You can freeze sandwiches. Why didn’t I realize this about 3 years ago? I have a school-age daughter, and naturally I want her to have nutritious, healthy lunches. My attempts to send my daughter in with various kinds of frugal, left-over based meals have met with mixed success, and all too often my kid would…
Kids
A Community Thing
Hi there. I’m Erica. Been a while, hasn’t it? Sorry about that. I have been elbows deep in my real life, for good and for bad. This blog is real enough. It’s as true as it needs to be. The stuff I write about doing, I actually do. The rants about food politics, I actually…
On A Personal Note… (Or: What I Did On My Summer Vacation)
At this time of year millions of kids have to write essays entitled, “What I Did On My Summer Vacation.” I thought I would write a grown-up version of “What I Did On My Summer Vacation” to explain what’s been going on in life beyond this blog. So, at the risk of getting all Opera…
Add An Outdoor Tic-Tac-Toe Board To Your Garden
I saw a photo on Facebook yesterday of an outdoor tic-tac-toe board with stone markers. It was so adorable, and so totally do-able that I immediately ran outside to make my own garden tic-tac-toe game. This project was super fast and easy, required only stuff I already had kicking around, and the kids love it. Gather…
Lunch In A Jar: How Mason Jars Can Make Your Brown Bagging Easier
Do you run short on reusable, environmentally-friendly containers when you are packing lunches? In the, “this may be too obvious to be a blog post but may also change your lunch hour for the better” category, I’d like to talk about using your stash of mason jars for things other than canning (or margaritas). Like brown…
Where The Men Aren't
Maybe you have websites like these your blog-reader. They are filled with instagram-tinted family photos and helpful recipes and they have cute tag-lines that always include the phrase: “journey to self-sufficiency.” These blogs focus on what one family is doing to become more healthy, self-reliant or economically and environmentally responsible. Sometimes the focus is on…
Mother’s Day: A Radical Act of Defiance
Secretly, creeping through the brain and heart and blood of every mama there is a deep, dark fear that we are Not Mom Enough. We snap at our kids, or grab the sharpie out of their little hand a bit too roughly before they can decorate another piece of furniture, or are the last to…
Side-Dressing: A Feeding Strategy For Plants and Kids
For a year-and-a-half I felt terrible guilt that I was ignoring my daughter. Reasonable observers would assure me that I was not neglecting her, but in my heart I knew that the attention lavished on her had diminished markedly since the birth of our son. You see, our daughter was a home-schooled only-child for six-and-a-half years. She got…
An 18 Month Old's Ode To Broccoli
On Things That Make You Feel Big Broccoli, my broccoli: Nothing brings me more joy I love you more than all my toys. With you I can pretend to be A big ol’ giant, eating trees. On Showing Your True Feelings Broccoli, my broccoli: When I know I get to eat you – and what…
Burning Polly Pocket: My Clutter-Clearing Fantasy
I can tell it’s officially spring because yesterday I was hit with an overwhelming urge to take everything in my house, pile it in the driveway and burn it. In my pyromaniacal fantasy I haul room-fulls of stuff out into the street and pile it up until all my precious individual things have blurred into an undifferentiated mountain…
The 5 Best Vegetables To Grow With Kids
I wrote the article below for the website of a local magazine called ParentMap about a month ago. It’s all aglow with the joys and benefits of gardening with kids, and these are many. But I gotta tell you, this past weekend I turned around to see my son standing in the raised bed I’d just been…
The Beauty of The Survivor
Part One My mom will say, if you live long enough, it’ll happen to you or to someone you know. It really doesn’t matter what “it” is – disease, divorce, death, loss of a child, suicide, job loss, tragedy. Live long enough and eventually these things will touch your world. I know friends, mentors, parents of…