, so I want to invite you to join me in The Sunny Way Organization Challenge. Spring is a perfect time to do this. It doesn’t have to be big. Maybe you’ll resolve to put the cloth grocery bags back in the car when you’ve unloaded the groceries so you don’t forget them, or maybe you’ll streamline the laundry so it’s easier to line dry it. Whatever it is we want to hear from you. For those of you who are already super-organized, tell us your secrets. I’ll be chronicling my efforts as best I can during the move and I’d love to hear more about yours. We’re all in this together.

My name is Stephanie “Stella” Griffith. I will be thirty years old this year, which I am really excited about. I am going to rock thirty. Five years ago when I was living in Los Angeles I met my soul mate, Zach and married him a month later. I knew he was the one for me when I asked him what he wanted to do with his life and he told me, “I’m not sure yet, but I know I want to enjoy it.” We moved back to my hometown of Minneapolis about two years ago to be closer to my huge, wonderfully supportive extended family. Zach channeled his boundless energy and pyromania into a career in construction and I am home with our amazing little girls, Cheyenne, who is four and Isabella who is two and a half. I like to think of us as your classic young family with more love than money. We are in the process of moving into the house I grew up in. I am really excited about that, too. It’s strange to think that 12 years ago I couldn’t wait to get out of there and today I can’t wait to be back. Life is funny that way.