Riot 4 Austerity

As we near the end of our holiday travels, I think about my favorite parts of our long vacation. We first visited my family in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina (where my parents grew up). We then drove down to visit David’s family in Florida.In both p…

During the Transition Training we watched a lot of images and videos of Transition Initiatives, and at first I watched them with mixed feelings of joy and anxiousness. My heart sank because I inevitably thought: “I can’t make that happen.”
That sinking feeling stems from the fact that, though I arrived here over 11 years ago, […]

Amie made a heart for me this morning. Hearts within hearts, then she cut it out. As she was giving it to me she saw Baba also needed a surprise. After a couple of minutes she came running to him, with… a brain.

“That is the Mama skeleton, and that is the Baba skeleton, and that is the big sister and the baby brother skeleton, and…”

warm and bright out, emptied all the rain barrels, stashed them upside down, and reconnected gutters
raked leaves, emptied pots and containers, stashed them in shed
Amie raked leaves too (cough)
drank two large coffees (more […]

I am very fortunate to have handmade items in my home. Many of them are Amie’s, of course, most of which I’ve already shown here. There are also  those made by strangers and mostly presented to us as gifts, a lot from India. The ones I want to show you here are two quilts […]

	Early Girl and Lemon Boy I found our first red tomato in the garden today, and we’ve got a few yellow ones too. When I thought about the names of the two varieties, I realized I needed to take a picture. Just like the tomatoes, the girl fetus is on the lower right, and the boy fetus is a little higher up on the left. My maternity shirts no longer cover my belly. I have a skirt with a belly panel and a pair of black maternity underwear (!) that cover the belly, but both of those items were in the wash today. Until I saw the photo, I had no idea that the whole underside of my belly was exposed though; it’s not visible to me. And now I’m feeling embarrassed that I went to the grocery store with my belly hanging out like that.
	36 weeks Getting bigger…
	Penguins Iris has a baby penguin, and Ben has the “mama penguin”. Although given the reproductive strategies of penguins, perhaps it was a father and baby set.

In other news, I’m still pregnant and a little bored. Ben’s mother and sister are visiting for the next couple of weeks, and smws is en route. I made corn chowder, Greek salad, croutons, blueberry crisp, and garlic bread today.

This slideshow of natural births of twins (plus a set of triplets) makes me want to cry. In a good way. It’s still weird to think that I’m going to have twins soon, if I don’t just stay pregnant forever. It’s something I still can’t really believe is happening to me.

Also, my OB is a pretty cool guy. (And the photo of him here seems to be a lot more recent.)

Our new house - bought a year ago - came with two rose bushes, and this being our first Spring here, we got to see the roses for the first time. Amie also got to draw and paint one:

The context was thus:

Grandmother sitting by, also drawing the rose, and grandfather, on the other side of […]

May 21
A few weeks ago I planted seeds in the garden behind the house. In that plot I planted 4 rows of potatoes (Yukon gold and Peruvian Purple), 2 rows of onion (red and white), and a row of carrots, a row of leeks, a row of flax, and two rows of lettuce. I looked […]

During the past few months, we have struggled with finding ways to get water into the house, learning to heat and cook with wood and live much like our ancestors did. This struggle has an incredibly high learning curve. Yes, our grandmothers and great-grandmothers may have been successful at living like this, but for those […]

In the evening Amie watched March of the Penguins. We had shown it to her about half a year ago but she wasn’t interested then. This time she was, going “oh so cute!” and so forth, but really paying attention when the little chick dies of exposure and the mother mourns over it.
- what happened […]