A beautiful night on a bridge

After dinner with some friends, celebrating one of their birthday's, I wasn't quite ready to head home. 

I just needed more time. A few moments that were given to spontaneity.

So I decided to take a walk. I was downtown by the new Guthrie and the river. I walked by some beautiful lofts, old historic company buildings, and then I found the St. Anthony bridge. I started to walk along the bridge. When I looked down, I saw the water that appeared black, and you could hear it stirring and crashing against the shore. The most distinct sound was the waterfall. The thunder of it was music to my ears. I love the sound of water. When I looked up I could see hundreds of city lights; street lights marking the way of an old train path, blue lights lightening up the Guthrie, skyscrapers with dozens of lights still on, apartments and lofts with lights on resembling life inside. It was almost like being in the middle of a starry night.

Walking along the bridge and taking in all the wonder almost took my breath away. The wind picked up and it was strong. My hair was down so it was uncontainable. I stood on that bridge and admired the city.

All that man had created.

What's great about what man can create, is how God gave him imagination to do so. I love that he gives us a taste of what it means to have imagination, to create, to love designing something, to participate in art. When God created the earth, he wasn't done. He still creates to this day, but the beauty is that he lets us do it with him. Even among the city, there was this river, these beautiful trees and shore line. The thing that man can not create is in the middle and at the center of what we can. It was a picture of God and man together creating something beautiful. I stood there and breathed. I took a breath and remembered in Genesis where God breathed into man to make him alive. I breathed again. Then I took another slow breath. I remembered how holy and divine it is breath. That every breath I take acknowledges God and gives him credit for who I am. I stood there for moments and took breath after breath and saw the wonder of the night.

It was a very spiritual night for me. I didnt' say much to God nor did he speak to me in words. But we had a moment and I'll treasure it.

Thank you.

Mentoriship in the kitchen

I have realized that I am a terrible teacher or mentor in the kitchen.  Coming home to MI, I told my sister that I would help her learn her way around the kitchen.  She has moved onto a very restrictive diet but doesn't know how to cook.  Well, that just doesn't work for me.  You can't have success or still enjoy food or even begin to think that you will stick to your new outline for eating if you can't enjoy food.  And how can you afford to enjoy food if you can't cook, and how can you cook if no one teaches you?

No one really taught me, I just had to figure it out and I watched a ton of Food Network.  No, I mean pre kids I would wake up on Saturday morning, snuggle on the couch with a bowl of cereal and watch for hours until Paul woke up.  I loved it.  Then I just started to figure it out.

I am not even close to a high quality cook.  I rarely create my own recipes, and most of the time I am just adapting or tweaking recipes I have found.  But I can cook.  I do know my way around a kitchen pretty well.

What I realized in the last three days is that I totally function in the kitchen without a plan.  This does not work well when trying to teach someone how to cook.  I also realize I cook a lot with whatever is in my house.  I kept throwing out suggestions to my sister about other ways she could make the meal and I am pretty sure I overwhelmed her.

We start heating a pan and she asks, "how much oil do I put in?"  I pour some in and say, "about that much".  Or she wants to know how much salt, pepper, cinnamon, seasoning to put in, and I look at her and say, "start with a little then add more if its too plain."  I double recipes or I adapt because I don't have a certain ingredient.  I also realized that makes writing out recipes for her really difficult.  I sat down and wrote out our recipe for Mexican Lasagna and couldn't believe how much I adapt that recipe.  It was very difficult to write out, but glad I did once it was over.

As much as it was about helping my sister learn how to cook, I have learned a ton about myself in the kitchen, how I function and where I can grow so I am able to teach my kids better.

All in all, in the past three days I have taught her how to cook:

Sweet Potato Burgers
Fruit Popsicles
Veggie/bean Quino salad
Butternut squash risotto
Chili
Eggplant/squash Lasagna
Mulligatawny Soup

It has a been a very big few days here.  Between cooking and visiting with friends, I am exhausted.  I mean I cook a lot, but I don't cook this much.  But my what is really exciting is my sister not only knows how to make these meals, she has them all divided and put in the freezer for the whole month!  She has her freezer full of personal sized portioned frozen dinners.  It's great!

Since I am writing out the recipes for my sister, I will be sure to post them later this week if you are interested, including the original link where I found it.

These are a few of my favorite things....

(I hope when you read the title, you sang the song in the back of your mind.)

I'm here! 

We did it.

My three kids, with my speaking partner Henry Graf, and myself drove 13 1/2 hours in our NON-air-conditioned car from Mpls, MN to just outside Detroit, MI. (Technically we dropped Henry off somewhere off  I80 and I69 in IN, but he was with us most of the way.)  Yes, no air-conditioning sounds as gross as it was.  Sweat dripping down my back, beading on Little's face and the fact that it was cooler outside the car than inside was just wrong.

We left Mpls when our housemate came home from the new Batman movie.  He was coming in for bed, we were buckling up to leave and head East all at 330am.

We drank more coffee than two people should.  Seriously, I'm kind of worried for my liver after a week with Henry and his addictive coffee habit.

The kids took a couple good naps.

We sang more than 73 silly kid car songs.

We listened to four books on CD.

We ate a total of 7 apples.

We stopped to pee four times.  It would have been five but we were stuck in rush hour traffic in Detroit, we were exhausted and I just wanted to get to my folks house when Little said she had to go to the bathroom.  I will own it. I let her pee the car seat, and its in the wash right now.  I stand behind my choice and the fact that we got to my parents 20 minutes earlier than if I had to find a spot to "rest" in downtown Detroit with three sweaty tired kids.

Henry and I had 8.4 inappropriate conversations.

I cried once I laughed so hard.

We listened to 3 songs that made me go...hmmmm...

We accomplished 0 movement on the book.

We had one serious moment where I felt so honored that my name will appear next to his on our book and I told him that.  He hates mushy stuff, so its fun to do to him.

The kids and I found 2 houses on fire, one house being transported on the road, one personal boat submarine and one miniature car cart pulling a trailer all in 20 minutes.  It was intense to say the least.

And a partridge in a pear tree.

Then we got to my folks and it was eat dinner right away so we can go on the boat.

I LOVE being on the boat.

Maybe you didn't understand that the first time.

I L.O.V.E. being on the boat.

I don't own a boat, nor is boating a part of our culture in Mpls, MN.  However, I grew up right by the water and we lived at our cottage in Canada in the summer.  It can often be strange to me that something that was so defining to me growing up has no place in my current reality.

So every summer I bring my kids for a two week vacation and they get to experience all the fun and knowledge and responsibility of living and playing on the water.  I love sharing the water with them.  When I looked at my kids tonight on my parents boat, I almost found myself physically ill I was so full of love.   Love for them, the water, the boat, my parents and watching them fall in love with the water. 

I have found that my first boat ride of each season has me quiet and relaxed.  I am not ready for the fun the boat offers yet, or all the company and memories we make on the boat.  My first boat ride of each season has me closing my eyes, breathing deep and allowing the rhythm of the waves and the wind on face erasing all the stress and noise of my life.  With each breath I can feel the healing water and fresh air brings.  At one point, each child and came and snuggled on my lap in the front of the boat while the sun was dropping in the sky.  I could wrap my arms around one of my children, close my eyes and breath deep.  Breathing in the fresh air and sweetness of the water, and breath out noise.  Mental noise of all the things going on in my head, physical noise of someone always talking to me, emotional noise of all the things I feel all the time.  Life noise.

Last night I got to share one of my favorite things with some of my favorite people, my sweet husband wasn't there, sad face.

Last night I felt refreshed more than I have in a really long time.

I am ready for vacation.

Enjoy a couple of the pictures.  Auntie Kelly loves her god daughter just a little so there seem to be quite a few photo's of her.

What to say?

My life has been radically changed by food.  An entire truth that I based my life on turned out to be a lie.  We ate whole wheat because it is good for you.  We drank milk because it's good for your bones.  That was a truth my whole life.  Then everything got turned upside down.  The more I read, the more I understood about wheat and gluten and genetic engineering.  The more I read, the more I found out that what we were drinking is a far cry from milk anymore once you factor in all the processing and chemicals.  I now also understand that we as Americans consume more dairy than anyone other race or country.  We also loose the enzymes that process milk after the age of four.  We really shouldn't be drinking it like we do, and if we were worried about calcium, than all we have to do is eat our vegetables.  We get plenty from veggies.

But that isn't what this is about.  Sorry, it's hard not to get distracted on this topic.  The point is that I understand that it's hard to wrap your mind around a new concept of looking at food.  Especially when it will challenge all that you know to be true.  Take my word for it, there is nothing scarier than realizing that you have not only lived, but chosen intentionally, spoken about and tried to empower your children to live a certain way and then you find out its all a lie.  It is almost like the ground beneath you literally gets taken away.  All the boundaries you lived in are torn down and you are standing in the middle of nowhere and you don't know which way is up or down or right or left.  You don't know where you are or where you are going, and you don't know how to get to the place you know you're supposed to be but still don't understand what that place is.  Confused yet?  You should be.  I was for months.  I still feel a little lost sometimes.

We have all heard the saying, "You are what you eat".  I think we all live in this general idea that doughnuts are bad for you, you should stop at one piece of cake and make sure you eat vegetables at dinner.  But what happens when it goes deeper.  When you realize that even in the things that you think are good for you, they layer in toxic ingredients.

I would say that I believed that I could tell a general difference in my kids when they had sugar.  They had more energy and the giggles came out 10 fold.  What I didn't realize was how intricately woven what they ate truly did effect how they behaved.  There is no way around it.   What you put in your body directly effects how you feel, how you  respond to people, how you behave, and your emotional response to life and circumstances.  My husband would kill me and then make fun of me for life if I put vegetable oil in our car to make it run.  It doesn't run on vegetable oil, even though I wish it did.  We need good old fashion gasoline. If we put vegetable oil in our car, it wouldn't run.  It wouldn't work.  We wouldn't be able to drive anywhere because our car doesn't have the right fuel.  Just like our car, our body needs certain food to run, to walk, to live, to love, to be free, to be whole, to be healthy, to be healed.  It's hard to communicate sometimes what we have learned about food and how it effects us.

It's hard not to be angry at how poisoned our food has become.  It's hard to feel confident in what we now know is true, but others look at you like you are crazy.  It's tricky navigating your way through food issues and what newspapers say, doctors, nutritionists, and then there is the internet.    All these things that I feel make it hard sometimes to talk with others about the diet.  I don't ever want to offend anyone by the way we eat.  I don't want others to look at us and assume we are snobs about our food.  I don't wan to talk about why we eat what we eat and have my listener think I judge them for how they eat.  But in the same breath, knowing what I know, it is hard to not want to share about how much better the quality of our life has become because we changed our diet.  Why wouldn't I want others to experience the joy we have found?  But how do I do that?

I don't know.

I don't know much...but I know I love you.

Heh, sorry, its late and I'm tired and that music lyric is funny to me.

So I guess in the end, thank you for letting me process our food issues here.  Thank you for walking along with us while we figure it out.  And I'll say it again, if anything that I say here resonates in your heart, pray over that.  Pay attention to it.  Your conscious is trying to tell you something.  Be patient.  We are each on a journey that looks different from one another.  Mine conscious was trying to speak to me for a couple years before I listened.  I lost those years with Big fighting, crying, frustrated, fighting, working on guilt.  We still fight and cry here, but real conversations happen afterwards where we get to pray together because my son can concentrate on me now.  He can focus and hear me.  We have our life back and I will never stop appreciating that.

Rose Quartz and mountain lions

I love that our family gets to go out the Black Hills every summer due to my husband being wonderful and playing music at family camp. We spend a whole week making art projects, singing songs, playing games and swinging on swings. I love hiking but haven't found that this activity gels well with my family yet.

But low and behold, Middle wanted to use his walking stick that he got from school and go gold mining. Paul and I made a pack that we would do whatever we could to make our kids dreams come true at camp. We went fishing, Tye dying, we made paper, and played countless hours on the basketball court and open field. But this was Middle's last big wish, and I was determined to make it happen. Justin a counselor was ready to take us. Paul and I just finished up a session talking about the Haiti Mission Project. It was 2:30, already way past nap time and Little had no choice but to come with us. Paul was getting things checked out on the car and Big was playing with his friends, so it was just me and Middle and Little. We were late already, Middle kept pulling on my skirt to get me going, and Justin had to be back in time to help prep dinner. So we grabbed our hiking sticks and Little had her bear and I was a screaming stereotype of a city girl who doesn't know how to hike. (Which I do, I just presently was not dressed accordingly.) I was wearing a sundress and three year old Old Navy Flip Flops, which basically means my feet were touching the ground and I was feeling every rock under each step. Those things are thin to begin with and I wore the balls of feet down to almost holes. We had a water bottle and my cell phone. No one was wearing sunscreen and I discover this hike is a mile to the Rose Quartz Mine where we will be lowering my children into a large rock pit to dig for treasure. I shake my head at the ridiculousness that we are becoming.

Four minutes into the hike I hear, "I'm tired, are we almost there?" And right after that, Little says, "Carry me mama? Carry me?" Oh my, what I have done.

Soon after this, we discover all the Mica on the ground which makes the Black Hills famous for all the sparkling rocks in the dirt. It is a beautiful shiny thin shell that coats rocks and you can easily peel it off. Little loves that fact that she has become an explorer and stops every five seconds and shouts, "Mica mama! I find mica!" Considering the ground is littered and covered in this stuff, it's gonna take us an hour just to walk 20 feet. This is annoying, I mean endearing to say the least. Here is Little with her huge hiking stick and favorite animal hunting for mica.

Right after this, Justin and I discover a large animals fresh remains and huge rib cage. I look at him and he informs me there have been mountain lion sightings this summer.

Awesome.

We hike on. I carry Little. We spot wild flowers. We drink water. I carry Little.  Little's puppy has to stop and pee. Yea, we stopped for that. She did the whole bit, wipe and wash paws and everything.

Good Grief.

Collect more mica, find a feather, carry Little some more. Then we arrive after a triumph mile hike to the Rose Quarz Mine in the Black Hills. This is where I find out that we have to lower my children inch by inch down the rocky terrain to get to the bottom. Me in a skirt, with my paper flip flops, a water bottle, two hiking sticks that have gotten discarded, two feathers and a fistful of mica that have become treasures. I shoved my cell phone down my dress and we made it happen. Look at how happy they look and they almost look completely unscathed.

.

Look how high that wall of rock is behind them.  That's what we slid down while lowering them into the pit.  The kids loved looking for special rocks.  They would collect them, and then separate them, and find their favorites.  Dreams come true baby.  Dreams coming true.

So we pocket our rocks and then start our walk back.  We climb out of the pit, me slipping on rocks and trying to stay decent in a skirt while not loosing our treasures. I have big sunglasses on, phone shoved down my bra, skirt covered in dirt, and my feet slipping on the rocks.  Who are we kidding, if I saw me, I would judge me, I was judging me when we left on this little adventure.

We weave through trees, Little races birds down the lane and that is when we notice more animal bones freshly savaged.   This is when I realize that there is no way on God's good earth that I could protect my kids from a mountain lion!  Justin and I exchange a look, and silently we communicate to each other that the best course of action is to quickly move forward.

This is a bit of challenge as Little pees herself and decides that she can't walk with wet shorts.  Middle has also decided that this adventure has far surpassed his walking capabilities and so Justin and I exchange water bottles, walking sticks and treasures, we haul the two kids on our backs, hands full of gear and we move forward.  My face is wet with sweat, my feet hurt and my back is now wet from pee.  We push on.

We make it.

We never saw the mountain lion.

And three hours later I got to shower.

Gross.

Someone please remind me of this story when next year I want to take my kids on a hike.