When you don’t work full-time at a job, you have a lot of time to micro-manage your food supply. I am astonished at how complex it’s gotten to keep my pantry stocked. You’d thing, being that I can walk to about six grocery stores and one is Whole Foods and one is the local organic co-op, that that would be enough for me, wouldn’t you? Take a gander at the list:

1. Jubilee Farm: This is where I get my CSA most of the year.  In the summer time, I pick up a bounty of fresh fruits and vegetables from the farm every week; it’s barely challenging to keep up with but I love it.  Last summer I froze or otherwise preserved some things that we are still eating.  I also get a weekly box delivered to Seattle the rest of the year, although there is a hiatus for most of December and January.  Although it’s a lot of fresh produce, it’s not enough for 5-7 home-cooked meals, so I supplement from other souces.  However, the off-season box comes with a dozen farm-fresh eggs every other week.  Farm fresh eggs are GOOD.
2. Spud: This is a weekly deliver service that focuses on local and organic foods.  I get some produce from here–almost all of it, right now, and I’ll still get some when the CSA starts back up again.  More importantly, Spud is my source for the best local milk.  This is where I’m really going to show off how insane I am.  They have a brand that is vat-pasteurized, where the milk is only heated to 145 degrees and kept there for 30 minutes, instead of the more common high-heat-short-time pasteurization where it goes to at least 163 degrees (often higher) for 15 seconds and then is rapidly cooled.  Don’t even talk to me about ultra-pasteurization, where the milk heats to 280 degrees for two seconds.  That stuff is gnarly, I can’t drink it.  Yes, I have a very highly attuned milk palate.
3. Amazon Fresh: This is the latest addition to our household food supply, and let me tell you: it’s the bomb.  It’s unkind of me to gloat about it, since it’s only available to a select few Seattle zip codes and nowhere in the rest of the country.  In fact 98115 was only added a week ago, after a very competitive voting with four other zips.  I received at least three emails from neighbors urging me to make my voice heard: such is the longing for this service.  The deal is basically this.  Your order groceries from a huge online selection, which includes frozen, refrigerated, and dry goods as well as produce.  The user interface is as elegant as you’d expect Amazon to be.  Then you hit submit, and your groceries are delivered.  I believe you can get them within a few hours if you want.  I have chosen to place my order by midnight and have them on my doorstep by 6 am the next morning, which is easiest since I can only spend time on the computer after Rosalind has gone to bed, anyway.  There is a $30 minimum and $75 minumum to avoid the $5 shipping fee, but that’s not difficult.  Can I say it again?  I *love* Amazon Fresh.
4. Thundering Hooves Pastured Meats: After reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I realized my happy thoughts when buying “free-range” meat at the grocery store were misguided to say the least.  So I did a little online research and found Thundering Hooves.  For my first order, I got a truly free-range turkey that we ate for Thanksgiving, four pasture-raised whole chickens, and a family sampler pack of pork products.  (Luckily we have a trunk freezer.)  Holy Moly this meat is good!  It’s incredibly flavorful compared with even the “organic” meats you get at the grocery store.  And it doesn’t hurt the tast to know I’m not contributing to either the animal suffering or the environmental problems that go along with factory farmed meat, either.
5. Grocery/Whole Foods: OK, so I still do go to the yippie grocery store fairly regularly, although you’d think I wouldn’t need to after all that.  For one thing, we don’t have a local fish market, and we have trout, catfish, or salmon at least once a week.  And then there are the store-brand items I’ve gotten attached to, particularly cheerios.  The bulk foods are also nice, not just for rice and lentil and the like but also herbs and spices.  Whole Foods has good espresso, too.  And we have some coupons.

There you are, that’s where the bulk of our food comes from.  It’s not completely the whole story–we still eat strawberries out of the freezer that we u-picked over the summer, for example.  There’s even still a little tomato puree in there from my own pathetic garden.

You may wonder why I felt the need to explicate all this in my blog.  Frankly, I’m wondering that a little myself now that I’m done!  But I feel a great satisfaction in contemplating all the places I gather healthy food for my family, just as I love putting it all together into meals that nourish us, body and spirit.

Rosalind is 16 months old now, and last week she has started sleeping through the night. I thought I would be enveloped in a rosy haze of well-rested joy by now. But instead I’m just baffled and frankly, still kind of tired. Here is some (a lot of) history.

Ah, sleep. It’s an eternal topic of conversation among parents or infants and toddlers, even preschoolers. Is he sleeping through the night? How many naps does she take? What is your bed-time routine like? Etc. For the first eight months of Rosalind’s life I was completely bored by all variations on this topic. We practiced 100% cosleeping, and although Rosalind would breastfeed who-knows-how-many times a night I mostly slept through it. I never felt fatigued, and when bleary-eyed new mothers complained to me I just smiled pityingly and thought, “She should really just take the baby to bed.”

And then suddenly I was done with cosleeping. Part of it was Rosalind becoming mobile–I couldn’t safely leave her alone in bed any more. Part of it was how much Nathan and I missed our time together at night. Sneaking quietly into bed under cover of darkness, no conversation allowed, was getting old. In any case, it was time for Rosalind to go into her crib. And ever since then, getting enough sleep has been somewhat of a battle.

At first I still nursed her to sleep and then shifted her into her crib. She’d sleep there until Nathan and I were in bed, and then I’d bring her in with us the first time she woke up. At first She was up at least every hour until she got into bed with us, always wanted to breastfeed in the rocking chair, so we never got any peaceful evenings. A big change was when Nathan started putting her to bed, and comforting her when she woke up before we were in bed. It was a very traumatic adjustment at first, but it didn’t take long until she accepted and even liked the new routine. She was getting really kicky and disturbing in our bed. I started creating artificial times before which I wouldn’t take her to bed. We had some more trauma when she realized I wouldn’t nurse her every time I went in, although I still rocked her back to sleep for a while. Eventually I could just put my hand on her inside the crib, but I still always had to stay there until she was sound asleep. Meanwhile I kept making the time when she could come into our bed get later and later. These changes happened so slowly, over the course of months, that it often seemed to me we were making no progress at all, and I had to constantly remind myself that indeed, things used to be worse. All I knew was, my tolerance for being out of bed was increasing faster than her sleep independence!

(Naps, meanwhile, are a whole different issue. I have always been almost irrationally opposed to a schedule that would tie me town to the house, and I did manage to avoid it for over a year. Rosy would sleep when she got tired, in the moby or sling or ergo, or the car, or the stroller, wherever we happened to be. But finally I had to accept that she needs a dedicated time to nap, and if not a consistent place, at least a consistent opportunity. Still, I haven’t gotten her into a routine that involves her crib–she has hardly ever napped there. Almost every day, I take her out in the stroller around the block a couple of times, and then bring it in to her nursery. She sleeps in it anywhere from half an hour, to two and a half, it’s completely unpredictable.)

You can see my disdain for the sleep conversation has been reduced, and now I am just as tedious as every other mother. The truth is, I even bore myself when I talk about all these details. Still, I can’t always help it, and since this is (I hope!) the one and only blog post that will be dedicated to the issue, I won’t spare you.

As of last week, the state of things wasn’t too horrible, but far from perfect. Nathan was putting Rosalind to bed every night at 8, and it was taking between 15 and 45 minutes to get her down. She was waking up 3-5 times a night, generally requiring only 5-10 minutes of shushing and patting to put her to sleep. I was bringing her into bed between 5 and 6 for some breastfeeding and a couple more hours of sleep, and we’d get up for the day between 8 and 9. And then, on Thursday night, something random clicked in Rosalind’s brain. Nathan put her down as usual at 8:30. The next time I heard from her was at 6 am, her normal time to breastfeed. Now, *I* was up before then, multipe times, listening at her door to make sure she was still breathing! But she was just doing her thing. The next night, same thing. And then next. Last night she did wake up a little earlier, at 4, but it was due to nasty congestion. It seems, for the time being at least, that she has learned to sleep in long stretches. Whether she’s not waking up at all, or waking up but drifting back off on her own, I am astonished.

And here’s the black lining on the silver cloud. It seems she doesn’t need as much sleep as I thought. Instead of going to sleep at 8 and waking up at 8, she has been staying awake until nearly 10 and getting up at 7:30. So now Nathan and I are staying up later than we should, to have a little time together at night, and also I’m getting up earlier than I used to.

Argh!

When I imagined having a daughter, before I did have one, I pictured a wild spirit. I thought this girl would be fearless, climbing on everything, not too interested in other people. I thought she’d have a knack with blocks and legos, she’d be fascinated by fantastical stories, and she’d be always original in thought, word, and deed. In other words, I imagined her as an idealized version of myself–the way I wished I was when I was actually growing up.

Rosalind is not that girl. She is not fearless, although not timid either; she thinks about things before she does them, even at this young age. Block toys are of moderate interest to her, but she shows no signs of being an architect later in life. Instead, her focus is on other people. Some of her first words were the names of her little friends, and she talks about (and wants to talk to) distant members of her family all the time. (I can’t tell you how many times a day she points to the laptop or the phone and starts repeating, “Nanna? Nanna? Peez?”) She is also constantly surprising me at how nurturing she is, almost maternal. I got her a plastic baby doll a few months ago when I saw how she was developing, and she *loves* that doll. She feeds her with a spoon, she dances with her, she washes her hair in the bath tub. Here she is giving her a ride on her horse Rody:

Rosalind and Baby go for a ride

Plastic dolls are all well and good–at least it’s a realistic baby instead of a Barbie, lord knows–but in typical hippy/pioneer spirit, I would much rather Rosalind be playing with a soft, natural, hand-made doll that she can keep her whole life. So I decided to make her one for Christmas. Not being very fluent in sewing patterns, I ordered a kit for beginners for a Waldorf Doll with pale skin, blue eyes, and red hair. It took more hours than I really want to think about, but it was pleasant work; usually I made progress while I watched the Colbert Report or Columbo with Nathan. Here is now it turned out:

Doll in her Christmas outfit

The doll, au naturel

Does Rosalind like the doll? Well–somewhat. She is no Baby in Rosalind’s affections. But I like to think that she’s gaining some fondness for her. It’s a little hard for me to watch her spill stuff on the doll, or try to pull the hair out that I so painstakingly sewed in–but I grit my teeth and smile, because my best hope is that someday she’s a dirty, raggedy, loved object.

Santa and a blobby baby, 2007

Scary Claus, 2008

2008 was Rosalind’s second Christmas of course, but the first in which she was an active participant. She loved the Christmas lights, the decorations, and the tree (so much that we had to build a fence around it.) She didn’t expect the presents on Christmas morning, but she had a great time opening them. She doesn’t understand about Santa Claus being kind and generous and magical, but she says “Ho ho ho” whenever she seems him (so long as he doesn’t get too close.)

We were in Colorado for Christmas itself, with Nathan’s family. Just like last time we were there, everybody was a little out of sorts: Nathan was recovering for a nasty flu/pneumonia thing, I got food poisoning the day after Christmas (thankfully a very mild case.) And Rosalind was up nearly all night on Christmas Eve, and spent much of Christmas day with an unexplained fever that sapped all her energy.

Listless baby

Still, she’s a trooper, and she chirked up when she had a nap and got a little baby tylenol in her. Here she is later in the afternoon in her Christmas togs:

Smiley Christmas baby

Also just like our last visit, whether Rosalind was feeling well or sick she *loved* her cousins. She was very affectionate and gentle to baby Emma, and she’d sneak up and give Connor the occasional hug too. But Jacob was the center of her universe.

Rosalind and Jacob

I feel so lucky that Rosalind’s first two Christmases were each with one complete side of her family. In 2007, we were with my brother and his family in Virginia, with both my parents around for at least part of holiday too (and even my grandmother.) This year, Colorado with both Nathan’s sisters and his parents. Thus we’ve all gotten to experience two whole sets of traditions, both wonderful in their own way. In the coming years, as our family matures and we start staying home for the holidays at least some of the time, we’ll get to pick and choose among them for our own style. I can’t wait.

The Solley Side (2007)

The Kriege Side (2008)