Passionfruit Gifts

Check out this incredible fruit to my good friend gifted me after she harvested them herself from a farm she frequents. Only the coolest people are friends like this and come proffering exotic fruits and conspiratorial plans to use them to sprout plants in our yards in tandem. Love having people in my life who are givers, who see small things as gifts and who want to share this dynamic, interesting California life with me.

 Its a lesser known variety of passionfruit. This one won't be in the grocery stores...its way too thin skinned.

The fruit is about the size of a hen's egg and has the most tender, delicate feeling skin when fully ripe. The outer rind is the most gorgeous, dusty apricot with such a shocking, sweet, seedy pulp. Totally amazing! Can't wait to see it clambering in viney profusion over our garden fence. I hear the secret is just to take one of the fruits out to the garden and bury it like some secret sacrifice in the dirt.

Painting, Gardens and Jam

Our first crop of arugula has turned into a fluttering cloud of white blossoms, like a flock of little cabbage moths, levitating next to the hose reel. I need to put in another crop of spinach, (maybe some malabar spinach for hot weather?) and a new block of carrots. The boys have been so excited about our first round of carrots at this house that they have been pulling them as little finger sized snacks and munching them before they get any chance to get big and hearty. Love that delicious, culinary impatience.  Need to remind myself that they do indeed love things that are good them, in addition to the pizza and chips that magnet all kids right in. I tend to blow the negatives bigger and discount the positives and end up with a nicely lopsided view of what really happened with my kids.

The whole house smells amazing tonight. I just batch cooked some apple muffins to put in the freezer (flour and sugar free!) so that those junk food loving boys have something sweet to grab for a snack. There is also a second big pan full of cherry plum jam bubbling away in the back burner. It smells tangy sweet and I have added just the right amount of sweetener to leave it zippy in the back of the mouth but still sweet in the front. Love me some sweet tart flavors. The first batch was made with greener plums that were still pretty firm but had all fallen anyway. This round, the plums were all making big cranberry colored splats on the sidewalk when they fell, finding ones that were still whole and hadn't squished on impact was the trickiest part. They have more natural sugars this time and when you pop them in your mouth raw, the skin slips off and leaves you with a big juicy mouthful. So delicious!

I haven't been painting so much this week but, I am chewing on a couple of ideas and am hoping that the long weekend will be a chance to pull out my brushes and sit in the sunshine and drip some art out through my fingertips. Recently, I saw the good friend who spoke painting prophetically into my life and convinced me that I was a painter when I thought I loved art but only knew how to draw. I am so grateful for her insistent warmth and pushing.

 So much happy that this habit bloomed out in my life and I had a time when I shared art days with her. She still lives in New England and I had a quick breakfast with her while we were in town, its so amazing to see my art on her wall and come home to see hers on mine and know that we have entered each other's lives and flavored each other's world's so sparklingly. Good friends are the type who make you a better person for their having been in your life. She qualifies.

Flying Solo

A is away for the first time since we've moved. I forgot this feeling: going to bed alone at night, trying to conjure up motivation to make meals without another adult in the house, locking the doors at night (A's job) and feeling slightly nervous, sleeping all wacky because he isn't here with his strong opinions on bedtimes and rising. Its hard to be the one behind, but its especially hard at certain times of the month. Heh.

Remember this post? Yeah, that issue is still with me. But PMS is better, I have found with a few tricks that bring some sanity.

1. Trick 1: Track my cycle. Knowing why I feel totally hopeless helps. I know I'm on drugs which means that I know a lot of this is high reactivity and not actual massive dysfunction. 
2. Trick 2: Skullcap tea helps me tremendously. If I start to feel blue or ragey or kind of hopeless sobbish, I make myself a mug and then a thermos and just nurse it for a few days. This is the one I buy. 
3. Trick 3: The third thing that helps is wearing the tracker I talked about here. Monitoring my heart rate and breathing means that it can vibrate to remind me if I'm getting too worked up which is surprisingly effective. I listen when an objective device tells me that I'm getting too wound up and maybe I should take a break. 

So, anyhow...its that time and I'm trying my tricks and they help...but its still a dark week with a lot of low energy. I don't really know how to get to the place where I understand and appreciate my cycle and hormones. They are so disruptive to me. Frustrating.

Today was beautiful, the rain took a break and the boys were fooling around in the yard, fussing about on the edges of the vegetable garden "weeding things" to help it all along. The radishes are starting to show their second leaves and we can see little arugula and bachelor's buttons too. Its an amazing thought that we can have a garden now. I could have had one before now if I had jumped on things and just begun as soon as the rain came. Next year I will know a little bit about the rhythm of things here. Everything is so topsy-turvy in my mind. The rhododendron are blooming and the peach trees but the plum trees finished a while ago and so did the cherries. Everything seems like a muddle. Its beautiful and its so fresh and I'm utterly grateful in this alien place, but it is alien. 

I had a couple of really filling connections with girlfriends right before A left town and that is carrying me. I may be stressed out and tired but I am not alone and I am loved.  I am also glad that it is only 4 days. Bit sized business trips help. But why, why, why do the kids always get sick when he leaves? Stress? Heartbreak? Sheesh. So frustrating. 

We are going to meet him downstate in Bakersfield and then drive over and see the incredible, historic superbloom happening on the desert floor in Death Valley. Never been there, and stoked to see botanical history. Botanical history + My Man = Life Saved.

Gardens and Baseball and Church

Today, we put the vegetable garden in. There are radishes and spinach and kale and all manner of other good things, actually planted in the ground of a whole new plot, in a whole new yard, in a whole new state. I feel like I live here.  Sort of.

Its amazing how long it takes to really feel like you "belong" somewhere. We continue to hunt and search for a church that will be just right for us. We like to take weekend adventures and sometimes we have normal conflicts like baseball tryouts and illness which slows down that process of church shopping immensely. We've been here for six months already and we had a top pick that we thought we'd decided on but its a lot harder to get over there than we thought (its a couple of towns over) and then we also have been unsure if the vibe is exactly right for us. Picking a church, as a non-Catholic is so much tricky, factor weighing!! Sheesh. Lucky Catholics.

This week the weather is hitting the 70's, the hills are unbelievably green and we are really revving up into true baseball season. I am the team mom this year, an exciting responsibility which I am determined to work hard on and make fun and not scary. I am a little worried everyone will discover that I am a weird homeschool mom, not a Californian and also not sporty....don't tell. I plan to give a great charade as "normal."

Tomorrow I begin in earnest to clean out the garage. I must, must unearth it and pare down the number of objects we own...especially the number of pieces of furniture (here's looking at you, old bedroom set!). Smaller and simpler. Cleaner and more open. There is enough. We have enough. Time to cull. I am dreaming about what I will do with the space in there. Pinterest board brewing with ideas for artist studio/guest space. Buy your tickets to California now....our little garden guest cottage will be a hot item! Plus, we want to see YOU!

Amish Parenting and Seed Catalogs

Reading a really great book about Amish parenting, believe it or not. I am really struggling lately with teaching my children to not be prideful and haughty, getting across the ideals of industry and conscientiousness and getting at the soul of helping to instruct in kindness. Most of these things are weaknesses in my own personal character too which means that I'm searching for ways to teach myself and guide myself as I struggle to get across to my boys. Parenting is the most fantastic muscle work! Seriously!

I am not finding the book astoundingly revelatory, the author is no researcher and sometimes isn't able to pinpoint what the Amish are doing differently but there are hints and clues and some clear ideas. Its also just a super interesting cultural narrative, there are lots of things I didn't know about the Amish: they occasionally allow....movies, video games, cell phones, divorces, visiting with shunned folks, birth control, junk food, puzzles etc. Fascinating to imagine their lives and look over the landscape of their world for useful principles, ideas or viewpoints. I wish I had an Amish neighbor. The warmth and support sound so indescribable, especially in the stage of young motherhood. My Mennonite roots start to show during reading and I find myself missing some of the older, more devout, grandmas of my childhood church. Makes me want to go can a giant batch of apple sauce....and read more Amish literature!

Today was cold again, the sun still shines though which makes it so much more bearable. I don't mind so incredibly much when it is sunny during the day and then the wind kicks up as darkness arrives and the temperature drops. Its kind of cheering to snuggle down under the down comforter with my man and listen to the howling in the branches of the old white pine that towers over our house. We have however been freezing our pipes and bringing in eggs that have frozen and split from the coop. Its great pruning weather though, so I need to get my snips all dusted off and get out there and shape up our fruit trees. I am thinking that next week might be a great time to make sure that gets done! Spring is coming soon and now's the time to make sure that we've finished all the winter jobs. Isn't that a cheering thought!?!

Another thing I need to work on is planning out the vegetable garden. Last year's simpler garden arrangement went fairly well, so I think this year I will do a similarly streamlined plan. Not a million varieties, just the basics, and clean, neat planting set-ups. I see a date with a thick stack of seed catalogs in my near future. Mama morning time with a steaming cup of tea by my side as the sun rises and boys snore! YAY!

Sending you lots of cheering energy as you while away the last hours of winter, plan your spring, travel for breaks, try to get yourself out of bed in the morning, smile even though the wind bites and wrack your brain for creative and energy consuming things for kids to do indoors! I am on the same program. Lets keep on!