Zero Mile Shopping

The wife's gone for 4 days, the boys are hungry, and there's no frozen pizza in the freezer. Nothing to do but go shopping.

First stop - the root cellar. Potatoes, onions, apples and carrots.
Next stop - the freezer. Blueberries, corn, green beans, stewing beef for tomorrow.
Then the garden - dig up some beets (and leeks if I were more creative).
A jar of blackberries from the basement.
Some garlic from the workshop, milk and butter from the fridge.

Boil potatoes, mash with butter and milk. Stirfry butter, garlic, onion, corn, carrot, beet, kale, green beans and apple. Splash a bit of very non-local soy-sauce to counter the ferocious fruit & veggie sweetness. Put on top of mashed potatoes. Eat. Serve blueberries and blackberries over yogurt for dessert.

All ingredients (except soy sauce) from our garden, or purchased locally in-season and preserved. Just an extreme but not exaggerated example of our first successful year of laying in a full winter's supply of food.

From zero supplies to a full dinner in zero miles.

Righteous Rage

Never get between a mama bear and her cub. Or between a Papa Ricky and his 8-year-old's first bumper car ride.

They wouldn't let me ride with him. Then I watched in impotent agony as he could barely reach the pedals, lurching and stopping and starting and managing just one round of the rink in the entire time. By the time it ended he was crying & jumping into my arms and I was in a screaming rage.

I scooped him up and swarmed the young woman who had refused to let me ride with him. "THE NEXT TIME YOU SEE A LITTLE BOY HAVING TROUBLE AND CRYING, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!!!!"

She started to answer and I just cut her off. Each time she tried to say something, I just yelled back more, then stormed off with my sad, scared children. I don't even know what she was trying to say - explain, apologize, offer another ride, I have no idea.

By the time we reached the customer service office I'd calmed down just enough to remember that being civil gets one alot further. More calmly explaining what happened, they bent over backwards to make it better - refund, free parking, free ride on anything we wanted and walking us to the front of the line for the front seat of the 1936 Giant Dipper roller coaster. Our beautiful day at Santa Cruz boardwalk ended in happiness.

And in a lesson. I rehashed my reactions with the boys and asked which was more effective. I let them know that I was sorry, and wrong, for treating a person the way I treated that young woman who was just doing her job. That much anger for something as insignificant as a bad ride is unacceptable.

I hope my boys saw how fiercely I will defend them, but at the same time saw that I will usually, and eventually, use a humane, relational and effective approach to do so. Rage is blind, deaf, and un-compassionate, and it escalates rather than solves or heals. The next time my child is wronged, I will just as fiercely defend him, and at the same time be a much better role model for how to resolve conflict.

8 Ways to Keep Children Happy in the Car

Road trip to California. 4000km with an 8 and 10 year old who like to play pinching games in the back seat, with no personal DVD players. How to entertain them? In reverse order:

8. iPod - the new Opium of the People. We downloaded (legally and for free from the library) the complete Chronicles of Narnia, plus Stuart McLean's Vinyl Cafe and some monster stories.
Good: Great classic stories are now a part of our family folklore. Passed many hours. Playing it through the speakers instead of individual headphones kept it as family time and a shared experience.
Bad: We largely tuned out to the experience of where we were driving through, would have to quickly turn it off to point out something interesting, to which the children would grunt a quick response then ask for the story again. It was a sometimes-needed escape from the long hours of driving, but likewise an escape/division from the very trip we were there to experience.

7. Music. The iPod also gave us much more freedom than my childhood memories of Dad domineering the radio with the country station of whatever county we passed through. Sometimes we went with one artist (Joni, Tom Paxton), other times we took turns choosing a song. A fun twist (and empathy lesson) was choosing songs for each other - an empowering and growing experience for a child to take the time to think about what his parents would like to listen to.
Good: Variety of music, passed time, interactive music selection, fun sing-along
Bad: More auditory sensation than our gentle media-free boys usually ingest, and still a divorce from the actual travel.

6. Food. Do we really get that much hungrier sitting in a car, or do growing boys really need food every 15 minutes? The little cooler was filled each morning with bread, cheese, nuts, fruit... and somehow almost empty each evening.
Good:Serious time-killer to delicately prepare and pass around sandwiches and snacks from the passenger seat. Healthy selections instead of fast-food.
Bad: Messy. Sometimes felt like we ate so much but never had a meal. The occasional Mexican breakfast taco helped with that...

5. Rest Stops. We had a snowball fight at the California border, played tag on muddy rest-stop fields, read historical markers, felt-up palm trees, knocked on doors to ask permission to pick their oranges, oohed at scenic outlooks and aahed at elk viewing fields. Waterfalls, big trees, yard art, historical houses, visitor information booths, any excuse to stretch the legs and release some pent-up energy. Some of our biggest laughs and hardest falls were roadside.
Good: Stretch, shift energy, release energy, PLAY, break the monotony, and often read or see something of local interest.
Bad: Sometimes it's almost better to stay semi-catatonic than to wake up just enough to remember how tired/bored we are. And several 10-minute stops do add up into hours.

4. Games. How many different license plates can we find? I-spy. A my name is Alfred, my partner's name is Andres (modern version). Car bingo, lists of car makes, a drawing journal of sites seen. We didn't do nearly as many of all this as I'd like to crow, but sometimes pulling out a quick riddle works much better than a stern "Stop it NOW!"
Good: Fun, creative, can be tied into observation of the journey.
Bad: Requires energy and creativity at just the same moments that parents are just as tired as the children who need it.

3. Singing. We are the Von-Juliusson Family Singers, so of course there was plenty of a-Capella, multi-harmony singing, humming, and whistling. At one point Zekiah asked "Why is everyone so still and only me making noise?" It gave us a chance to teach new songs, find out their special versions, and create new ones. Turns out Z thought that farmers should not use DVD's (instead of DDT), then galen added a second line, so we ended up singing Joni Mitchel as:
Hey farmer farmer, put away that DVD now
Don't give me TV's and DVD's, and leave my mind to be free
Good: Creative, home-made, shared, and surprisingly in-tune fun.
Bad: Yes, I'm sad to say that sometimes it was too much, too loud, or too incessant - there were some times that we actually told our kids to STOP SINGING.

2. Talking. How often do we get a chance to just sit and talk without distraction or time limits? To share or explore something, let it rest when space is needed to process, then come back to later on? And what better way is there to know what's in our children's minds than to listen to back-seat chatter when they forget that adults are in the front seat? It's all good.

1. Scenery. Wow! Or as the boys said over and over and over again, WHOA!!! Redwood trees, surf, eagles, rivers, sand dunes, desert hills, winding back roads, tractors, farms, old cars, snow, hail, changing ecosystems, signs, bumper stickers, city names (Drain Oregon, Weed California). In the alert spaces with no ipod or other distractions, we just drank in and marvelled at the bounty of the world. The boys wrote "WHOA" on the windows to spare their voices. Pure rolling glory at 70 mph.

As Anne Landers preaches, life is the journey, not the destination. My favourite aspect of this whole trip was just being together as a family and experiencing new worlds together as a family. Anything we did to enhance that experience went into my "good" ratings, and anything we did for survival went into "bad" but was entirely necessary and functional. Not every moment is a teaching moment, and not every tree is a WHOA tree. I celebrate the incredible quality time we achieved in the car, and honour our family's resilience and creativity to get through the in between miles.

Advice to the Young

I was recently asked to share a brief bit of advice, words of wisdom and hope, to a friend's daughter as she graduates from high school. "She will be surprised with notes from friends and family offering best wishes and advice for the future in these challenging times."

Rather than ponder and pontificate, I just shared the first things that blurted onto the screen.

1. Don't wait. Don't wait for someone else to tell you you're ready, or for some "appropriate" age or degree. If you have energy around something, do it. That energy probably won't be there later - new opportunities will have come up by then.

2. Don't hurry. I know that sounds a bit in opposition to #1, but enjoy where and who you are right now, don't spend too much time looking forward to "When I...". You are, right now.

3. Come to Wildside Farm and be a Wwoofer for a week or two.

Lost: 2 Wwoofers and 24 Africans

Friday night on the town looks a lot different in Duncan than in Vancouver. Took the boys in to see Watoto, a traveling choir from Uganda that peddles Jesus and rescued orphans. I am glad my children got the cultural experience of seeing real African kids on stage, but disappointed at the presentation of the colonialist religious fare instead of the rich traditional music and dance that I experienced there. Yes, Christianity is now a solidly African stream, and it's been there long enough and is distinct enough in its expression from Canadian churches that it is a genuine part of the culture; I just always feel like it's not as "real" as the stuff that's been passed down for centuries, and evolving for centuries, and newly invented out of those roots instead of out of our Western roots. I want Papa Wemba, not Father Ng'ong'o.

The word "Rescue" jumped out at me so many times. Watoto is here to http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif"reschttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifue children", taking them from thehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifir home areas and into beautiful, holistic orphanages called villages. As orphanages go these are really nice, a great model and great aims. I just always question whether orphanages are the best route. Other programs in Africa work to support the children and the people taking care of them (grandmothers, uncles, neighbours) so that the fabric of the society is not further ripped apart. Taking them away from their people, no matter how nice the next home, is a further trauma to a child already in crisis. Plus, the amount of resources required to run an orphanage for 100 children could support many more children in their home environments. It's a well-intentioned program and overall a great blessing for the children lucky enough to be selected, but not the long-term solution for a nation in need of deeper societal change and grass-roots support to address its own challenges. For my buck, I'll stick with Oxfam for the long-term stuff and ACCES for the direct support.

Thankfully my children were fading once the music ended and the sales pitch began (note, as a professional fundraiser I don't begrudge the donations appeal one bit). So we headed back to downtown Duncan to find our two "Wwoofer" farm volunteers who were having a brief night on the town. Failing to find them at the pub, we spent the next 45 minutes hitting everything that was open in town. Two live music venues (folk and reggae tonight), 6 restaurants, 1 pizza joint. Finally found them back at the pub. We live in a town where we can hit everything open in 45 minutes(not including the fast-food boxes on the highway, or the scattered little places outside of town). All that on foot, in a light rain, with 2 children and not an ounce of fear. Just a grand exploration adventure to add to their odd life-experiences quiver.

I am loved

There's nothing to bring tears to a papa who won't be home for dinner like an email from the family:

We Love yoU.

Zekiah says: i want you to come home. i hope you're having a good time wherever you are right now. and i love you papa. I can't wait til you come home. i hope you get this. bye.

Galen says: i love you papa. you are the best papa in the world. me haven't given you my zamboni hug yet. i wonder what you're doing right now? right now i'm in sarah's office. telling her what to write on the computer on this email. much love, from galen.

Veggie burgers for dinner :)

your family.

Sapsucker Break

Broke my new rule of maximum 2-hours computer at a time. That's a new year's resolution, to atleast every 2 hours go away (hopefully outside) to chop some wood, walk, play, sing... Then, if necessary, come back refreshed. It's helping keep my mind clear, keep me focussed on getting just one or two good things done in that shorter chunk, keeping me balanced.

But at my new downtown "office", just how many times can I walk around a "city" block and feel refreshed? I did once today and it was good, but the afternoon was the "gotta get it all done before going home" feeling that, predictably, led to a dwindling efficiency then a horrible Excel mistake that took an extra hour to untangle.

When I did get home early enough to play with the boys, they and Sarah were all miraculously not there. I could sneak in for that nap I'd been dreaming about for the last 2 hours. But instead I rounded up the boys and the Woofers, grabbed a drill and old applejuice bottles and some tubing, and finally tapped our maple trees. All fatigue was gone in an instant as we communed with that cold air and drank maple sap straight from the trees, inserting the spiles and surgical tubing into their trunks like straws. I don't know how much we'll get, and suspect that the energy that we put into our inefficient boiling-down will never make environmental sense, but it just felt GOOOOOOD to be out there making our own sugar.

I could have napped. Instead I drilled and sucked, and that energy has carried me much further into this winter night than I would have planned. Even to my first blog posting in almost a month (did you miss me?)