healthy food, lifestyle, travel, & everyday moments.
Just dropping in to wish you and yours a very happy Thanksgiving! We have a full long weekend planned visiting with friends, cooking (sweet potato casserole and gluten-free pie), two Thanksgiving dinners, getting our Christmas tree and celebrating a big birthday. Hoping your holiday is full of love and busyness/peace… whichever you prefer, or maybe a bit of both 🙂
xx Claire
What exactly is a crunchy mom? Some definitions include: someone who raises their children in a natural lifestyle, someone who follows their intuition to parent rather than current trends or official recommendations, or a parent who prioritizes the health of their children and the environment. Some definitions include phrases like “liberal-leaning” while others call crunchy moms “crazy,” “anti-science” or “conspiracy theorists.”
Obviously, there’s not even one official definition, since much of the above is self-contradictory!
The stereotype of a crunchy mom has evolved considerably since the term became popular 15-20 years ago. The pandemic definitely fueled a large part of that change and popularized the idea. People who previously might not have been interested in holistic health, homesteading, medical freedom or alternative diets adopted those values.… Read More »
February 28th, 2014; it was yesterday and also a whole lifetime ago.
The body remembers when the anniversaries of tragedies are creeping up. February is also the anniversary of a loved one’s cancer diagnosis and the anniversary of little A’s weeklong hospital stay. Februarys feel heavy to me.
The rawness of grief wears off through the years, but the mark it leaves on my soul deepens as I’ve grown up. As I watch my own children turn from babies into toddlers into small children, the finality of death seems harder than ever to swallow. When the deceased is a child or a young adult whose life is cut short suddenly–death feels so random, so pointless, so inexplicable. Religious platitudes are meaningless in the face of its harsh reality.
“No parent should have to bury their child,” as Theoden poignantly remarks in The Lord of the Rings movies.
Life is short, and fragile, and we are imperfect humans incapable of appreciating all the goodness that the world has to offer. Parenting very young kids is the hardest thing I’ve ever done and I’m often tempted to think, it will be easier in the future.
Maybe it will. But there’s always the possibility that there won’t be a future. I don’t want to wish away these difficult but beautiful days. If there’s ever another watershed moment in my life that divides it into a before and after–and there always will be–I want to have really lived the “before.”
A part of me has lived in the evening of February 28th, 2014 for nine years, and it always will.
xx Claire
My usual Friday post did not make it to the blog yesterday because we were doing something a little different: closing on a new house! Our current lease is up in a couple months and we happened to find a house that’s perfect for our family 🙂 It’s similar to our old house but with a few differences that make it better suited to our lives now. (Buying and selling your first house is definitely a learning experience, isn’t it?)
One of my favorite parts is that our new house is a short walk from my mom’s. Little e is asking me when he can walk to Grandma’s by himself… I told him three is a little young yet, but it will happen soon enough.
And I’m excited to have a little more space–not too much, I learned from our last house that I don’t want a huge space to furnish and clean #lazy :P–and be able to personalize it too.
Now, it just needs to be spring so we can get to gardening and enjoying our new backyard. Of course I already have grand plans for raised beds, berry bushes, some kind of playhouse for the kids and a grill/dining setup for summer nights. The weather here just needs to follow suit!
xx Claire
I used to be very anti-Valentine’s Day knowing that it’s just a consumer holiday. Okay, it has Christian origins–but in modern times, the celebration is mostly commercial.
Then I had kids and I want to celebrate all the holidays! Besides, it’s the point in winter here when the cold, dark weather starts to feel interminable, Christmas was a while ago and Easter is still far away. It’s fun to have something to celebrate, although I try to steer away from the commercialism as well as I can.
But you needn’t spend tons of money to have yourself a nice little celebration, so here’s what we got up to on Tuesday!… Read More »
