Today is my four year wedding anniversary, so you’d think I’d be inspired to whip up something extra-special in the kitchen.  Oddly enough, the only thing I want to eat are leftover baked beans from this recipe I made last night.  They may not be glamorous, but boy are they good!

**For the record, I had every intention of making fresh-baked cinnamon sugar dounuts for Mario and Nina this morning; I  just forgot to set my alarm to extra-freaking early.  I’ll make them this weekend when I can stick around and actually watch my family enjoy them.  Nina’s never had a dounut – can you believe it?  I can’t wait to see the look on her face when she takes her first bite.

I want it on record that in no way do I think Middle Aged = Old!  But still, this afternoon was the first time I really felt my age.  More than when I got divorced, or remarried, or was told I should consider an amnio when I got pregnant.  Nope, this was the moment when it finally hit me that I’m 37 (which is not a bad age to be).

I wore one of my Cure concert tees to yoga class today, from the Standing on the Beach/Staring at the Sea tour.  (Does anyone else remember that tour?  Or at least the album?  Anyone…anyone?)  A student asked me who was on my shirt – not the most unusual thing, no biggie – not everyone is a Cure fan, right?  But then it dawned on me that she hadn’t even been born yet when I was rocking out in this shirt.

Yeah, I probably should feel at least a little bit middle-aged, but I’m still on an adrenaline high from balancing, twisting, and contorting myself for an hour straight.

I miss Chicago.  Most of the time it’s just a distant pang at the back of my conscience, and that’s as it should be – I’ll always be a city girl - a Chicagoan! – at heart, and I don’t want to forget who I am.  But some days I miss Chicago so much it makes my chest hurt.  On those days, I take a walk through the 14.78 acres that constitute my back yard and remind myself that when I lived in Chicago, I was often taking trips to seek out places where I could get away from the concrete jungle, the traffic, the hordes of people; places that were just like what I’m lucky enough to now call home.

Come on, take a walk with me and my little forest gnome.

It’s awfully pretty out here, don’t you think?

We’d better get moving, the gnome looks impatient.

Fortunately, I’m one of those people who’s happy just about all of the time, no matter where I am.  And how could I not be happy here?

Amy and I once drove for I don’t know how many hours to climb and boulder in Vedavoo (and reward ourselves with copious amounts of Fat Tire and Beau Jo’s pizza).  Being in the mountains is intoxicating – but so is losing yourself in a maze of trees:

Good thing she’s such a formidable little gnome, or the trees just might swallow her up:

Peeking through sun dappled leaves out onto the pond…in the spring, we have baby geese out here to keep us company:

Upon emerging from the woods, we’re greeted by a blue sky:

Yeah, I think I can get used to this.

When I was a freshman at university, I developed an immediate aversion to plastic straws after a boyfriend told me some of the horrible ways that discarded plastic resurfaces in the environment.  To this day, I can’t touch a straw without internally wincing.

I’m far from perfect, and maybe if I hadn’t had such a maddening crush on this particular boy I wouldn’t have taken personal accountability to heart until much later in life.  But these days it’s impossible to avoid the trappings of our disposable society.

When articles about the Pacific Garbage Patch started showing up, I thought there would be some sort of public outcry that would catapult our society beyond the no-brainer, (hopefully) commonplace acts such as using cloth shopping totes, stainless steel travel mugs, and minimally packaged shampoo bars.  It hasn’t happened yet, but every day I see people taking baby steps in that direction.  But I can’t help but wonder – will all of the consumption and waste continue until we hit a tipping point?  I know that change doesn’t happen overnight, but sometimes people need a push to get on board.

I stumbled across a Website today called Midway Journey, and the work they’re doing will hopefully contribute to this push.

One of the collaborators on the Midway project, Chris Jordan, recently posted photographs that really drive this point home.  I’ve included some of them below.  If you take the time to view these photographs, please really look at them.

In Chris’ words:

These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

I’ve been too busy to make hardly any food this week, let alone blog about it.  So busy that the only bread coming out of my oven was made with my last cherished bottle of Fat Tire.

But you know what?  Beer, garlic, and fresh rosemary get along quite nicely in this recipe.

MoFo 2009 recipe #8:  Rosemary Garlic Beer Bread

I’m working out of our students’ computer lab today, so I don’t want to mess with uploading photos directly off of my phone onto some random computer.  Luckily, I have a few pics from last Sunday that I already uploaded to Flickr.

These days, Nina is all about Dressing Up.  Any occasion is of the utmost importance:  washing dishes, transplanting earth worms, building a light house out of wooden blocks.  If she’s going to be forced to wear clothes (yes, we’re still in the throes of her naked phase), then darn it, she’s going to look good.

I really was going to post something other than one of Nina’s crazy self-styled outfits…

but who can resist a toddler in mismatched prints?

This outfit was put together for the occasion of Planting Garlic.

On our way to the bed, Nina found a new hydrangea bloom.

She really is a cutie-patootie, wouldn’t you agree?

I’ve really tried to watch my words around Nina, but there’s one that she picked up probably a year and a half ago and hasn’t forgotten.  It was mildly embarrassing when she would blurt it out randomly, but since at least this week  she’s started using it correctly, in full sentences.  Friday evening we were watching the wind pick up outside when she said, clear as day in her high-pitched, lilting toddler voice, “It’s shitty outside, mommy.”  We try to avoid making generalizations or being lazy with our words when we talk to Nina, so I just continued discussing the weather with her by using appropriately descriptive words (cloudy, windy, cold, etc).  Saturday morning we were getting ready to go to the library and she said it again.  And on Sunday when I put too much pepper in her breakfast…yep, same word.  So we had the talk about when to use certain words, and that Mommy will try a little harder, too.

I had three reactions to this new word in her vocabulary:

1. I was pretty impressed that she was using it appropriately and not just for shock value,
2. I kicked myself for using that word in the house when I thought she wasn’t within earshot, and
3. it really sucks that she automatically thinks a cloudy sky = crappy weather.

So now for the positive validation of at least one of my parenting skills, what I feed my kid.  Nina called me into the living room for a feast she’d prepared in her make believe kitchen.  She sat me down and said she had to go outside to pull up our food.  What’s on the menu, Nina?, I asked.  “Corn… potatoes – umm, orange potatoes… leaves, carrots…purple potatoes…hmmm…and lemon balm!”

I was feeling pretty proud of myself until I remembered that on Thursday night while at the CVS drive-thru Nina leaned over and shouted at the top of her lungs to the pharmacist, “HOT POTATOES!!“

Our visit was short, but sweet.

The air was dark as pitch when we arrived.  Then I looked up and could actually see the Milky Way!  That hasn’t happened since I was in Breckenridge with Amy.  I tried taking some pictures, but the only one that came out was  a shot of the moon:

goodnight, moon

There was so much moonlight that when Nina woke up nearly two full hours before sunrise, she thought the sun was already out and exclaimed “Nini!  Tent!  Wake up!  Sun up!  Tent!”  You get the gist.  It was a very exciting morning, and a lot of fun seeing Nina experience waking up in a tent for the first time.

After a tour of Hatteras island (where Mar was born and raised), we picked up a new kite for Nina and headed straight for the beach.

I can't believe my husband spent most of his life here. Wow.

Nina's lucky she didn't fly away with the kite!

Just look at that sky...

In case you're wondering, it's a frog

Enjoying the sand between her toes

Nina slept for a whopping 7 minutes on the ride back to camp.  Despite hours on the beach in 90+ degree weather, she was completely refreshed and insisted on showing me some of her new faces:

She calls this her "Grrrr face"

and this is her "we didn't bring any ice cream?" face

When we woke up the next morning, the temperature had dropped at least 20 degrees!  Truth be told, it felt wonderful.  It was also the kick in the pants we needed to pack things up.

See me? I'm eating breakfast! Outside a tent! Very exciting stuff.

Brrrr!

Nina is still learning how to catch a frisbee...

But get out of the way when it's her turn to throw!

We headed towards the beach one last time, but then it started to rain.

boardwalk path from our camp site to the ocean

These smiley little flowers were all over the ground at our camp site.

A wonderful trip in general, and a great first camping experience with the Neenster.  We hope to take her camping in the mountains in the next few weeks.

Once again I’m way behind on my Sunday NYT reading, but this article is so great that I really think all of my non-veg friends (that would be 99.9% of you) and family (that would be ALL of you) should read this.

Wait!  It’s not a scathing, preachy condemnation of omnivores.  Not even close.  It’s a wonderful narrative about how food is wrapped up in memories and experience, about falling off the veg wagon and clamboring back on again, about an immigrant grandmother’s comfort food, about parenthood, about self-discovery.

My favorite bit is about parenthood, actually:

“Children confront us with our paradoxes and dishonesty, and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every why — Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that? — and often there isn’t a good one. So you say, simply, because. Or you tell a story that you know isn’t true. And whether or not your face reddens, you blush. The shame of parenthood — which is a good shame — is that we want our children to be more whole than we are, to have satisfactory answers.”

So go forth, read this article!  (Amy, love, I’m especially talking to you.)  I promise you won’t regret it.