Posts belonging to Category Nature and the Environment

We just returned from a 2 week vacation at the beach.  The weather was very warm and amazing, every day was a beach day, and we all got our fill of sun, sand, and the surf.  We returned on Saturday and started our school year today (I’ll post about that tomorrow), and so during the trip my mind wandered and thought about education, curricula ideas, and fall planning.

I think my approach to academics is a bit on the intense side, but I save the intensity for the three R’s (reading, writing, and arithmetic).  We do the 3 R’s daily–we drill, we drill again, and we keep a strict schedule.  The way I see it, once a student has learned how to read, write, and reason (math), they are very capable of learning almost any other subject.  As a homeschooling mother, my academic goals are simple–give my children the toolset to be life-long learners.

And so subjects like Science, History, Geography and Art are often learned at convenient times, in fun-ways, and are not a source of stress for me.  My older children are still very young (2nd grade and K), and I’m sure we will get more “intense” about these none R subjects at some point.  But not right now.  Right now we are learning science on the beach.  Our lessons were fun, student-led, and very memorable.

Gianna and I searching for sea life

One of Gianna's first finds, he's coming out to say hello

Our next two finds. We cooked and ate this crab and mussel for lunch.

Claire was terrified of this smaller blue claw crab. Science lesson courtesy of a poor seagull, I robbed him of his lunch.

My babies chasing the birds. They learned pretty quickly that said birds will run or fly away every time.

Studying the hermit crabs, sand crabs, baby blue shell crabs, and snails Gianna fished out of the jetty.

The kids learned many lessons, including–low-tide is the best time to find sea life in the jetty; blue claw crabs reside in the jetty under the rocks; you should not reach your hand into a small pool with a blue claw crab present; even the small blue claw crabs can take a chunk out of your skin (poor G!); mom is lucky if she can catch a crab with only a bucket and shovel; hermit crabs borrow their shells and change them as they grow; mussels, crabs, and clams all make their own shells; sea gulls view small children with food as prey (poor Claire had food removed from her hand by some very aggressive birds!). And we also discussed some more scientific things, like the diet of bottom dwelling sea creatures, their habitat and need for water, the tracks different animals (mainly birds) leave in the sand, and the concept of tides and the moon.

I’m sure Gianna will think her science book pretty boring after our two weeks at the beach. I know I do!

Here on the Gulf Coast, people are starting to talk about hurricane season, which runs June through November. The last couple of years were fairly uneventful, a much-needed break after the devastation of Hurricane Ike in 2008! Although I saw my fair share of natural disasters as a child – Hurricane Bob in Boston and a blizzard while living in Istanbul (the city’s first in 100 years!) come to mind – Ike was my first hurricane experience as an adult. The storm ripped through our part of the Gulf Coast in the middle of the night and headed inland rapidly. Most people thought that they would have more time to pack their bags and evacuate, but the storm moved more quickly than expected.

Our house shortly after the storm hit.

When Ike hit, we had been living in Texas for less than 3 months. My husband’s job required him to work throughout the entire disaster. This meant that the kids, then 4 1/2 and 11 months, and I would be at home by ourselves for the duration of the storm and its aftermath. Some generous neighbors invited us to spend the night of the hurricane with them, and while the kids thought that this was all a grand adventure, the adults made the best of the situation with a movie and some last-minute preparations. The winds were already very high and there was a lot of rain, but the power was still on. When the storm hit in the middle of the night, we moved all of the children downstairs (just in case a tree were to fall on the roof) and waited vigilantly. The power went out immediately and we pulled out our flashlights and candles. By morning, the worst of the storm was over and I went home with the children, ready for the worst. Amazingly, our home was fine. While we sustained some water damage and had a tremendous amount of fallen tree limbs, we were uninjured and our home was mostly okay.

As we all learned, the hardest part was yet to come. Power outages lasted anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, which meant that refrigerated food began to spoil, air conditioning was down, lights could not be turned on, etc. Personally, I felt instantly isolated: I could not charge my cell phone, I had no internet access, and I had no family or close friends in the area. Thank goodness for our wind-up emergency radio! There was also a huge amount of manual labor to be done: tree limbs had to be chopped and dragged into piles, leaves had to be raked and bagged, and homes had to be thoroughly cleaned. Restless children had to be entertained, and hungry mouths had to be fed.

Piles and trash bags full of tree limbs - lots of hard work!

Until our power returned on Day 6, we survived by counting on the help of neighbors, buying a car cell phone charger, finding open restaurants and grocery stores, and enjoying some unseasonably cool temperatures. Because we have a gas grill, friends brought over their meat and we had nightly cook-outs on our back patio. My husband charged his laptop at work during the day, and the kids watched a movie at night while the adults chatted. It was a great way to build community and to make fast friends! We only opened the refrigerator and freezer when absolutely necessary, but mostly we ate canned beans, granola bars, and other pantry staples. We drank bottled water and made sure not to drink the water when taking quick showers.

So, what are some steps that we could have taken to be more prepared for Hurricane Ike? How can you ensure that your family is prepared for a natural disaster?

According to the National Hurricane Center, all families should develop a Family Plan, create a Disaster Supply Kit, have a place to go, secure their homes, and have a plan for their pets. Their website is a great resource, as is the CDC’s website for all natural disasters, and I would encourage you to visit these sites to help you develop a preparedness plan for your family. In the case of hurricanes, the National Hurricane Center includes the following items: water, food, blankets & pillows, clothing & rain gear, sturdy shoes, first aid kit/medicines/prescription drugs, special items for babies and the elderly, toiletries, flashlights and batteries, battery-operated radios, fully charged cell phones, and cash. I would include: a full tank of gas, a full pot of already-made coffee, a car cell-phone charger, cleaning supplies and paper towels, and above all, a hard-working, positive attitude!

What other items would you add to your disaster preparedness checklist? What have I forgotten? Let’s help each other to prepare for natural disasters!

We learned about these handy helpers from our friend L, who orders them in bulk and sells them as a fund raiser for her LaLeche League group, and they have made picnics such a snap for me – no more baggies to buy and throw away, and the kids have a plate for their sandwich when they open the mat.  You can choose from many different fabrics, so each child can have their own and you won’t need to be pulling apart sandwiches to remember which one has mayo.  They even help keep the counters clean as I make the sandwiches right on the open mats, a great help on a busy morning when we are running out the door.  I have to go and pack up some PB&J for the park right now, but I just wanted to make sure that you all know about the easy, wonderful wrap-n-mats.  I am going to order some of the pouch style so that we can have our snacks-n-sides ready to go in the same way.  Happy August!

The kids were playing outside today with neighborhood children here in Oxford, our most recent stop. All three of my children and a very sweet four year old neighbor boy (who, incidentally, has not yet gone off to school) began a game of making underground “houses” by digging wide holes into the ground, about 6 inches in diameter and an inch or two deep, one for each child. Their holes were in a rugged area on the edge of a large field near our apartment building where the grass is already patchy. They were imagining wonderful things, making plans for each step of the process, laughing, chasing bugs, getting dirty, all those wholesome heartwarming childhood things. I reclined in the sun and basked in their happiness.

Then, our seven-year-old neighbor Ruby, just back from public school (at 5pm), skidded up on her bike, tilted her head, and said with a pretty little English accent, “you children should stop that right now, you’re ruining a patch of nature.”

Her sass-itude ruffled my feathers, but her point, well, I considered it. After all, I’ve been fraternizing with liberal environmentalists since I left Alabama at the impressionable age of 18 to attend Princeton. Environmentalism is the religion of the godless. As long as Hollywood Hedonist respects the environment and pays big bucks to offset his carbon footprint, he is absolutely righteous and can even hold himself up as morally superior and look down on the rest of us. And also in the environmentalist camp we have Tree Hugger, who hates all things chemical and artificial including deodorant, actually probably worships leaves, yet wholeheartedly supports chemical abortions and couldn’t live without artificial and chemical contraceptives. That’s why I’m highly impatient with the environmentalist agenda. Public school is a great place to be indoctrinated by them. Poor Ruby.

However, as Christians, we are of course called to environmental stewardship—respecting and caring for God’s creation, but not worshiping it in itself. And it’s here for us to enjoy as well as to preserve for future generations. In Alabama as a child, I spent summers barefoot, dirty, breaking off tree branches and leaves to build forts, digging deep into the ground in search of water or China, plucking grass and flowers endlessly, even doing scandalous things like burning bugs by reflecting the sun through a magnifying glass. I can’t imagine my childhood apart from these encounters with nature, which were my joy and were so rich with imagination and exploration and exercise and good fun.

The times are changing since then—with both the good environmentalists and the cultish environmentalists hiding behind every tree, we’re constantly made aware that every single blade of grass and leaf is a treasure from Mother Earth. And that’s true to an extent. But political correctness aside, I desire to teach my children proper stewardship of God’s creation. So my question to you: was Ruby right? What limits do you place on your children’s freedom to enjoy and explore and dissect and experience (and even destroy) rugged nature, in order to preserve it? Do you talk much with your children about protecting the environment? How do you frame it?

We’ve been having some fun with planting this spring, thanks to Christopher’s interest in gardening (they’re learning about plants at school this month!). Last week, Christopher came home with a lima bean plant and wanted to plant it in the clay behind our garage, along with some apple seeds, so he built himself a makeshift garden and was very excited that he did it all by himself…Well, with a little help from his sister, who diligently brought him rocks for his border

Last weekend was an intense educational experience for our family. We spent the weekend in western Pennsylvania visiting the sustainable “beyond organic” farm of an old law school friend.
The paths of lawyers and farmers usually only cross at an upscale, yuppie farmers market. Fortunately for us, we were blessed to have known our farmer friend before he became a farmer’s market supplier.

Farmer Dave was an old law school classmate of Mr. Red. Despite a stellar first year performance, Dave decided that law school wasn’t for him. Instead, Dave and his beautiful wife Mandy took a big risk – a risk many of us crunchy folks talk about taking, but few ever actually take. Dave and Mandy packed their bags, moved in with Mandy’s parents, and started working towards owning their own sustainable farm.

In the Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan spends some time on Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm. At one point, Salatin lets Pollan know that part of the problem with modern farming is that all the A students have left the farms for higher paying prestigious jobs. Salatin laments that most of today’s farmers are C students. In his book, Pollan clearly illustrates that good, local, sustainable farming takes brains. And like Salatin, Farmer Dave has the brains.

So what happens when an A student goes back to the land for a living?

We arrived on Saturday afternoon to Dave’s home atop a scenic hill in the country. Dave built the house himself. It is designed to be tremendously energy efficient, and includes a row of windows on the south side of the house. These windows provide heat for their well-insulated home. Inside these windows Dave grows herbs and other plants.

In the field, Dave grows a variety of crops. But Dave focuses the bulk of his energy on raising organic chickens and turkeys. The chickens we saw were beautiful little creatures. My daughter Gianna went right into the chicken pen and picked up a chicken.

Dave moves the pens daily so that the chicken poop can fertilize different parts of the field for his crops. Dave also raises some egg-laying chickens. The turkeys are kept in a larger, fenced area but, like the chicken pens, Dave regularly moves the fencing. During our tour of the turkey pen we first met “our turkey.”

Before the visit, Dave joked that instead of just buying our Thanksgiving Turkey from him, Mr. Red should butcher our turkey. Mr. Red nervously agreed. Dave then took us and our Thanksgiving turkey (and five other turkeys) over to his butchering station (shown below).

It’s a clever open-air station very similar to the Polyface arrangement described in Omnivore’s Dilemma. I won’t describe it in detail, but it’s a very respectful and simple butchering process. Mr. Red made the fatal cut to the throat and I helped with the gutting. I’ve written before about organic living and the importance of being “close” to our food. This was a whole new level of closeness.

It was a really incredible experience to take such responsibility for one’s meat-eating. Mr. Red described it as a “spiritual experience.” We even blessed the bird. And bless him we should. He is a wonderful creature, made by God and worthy of respect. It’s wonderful to see a farmer whose work incorporates those values.

The butchering and cleanup took the rest of the daylight. The next day, we briefly visited the farm of Mandy’s parents (Farmer Dave’s in-laws). The kids fed their pigs, pet their beautiful horses, and jumped in the back of a pickup truck to watch the farm dog chase around a large herd of cattle. What more could a kid ask for?

Dave and his family are doing a great thing. Their farming not only uses the land, but nourishes it. The problems of factory farming may seem overwhelming, but to a little plot of land atop a hill in Western PA, Farmer Dave is making a difference.

So the next time your local, beyond organic farmer wants an extra dollar per pound for his meat, remember Farmer Dave, and remember that your extra dollar is going to support something more than just a tasty chicken.

While I have some concerns with The March of Dimes (primarily their goal to have every baby be a healthy baby, a very unachievable objective in our fallen world) I do think The March for Dimes does some great work. They give women valuable information to make wise health choices prior to and during their pregnancies. Having personally suffered the loss of a baby due to a very serious birth defect, I’m all for helping to improve the health of every mom and baby. For the moment, I’ll put aside some of my concerns with The March of Dimes and link to their recent online newsletter article, The Eco-Friendly Mom and Baby for the 21st Century.

Many of their recommendations are great for new moms, and a real starting-off point for those of us looking to go more “green” with our parenting. I know some of our commentors are pretty hard-core in this area, but for the rest of us, it’s a good place to start–especially for those expecting new little ones soon! One of their recommendations, buying an organic mattress, is of particular interest to me, and I’m wondering where I can get one of these so as to not break the bank?

Before I begin, I want to remind our new readers that I am a self-proclaimed granola, or “crunchy” mom. I realize that not everyone takes these issues as seriously as I do, and that’s ok. It is not my intent to be self-righteous in this post, but only to discuss some of my recent thoughts on organic living…

I recently returned from a trip to upstate/western NY, where I visited my sister and her family in their small rural town. My sister and her husband are real granolas, and they take the art of food preparation to a truly new level. At her home we were served fresh bread made from home soaked whole grains, butter that smelled like cheese from a local family farm, unpasteurized milk, and eggs with deep yellow/orange yolks—again from a local farm. We dined on whole wheat buttermilk pancakes, and my sister, with the help of a local cow, made the buttermilk! We topped off our visit with homemade vanilla ice cream made from fresh cream and sweetened with maple syrup.

When we left, I realized that my sister lives really “close” to her food. Other than herbs, she doesn’t grow the food herself (she lives on a small lot), but she knows who does, and as a result she is deeply aware of where her food comes from and how to best prepare it. Her food is natural, usually organic, and local.

We live in a small urban town and during the summer we try to buy most of our food from the local farmer’s market. The framer’s market is great because it gives the local farmers a direct to customer outlet for their foods. It allows small local family farms to not only survive, but to thrive. The farmers make more money selling directly to us, and we buy things cheaper than we could at the local supermarket. I love buying lettuce that was picked fresh in the morning, and I love talking to the farmer who picked it. I love knowing what fruits and veggies are in season in our area and waiting for the locally grown peaches, rather than buying peaches from Peru in the wintertime.

All of these things are part of what I would consider “organic living.” I use this term to mean living as a good steward of creation. Understanding where your food comes from, respecting the land it was grown on, or the cow that provided the meat, and generally treating creation and our bodies with respect.

Lately, buying organic is the newest fad in “nutritionism.” Just like the low-fat craze of the 80’s, the “organic” craze has come to mean buying anything with an organic label. The box of organic teddy grams is better than non-organic locally grown lettuce because it has the label “organic.” Organic lettuce grown in Honduras and shipped to the East Coast is better than lettuce grown on a local farm moving towards organic certification. Don’t think about the energy involved in shipping that lettuce from Honduras. Don’t think about how they actually make an organic teddy gram, the processing involved, or the trash and debris involved in the packaging. Organic teddy grams are just about as far from “organic” or close-to-nature as you can get, except maybe a bag of organic Doritos (is that possible?). But our label conscience society wants us to believe that those teddy grams are somehow good for us because they have the label organic.

I’m not trying to say that I don’t buy organic crackers or teddy grams, because I do. And I’m sure those organic teddy grams are better for your body than the regular teddy grams loaded with dyes and other harsh chemical additives and “spices.” What I’m saying is that organic living is really about moving away from these pre-packaged things, and moving toward locally grown and homemade products. It is about taking the time to prepare our own food, to understand our food, and to respect our environment and neighbors. It is about slowing down and making food preparation a part of our family life. Our culture is constantly pressuring us to go, go, go, and to buy, buy, buy, things that will make our life easier, and that usually means pre-prepared food products, and organic teddy grams. There will always be days when this cannot be avoided, but wouldn’t it be great if we could avoid it on most days. Like most things, I’m aiming for the 80/20 rule (achieve the ideal 80% of the time, don’t sweat it the other 20%).

If you’ve never considered this before, think about one practical way you can get more in touch with your food. This might mean making something from scratch that you normally buy pre-prepared (and this usually saves money.) If there is a local farmer’s market in your area, check it out. If not, maybe try to shop at a local store, you know the kind of store where they know your name after only 2 trips. If this isn’t possible, try to buy locally grown products at your grocery store and take a pass on those peaches from Honduras in January. And remember, as mothers, we are the main purchasers of food, so we really do have the power to change the way food is bought and sold in this country.

This weekend, I noticed a friend using glass bottles to feed her baby. My brother’s fiance has purchased an aluminum water bottle. It is really time to toss our sippy cups and beloved Nalgenes? If the New York Times says so, perhaps the BPA concerns have moved past crunchy extremism…

I could put this in the comments under MaryAlice’s recent post on Going Green, but I thought it was interesting enough to get its own post.

I saw this disturbing story today, and am really concerned about our water supply! Several years ago I read an article in Family Foundations Magazine about birth control hormones in our local lakes and streams. These hormones were causing changes in fish, specifically the male fish. Big surprise, now these hormones and pharmaceutical drugs are in our water supply. What we flush down the toilet gets filtered and cleaned, but trace amounts of the drugs we consume, from ibuprofen to birth control pills, eventually wind up coming back through our faucets. The water treatment plants are not high tech enough to remove many of the hormones and drugs from the water, so trace amounts remain.

Over the past five years, the number of U.S. prescriptions rose 12 percent to a record 3.7 billion, while nonprescription drug purchases held steady around 3.3 billion, according to IMS Health and The Nielsen Co.

“People think that if they take a medication, their body absorbs it and it disappears, but of course that’s not the case,” said EPA scientist Christian Daughton, one of the first to draw attention to the issue of pharmaceuticals in water in the United States.

Some drugs, including widely used cholesterol fighters, tranquilizers and anti-epileptic medications, resist modern drinking water and wastewater treatment processes. Plus, the EPA says there are no sewage treatment systems specifically engineered to remove pharmaceuticals.

One technology, reverse osmosis, removes virtually all pharmaceutical contaminants but is very expensive for large-scale use and leaves several gallons of polluted water for every one that is made drinkable.

Another issue: There’s evidence that adding chlorine, a common process in conventional drinking water treatment plants, makes some pharmaceuticals more toxic.

Am I nuts here, or is this really creepy. I really wonder how all these trace chemicals are affecting our bodies, just read what they are doing to fish:

Recent laboratory research has found that small amounts of medication have affected human embryonic kidney cells, human blood cells and human breast cancer cells. The cancer cells proliferated too quickly; the kidney cells grew too slowly; and the blood cells showed biological activity associated with inflammation.

Also, pharmaceuticals in waterways are damaging wildlife across the nation and around the globe, research shows. Notably, male fish are being feminized, creating egg yolk proteins, a process usually restricted to females.

Makes me think twice about popping an ibuprofen for a headache, or taking that unnecessary antibiotic just in case the illness is bacterial.

Last year my sister-in-law spent $6,000 on a reverse osmosis system for her house. I thought she was nuts as they don’t have a lot of extra cash to spend and intensely purified water seemed a pretty low priority on my personal list of home improvement projects. Now she doesn’t seem so crazy.