Well, it has become apparent we now have a boy on our hands. All remnants of toddler, baby, or small person have completely grown up and away. The Spicy Barracuda is now, officially, a kid and quite the boy at that.

This began to become apparent in Georgia. He little round Buddha belly (which he had sported practically since birth) skinnied into a flat strong little tummy with ribs showing. His pants no longer fit and he shot right up practically an inch! I'm very thankful he doesn't have my legs, but has opted for thinner, leaner muscles which give him much more grace than I have ever been able to muster. I am equally thankful we didn't accumulate more size 5 pants as it appears he will have grown out of them quite rapidly.

As his shoulders have broadened and his jaw line continues to become much more defined the man residing in him has become quite obvious. It may be quite a while before girls start showing up at the door or calling on the phone, but we are having to let go of our little man and relinquish him to new-found friends. Though there are no young kids on our block, we live less than five walking minutes from a large park and the local elementary school where children abound. He also has quite the following at one of the grandparents houses in suburbia.

It is too soon for me. I tell myself that his sense of personal direction isn't strong enough, his knowledge and judgment in the face of peer pressure aren't fortified, his ability to stand alone with difficult choices falters too much. All of this is moot, however, he has made the decision himself and is demanding personal independence.

He knows many of the neighborhood kids now all by himself and looks for them at the park. Most of the YMCA afterschool program knows him on site and some wait for him to show up and play. He now wishes to play with me sitting quite a ways away (luckily Dad is still cool enough) and when I come to pick him up from a weekend with the suburban grandparents, there is a very down face.

The final blows of reality came when the desire to shave off the back of his mohawk was issued. The haircut has been all his own choice since it was first given at 18 months old. From the colors to the style, his hair is his to do with as he wishes. So after four or five "are you sure's" the clippers took off the long mane of hair traveling down his neck. This request was shortly followed by "Can we go get Pokeman cards with my allowance?"

So up the street the family walked. The Barracuda giddily running ahead with his prized allowance jar clutched in his hands, Jules and I following close behind. The realization came quickly that this will be the first of many such walks.

I remind myself that his independence is a good thing: we want a leader, not a follower. This new found voice and sense of self have shown themselves elsewhere from learning to read by himself to now declaring a desire to learn Spanish. He will make his own way, and we are still there to guide him, but from this point on he has taken over the drivers seat.

Trans fats come from vegetable oil which has been hydrogenated, converting unsaturated fatty acids to saturated ones. In processed foods, trans fats replaced solid fats (like butter and vegetable oil) because they are cheaper and preserve foods better. Trans fats however, have unwanted side effects when consumed. They lower the "good" cholesterol and increase the "bad". This switch causes insulin resistance elevating the risk of Type 2 diabetes and contributes to coronary heart disease. In 1999 Harvard researchers estimated that 100,000 deaths annually could be prevented by reducing the consumption of trans-fats. So where are these harmful food additives? All over everywhere! The top offenders are boxed mixes such as cake and brownie mixes, Bisquick, cornbread mix; spreads like shortening, margarine, and butter substitutes; and powdered soup mixes.

The FDA required trans fats to be put onto food labels in January 2006, but a food can be labeled zero trans fats if it contains less than .5 grams of trans fat per serving. So be careful, because this labeling can be deceiving. By eliminating problem products our family has eliminated many of the harmful trans fats from our diet.

When we first started converting our food, we used margarine and Jiffy cornbread mix. They were cheap, good, and worked well. I am now finding out, however, that cheaper isn't always better. So we are now switching over to making our own butter and rendering buttermilk.

Finding diary products cheap enough to be able to justify the switch caused a bit of a problem. However, if you combine the price of buttermilk and the price of a pound of butter, you probably will break about even. In our household buttermilk is a complete frivolity, so breaking even here just wouldn't do. It took some sleuthing, but by using Cash & Carry (a restaurant supply company which allows the public) we were able to purchase whipping cream from a local, farmer owned dairy for less than it would cost to purchase a pound of butter. Not only that, but we can render the buttermilk as well which saved us even more! Score!

Homemade butter is about the simplest thing possible to make. Everyone thinks of a farm lady from the early 1900's with her churn struggling away, but all I used was my mixer. I will say, though, without a mixer, you are gonna need one hell of a bicep! Butter is basically whipping cream which has been over whipped. Due to only being able to purchase ultra-pasturized whipping cream, the process took about 30 minutes total. Here is the run down:

Pour the whipping cream into a bowl and begin to whip it. I used the whisk attachment, and medium speed. After about 15 minutes I had whipped cream.


Depending on your mixer, you may want to let it rest in between the transitions. I stopped and scrapped down the sides before mixing again for10 minutes till the whipped cream started to turn yellow and tasted like butter.

At this point I draped a towel over the top and turned the mixer onto turbo crazy high. After another 10 minutes on uber-high the butter began to break away creating a yellow, clumpy, dripping mixture.

I scrapped down the sides again and began mixing on high once more. At this point it is almost butter so you really need to watch it. In three minutes, the sloshing of the buttermilk could be heard and there was butter!Now, it is hard to accurately quantify how excited I was at this. Alright, I admit it.

I'm a nerd.
Being a nerd, I was also excited to have discovered the awesomest kitchen tool. When I am making butter, I call it my butter squisher (it has other names when I am doing other things with it). In reality I think it is supposed to be used with spaghetti some how, but around here it is a butter squisher, canning strainer, chicken stock divider, and lots of other great stuff.

By making butter, you are essentially separating the fats (the butter) from the liquid (the buttermilk) within the cream from the cow/goat/sheep/other dairy animal. So when it becomes butter, you have the clumpy yellow butter in the bowl sitting in the buttermilk. You need to squish as much buttermilk as you can out of the butter. Enter the butter squisher!

Press the butter to the side of the mixing bowl, clumping it all together into a mass and squeezing out the buttermilk as much as possible.














Once the butter is together in a mass, lift it out of the bowl, wrap the butter in a couple layers of paper towel and physically squeeze it as much as you can with your hands to remove any other excess buttermilk. This not only presses the butter into a ball, but gets a lot of the left over moisture out.
Pour the buttermilk out of the mixing bowl into a jar, bowl, or some other receptacle for later use. (It is amazing in mashed potatoes, pancakes, waffles, biscuits, gravy, muffins, just about anything other than drink. Remember, it is also pasteurized as long as the original whipping cream was pasteurized so no worries there.) You should get about a pint. Every quart of cream is different so it goes up and down a bit, but average of a pint.

Now place the butter ball back into the mixer, and switch attachments to the bread hook. Add a small amount of cold water (about 8 ounces) and beat the butter around again to chop it all up. Essentially you are rinsing all of the last of the buttermilk out.


After a minute of so (when the water looks as though it isn't getting any murkier) smush the butter together into a ball with your hands, wrap it in a couple of layers of paper towel, and squeeze all the water out. You now have butter! One quart of whipping cream yields about a pint of buttermilk and a pint of butter (about a pound). Both last as long as the store varieties when kept in the refrigerator.
The creating of our own dairy products is a new beginning in our household and a definite sign that we aren't turning back from our voluntary simplicity. In fact, as we venture further, the transition back seems even crazier than moving forward.

The more I look at it, the more the shift in our life hasn't been so much into simplicity (though this has occurred) it is in changing the perspective of how live to appreciate the small things we do every day. What used to be the mundane, annoying little things we had to fit into every day have now become events. We celebrate the activities by doing them together and making something positive occur from them. It is through these "events" that we can appreciate the small, normal things that make our life. We had normally read before bed time, but make an event out of choosing a classical chapter book and creating a story. It constantly rains here, but we made an event out of it by harvesting the rain and really quantifying the water to be useful. Everyone has to go to the grocery store, but we created an event out of it by limiting the trips to once a month, choosing to really create our food every day from scratch, watching it dwindle and then refilling it as a family. Mornings were just dragging ourselves out of bed, till Jules and I decided to make an event out of them by creating personal time for ourselves. Everyone walks their dog (hopefully), but it has finally come time to make an event out of that as well by creating "The Walk."

Our beloved Guadalupe is newly 6 months old and with that has come quite a bit of territorial behavior. She adores her family (even Bell Bell) but being a shelter rescue if anyone else moves too fast she gets very scared and sometimes snippy. That has always been true. However, if a total stranger comes up to her on the street when we aren't right there she will down right freak out at them. This is completely new behavior. She has always been territorial around the house, but frankly, I kinda liked that with Spicy Barracuda and I being home alone during the day. It makes me feel very safe to know that when I am walking my dog with my child, or at home alone, I have something there which will protect me. However, getting angry at strangers who just find her cute isn't going to work.

So I began to read up on Rottweilers and found out that this is really, really normal. It isn't an obedience issue. She comes when called, even if she doesn't want to. She doesn't jump up at people and quiets her barking when told to. She sits, fetches, and heels very well. She adapts to new rules incredibly fast and has never been even slightly aggressive to anyone in the family regardless of how the Barracuda wrestles with her. She just doesn't like anyone else to mess with her at all.

All the books have said the same basic thing: Rottweilers need activity in large amounts or they become temperamentally aggressive. So The Walk has been instituted. Every morning the Spicy Barracuda mounts his noble stead (a rockin' little bicycle) and we go for a very brisk 1 hour walk around the neighborhood. The last 10 blocks or so we race so that the Barracuda has to ride as fast as he can, I jog, and Guadie full on runs. We arrive back to the house panting and significantly more mellowed out for the day.

The exercise has done wonders! The winter nicely gave me a present of about 10 pounds to shed and this exercise has been very helpful. The difference in both Guadie and the Barracuda is equally amazing. When we missed The Walk only one day due to some broken plumbing and spewing water taking precedence, they both were hyped up beyond belief. It was one frustrating bouncy day around our house! Apparently this really gets the ya-ya's out of both of them and is great for me.

By leaving the house at 9 o'clock (no exceptions) we arrive home at 10:00 and don't have time to lazily begin our day. It is hard to let time get away from you when your wake up call is power walking! When we come home we have breakfast, brush our teeth, and begin with school for the day. The structure of having a specific starting point has made a wonderful flow. It provides the Spicy Barracuda with a specific, definable moment when things are going to start during our day. He knows what to expect and when things will be happening. Before this, time was the major designator and he is still too young to be able to really wrap his brain around what all that means. When we get home from The Walk he is ready to go. Who knew setting aside one hour in the morning could alleviate so many problems for the rest of the day!

Spring break arrived and though we had planned a long awaited camping trip with the Spicy Barracuda, a forecast of 38 degree highs and 100% chance of rain kinda killed it. So, off to my family's beach house we ventured instead. The four days were wonderful! After the first two of pouring rain and crazy wind, the skies were cloudless and in the seventies.

The Barracuda loved it, Guadalupe loved it (her first time at the beach) and it definitely showed me the extent that our family's lifestyle is a bit off from center. To open up a pantry and see stacks of cans was odd. To not have a bins of bulk food and be making meals from scratch, was odd. To be without Jules (he stayed home for most of the trip), was odd. But most odd of all was the water!

Having rain barrels of water has changed the way that both Jules and I look at the consumption of our water. The idea of rain barrels began because in the summer it is as though someone turns off the rain faucet. It completely dries up (not even a shower) for at least a good two months and more like three. The bummer with this is that it is the prime growing season and thus, if you want a garden you have to pay for the high priced irrigation from city water. City water around here increases almost 20% in the summer! With 90-100 degree days the water is a must and so we figured why not harvest the water for free during the rainy season (the other nine months of the year).

We started small with only two barrels set up and an incomplete overflow valve. Sure, it rained a lot here. Sure, everywhere on the internet cautioned people at how quickly rain barrels filled up. But, come on. We just had them hooked up to the small porch awning not the whole roof, and two barrels is 110 gallons of water. No problem, we had a couple of weeks to get it all perfected.

In one weekend rain event we had a barrel and a half full. And it was still coming! We hadn't anticipated this kind of water falling from the sky. I have lived here my whole life and never really thought much of the volume of water when it rains. It doesn't pour, it just rains...all the time. What were we doing to do with all that water?!? We didn't want the barrels to become completely full, and flood out the makeshift overflow creating a nice eroding river in our backyard.

There had to be something, so we brainstormed. We couldn't use it to cook with because the gutters are dirty. We couldn't drink it for the same reason. The crops weren't in yet so watering wasn't necessary and the rain was watering for us. Dishes and laundry were out for the same reason we couldn't cook with it. Jules came up with it at last - the toilet. It didn't matter how dirty the water was if we were just using it for flushing the toilet!

We figured we could make use of the water (and mainly keep the barrels from flooding) for the next couple of days (it rained all week) until we could acquire a third barrel and establish the overflow. Problem solved, at least temporarily.

How much water do you think it takes to flush your toilet? I had never thought about the toilet this way. Who really wants to think about their toilet? Uh, not me. But it is one of the most highly used appliances in your house and a very simple machine. Once you turn the water off at the wall you get only a single flush. You then have to take the back lid off and fill the tank up again to the water line (literally a line in the tank) to get another flush. This is normally done automatically through the wall and that is why you turn it off. I had no frame of reference as to the water capacity of our toilet. The tank didn't look that big, eh, maybe a gallon or something. NO! It takes almost four gallons of water with every single flush of our toilet!
To put that into perspective, those are two liter soda bottles and

that is only one toilet flush.

The average person flushes the toilet 8 times a day. For those of you who work outside the home and your house (and toilet) sit unused all day this might not be much, but the Barracuda and I are home almost all day, every day. That is a lot of water (and money) literally being flushed down the toilet. Jules and I could not figure out why the water bill had spiked so much since the Barracuda and I moved it. We accepted it, but were baffled. Now, we have the answer. Somewhere between $20-$30 of our water bill was just toilet flushing.

Everyone's toilet is different, and you can calculate the amount of water you toilet uses (a great bored out of your mind activity to do with the kids) by visiting this website. If you live in a large household, this probably wouldn't work for you. There are only three of us here so we are able to pull it off very, very simply. A large kitty litter container is exactly the right size to fill the tank of our toilet now that two bricks have been placed inside. You flush, you fill. The difference is actually surprisingly minimal except in your perception of personal and household consumption.

I had no idea we used the amount of water we did. With the extent of the global water crisis leaving more than a billion people without clean water to even drink, I am so taken aback by us using four gallons of fresh water just to flush our toilet. Though I do not see our small simplification of using rainwater to flush the toilet as a way to save the impoverished of the world, the perspective it has given me on just how much I take for granted will stick with me for a long time to come.

After receiving many comments and questions about what our family is attempting, I've decided to start blogging it. Whether people are actually interested, or merely voyeuristic intrigued I will never know, but I think the process of remembering how to live smaller, fuller lives rather than larger, expensive ones will benefit us long after the recession has passed. More over, I hope to express to others how simple it really is and how amazingly enjoyable!

A couple of years ago I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. Though I realized the agricultural system in America was probably not the greatest, I didn't understand how fully we have become removed from the natural environment which we lived. I had no idea when various fruits were in season; hell, I had no idea where my food even came from. I'd never grown any food of my own even though I had a spacious yard. I rarely made desserts in favor of prepackaged cookies. Cooking was something I had always enjoyed, but going to Burger King was equally desirable. What is more, I'd never even thought about so many of these things until someone stopped me and really asked. This was just the way I lived my life, my family had lived their lives, and everyone I knew lived theirs as well. But I was tired a lot, never seemed to have enough money even though I worked full time, didn't get to experience quality time with my son, and generally felt as though there was never enough time to reach out and grab the life which constantly felt out of reach. I decided to stop.

My full time job became a half time job. My son and I started making cookies and giving them to our friends and family. Not only could we no longer afford the packaged ones, it was fun and we could do it together. Exercise replaced shopping, the television was replaced by books (the library is free as well), and I began to spend a lot of time walking down by the river thinking about what I actually wanted rather than what I thought I should be doing. Personally, I decided to not go back to the rat race. I soon after began my unconventional life with Jules and together we haven't really looked back.

Recently, my son's father, Jules, and I decided to take it one step further. We are shifting our entire household away from packaged, processed food in favor of the simplicity of making it all ourselves. Soon we will be killing our TV and not converting to digital. We have removed a third of the yard to plant a garden, are hand digging a root cellar out of our crawl space, and are beginning to look at alternatives to the standard chemicals used in a household. This is not happening overnight, but it is making dramatic progress and our life is too. We are not trying to "go green" we are trying to simplify. We have basically decided to stop diversifying our life with consumerism and start making it ourselves. Hopefully in reading you will find small things to begin incorporating into your life and family as well.

Our Family
The Spicy Barracuda is our 4 and a half year old (now 5 1/2), crazy little man. He is a constant bouncing ball of precocious energy who loves to read, watch PBS Kids (No more Television), dance, cook and garden. It never ceases to amaze me the things he comes up with and all of his articulate declarations. The Barracuda has been an incredible help in our projects and still expresses wonder every time seeds sprout, trees can be climbed, or rocks are thrown into a river. His giggling cackle, mohawk, and love of the color purple and anything sparkly, force us to lighten up and enjoy the present. My Barracuda is my daily reminder to still search for knowledge, still strive to create, hope for better things to come, and marvel at the world around us. He is such a cheerful, good-natured child that very few days are unhappy in our household. Combined with Jules and an every growing puppy, they will soon begin eating me out of house and home!
None of this would be possible without Jules. He has been incredibly supportive (even when he thought I was crazy) and continues to enjoy our adventure together however nontraditional it might be. Jules teaches English, gardening, Earth Science, music appreciation and a handful of other subjects at an alternative high school always bringing home new and interesting topics for us to engage in. He was the creator of household dance parties and aided the Barracuda in his nickname by introducing the song by Heart. From the Beastie Boys and Wyclef Jean to Bob Dylan and Freedom Rock he has been integral to showing our Barracuda the wonders of music. An avid bicycler, long distance backpacker, and amazing dad, Jules makes every day worth snuggling into bed at night and waking up to in the morning. Out of everyone in our family, the transition away from mainstream has hit him the hardest, admitting the culture shock is sometimes hard to adjust to. Jules is my constant reminder that we don't have to be a "normal" family, we have to be a happy family.
Princess Bell Bell is our neurotic little shelter rescue. She is the softest, most snuggly cat if you are honored enough to be one of the chosen few she will grace the lap of. She frequents warm sunny windows, abandoned blanket covered furniture, and table and refrigerator tops all over the house always reminding us how graced we are to have her and the importance of a lazy nap. With the household addition of our new puppy a few months ago, we don't see her as much as we used to. Slowly that is changing and we are all very glad since she is a highly loved addition to our family and a cat in every sense of the word. Though she tolerates Barracuda very well, and enjoys me when I knit or read, she is Jule's cat through and through. A total daddy's girl!
Guadalupe the Maniac is our dopey little Rotty (We now know her to be doberman/shepard). I may say little now, but if her paws are any judge she will soon be HUGE! She is also a shelter rescue and our families Solstice present this past holiday season. At 5 months she is easily the size of Barracuda and they have many an adventure in the backyard together. She will sloppily lope after any stick and ball loving whomever threw it for the extent of a long fetch session. She is the silliest little thing, full of big paws, floppy ears, a barrel of a chest, and the wiggliest, frolicking walk I've ever seen. We adore her and all the playful silliness she has brought into the household. Though a chore at times, she is luckily cute as all hell and with merely a look or two can convince us to keep her regardless of the trouble she has gotten into. Guadie, as she is playfully nicknamed, is definitely my puppy. She will happily sleep with me, sit with me, lay in my lap (even though she no longer fits), be prone to fits of joy when I come home, and generally follow me throughout the house. Luckily Jules isn't too jealous.

Lastly, that leaves me. I'm an ex teacher of at-risk highschool students who might return once again in the future. I work part time at a local restaurant and spend my days being Barracuda's mom. I enjoy reading, knitting, cooking, working in our backyard garden, and learning more and more of the old world skills we seem to have lost contact with. Though this lifestyle many not be for some, it is an incredibly exciting way for me to nurture my family and experience living with them. I grew up in a household that had quite a bit of money, a large a house, and a complete lack of connection to each other or our surroundings. From that experience I would much rather have less money and more connection to each other. If it is one thing this change in lifestyle has provided, I would say it is a greater amount of time together and an appreciation for the Earth around us. In my opinion our lives have gotten fuller as we have removed the processed food and packaging. I now feel as though we are creating a life, rather than merely existing in a house.