To Grandmother’s Homestead We Go

We went to visit my Mother-In-Law & Step-Father-In-Law on their 13 acre homestead in Sonoma County, CA in June of this year. It’s a really special place – there are large Redwood trees in the wooded parts of their land and there is also a big creek running through the property. In the middle of it all is their passive solar hand-built house and several large growing areas for their various veggie gardens, vineyard and greenhouse for my MIL’s lavender growing business. The views are beautiful and you can see large vineyards for miles around.

My MIL spins her own wool on her spinning wheel, has a loom to weave it on and showed my son, Leif how to card the fibers and then to spin it on the wheel. He thought this was great fun.

We did many special things while we were there and since my son likes art projects, I thought it would be interesting for him when we took hikes around the property to collect cool looking items we found in nature to build some fairy houses on the banks of the creek. He loved that idea since we have read a few books about this. I think by the end of our trip, he built 5 fairy houses and we took many pictures of them all.

My husband and I took a day off to be by ourselves to celebrate his birthday and go to some wineries for wine tasting and to see some sights around Sonoma County. One place we went to is an exact reproduction of a 12^th century castle just outside of Calistoga called Castello di Amorosa. It was awesome! Such amazing detail work with actual artifacts from salvaged castles – including the stones of the castle – were shipped over from Europe to build it.

Since our son was hanging out with his Grandma and Papa all day on the homestead, they had some fun projects lined up for him, too. My Mother-In-Law knew in advance that we were taking a day to ourselves so she gathered items from local thrift stores to build a “scarecrow boy” the size of Leif. He LOVED this! When it was done, they staked it right in the middle of a new garden bed.

He did a special building project with his Papa, too. My son requested to build and paint “a sculpture.” So my FIL gathered some scrap wood from his workshop and found some paints and Leif said he wanted to build a tree. The two of them laid out the design and then my FIL nailed it together and Leif very carefully painted it green and brown. He decided before we left to give it to his Grandma to hang in her greenhouse “so she could remember him!”

Later that day, they had to gather up some firewood to stack outside their house and my son had a great time helping to load up the pick up truck from the various wood piles in the woods and then help unloading and stacking the split logs by the house.  They would have gone swimming in the creek but it was a little too cool to do that so they built another fairy house instead.  He had a great day alone with his grandparents and we had fun drinking wine, going out to dinner and seeing the sights alone, too.

Café Gratitude opened a restaurant in their town a few months earlier and I was ecstatic to be able to finally go in person! I had purchased their cookbook last year and I think they craft some of the greatest raw food recipes. We ate there 3 different times! Michael and I went to dinner there after our day out alone and saw local musicians play while eating. Such a perfect ending to a perfect day!

On my husband’s actual birthday, we helped my MIL work in her booth at the local farmer’s market. She sells lavender plants of all different sizes and varieties. She cultivates 38 varieties now and is always testing out new kinds to see how well they will do in her area before she will grow and sell them. There is even a white lavender variety named “Melissa” that she grows & sells.  And out of all the herbs I work with, lavender happens to be my favorite. I even had some sprigs of it in my wedding bouquet.

We had a family birthday dinner that night back at the homestead with relatives that live in their area. We drank lots of great wine and I learned so much more about the art of crafting wine this trip since my FIL has been making his own wine for decades. Michael’s Step-Brother-In-Law gave him a bottle of his own homegrown, locally pressed extra virgin olive oil. It is SO GOOD!! I wish we could grow our own olive tree orchard where we live! We learned more about this process, too.

We visited Bodega Bay and played by the ocean (which is always cold and breezy), went to Armstrong Woods State Park which is an amazing place to hike around the giant Sequoias (can you see me in the tree photo below?).  We also visited “Train Town” in Sonoma which was so fun for Leif.

It’s so nice to spend quality time with family and get a fun vacation out of it, too!

Chicks & Garden Update

Since an ordinance was passed in my town allowing backyard chickens and permits were issued, we went ahead and took the plunge and got ourselves 4 baby chicks on March 21st! We now have an expanded garden, made new garden beds on the side of our house, built a small greenhouse (8′x8′) last fall with all reclaimed materials and are going to be building a movable chicken coop (with reclaimed materials, too) to fit in next to our greenhouse. It will be like a coop/chicken tractor so we can move it around the yard and  the girls can graze safely on grass. I will let them out inside the garden to eat bugs and let them run around the yard while I’m out there with them. I’ve noticed a red tailed hawk in my neighborhood recently which doesn’t make me happy!

My husband grew up raising chickens so I am getting lessons first hand from him even though caring for them on a day to day basis will be up to my son and I. My husband has lots of other projects lined up to do!

We also built our son a funky tree tower next to the greenhouse because there was an Aspen tree in bad shape that needed to come down. My husband decided to make the tree tower for our son’s birthday in February and built it on any weekend that was not frigid this winter – and we had lots of nice weekends, actually.

Here are some pix of the peeps from 4 days – 2.5 wks old:

The two golden colored ones are Buff Orpingtons and their names are Daisy and Lulu. The two brownish ones are Easter Eggers – Americana’s, specifically and their names are Iris and Acorn. All 3 of us named them. They really are so very cute at this age!

Here is a picture of our (still unfinished) greenhouse that will be painted this spring and the funky tree tower to the left of it:

It’s located right in front of our newly expanded garden space, that’s the garden fence behind it. The tree tower looks like it’s all open in the picture but there is lots of cable wire going through the Aspen branches and it’s a 4 ft tall fence so my son won’t fall out! It’s very secure and he loves it!

The greenhouse was built so we could walk in there through a door (on the left side), it’s about 8′ tall at the highest point and has 2 large beds on the ground as well as a big shelf on the back wall under another window that can hold 4 large pots (or 7 flats of seedlings). The roof windows open for ventilation, too. There is a sprinkler head inside it from our sprinkler system so we can run a drip line off of it to the beds. We are also hanging up heavy duty hooks to hold large hanging pots in there, too. I want to grow the upside down tomato plants to have a longer tomato growing season in the fall (I admit I’m a little obsessed with growing tomatoes!). We have also worked out our glitches from last winter’s trial garden and will use the back of the greenhouse to help anchor the hoop house for better winter gardening this year. We are pretty excited for all of this additional growing space we’ve got now!

Many seeds have been started indoors this past week and my husband just rototilled in a mix of compost and top soil into all the new beds we created so now we are ready to plant! We will be direct seeding the new greenhouse beds this weekend with several varieties of cool weather greens and peas. This growing year  should be a good one since we are done with the hardscaping now and can successfully do year round succession planting.

Now with the chickens, we will have free range, organic eggs from happy birds (and my son & husband eat lots of eggs), new fun pets to hang out with and we will be able to feed them many veggie scraps from the garden and compost their waste and bedding to eventually be put back into the garden. The cycle of life. Love it.

The thing I love most about gardening is all that you learn from nature. Everything is trial and error and you find what works best for your individual space and then when it clicks, you get to watch the magic of nature unfold in front of your eyes and reap the bounty! I find this to be so much fun!

Birthday Extravaganza Week

I know I’ve been a bad blogger and haven’t posted in a few weeks. There has been so much going on: I’ve been trying to learn some new technology, learning to use Twitter, as well as working on my website redesign and planning my son’s 5th birthday extravaganza with his buddy! That’s right, it was a joint birthday party for 2 little 5 year old boys.

His birthday was last week, Fat Tuesday, actually. He was born on Fat Tuesday, too. The kid likes to party!

Since his actual birthday was a weekday, the party was this past Sunday. He doesn’t go to preschool on Tuesdays so I had to plan a day of fun for him since he has no family here to make a big deal over him. It’s all up to us to do it. My husband took a half day at work so we drove down to his new office and picked him up, went to a nearby fun playground with really big slides (his favorite) and had a picnic. Did I mention it was almost 70 degrees out and sunny that day? Amazing. We played hard there for a couple of hours then went to a nearby (cheap!) movie theater that was showing 2 different animated kid’s movies and he picked the movie, The Tale of Despereaux. He LOVED it! It was a very cute movie. He ate a giant bag of popcorn mostly by himself, too.

After that, we drove into Denver to a restaurant, Casa Bonita, that is so kitschy it belongs in Vegas! South Park TV show actually did a whole very funny episode about it, too. That is the only thing I can think of when I think about this restaurant. I’ve lived in CO for almost 15 years now and have never been there and after reading about my friend Heather’s experience there recently with her kids, I knew my son Leif would love it and I was right! The food is pretty lame Mexican food (according to my husband) but we had a great time there. There is a wandering mariachi band that plays and sings while you eat and you can get free sopapillas throughout your meal. I was able to “veganize” a taco salad so my dinner wasn’t too bad!

They actually have a little show they put on approximately every 15 minutes on this tiny stage area that is right in the middle of the dining area and there is a 30 foot drop down into a pool of water. There is a waterfall and fake palm trees, too. Leif was mesmerized by the little skits and then the guy diving 30 feet off the platform into the water – he thought it was the coolest thing!

The place is enormous, rooms and hallways leading to all sorts of areas including 2 arcades (with ski ball no less – my favorite – but it’s called “ice ball” here), tons of both new and very old school video games – even Pac Man! – a mini arcade area with rides for little kids, a place to redeem the coupons you win at the arcade for little toys, a treasure chest room, vendors selling different trinkets, etc. It really was so fun!

He then had his birthday party at preschool on Friday and it’s a Waldorf school so it’s a special type of ceremony for the child. The teacher crochets a crown for him and he wears a birthday cape and holds a star wand and she reads a special birthday story and lights candles for how old he is. Each parent/teacher/child at the ceremony says birthday wishes/blessings for him as the teacher ties “wish knots” in play silks for each wish spoken and the silks surround his handmade doll she made for him. He takes the basket and unties all the silks and finds his present at the end. It’s very sweet and loving. We will miss this!

Last Sunday was the big extravaganza birthday party at a local gymnastics place that we shared with his buddy, Jackson who goes to preschool with him and lives down the street from us. His 5th birthday was yesterday.  We carpool to school with him, too and they both have been talking about their party for a few weeks now – it’s very cute listening to them.

We did a flying theme (airplanes, helicopters, etc) and the party was at a local gymnastics place that Leif loves going to. We tried to “green up” the party a little by buying a zero waste event kit from our county recycling office. All the plates, utensils, napkins, cups are compostable (made from corn) and go into a huge BioBag trash bag that we return to the recycling dept. for them to compost. All the food was vegan, too. Even the cupcakes, frosting and whipped cream – it was soy whip.

They both had lots of fun as did their friends and when we went home, his buddy Ava came over to play with both Leif and Jackson at the playground and the 3 of them just had a great time! We made some homemade pizzas (3 different cheeses – cow, goat and vegan cheeze) for dinner and Leif and Ava played with all his new presents only stopping to eat pizza and birthday cupcakes. My son was a very happy birthday boy!

He did get a new scooter (that he’s been asking for everyday!) for his birthday which he was so excited for but he now realizes he can go farther and faster on his bike – scooters are much more work! He still loves it and even let Ava try it out at the playground. Jackson got a new scooter, too. This should be fun watching them scootering around together soon!

Little boys are just the cutest, sweetest things! I love my little birthday boy so much!!!!

Baby Candy Mama & Child Giveaway!

I am offering a great giveaway for both mama and child that is already wrapped and ready for the holidays!  Baby Candy, a small, mom owned company, makes cute shirts and onesies for babies, toddlers, kids and mamas, too.  I am giving away a matching “Sugar Mama” chocolate brown 100% cotton tee shirt size L for mom and the same adorable shirt size 2T for her toddler.

The way they are packaged is very unique – it looks like candy and comes with a “nutrition facts” label on the back listing the size and what it is.

This giveaway is worth just about $50 and makes a wonderful gift for the holidays!

To enter (up to three chances to win!):

• Please leave a comment telling me some of your creative ideas for holiday gifts for kids that are inexpensive or homemade. I think we all will be trying to economize this holiday season and I hope you can share some tips that I may not have thought about yet!
• If you would like another chance to win, subscribe to my feed via RSS or email and leave a separate comment letting me know you have done so.
• For yet another chance to win, just link to this post on your blog and then leave another comment here with the link to your blog’s post.
• Be sure to leave a valid email address
• Contest is open to US and Canadian citizens
• Contest will end on Saturday, November 1st at 12:59pm EST
• Winner will be chosen by Random.org and contacted by email

Be sure to stop by the Bloggy Giveaways Carnival to see all the other great giveaways!

Halloween Parade 2008

Last Saturday was our town’s annual Halloween Parade down Main St. Yes, I live in a town with a Main Street and seasonal parades and other fun events here.  This town also has made Money magazine’s list for the 100 best places in America to live (we are in the top 50) several times, too.

Since we had just gotten back from vacation a few days earlier in the week, I had no costume for the boy and didn’t even have any time to get one before we left.  My husband did make a set of foam swords this summer for them to have sword fights since Leif was obsessed with doing that with anything he could find.  So, I decided to work around that. At first he was going to be a knight in shining armor but then we didn’t have time to sew a helmet and wound up making him a gold crown instead so he declared himself a king – “a good king” to be precise.

I went to the local fabric store and got him some shiny gold fabric to make a cape and I’m sure he will get a lot of use out of that since what boy doesn’t love a cape to play with?   We made him a crown out of an old paperboard sign and painted it and made a shield out of cardboard.  My husband painted him a coat of arms on the shield that had a nature theme – a leaf and vine, what else for King Leif?

It turned out to be a very inexpensive, fast, homemade costume out of mostly stuff we had on hand including the paints.  And he loves it!

Good King Leif

The King and his good friend, the Knight

The King and his good friend, the Obama-supporting Cow.

The King got tired and decided to hitch a ride upon his noble steed, aka Daddy.

Another favorite thing he has been really into this past week was a temporary tattoo we got at our local democrat office of Obama on a postage stamp.  He wanted it on his belly and loved showing it off.  I took many shots of his cute belly:

On Halloween, we plan on going to our rec center’s huge annual Halloween carnival that has lots of fun carnival games for little kids, several bouncy houses and a spooky boat ride across the large pool.  The pool area is dimly lit and there are still more places in there to play games and win prizes.  In another room, they bring in small animals for a petting zoo. We’ve gone the past 2 years and he just loves it.  Yet another great thing this town does for the children that live here and all of the events are free.

After that, he likes to go trick or treating with his Dad and loves the idea of getting things from people even though he really does not like candy (I know, strange) but that is probably because we don’t eat candy or any products with high fructose corn syrup in them so he just doesn’t like the taste. I buy him these organic, naturally sweetened lollipops which he loves so I give him those instead of the candy he collects. I am trying to get him a Unicef box so he can collect money for Unicef instead of candy he (or we) won’t eat.

I hope you all have a very happy and safe Halloween with your kiddies!

Special Santa Fe

We went on a little vacation to one of our favorite places in the world, Santa Fe, NM. This is a place we still consider moving to and a place that I thought I was originally going to move to when I relocated from NYC. I got “sidetracked” in Colorado and 14 years later, I’m still here.

Whenever we go there, we try to do some new things that we haven’t done before and to also visit with some friends and family that live in northern New Mexico. It is very, very similar in lifestyle and consciousness and attitude (mostly) to where we live now (which I do love where we live). There is just an “extra something special” there with the architecture and art and the energy of the land itself for me. This city has also been there for the past 400 years. I’m drawn to it and recharged by it every time I can spend at least a few days there and we were there a week and it still felt like it was not enough time.

We stayed in a 1 bedroom condo for the week and traveling with a young child, this is the BEST way to travel and have little stress. Since my son is a major picky eater, eating in restaurants is really no fun for us with him so we did take out at night a lot and he got to eat his favorite foods right in the condo and be his loud little self and pretty happy. The wireless for the rooms was down and only accessible in the lobby bldg. so we were internet free for the week. I think I had a harder time with it initially than my software engineer husband did. I tried one night early on to check email in that bldg. with our laptop but it was noisy and annoying and not worth it. We both really enjoyed the relaxing evenings of getting to spend some real quality time together and I think it was great that we couldn’t use the computer in our condo!

This was my very first trip as a raw vegan and I was worried that I would not have much to eat so I prepared different foods before we left and brought it with us which worked out great for me since we had a kitchen. I knew I would go crazy on the guacamole and pico de gallo found everywhere so I made raw corn chips and crackers for that but funny enough, I now prefer to dip into those yummy foods using veggies instead of my chips or crackers. I did eat some green chile (which is cooked but I love it) on my salads and other foods and can now tolerate more heat and spice than ever before since going raw.

I made this new recipe of raw granola I found and my (omnivore) husband loved it and said it was the best granola he’s eaten – and that is saying a lot! I also made raw nori rolls, sun garden burgers with raw ketchup, and a raw bread. I brought my “magic bullet” chopper/blender in case I wanted to make some smoothies. I was pretty well stocked for the week and only needed to get fresh veggies and fruit. I saved a lot of money doing this and didn’t feel deprived at all (I love all of these recipes) and wound up bringing a lot back home, too.

I found the one restaurant in town that served raw entrees and desserts which is inside this cool place called “Body” that is a natural home store, yoga/pilates workout studio that also offers healing services (yes, it was huge). My kind of place! I had a raw pizza and salad to go and it was excellent and now I am on a quest to figure out how to re-make their recipe this week.

So, I managed to stay totally raw for at least 98% of my trip and looking at my husband eating the traditional NM food smothered in cheese didn’t even tempt me – which is very weird for me bec. I love the food there and had the vacation mindset going on. I even lost weight from all the walking and hiking we did. Woo hoo! And, I had lots of energy – even at night. I am loving living raw!!

We took a tour one afternoon of a new community being built that has everything we like – photovoltaic and passive solar design, wind power, reclaimed water for landscaping, geo-thermal, eco-friendly building materials and insulation from top to bottom, beautiful architecture, lots of open space and trails surrounding it, community garden plots, commercial sized greenhouses going in for food sold to the community at a discount first, farmer’s market second, lots of fruit trees planted on the property for the community, parks and playgrounds, only environmentally friendly landscape maintenance used, etc. Basically our dream community. We just need work to support us down there and we are not moving in a bad real estate market for at least a few years. Good thing they will have a few phases being built so we have time to re-consider in the future.

The one new hike we did was at a place called Tent Rocks. It is just south of Santa Fe and a totally awesome place. These other-worldly looking rock formations formed millions of years ago from a volcanic eruption and it’s a soft sand and gravel type of rock pillar with the top part being a harder granite rock which kept it in place all this time. It has very narrow channels to walk through as you ascend to the top which my 4 year old loved doing as well as climbing on all the rocks (although for the other half of hiking he wanted to be in the backpack). It even had a cave that the two of them climbed up into and my son thought it was the coolest thing and wanted to sleep in it. I guess spelunking will be something we can do with him when he is older. He even pointed out a few formations that he thought were spaceships so even a 4 year old thought it looked alien like.

We took a train ride one day on the Santa Fe Southern Railway in an old 1920’s passenger car out to a train depot in a town called Lamy, had lunch and then rode the train back to the Santa Fe station. My son loved it since he loves trains so much. There was an outside platform to stand on, too which was fun.

There is so much more but this is a little recap of some of the fun and interesting things we did. I’m so glad that even though I don’t get to live there right now, we are only a (several hours long) car ride away from such a special place.

My Baby Is 4!

Well, he actually turned 4 on the 24th of February, aka Oscars Sunday. We started off the birthday extravaganza with a party at school on the 21st. He goes to a Waldorf preschool and the teacher does a special birthday celebration for each child where they eat little star bday cakes and then have a ceremony and the birthday child dresses up in a cape, a crown and holds a star wand. She lights candles for how old they are and reads the story of how they chose to be born into their chosen family (and the stork drops them off at our house). Leif was way more into the cape and the wand than he was in listening to the story but it was sweet. She made him a wool felt doll and he calls it the “Prince Leif” doll.

We had a fun party for him and all of his friends on Saturday the 23rd and when I asked him if he liked his party and had fun he said, “yes I did!”.

It was a “transportation” themed party but with a major focus on trains since he’s still obsessed with them and now fire trucks and helicopters, too. When we all sang happy birthday and everyone said his name he pointed to himself and said, “that’s me!” so I feel like he really got the meaning of a birthday party and in feeling special and loved by everyone and in honoring yourself for a day. I love birthday celebrations so I’m really happy that he “got it” this year. Here are some pix from the party with some of his friends:

When we got home from the party and opened all of his gifts, it was still sunny out so we gave him one of our presents, a new bike. He was sooo stoked on this bike, I tell ya! He just loves riding it.

The next morning, his actual birthday, he crawls over to me in bed and kisses my cheek and says, “I love you so much”. Aww. That just melted my heart. I feel like that was his way of thanking me for the party. He was just so happy the whole weekend with the party and then on his actual bday on Sunday we went to the zoo.

The weather was nice the whole weekend and the zoo was crazy! It was so packed we had to park about a half mile away. We discovered an enormous castle like playground that he wanted to play in and I kept saying, let’s play here instead of the zoo and the birthday boy said let’s play here and go to the zoo, too! He won out, of course since it was his day and he loves the zoo but it was really crowded and I will never go on a nice weekend again. Only weekdays. Or maybe never at all. I actually hate zoos. I think it’s so cruel to the animals to be in such small areas with tons of humans gawking at them all day. They seem depressed to me and some seem to have gone insane, too. I find it heartbreaking to watch. I have a really hard time being at the zoo and reading the energy of the animals. Sorry, I digress.

I can’t believe what a little person he’s turned into in such a short amount of time. His inquisitiveness, his amazing memory for everything! His wanting to always engage in conversation and watching his mind process words and formulate the next sentence when we are having a conversation is pretty interesting for me to watch. He’s got a funny sense of humor and really enjoys a good laugh. He’s also very compassionate to his fellow human being and (usually) all animals, too. He still is very cuddly and loves to be held or touched, even just holding hands. I can’t wait to see him blossom and grow more as this year unfolds.

I think this is a fun age, they are like mini people but still with cherubic faces and extreme innocence and are just so adorable but can really interact with you so much now. It’s definitely been a rewarding 4 years with my little guy who I love more than anything!

Photos!

Yes, it’s true, I have actual photos on my blog now. I have been experimenting with learning new software and last night and part of today when I got a minute I went thru alot of pix stored on my computer from just this past year and picked the best ones and even titled each and every one of them so you my friends and family can see us and really, Leif and his friends, too.

So, my in home tech support fell asleep uncharacteristically early last night otherwise I would have had more photos ready to go. I did have a few glitches to figure out with some postings and Flickr in general that I just gave up on after 2 hours of it not working whereas Michael fixed it in less than a minute this morning. Ugh. Don’t know why I wasted my time last night.

So check out the Flickr link on the right if you want to see some shots from Leif’s 3rd bday party, our trip to Hawaii and a few from this summer.