I am a bad suburban hippie! It has been a month since my last post. What is even sadder-er is that I have composed several imaginary posts in my head and was too lazy to blog about it. Hopefully, I will manage to post at least a few times per week from now on. I have so may exciting things going on in our household that I want to share. Keep you eyes peeled in the coming week for interesting suburban hippie adventures such as going grocery shopping hippie style, and my growing obsession with cloth diapering. Sooooo exciting! I know!!
Peace and Love my friends
I know I have been neglecting this site but next week I plan on getting on the ball. In the mean time, I hope everyone has a safe and happy time celebrating this Great Nation’s Independence Day. This was last year’s 4th of July at my parent’s house. I plan on being in the exact spot as seen in the photo and do nothing but kick back and relax all weekend. Word from my mother is that it has been raining for days now and may still be raining by Sunday. That is still not stopping Parker from stopping at the first fireworks warehouse he sees along I-20 and spend his life savings.
I hope you all have as wonderful a time this weekend as we plan too. See you Tuesday….Maybe…
Much love,
Wenders
So now that Wenders has been regaling everyone with the secrets of where her world and history of food comes from, I feel it’s a good time for me to say “Hi” and a few words on where my world of food comes from.
It is actually eerily similar to Wender’s story, with the exceptions of ; A. we didn’t live on a farm and B. we lived on another continent. But my earliest and cleares memories from the homeland most often involve picking berries off the bushes, sneaking with my best friend into the greenhouse and schnagging a couple cucumbers (European ones not these nasty thing you have here in america with ginormous seeds and leather for skin) and then hiding in the hedge and devouring our loot. Or picking peas, raspberries, strawberries, digging up potatoes and carrots or cutting chives, and parsley for dinner. It seemed like everyone had a garden of some sort with something healthy to go snack on. Heck, I even remember picking apples from the trees along the bike path on the way to school.
So when I hear of kids who have absolutely no idea where carrots come from and have to make special field trips to the country side so they can see things actually sitting in dirt, it makes me wonder what it would be like to grow up in a world where food is like gasoline. Yeah you know it doesn’t start out at the store/station but beyond that it comes on trucks you don’t really give it a second thought. That makes me sad, because I remember the joys of finding my very own pea and watching it grow and sneaking it extra water, until I deemed it was ‘Perfect’ and then picking it and eating it.
Then in the early 80s we moved to Texas, hot, burning, scorching, Texas. We were very fortunate, in that mom generally kept us well fed with home made meals on a daily basis which we all ate together at the table, but the parents were busy, the land a rental in the sprawl of suburbia, and time was a precious commodity for us all and so the days of fresh handpicked berries, veggies and herbs were over.
Next… the end of family dinners and the creep of convenience.
This was such a good looking lunch I had to take a camera phone pic and post right away. It’s a meatless chicken whole wheat wrap with organic vegetables and cheese with chipotle dressing. (I’m pretty sure there should have been way more comas in that sentence.) It was amazingly yummy, even if all I had was sliced cheese, and took only 2 minutes to make. I would even wager a bet that I could even get the picky preteen to eat this!
Fast forward [# REDACTED] years and I look at what the world has become and I long for that massive garden in the middle of nowhere. Somehow, I too became a slave to the quick and easy. It all began in college where I learned about fast food 101. It was the first time I lived within walking distance to TACOS! It was the first time I could call and have a pizza delivered. It was the first time I didn’t have parents around to say no. Thus, beginning a love/hate relationship with fast food. Can you say freshman 15++! I got better about cooking when I moved out of the dorms and got my first apartment, but not by much.
Fast forward a few more years when my first son was born. It was the first time I became conscious of what our family ate. I was especially diligent and mindful about the foods my son ate until he was about 2. This directly coincided with when I returned to work. Whew! I was really tired. I didn’t feel like there was any time to cook once I picked him up from daycare. It was much much much (MUCH) easier to grab something on the way home. On the nights that I did cook, it usually came out of a bag, can, or box of preservative laden goodness. Hey, but at least I was cooking. …..Because microwaved chicken nuggets were a suitable meal……oh Lord, cooked in plastic trays none-the -less! Although, I didn’t pay attention to the fat content, I usually cooked something that had a veggie, and it usually involved chicken because I wasn’t so much of a red meat eater. The meals were actually quite wholesome. The real kicker was that I was too tired to fight a picky eater so when my oldest son would complain or refuse to try anything, I just cooked him nuggets or fries while we ate the vegetables! It is very hard to not be too hard on myself. But that was definitely the WRONG way to go.
It would still be several years before I would start seeing the light, but I did start rekindling my love of gardening. Unfortunately, apartment patios and containers were not the best environment for me or my plants to grow. It took an act of desperation to help me see that my lifestyle was not working for me. It mainly took a nasty break up and loosing everything to help me return to my roots and relearn the basics.
In my next post, I shall delve into murky depths of my despair turning into a monumental growth of spirit when I have to suck it up and move back home as a 30 year old single mom.
In the mean time. I started another blog on beautiful basics. This one is co-authored with my super BFF Kinundra. It’s called Enuff of the Fluff and it is about our journey into weight loss and exercise. I also made a big decision to use cloth diapers and you can read all about this adventure here. I have also been exploring other avenues in my emerging creative business in Wenderflonia. Life is good and I am letting the pieces fall where they may. I hope to keep up the blogging next week however I am making a well needed trip back to my parent’s house. My mother is in desperate need of some grand baby holding time, and I am happy to oblige. Problem is that, being so far out in the county, the internet is very limited.
Wenderz
As a child, my mother would always shoo me out of the house with an emphatic, “Go Play!” Most of the time I would begrudgingly stomp out and slam the screen door along the way (still love that sound). At the time, I just wanted to stay inside and bother her or play in my room, but on those nice spring, summer, fall, winter days (It’s Texas folks. It’s always outside weather.) she wanted me out of her hair. My mother was a busy woman after all. She was a housewife raising two kids on a farm in the middle of BFE (errrr…West Texas). What the heck was there for us kids to do? As you can see by the photo, my brother and I had limited entertainment …..
Ahhh what COULDN’T be done with a lawnmower!
One of my fondest memories was the family garden. It was a living buffet of goodness. I can remember sitting in the onion patch eating seed onions and gorging on sun warmed cherry tomatoes. Oh, It’s a fond memory now but at the time it was also a sore spot. After supper every evening it was our job to go pick, weed, hoe, shell peas or laboriously do whatever needed to be done. This was no piddly back yard garden either. It was a serious, get you through the rest of the year with no grocery shopping kind of garden. An acre, at least, of row after row of organic, home grown goodness. I was the older of the two children and still maintain that I did ALL of the work while my brother made mud holes to “waller” in. Now I realize that my mother had the hardest job of all. Many nights she spent exhaustively canning and freezing and blanching and sterilizing and juicing and peeling and water bathing the fruits of our labor into the wee hours. After having done thins myself, I know realize what an arduous task this was. Speaking of fruit trees, there wasn’t a shortage of them either. I mostly remember peaches, plumbs, apricots, and pecan.
Ahhh the good life. We grew, fed or hunted most everything we ate. There was always a cow grazing in the field named T-bone or a pig named Porkchop. My dad hunted deer, and dove and is still to this day an avid, to the obsessive degree, fisherman. The amount of pictures I have sitting on a dead deer carcass will frighten you. I will spare you the scanned visuals, so you will just have to believe me. (No wonder I am a vegetarian!)
When I was very young, my family only ate out at a restaurant once a year. A real treat was to go to McDonalds for an ice cream only (small) and play on the play ground for an hour. These special occasions were reserved for when we got to go to town for well-doctor visits or buying shoes. Which was about once a year as well. We were dirt poor yet we lived and ate better than most families do today. These were happy and good times for me.
The story of my childhood is what I consider beautiful basics. I know that times have changed and I am essentially a city girl now, but I still want to hold on to these principles. I want my children to know where their food and livelihood comes from. simple. beautiful. and basic.
In my next post, I will fast forward a few years and discover Taco Bell!
That's Me!
Hello! This is my first post to BeautifulBasics. I am so excited at the possibilities that this site has to offer. As a mom who deeply cares about the health of her family, I understand the importance of eating and living healthy. In a world completely filled with saturated everything, I also know it can be very difficult to find the simpler, more wholesome, things in life. That is why I think it is important to find other people who share similar values and gain insight and inspiration. It is my hope that this site and blog can aid other individuals and families with their own quest for health/vitality.
I intend to use this blog as a way of documenting my family’s journey in a world of good health through simple and basic living. It hasn’t been too terribly long since we committed our family to a life this. So far it has been both easy and difficult. Sometimes it is really hard to say no to Sonic!
The Players:
My partner in everything and super-awesome creator of this site
The Childrenz
Welcome to Beautifulbasics.com . This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
Simon
Wenders