Family
sastyk | January 20, 2016Are you new to this parenting gig? About to give birth or adopt or take on a foster placement? Or maybe you've had one easy kid, and are about to go to two and sense that things are about to change radically. Or maybe you have them, but you feel like you are missing something in the "how to stay sane and meet everyone's needs" department. I want to give you the single most important piece of advice I have - which is about how not to lose your mind as a parent. I know, I know the title isn't all that prepossessing, but stick with me.
Let's say you just had or adopted a beautiful baby.…
sastyk | July 13, 2015My children made me try a chocolate-covered gummy bear the other day. Now a chocolate gummy bear is not a local, sustainable or home-grown food, and frankly, I don't like gummy bears (the only good use I ever had for them was in college, where nothing would keep posters on cinder-block walls without damaging the walls like a gummy bear melted on with a lighter), and I'm not that big a chocolate person. But the kids kept telling me that this was better than either the low-quality chocolate used to cover them or gummy bears. I tried one, and they were right - it was better, an official…
sastyk | June 13, 2014
We adopted him on Wednesday, with 30+ family and friends in attendance. It was fabulous. The judge did a wonderful job of including ALL my children in what was a special day for our family, and then we partied.
The funniest moment was that the lawyer had spelled his middle name incorrectly (Raphael/Rafael) and the judge was clearly prepared to delay things to change the paperwork when I announced "Nope, we're good, we'll take your spelling!" I wasn't doing ANYTHING to make this take one minute longer.
It takes a little while to sink in, since he's always been my baby, but now he's my…
sastyk | June 13, 2014
(Some of my kids watching sheep mothering their babies)
Over the last decade a whole lot of babies have been born on my farm or brought home to it. We have had calves, chicks, kids (goat), kids (human), ducklings, goslings, kits and lambs. One of the most fascinating revelations of this is just how variable the instinct for parenting is among animals. Among closely related goats, for example, we have had among our best mothers, and our single worst one, a doe so dim that she would stand there screaming for her baby but refuse to move any closer to the baby who was screaming just as…
sastyk | February 4, 2014Yesterday morning Isaiah (10) asked me with a grin on his face: "Which one of us is your FAVORITE child?"
My answer "None of you. I like Rubeus best. He's quiet, and soft, never talks to me, and takes care of almost all his own needs."
D. (11) "But he's not a kid, he's a cat."
Me: "Shhh...you'll make him feel bad. He's my baby too."
D. "But you aren't a cat and you didn't give birth to him."
Me: "I didn't give birth to you either, and just because you don't look like me doesn't make you not my baby. We don't discriminate in this family on the grounds of fuzzy ears and paws either."
D. "He's…
sastyk | March 29, 2013Things have been a little nuts here.
Two weeks ago Eric and I took an emergency placement of two children, six and 17 mos. It turned out to be one of the most exhausting and stressful placements we've ever had, not because of the kids, who are delightful (although I had somehow forgotten what 17month olds are like - the "oh, yeah, I was hoping you'd pull all those books off the shelves and try and feed them to the cat" quality of that age toddler ;-)), but because of really complicated circumstances I can't talk about. Let us just say it involves a lot of things we've never been buried in…
sastyk | September 21, 2012Most of the comments people make about our slightly changeable and somewhat odd family are lovely. Like all parents my husband and I love hearing how beautiful our kids are, how well behaved (even when it isn't always true), how nice it is to see us all together, what fun it is to see a big family having a good time.
There are a few that trouble me a little, but I understand why people make those comments - our family is different and strange, and people are processing how to respond to it. I've made mistakes when in those kinds of situations too, so I don't mind it. I know some people get…
sastyk | June 20, 2012Apologies to everyone for the radio silence - lots of stuff going on here and the blog has been horribly neglected. Between trying to get the final garden push done, a bunch of goat birthing (including four beautiful babies yesterday for Eric's 42nd birthday - Urania gave us Tybalt and Mercutio in the wee hours while Calendula delivered Beatrice and Benedick), a lot of legal and medical proceedings involving C. and K, our foster sons, and the end-of-school stuff (Eli is transitioning from the program for kids with autism that he's been in since kindergarten to a new program for middle school…
sastyk | June 7, 2012I really wish I could share pictures of K. and C., who are having their first farm springtime, complete with baby goats, dam building in the creek, their own gardens, finding nests of newly hatched chicks, catching toads and salamanders, eating salads made with wild greens they collect themselves, but that would violate their privacy. Still, I think I can give you at least a sense of the Hun-like decimation of food that goes on in my house with six little guys - they all stuck their hands in over the jambalaya to show how a pan the size of Idaho makes just over one meal:
Meanwhile the…
sastyk | May 10, 2012Let's be honest, when you work on energy and environmental issues for a living, good news is always welcome. And when it is good news that makes your kids happy, well, even better. President Obama's coming forward in support of gay marriage didn't fix all problems, but it made everyone in our home more cheerful.
All the children living in my house have close family members - parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles etc... who are gay. I would say that there is more than passable odds that one of these days one of the little boys in my house will be coming out. All of them know that…
sastyk | December 1, 2011
This video is making the rounds of the internet, and of course, is particularly meaningful to me. Like this young man, I'm the child of a lesbian family with a mother and step-mother. Like him, no one every looked at me and said "you can tell she was damaged by her upbringing in a gay family."
I wouldn't add much to his testimony, but because I'm 20 years older, I would add this. Not only are gay families just like everyone else, but gay and heterosexual households demonstrate this over and over again by the way gay marriages and straight marriages derive and build upon one another.
That…
sastyk | April 7, 2011I'm getting a lot of questions via email and comments about our experience entering into the foster parenting world, and I did want to talk about this. Some people are critical, and think we're nuts (quite possibly), some people want to watch because they want to try this too (cool), some people have been there themselves in some portion of the system - as a worker, parent or child and have a lot to teach us. I wanted to put up a post that tells more about where we are and what we're doing - and also includes an important caveat about what I will and won't be writing about.
What I Will And…
sastyk | March 24, 2011Life has been proceeding more or less apace, and it feels like a long time since I've sat down and contemplated anything, much less my Anyway Project goals. At the same time, all this business is a series of steps on the way to actually many of the things done. I hope that's true of all of you!
As you'll remember, the goal of the Anyway project is to integrate our preparations for a harder future with our daily life now, to turn them many parts into a whole. As I wrote previously:
The larger idea of the Anyway Project is to make our lives work more smoothly. Most of us stand with feet in…
sastyk | February 28, 2011I've had a number of emails recently, as I've written here, at The Chatelaine's Keys (Yes, I know the site is down - there was a billing mixup that required a fax to fix - we don't have one at home and we got a foot and a half of snow on Friday, too much to bother struggling out for. The blog will be back soon, now that Eric is at work where faxes are more prevalent than out here on the farm.) and on facebook about the process of preparing to foster and eventually hopefully adopt more children that asked what this had to do with peak energy and climate change.
I'm a little reluctant to…
sastyk | February 3, 2011These were taken before the 18 inches of snow that fell the other day, so you can actually see the ground, but the scene is still basically the same - white, with scattered critters. We're all definitely starting to dream of spring!
The creek in winter
Asher at the Creek
Isaiah, finding material to repair our (very primitive) footbridge
Hauling wood is a daily chore. When the snow is falling hard, my fuzzy, frosty spouse looks vaguely like a yeti after a few loads ;-).
With all this weather, it is good thing all the stuff in the root cellar is still holding up! At least we don't have…
sastyk | December 24, 2010I've had a lot of requests to say more than I did in my Anyway Project Update about our decision to adopt more children, and a lot of requests to write about the project as we go along. So I will say something here, although with the caveat that the process is very new for us, we are just beginning, and we have not yet been approved as foster/adoptive parents. Many of my assumptions are just that - assumptions. At the same time, I will write about the process when and if children join our family, but I hope my readers will be understanding about the fact that because any children we take…
sastyk | November 4, 2010
I have a vivid memory as a teenager of yelling at my Mother, "I didn't ask for two mothers! I don't need two mothers! I don't even want *you* and you got me this other one who won't leave me alone!" I was 14 and about as revolting as every other fourteen year old, or maybe just a little more. And like most step-children, I resented the heck out of my step-Mom, Susie. I have to say, I'm awed by anyone who sticks with it through the outs and ins of step-parenting - you've got my admiration - just thinking back on how unrewarding it was for my step-mother makes me realize y'all who take on…
cevans | July 19, 2010
My grandmother suffered in her old age from macular degeneration, a common age-related eye disease that causes the center of your visual field (the macula) to gradually fritz out. As it affected her more and more, the font size in her emails ballooned to cartoonish sizes. She began walking with a cane, and needed a fancy electronic doo-dad to tell her when her cup of tea was full. By the end of her life, she was totally blind.
Watching my grandmother wink out from the world of seeing was tragic; the knowledge of macular degeneration's heredity terrifying. Relatives of those who have…
sciencepunk | May 13, 2010Over at Evolutionary Genealogy, Leonard Eisenberg has been thinking about how we're related to other animals. Not so much in the evolutionary sense, but in the familial sense. After all, if your cousin is simply the offspring of your parent's sibling, why not continue that logic back a few hundred millennia or so?
To make a rough estimate of the cousin and removal relationship between you and any other living thing, all one needs to do is count up the generations back to the common ancestor. This sounds easy in theory but is complicated in practice. First, make an estimate of the number of…
sastyk | February 15, 2010I imagine after the last few weeks, the idea of storing food isn't seeming quite so crazy to a lot of folks in the country, but still, I hear all the time "I want to start building up a reserve but my husband/sister/mother in law thinks this is nuts." So I thought I would repost this piece, on how to get your family on board (and what not to say).
Ok, I've convinced you - you need a reserve of food, you want to learn to can and dehydrate, you want to start eating more local foods. But you haven't done anything yet, because, well, the rest of your household isn't on board. Before you go…