Some days it feels like our family’s mission in life is mostly to keep other people’s stuff out of the landfill.

In the last couple of weeks Craig refurbished (another) hand-me-down laptop and we laid a walkway made of brick salvaged from a demolition in our neighborhood. (I will be eternally grateful to the neighbors who helped us cart all those bricks home!) Nearly all of our clothes and furniture are second hand, as are the dishes, though I admit that I dream of someday purchasing myself a beautiful matching set when there are no little hands to help me break them.

We currently have a rescue dog, hand-me-down cats and garden plants, and second-hand chickens, some of which came complete with a coop.

I realized as I glanced around our bedroom that almost every item of furniture could be counted either as a hand-me-down or an heirloom. (I’ll leave you to decide which is which.) And without stretching our budget to include more “consumer goods” we have a full life, and a remarkably full house – so much so that I’m constantly hauling things off to Goodwill.

I’m not complaining – I’d rather be given a slightly-used pair of shoes for one of the kids than pay $50 for them and wonder what kind of sweat shop I’m supporting with my purchase. And it’s not like we don’t buy new things sometimes. Socks, for example, are best when fresh, in my opinion. It’s just hard to wrap my head around how there can be so much stuff in the world that we can fill our house to overflowing (almost) without ever buying anything new.

Also, as I look at the piles building up in the corners (again), it occurs to me that I need to accept that it’s probably not my job to keep things out of the landfill, especially things I didn’t buy in the first place, lest we all go the way of Hanta in Too Loud a Solitude. (Which you should read if you love darkly beautiful books about…books.)

In the meantime, I guess I’ll continue keeping our local thrift shops in business…

Victory! There are posts on my own blog between this and the most recent Mighty Is Her Call post! Here’s the link if you’re interested:

It’s happened twice now: my daughter has requested that we grow Brussels sprouts in the garden, and I have sallied forth to the local garden center right around October and returned with cute little baby brassicas. Only weeks later do we realize…these are not Brussels sprouts.

How can this happen twice, you might wonder? The first year they were cabbages. And a Brussels sprout looks like a cabbage on a stick, with little buds all over the stick. So I kept watching these cabbage-shaped things and waiting for the stalk to shoot up. Needless to say, it never did.

This year, I resolved to try again. The plants were clearly labeled. I brought them home, my daughter happily planted them in her little patch of garden. We waited. Giant green leaves and a knobby white center emerged…we had planted cauliflower.

I thought my daughter was going to cry. She loves Brussels sprouts and she had waited a year and a half for these. And they were cauliflower. (In my defence, they’re all in the same plant family. The little ones look enough alike to my untrained eye…but I digress.)

There was no point in digging them up by the time we realized the mistake, and it was too late to try again this year. So we watched the cauliflower grow to a pretty ridiculous size, and then I chopped one down and brought it in for dinner.

Whatever the ancients may say, I think that ambrosia might just be home-grown cauliflower. It was really, really good.

When we realized that we could cook and eat the leaves like any other green…well, it almost made it worth the four square feet of garden each plant took up to make its tasty head.

And it almost made it worth missing out on the Brussels sprouts, again.

So I went to the freezer section at the grocery store, loaded up on bags of Brussels sprouts, and we’re making the best of it. I also added one thing to the wish list attached to my seed catalogs: Brussels sprout seeds. If those grow up to be kale…well, I guess at that point I’ll concede defeat.

Here’s my latest over at Mighty Is Her Call:

Check out my latest post at Mighty Is Her Call:

My latest over at Mighty Is Her Call:

Find it here:

So I’ve been neglectful again…but here are links to my last two posts over at Mighty Is Her Call.

Praying Through the Chaos

Growing Pains

So it’s been a while…again. But good news! I’ve been asked to join the lovely ladies who blog at Mighty Is Her Call, so hopefully that will be some motivation for some more writing, both here and there. In the meantime, here’s my first post over there:

Beauty is closer than I think

And here’s some eye candy from the tree across the street:

This was a couple of weeks ago, and the blooms have been replaced by lush green leaves now. Japanese magnolia season is short, but it might be my favorite time of the year!

This week’s parenting tip: Keep large wooden puzzles safely secured, especially at night.

You might be thinking, “That’s a strangely specific parenting tip. I wonder what made her think of that?”

Well. Let me tell you.

If your large (noisy) wooden puzzles are not secured, say in a cabinet, or in a crate, or with the pieces in plastic bags, it means they can be knocked over.

Perhaps by a five-year-old on a trip to your bedroom to inform you that he is cold.

And it is possible that, on the way back from this trip, intending to get under the blankets as you have wisely (if grumpily) recommended, this five-year-old will bump the puzzles, which are not safely secured. No, sadly, they are precariously balanced near his door.

And when the puzzles are bumped, well, they can’t help it, but they fall. And it sounds like a whole shelf in the pantry has come down, or the raccoons and opossums have finally defeated the cats and taken the screen porch for their own…and are tearing it apart to celebrate.

So the next sound you hear, after the almighty crash, will be some blood-curdling screaming. “SOMETHING IS TRYING TO EAT ME!” screaming.

So of course, you pop out of bed (fortunately you were still awake from employing your sagacity against the cold) and head towards the noises.

You’ll only get a few steps before you catch a five-year-old, coming at you full speed, and haul him back down the hall with his legs still churning, AWAY from the sleeping baby.

Somehow, you establish that the noise came from inside (so it’s not the raccoons…yet) and that what actually happened was that the cold, insomniac five-year-old bumped the puzzle stack.

By some miracle, the baby has not been awakened.

Everyone will be tucked back into bed. An hour or so later, your heart will have slowed down enough for you to go back to sleep.

At which point, the baby is sure to wake up.

Thus, my friends, heed my advice: Lock up the puzzles.