Life gets in the way of blogging sometimes, even when it seems like not very much is happening at all. Shall we have some random so I can play catchup a bit?

1. Ladybug has been sitting up unassisted for the past week or so, and she’s quite pleased by her new perspective on the world. It’s so much easier to use your hands when you’re sitting up! Which means it’s so much easier to put EVERYTHING you can grab into your mouth! (Why is it that so many of us seem to have our second children just as the first child is really, really getting into the small Legos? My entire living room floor becomes a choking hazard on a daily basis now.)

2. I haven’t had time to bake bread since the baby was born, but I grumble every time I have to buy it at the store. I can make much better bread for much less money and grumble grumble grumble. So I borrowed this book from the library and gave it a try. I know a lot of you love this book. A number of people I love and respect swear by it. But folks? No. Just…no. It was bad. I tried the 100% whole wheat recipe, because that’s what we eat. (I’ll allow that maybe the recipes with white flour are better, but I’m not interested in those.) What I got? The texture was I guess okay. Sort of dense and chewy, but okay. I mean, you expect that with 100% whole wheat. What I could not get past was that it reeked of booze. I don’t want my bread to smell like Scotch, thanks. I did some googling and found this problem raised on a trouble-shooting forum for the book and one of the authors said, basically, “Yeah. That’s normal with this method. Some people are more sensitive to the smell than others.”

Uh… No. That wasn’t the good strong beery smell I’ve encountered in my sourdough starters when they were healthy. It was similar to the smell of my sourdough starters after I neglected them too long and they started to die. (May they rest in peace.) It was the smell of yeast in distress. No thank you.

Which is to say that I’m determined to find a way to start baking our bread again, the way I like to do it. Which means starting from a sponge, and doing it all by hand. Which is also to say that I’m about to embark on a baking-with-a-baby-strapped-to-my-chest adventure. We’ll see how it goes, and how accommodating Ladybug is.

If you like the 5-minute bread, let’s just say it’s not you; it’s me. Though I’m tempted to say… Have you ever baked real bread, with your hands and not with a stand mixer or a bread machine? And if so…do you really like the 5-minute bread, or are you just settling for it because it’s so damn convenient?

And now that I’ve pissed off a bunch of people about bread baking… what’s next?

3. I finally got a new MacBook to replace the drowned one! Woot! No one is allowed to touch it but me, so if this one drowns or spontaneously combusts, the fault will be mine alone.

4. Seasonal shift in the garden. We’re nearly done with the tomatoes and cucumbers, and the pole beans are producing only a handful of beans a day. It’s kale and collards time, and waiting for the fall and winter broccoli, spinach, and lettuces to mature so we can start to harvest those as well. We dug up the last of the Yukon Gold potatoes. We didn’t get as many as I’d hoped–just about ten pounds–so it looks like we’ll be buying our potatoes this winter. Ten pounds of potatoes isn’t that much around here.

5. Interesting process going on with my new novel-in-progress because I haven’t been able to sit down and write it. The story is unfolding and developing anyway, mostly in my head and partly on index cards. Totally different than the way the first two novels grew. But that’s a post in itself, one I’ll write very soon.

6. Baby’s awake. Later, darlin’s.

It was a back ache. And after Billy stretched and rubbed it last night it went away. (How much do I love being married to a physical therapist?!)

I guess my feelings about eating meat are still kind of complicated, or I wouldn’t have managed to turn a sore back into the absolute conviction that I’d fucked up major organs by eating food.

Bring on the meat! (With a bit more restraint this time, I promise.)

Meat! Meat! I LOVE MEAT!

Did you know that meat is delicious? And makes you feel like a superhero when you eat it? Hello, protein rush! In the two weeks that I’ve been eating it I’ve tried roasted chicken, burgers, braised chicken legs, a pulled pork sandwich at the farmer’s market, pork chops, a sardine sandwich, bacon and eggs, roast beef, and…is that it? I think that’s it. There were several roast chickens and two roast beef incidents. In other words, I’ve been eating a hell of a lot of meat.

When I started my intention was to eat it maybe twice a week or so, and that’s still my intention. But I decided to give myself this beginning period to just enjoy and try new things. Meat is all new and shiny and I’m excited about it and I’m SO DAMN HUNGRY for it, so I just went with it.

And I lost six pounds without trying. And yes, I’m totally still eating carbs. I’m a big fan of carbs–we go way back.

But then on Sunday I started to feel..aware…of my kidneys. And by today I can tell you that yes, my kidneys are tender. Shit. I just talked to the dialysis nurse/herbalist next door (I love my neighborhood) and she confirmed my suspicion that I’d overdone it with the meat. It wasn’t more meat than a lifelong omnivore would have eaten but it was way more than was fair to expect my body to handle after twenty-two years of no meat at all. She’s bring me some dandelion root to make a tea, and has encouraged me to drink lots of water and eat watermelon, and to take a break from the meat. When I do start to eat it again I need to add it into my diet slowly, easing into it. Which is exactly what I should have done from the start.

Yes, I know better. But it all tasted so GOOD. And it makes me feel so very, very good.

Ah, meat.

So kidney discomfort aside, the dietary change has been a good one. (I know that’s a hell of a thing to set aside, but Nurse Next Door doesn’t think it means I shouldn’t or can’t eat meat. Just that I overdid it.)

Here’s what I’ve learned in the last two meaty weeks that has me convinced I don’t want to go back to being a vegetarian:

• It is apparently not normal to need to eat every two or three hours. And if you don’t eat that often, it is not normal to a) turn into a raging bitch b) feel like you’re going to pass out or die c) hijack the whole family with your hunger d) watch what you’re doing to everyone around you and be unable to behave differently because you’re so hungry you can barely function
• It IS apparently normal to feel sated after a meal, to not be constantly resisting or giving in to the urge to eat.
• It is not normal to drive yourself totally nuts with intense food cravings when you are not pregnant.
• The low-level exhaustion I dragged through for the past decade at least? Not normal.
• The low-level anxiety? Also not my normal state.

It all changed with that first chicken leg, I swear. That’s the biggest reason I wanted more and more and more. I feel like I have an entirely new brain. And when I eat a meal, there’s true satisfaction, not just hungry or full.

I was eating a good, balanced vegetarian diet, and I was starving myself*. I’m not going back to that, so I sincerely hope that after a few days of meatless rest I can ease gently into a diet that includes meat, with my kidneys’ blessing.

*My experience only. Not trying to say YOU must eat meat.

Look what Billy gave me for my birthday! His name is Wallace.

The fall and winter plants I started in mid-July are now healthy teenagers and have been transplanted into their winter beds, which had previously been the spring beds of the peas and red potatoes. The first bed has Dwarf Siberian kale, Nero di Toscana kale, collards, and Apollo broccoli. The second bed has cabbage (I forget which variety and don’t have my gardening notes at hand) and purple sprouting broccoli, which is a raab and will be ready to eat in early spring when we’re damn sick of kale and collards and cabbage.

The winter stuff I started a couple weeks ago (spinach, beets, a few more cabbages and broccoli) will go in where the storage potatoes are now when they’re ready to be dug. Yes, I know beets aren’t supposed to like to be transplanted. We’ll just see how it works out. Their space is full of potatoes at the moment. If we get no beets of our own this winter, that’s fine. They’re cheap enough at the farmer’s market when we simply must have some.

My guys, harvesting the red potatoes:

In pots (a few seen in the main garden pic, but most of them unpictured on the patio because they want partial shade) I’ve started mixed mustards, miner’s lettuce, braising greens, and carrots. All the pots will nestle under cloche once the weather turns. Also cloched will be our two 4X4 raised beds: the one you can see in that photo with spinach (Winter Giant) and one (not pictured) with lettuces (Arctic Tundra mix from Territorial Seeds, and some winter romaine whose name now escapes me. It’s also from Territorial, as are all our seeds). Last year our cloche system failed due to crappy engineering on my part, so all we had in the garden after a week and a half of deep freeze in December (or was it January?) was a ton of kale and Brussels sprouts. I’m optimistic that we’ve got it figured out this year and will eat quite well from the garden all winter. If it goes to plan (heh), we won’t need to buy any produce but fruit (storage apples).

We’re not buying any produce but fruit right now, but that’s easy in summer. We’ve got kale, green beans, artichokes (though I think the four I harvested on Monday were probably the last for the season), those red potatoes, and three varieties of cucumbers right now. And finally, FINALLY, the tomatoes are ripening. We’ve got this gorgeous stand of tomato plants this year–the best yet, because I planted them in the ground instead of pots this year–and they’ve set an embarrassment of fruit, but it’s only now, at the ass end of August, that we’re eating any. Ah, Portland. June was so damn cold that it’s a miracle we’re even getting the cucumbers we are. And the winter squash all got stunted, so it looks like we’re only going to get one or two squash from each plant. I didn’t even bother with eggplant this year. This just isn’t the right climate to count on the heat lovers growing worth a damn. At least not in my yard’s particular climate.

The jungle that is our beans, tomatoes, cukes, and squash. I love to let the summer plants get all unruly like this.

Mystery squash. It was an unlabeled start leftover from the kid's school's garden.

Still, I think I like the spring garden the best. All my favorites are around then: asparagus, spinach, lettuce, peas, broccoli raab…

Gah. I’m making myself hungry. Tonight we will be eating kale and potatoes and garlic* from the garden, along with the farm-raised pork chops that Heather passed me over the back fence the other day to welcome me to the omnivorous fold. Pork chops were the last meat I ate in ’88. I can’t wait to try them again.

Yes, it’s going well. My body is liking the meat very, very much. That’s a post in itself, though, so I’ll save it for another day soon.

*The garlic! I forgot to show you the garlic! We harvested it in mid-July and cured it in the basement, and here it is! Isn’t it gorgeous?!

Fifty-one heads. That should last us about nine or ten months, maybe a little less. Then we’ve also got a bunch of shallots, now curing in the basement, and I’ll show you those when we’re done. We’re going to plant a bit more of each this fall. I wish I’d gotten it together to do storage onions from seed, but it’s too late now (I think?) and onion sets are so pricey. Next year.

and I liked it.

Yes, you read that right. Yes, you’re at the right blog. Last night, for the first time in nearly 22 years, I ate meat. I ate it on purpose, and I liked it.

I became a lacto-ovo vegetarian in 1988, when I was fifteen. My reasons at the time were entirely ethical. I was opposed to factory farming and wanted no part of it. A fine reason. Factory farming is a nightmare for animals, for us, for the environment. As I got older, I added health as a reason for not eating meat. And surely it’s better to go without meat that’s pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics.

But the food choices now readily available are quite different than they were in 1988. I kept on with my tofu and tempeh ways mostly, I must admit, because being a vegetarian was a huge part of my identity. It was a label I’d chosen, and clung to with the usual fierce vegetarian righteousness.

Then I read Farm City, on Rachael’s recommendation (and thanks to a gift certificate from her. Thanks again, lovey!). I read about Novella Carpenter raising her own chickens and turkeys and rabbits and pigs for meat, and I started to feel…hungry. But I was a vegetarian. I stuffed that impulse down.

I enjoyed Farm City so much (really. Great book. Pick it up) that I finally moved on to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, about a hundred years after you all had already read it. See, I didn’t think it applied to me because I “wasn’t an omnivore.” If you’ve already read the book, you’re smiling at that, most likely. I just didn’t get it yet. The Omnivore’s Dilemma led to In Defense of Food, which lead to watching Food, Inc.

Then I picked up The Vegetarian Myth, got angry, put it down, gave it a bad rating on Goodreads, and went to buy some more tofu.

A couple months went by.

I fed the vegetable garden some steer manure, some bone meal. My garden isn’t vegetarian. I bought some more tofu.

I finished reading a novel and wanted some nonfiction, so I started reading the copy of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle that I’d snagged at a neighbor’s book swap last winter. That was what finally tipped the scales. Well, that and my thirty-seventh birthday on August 20th. I suppose I lean more toward the reflective around birthdays.

I’d become a vegetarian at fifteen in good faith, for good reasons. But then I’d put that decision on cruise control for twenty-two years. It was time to revisit it. If my reasons were still valid–for me personally, of course. I didn’t judge those who ate meat before and I do not judge those who don’t eat it now–then I would continue as I’d been. If they weren’t valid, I’d consider adding some pastured meat to my diet.

So the factory farming thing. Factory farming is destroying our health and our environment, and it’s undeniably cruel to animals. Factory farmed meat is still out. But I’m not fifteen anymore and it’s not 1988. I can very, very easily buy meat directly from local farms where the chickens, cows, pigs, turkeys, and maybe even bunnies (not sure yet if I can eat bunnies) were allowed to live as they are meant to, the cows grazing on grass, the chickens eating bugs, the pigs rooting around and being…well…piglike. I have easy access to clean meat from animals raised humanely and sustainably. We’ve been getting our eggs from just such a farm for a few months now (ever since I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and it would just be a matter of adding a bit of meat to the order we’re already putting in each week.

There’s also this: I’ve been opting out of the factory-farm economy but in terms of food dollars I haven’t been doing anything to help the situation. Not eating meat isn’t a vote against factory farms–it’s like sitting out an election because you don’t like the political system, letting your vote go to waste. By supporting local, sustainable farms who treat their animals well, I’m voting with those food dollars. I’m helping to ensure that such farms continue to exist.

So the factory farm reason got crossed out. Now how about my being a vegetarian because it’s healthier. With factory farmed meat, I think that’s true. But with pastured meat I’m not at all sure it is. I was in the habit of telling people I felt better without meat, that my body ran better without it and everyone’s system is different. Everyone’s system is different, sure, but now that I’m looking at my choices totally honestly, that was a load of bullshit on my part. I have no idea if my body runs better with or without meat because I haven’t had a bite of it since I was FIFTEEN.

And you know what? I wasn’t one of those pizzaterians. I had studied vegetarian nutrition and chose my food with care. I was never once anemic, even during my pregnancies. But still…I get sick really easily. I never manage to fight off any cold or flu that’s going around. That started when I was 21, but I don’t know if that is because of the vegetarian diet, because I had Lyme disease when I was 21, or because I have shitty luck. Basically, I’m saying I’m not sure one way or the other about the health issue.

There went my reasons for not eating meat, but did I have any solid reasons FOR eating it? It comes back to that steer manure and bone meal in the garden. When I was fifteen I thought, with all the arrogance of youth, that it was possible to lower my position on the food chain. That I could remove myself from the cruelty of nature. After all, Morrissey taught me that Meat is Murder, yeah? But the food chain isn’t so much a chain as a circle, is it? And we can’t remove ourselves from nature. Why would you want to? I’m not above the natural world. I am an animal and I am part of it. I want to take my place again.

Okay…and maybe I’m also a little bit curious about what rabbit and duck taste like.

I will only eat pastured meat. I’m going to take it slowly, and only eat it in moderation. And we’ll see how it goes. I’m not going to say I will now always eat meat. The change is flexibility. I’m open to it. We’ll see how it goes.

I keep taking pictures and then meaning to post them, and then the process of posting a photo via this old computer seems like too much of a chore for the limited time I have, and I don’t do it. And now I find myself with weeks’ and weeks’ worth of stuff I wanted to share and haven’t yet. I’m going to dump it here all at once and try to keep more on top of it going forward. So…many pictures to follow. If you’re interested in what our summer’s looked like so far, grab a cup of coffee because you’re going to be here a while. If not, that’s cool. Check back soon. I may actually have something to say again one of these days.

Billy’s birthday. Jujuba in a park in North Portland. Picnic, sun, lots and lots of dancing with my guys (with the babe in the Ergo and her head well supported by my hand, I assure you). (Yes, you can TOO dance while wearing a baby. You just have to dance a bit more carefully.)

A day trip to Big Cedars:

Gardening:

And just kinda hanging out:

My friend Lisa Unger’s new novel, Fragile, comes out today. I’m very much looking forward to reading it.

The wonderful Caroline Leavitt did a great interview with her here, and Lisa did a guest post on Caroline’s blog here. The guest post is quite a good one, and you should especially read it if you’re surprised to find me blogging about “this kind of book.”

Enjoy!

I guess July was the month of infidelity then, because I’ve finished the three books I set out to read and am moving on.

I wish I could tell you that Madame Bovary was as wonderful as I remembered it being. I can’t tell you that. As you already know if we’re friends on Goodreads (and if we aren’t yet, feel free to send a friend request), I did not enjoy Bovary on this second reading. It dragged. All the characters were irritating–Emma Bovary most of all. I cheered when she died. I don’t remember ever before cheering a character’s death. Awful. I have no idea what it was that I loved about it when I was eighteen.

The Scarlet Letter was equally surprising in that I enjoyed it much more than I expected I would. I liked it when I read it as a high school freshman, but I hadn’t given it much thought, if any, in the past 22 years. Then a neighbor told me she loved it and reread it all the time, that it was so much better as an adult. She was right. It’s a great book. Beautifully written. Give it another try if you haven’t read it since high school either.

I’ve got a few more classics that I downloaded to my Kindle for free, but I’m craving something contemporary next. There’s no room in the budget for something new on the Kindle right now (if only I could somehow cram my shelves full of already purchased paper books onto the Kindle!), since we’re saving to replace my poor dead laptop. That means I’ll have to cowboy up and read a regular old paper book or two one-handed while nursing, risking a sore wrist to do so. Yes, I’m very brave.

Next up, I plan to finish Already Dead by Denis Johnson. I started it ages ago–maybe even a year ago–but life intervened and even though I loved it, I never got past the first 100 or so pages. I’m going to start it again. After that, I’m thinking I’ll finally finish Gilead, which I’ve started and stopped twice already. Life was weird for the past two years, what with all the pregnancies and miscarriages, and I think that affected my reading, so I’m not going to automatically dismiss any book that didn’t hold my attention during that time.

When I can buy a new book or two for the Kindle again, I’m got my eye on this and this.

What are you reading this summer? I’m always open to suggestions.

So, those birth photos I posted a while back… It wasn’t to shock you. And it wasn’t an urge to gratuitously share images of someone’s gloved hands inside my abdomen. Really. I thought the photos spoke for themselves. They did, quite clearly, for many of you–particularly those of you who have also had c-sections. But some folks didn’t get it, were disturbed or offended. I’m fine with that, actually, if you were, but it’s been nagging at me since then, the idea that my motivation in posting them wasn’t clear.

Here’s the thing. We all know what a vaginal delivery looks like, right? We’ve seen plenty of images of them, plus it’s as natural an event as you can get so it’s not hard to imagine how it works.

A c-section? Not so much.

I was born by c-section. My two children were both born by c-section. Even so, I had no idea before I saw these photos–taken by Billy, at the wonderful anesthesiologist’s urging, during Ladybug’s delivery–what a c-section looked like. I didn’t give much thought to the particulars of the surgery before Thumper’s birth because I was going to have a drug-free natural delivery with no medical interventions, thankyouverymuch. And after his birth, I couldn’t bear to think too much about the particulars of the surgery because I felt so traumatized by the way the labor and delivery had gone.

If Billy had photographed my first c-section, I would not have been able to look at those photos. No way.

But the thing is…bloody and medicalized and brutal as it is…this is the way my two beautiful children came into the world. It’s the way I came into the world, and my brother after me. That is the reality of birth for so many of us. (Yes, probably too many, but I’m not interested in debating c-section rates or birth politics here.)

It’s not pretty. It’s not romantic. But it’s birth. It counts.

Remember how the marauding neighborhood cats and their evil garden-shitting ways destroyed my spinach bed two seasons in a row? And how I swore it had put me off cats forever, that I would never again have a cat myself? Well…yeah.

It turns out that once I no longer needed to fear toxoplasmosis in my cat-contaminated garden soil blinding my fetus, my I Love Cats button got reactivated. I found myself really, really, really wishing we had a cat. It didn’t hurt that Thumper has been asking for a cat for months now. On Tuesday the kids and I headed over to the Oregon Humane Society and brought Benny home. (Thumper picked out the name. Good one, hunh? Billy and I have been calling the cat Benny Hill, but truth be told the kiddo named him after Benny the Bull in Dora.)

It’s so nice to have an animal in the family again. It’s been weird since Diego died in February. This was the longest I’d gone in my entire life without a pet of some kind. He’s nine days younger than Ladybug. Super sweet and affectionate, and very good (and tolerant!) with the kids. Yay Benny!

Also weird and kinda funny: As I walked out of the Humane Society, Ladybug strapped to my chest, holding Thumper’s hand, and the cat carrier in my other hand, I felt truly grown up for the first time. I was wondering what it would take, if I would ever feel that way. But don’t worry–the feeling passed.

PS: Thanks to Everette and David for helping me figure out how to get photos up here without the cushy convenience of iPhoto. You’re my very two favorite nerds (and that’s saying something!). AND you’re both now in Seattle. Remind me to introduce you to each other. You need to meet.