MamaStories

Hive inspection by the county inspector

That’s one whole frame full of good honey, both sides. I’ll harvest it when the rain holds up.

~

I apologize for the dearth of posts. Our household has been in such a flux and beset by crises these last few months, it has been hard to sit and write something down. Here is what has happened so far.

June

- my 13-year-old nephew arrives, we get him from JFK and bring him home. Car breaks on way home.

July

1 week of farm camp for Amie and my nephew. Have car problem(s) fixed over several visits to mechanic.

- MIL arrives

- chipmunks harvest tomatoes and eggplants

- letter from our Town giving us 2 weeks to fix an unknown leak in the main water pipe

- lice!

- trip to NYC to drop off nephew, come home and have water pipe fixed – but good news: insurance will pay – deductible

August

- FIL arrives

- leave for 1 week on the Cape. Friends (3) from NYC come to visit for 1st weekend, after which the mom leaves, the dad and 6-year-old and 9-year-old golden retriever stay on

- friend from Belgium comes to visit, sleeps in tent because cottage is so packed. Leaves after 3 days

- bring 7 people home

- find out we need to replace all tires on both cars

- surprise for our birthdays: SIL arrives

- mom from NYC arrives

- big birthday party, 50 people in back yard, main drain gets clogged, basement flooded with reeking water. Friend from NYC devotes the evening to cleaning up the basement!

- NYC friends and dog leave. For hours try to fix clogged pipe ourselves, no use

- lice?

- cave and get plumber: he fixes it in 1/2 hour! Clean basement

future

- SIL will leave this week, FIL the week after that. A second visit from my Belgian friend expected, plus a visit from another friend from Belgium. Kindergarten starts. MIL will leave mid September. My parents come in October.

We’ve been loving it: family, friends and fun. Amie basically had a two-week-long, uninterrupted play date with her friend from NYC. But it is hectic, so I haven’t been able to do much of what I planned to do – work (harder) in the garden, build a shed, read more about herbalism, blog.

~

{UPDATE 24 August}

add to the list, for today:

car with MIL, FIL and SIL breaks down in the middle of their shopping trip

While I’m trying to get tow-truck and mechanic arranged for them,

Amie wakes up from an uncharacteristic nap with a 102 F fever

It doesn’t end…

This is one more long update. Life is so full it’s tough to find a moment to sit and write it all down. But here goes…

Home-grown salads are a common fare nowadays: lettuce mix, beet “greens,” cherry tomatoes, onions, garlic scape dressing. I could throw in bell peppers too, but I’m letting them mature to red – one (from an overwintered plant)  is getting really close. We are also harvesting lots of tomatoes and green beans.

I took down all my favas. I had high hopes because the pods were so fat. But a 4′ by 2′ bed with about 20 plants yielded only 6.1 oz. de-podded and peeled favas: enough for one small appetizer!

I won’t be growing favas anymore, however delicious, and however interesting.  The following photo shows the mycorrhizal nodules on the roots of the plants when I pulled them (there were a few more blossoms, but the leaves and developed pods were developing a black spot).

Most of my brassicas bolted. Neat, a bolted cauliflower:

It’s like a space ship. I’m keeping it to see what happens next.

We’re also eating the scrumptious husk cherries, and we’re comsuming two gallons of mint ice tea (mixed mints) with honey a day. Then there are all the other culinary herbs, of which we use some immediately and dry the bulk. I’ll write about our drying setup soon – it’s our next big project.

I’ve also harvested quite a bit of propolis and wax comb from the hive, which is doing well. The top broodbox is heavy with honey. I put on the first honey super two weeks ago, with a queen excluder. The excluder is a grate through which only the worker bees can pass.  We put these between the broodboxes and the honey supers to keep the queen from laying eggs in the honey harvest. However, after 2 weeks the bees had drawn out no comb whatsoever, confirmation that they might be reluctant to do anything in there because of the lack of queen pheromone. So I removed the excluder for now, and will see what happens.

propolis and wax

As for the house, DH, my nephew and I put down a wooden floor on concrete footings in our previously dirt floor shed. The idea is to put up insulation and drywall and two large doors and it can be an almost-year-round woodworking shop. It’s great to have the table saw and lathe out of the porch. Getting all the stuff that was in there before back in, in an organized way, was my biggest challenge. You know how you end up with boxes and boxes of odds and ends…

And last but not least, we’ve also added one more member to the family: Amie’s grandmother has arrived from Singapore. This means lots of art is being made, about which later. And yummy Indian food!  So we’re five now: three adults, one teenager, one kindergartner. I  do love having a full house!

Amie and I went to visit our new friends of the Freecycle comfrey, L and S, last week. Their raspberry garden was bursting with plump juicy berries. L helped Amie pick, she is so good with young kids. Amie was in seventh heaven, practically yelling with the fun of it. I chatted and picked and in less than 40 minutes we had gathered one pound and seven ounces. Later at Whole Foods I saw 6 ounces of organic raspberries for sale at $6. Wow. So:

raspberries from friends: 2 lbs (from two pickings)

We also picked our first strawberries. There are more ripening, I think in the end we’ll have about 100 berries. Amie again had a blast picking them after we removed the net.

strawberries: 3 oz.

We’re getting a good daily harvest of green beans every day now, from one 4×8 bed of Provider and Maxibel:

green beans: 1 lb 1 oz

I had to pull some pea vines because the chipmunks uprooted them. Still, incredibly – we hit 100 F yesterday – the remaining peas are still producing pods and even flowers.

peas (mix): 1 lb. 8 oz.

At the moment they’re straggling in one at a time, but the first big batch of tomatoes is on the verge of ripening and soon though there will be too many to eat day by day. Better get that solar dehydrator built.

tomatoes: 2.2 oz

cherry tomatoes: 6

Other harvests:

radishes: 4 edible ones (1 really good one)

garlic scapes: 10 (made them into Daphne’s salad dressin: delicious!)

garlic: 8 bulbs for eating, 8 for sowing

cauliflower: 1 tiny one, the rest bolted

carrots: 3 ounces of the baby kind, and a big bunch of green leaves that went into soup.

comfrey: 1 stuffed bucket for compost, though it looks like I should harvest it for skin salves.

The fava beans are in the pipeline, they are huge and kinda grotesque, but I’m waiting for a chance to make some Fool Mudamas to pick them. The onions have all fallen over and they are looking fat and juicy. I’ll be able to pull them soon as well, adding yet another empty bed. Time to plant Fall and Winter crops. Maybe the brassicas will do better in the Fall this year – all my brassicas, but (so far) the Brussels Sprouts, bolted.

~

The borage is in bloom and the bees just love it. At my last inspection I found my queen – I thought she had been superseded. I tall looked well enough for the first  honey super to be added on. If we have some honey I will be happy, because local honey can help Amie’s respiratory trouble which – we think – is due to allergies to pollen. And how local can honey get!

~

My nephew from Belgium arrived last Monday and he will be staying here for a month. He’s a strong and friendly thirteen-year-old who can help a lot around the house and garden, and he and Amie get along so well. He’s a teenager but he can still play. What a boon it is to have him here.

During the Transition Training we watched a lot of images and videos of Transition Initiatives, and at first I watched them with mixed feelings of joy and anxiousness. My heart sank because I inevitably thought: “I can’t make that happen.”

That sinking feeling stems from the fact that, though I arrived here over 11 years ago, studied, married, bought a house and had a child here, I still don’t feel at home. Why? Not because of the people around me: I have found each and every one of my colleagues, neighbors and friends – Americans or not – to be sincerely welcoming. So it must be me.

I always assumed children have a natural sense of being at home, for I myself, as a child, felt at home, without ever a shadow of a doubt. But was it because of something a child does or is, or was it because of what my parents did and modeled? Or was it because of the place?

The place was Antwerp (Belgium), a city within half an hour’s drive of the city where my grandparents and aunts and uncles all lived. A place where my family can trace and place our ancestry as far back as the 1700s. And a place with a culture in which “migrating” is the exception. You see, Belgians don’t leave Belgium: the emigration rate is less than a percent. And Belgium is a small country, about the size of Maryland, so children “leave” (for college, or to live) to within at most a two hours’ drive away from their parents. In my family I was the third (out of four now) in the span of two generations to move abroad, which makes my family exceptionally migratory.

Let’s put this in context. The United Nations Commission on Population and Development concluded in 2006 that only 3% of the world population is an international migrant (with most migrants moving from developing to developed countries). The kind of mobility within the United States that makes for big moves, in contrast, is high: the Census of 2000 determined that, within 5 years, no less than 8.42% of its respondents had moved to another state and an additional 2.86% to a foreign country. That number has in all probability gone up in the last couple of years.

So let’s just say that my Amie is seeing a home very different from what I saw as a kid. We see family once or twice a year, not every weekend. Mama and Baba have strange accents – and so does she, insisting on “woh-T-er”. Mama and Baba can’t vote and they don’t know how to negotiate certain communal systems. So I am afraid that Amie will not know what “home” is, or that she will call “home” something that I would call but a weak version of my own rich childhood memory of home.

And so I must ask myself: can I, dare I, make this place my home? What if home means not just the core family of the three of us, not just lengthy visits (visits: that says it all) from grandparents and aunts and cousins, not just local traditions with good, good friends that we see often… but also the wider culture of a hometown?

The Training helped me realize that I should make this hometown happen, for myself, for Amie, and that it is possible. That this what a Transition Initiative could mean to me, my family, and the people in my community: not just becoming more resilient in the face of peak oil, climate change, and economic crisis, but first and foremost what our trainer called  “becoming indigenous toyour place”: coming home.

{Previously, about Transition: the giving of gifts}

Amie made a heart for me this morning. Hearts within hearts, then she cut it out. As she was giving it to me she saw Baba also needed a surprise. After a couple of minutes she came running to him, with… a brain.

1. warm and bright out, emptied all the rain barrels, stashed them upside down, and reconnected gutters
2. raked leaves, emptied pots and containers, stashed them in shed
3. Amie raked leaves too (cough)
4. drank two large coffees (more milk than espresso)
5. baked and pureed 5 sugar pie pumpkins
6. will reserve puree for pumpkin bread (not for today), will freeze rest
7. will roast pumpkin seeds later
8. made leek and potato soup
9. made veggie stock with the dark greens of the leek and other veggie scraps, will freeze in cubes
10. boiled sweet potatoes, then fried with caramelized onions and lots of ground pepper
11. will have sweet potatoes and soup (with raw milk) for dinner with homemade bread and (not as yet homemade) butter
12. will freeze leftovers
13. miraculously found room in my fridge for raw milk delivery for friend
14. started new wheat grass sprouts
15. Amie is having an early dinner of boiled carrots, humus and a farm fresh (chicken) egg omelet… with ketchup, and she promised she would try the potato leek soup {tried it, did not like it}
16. which reminds me I have to make a go of the chickpeas next year
17. looking forward to evening, work on novel again – lots of good ideas!

I am very fortunate to have handmade items in my home. Many of them are Amie’s, of course, most of which I’ve already shown here. There are also  those made by strangers and mostly presented to us as gifts, a lot from India. The ones I want to show you here are two quilts made by my Mom and my mother-in-law (MIL). Both are fantastic crafters with needle and thread.

My Mom made this quilt a long time ago. I always covered Amie with it, in the stroller, when we went out on a chilly day. I dug it out a week ago, sewed back the plain strips on the three sides (for tucking in), and hung it in our bedroom.

This quilt was a collaboration between my MIL and her MIL, Amie’s great-grandmother, who lives in Kolkatta, India. It was made from my husband’s baby clothes and blankets that my MIL had saved. The border on the other side has “Hit Tima Tim Tim,” a Bengali nursery rhyme embroidered on it, in Bengali script and transliterated in Latin script.

Together they add cheer and warmth to our small bedroom .

Some day I hope I will have the peace and quiet – in my life as well as my spirit – to sit down and make a quilt, or an embroidery. Though I have never had the patience for any kind of needlework, and in my youth was known to look down upon it, it appeals to me now, especially if the picture in my head also has Amie in it, sitting next to me, working on her own thing. Maybe in winter we’ll attempt it.

Our new house – bought a year ago – came with two rose bushes, and this being our first Spring here, we got to see the roses for the first time. Amie also got to draw and paint one:

The context was thus:

Grandmother sitting by, also drawing the rose, and grandfather, on the other side of the world, witnessing via webcam.

In the evening Amie watched March of the Penguins. We had shown it to her about half a year ago but she wasn’t interested then. This time she was, going “oh so cute!” and so forth, but really paying attention when the little chick dies of exposure and the mother mourns over it.

- what happened to it?

- it died because it was too cold.

- but no, it didn’t get dead. Look, it’s moving, like this. [makes sad little movements with her head]

- no, sweetie, it’s dead.

- what is the mother trying to do now?

- the mother is so sad she is trying to steal a chick from another mother.

- stealing isn’t nice.

- see, the pack doesn’t allow it and the chick is back with its mother.

When we went to bed she wanted to sit in the pile of blankets to keep her egg warm. Then she wanted to talk about the penguins.

- I especially want to talk about when the chick got dead. I liked that.

- you liked it? Do you mean it made you happy?

- no.

- so you mean you are interested in it.

- yes. It’s interesting.

I had to explain again why the chick had died.

- but I didn’t see any blood.

- it wasn’t wounded, it was just too cold.

- can I have a baby penguin? It’s not too cold here.

- it’s too warm here. Penguins like it cold, but not too cold.

Seconds later:

- promise me we will die next to one another? [this while holding my head, her nose nearly touching mine, her eyes locked to mine]

- I can’t promise that, sweetie. We don’t know when we’ll die. It’s mostly not in our control.

- we could die in an accident.

- yes, or when we grow old and it’s time.

- but we don’t die on the cross. Only Jesus died on the cross. What is Jesus’ Mama’s name?

- Mary – not the Mary we know. A different Mary.

- What’s her last name?

- I don’t know.

- Jesus died and then Mary died too. They went far away. As far as… Auntie R. That was a long drive.

A little later:

- Mama, can we have another baby? But I want it to be a girl. We can call it Amie.

- but you are Amie. So we couldn’t call her Amie!

- but what if I die? And I still want to pinch your arm? [arm pinching is a leftover from nursing: she does it when tired or sad and when falling asleep]

I was dumbfounded. A weird thing, that statement: “Amie” (II) would still be pinching my arm, and that seemed to make her feel better about dying. Such a strange concept of identity, such fearless exploration of what death is and what it means to her! She soon fell asleep.

I’ve written about how I want to communicate to my daughter about death here.

A new law will be coming into effect on 10 February, called the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA). It demands that all products for children aged 12 and younger be tested for lead and phthalates, and that those that haven’t been tested yet are considered hazardous and may not be sold.

It’s about time that lead and phthalates are banned from children’s products – manufactured in the States or imported from abroad – and that the manufacturers have tests to show their safety. But this well-intentioned law suffers from two problems:

1. It applies to any and all “consumer product designed or intended primarily for children 12 years of age and younger”: from toys and clothing to books, games, sports equipment, furniture and DVDs.
   
2. It applies not only to products being made right now and after 10 February, but also to products that are already on the shelves. This means it doesn’t just put manufacturers on the spot, but retailers (or resellers) and second-hand sellers, as well.

Consider that

Lead testing promises to be expensive — from several hundred to several thousand dollars per test, depending on the product. And each batch of each item must be tracked and tested, making compliance brutally expensive for items with small runs. (source)

No wonder the law in all its generality is creating a panic. For instance, for a while there it seemed as if many thrift stores and second-hand shops were going to have to close.

But there may now be good news for them. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is responsible for enforcing the law,  drafted a Memo to clarify the law. “The commission does not have the authority to change the law but can decide how to interpret it” (source).

As for second-hand children’s products – thrift stores, consignment shops, and other used-goods stores:

Sellers of used children’s products, such as thrift stores and consignment stores, are not required to certify that those products meet the new lead limits, phthalates standard or new toy standards. (Memo)

How about the retailers whose entire stock is bound to become contraband? Those that sell clothing and toys made of natural materials such as wool or wood (not painted) may be off the hook, for the Commission is considering giving also them an exemption (source).

All others may have to consult their lawyers. For them too, the CPSC seems to bending the rules a little, in what to me two  rather confusing paragraphs:

1. The new safety law does not require resellers to test children’s products in inventory for compliance with the lead limit before they are sold. However, resellers cannot sell children’s products that exceed the lead limit and therefore should avoid products that are likely to have lead content, unless they have testing or other information to indicate the products being sold have less than the new limit. Those resellers that do sell products in violation of the new limits could face civil and/or criminal penalties. (Memo; my emphasis)
2. While CPSC expects every company to comply fully with the new laws resellers should pay special attention to certain product categories. Among these are recalled children’s products, particularly cribs and play yards etc. (Memo; my emphasis)

Does this mean (“while”) that that only those “certain product categories” should be actually tested?

Can the small shops afford to run these tests on their suspect stock? Many can’t, like Amanda Christina of Hearts and Trees, who will no longer be able to sell her homemade art, handicraft and nature study kits.

And what about children’s books, for instance? From a Boston-based article on this matter:

This Wednesday, Amazon.com sent a general letter informing its vendors that, if they did not certify their products by January 15, the items would be returned at the sellers’ expense…

To make matters worse, even publishers that have already had their products tested for lead will be forced to retest…

“All of us are totally in the dark,” says Terri Schmitz, owner of the Children’s Book Shop in Brookline. “I can’t make a decision, because I don’t know what the regulations are. We’re all sort of in limbo here.” (source)

You may even find the shelves of your childrens’ library empty…

To be continued, no doubt.

Go to Cool Mon Picks SaveHandmade for more information, resources, and a way to respond to this law.