Happy Thanksgiving!

Yep, a day late and now a dollar shorter. :)

As I sit here the evening of Black Friday, I give thanks for leftovers.  How else could I gross my kids out with my "turkey bowl extravaganza"?  Mm... Turkey, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, fruit and nut dressing, broccoli, cranberry sauce all in a convenient bowl.  I have to admit that going a little more primal for the dinner has been a great thing.  Very little bread and flour to assault the tummy and create a miserable bloated feeling.  The carbo-licious potatoes and sugar laden cranberry sauce weren't at all primal but they sure were tasty!

Black Friday shopping has left me with regret.  I keep thinking I should have gone to two more stores, but 5 hours and only 3 stores in I realized I probably really didn't need to go.  Nope, I didn't need to, but I sure regret not going.  Those last two stops would be primarily to purchase stuff for me.  I have a hard time allowing myself to shop for myself on days or trips dedicated to Christmas or other gift giving days.  I wish my guilt conscious would give me a break now and then, its costing me money.

But as it is, my list is well under way for a Merry Christmas, and for that, I am thankful.

Let's beat the different drummer

Have you ever gone off the beaten path in life?  Have you ever gone against conventional wisdom?  I grew up somewhat offbeat in a way.  We didn’t always do what everyone else was doing, and for the most part that’s pretty much ok. 

Now it’s my turn.  I’m good with being offbeat myself.  I breastfed my kids all past 1 year, made our own baby food, cloth diapered the younger two.  I stay home with the kids, we home school, use hand-me-downs, and avoid a lot of commercialism.  It seems pretty normal to me, but it isn’t when you compare us to mainstream families.  So it should really be no surprise when my husband and I decided to change our way of eating.  My oldest sister had suggested the South Beach diet, but it seemed too hard--too organized for me.  I liked the idea, but lacked the motivation and follow through.

In playing a game of “follow the link” one day, I ended up on Mark’s Daily Apple.  I read a lot of what he had to say, and it made sense to me.  Grains and gluten are bad for you.  “White” foods like potatoes and rice aren’t good for you.  Stop eating these things and see what happens.  What happened for us is that we started to feel better.  There are 10 basic “laws” or ideas that Mark Sisson espouses that will help you live better.  I can dig that.  They make sense.

But this idea is so foreign to others that they can’t help but be all out jerks about it.  Well, they could help themselves if they wanted to, but I suspect it’s more fun to be a jerk than it is to just say, “hey, good for you, I’ll buy my own bread.”  Or “Oh, you forgot the potatoes?  No big deal since you cooked dinner for 20 other people while I sat on my butt and did nothing.” 

This, and my last post about the itsy-bitsy spider bring me to the conclusion that people will allow you to follow your own drummer only when they can set the beat.  Otherwise, you will be treated poorly for making a decision that is healthful for yourself and your family.  I don’t know if it’s a guilt thing or if its an asshole thing.  It is something though.  It is being mean and cutting others down to make yourself feel better.  It is being small and acting like the ill-mannered troll that lives under a bridge, but with an ax to grind because someone went against the crap that you can’t say you believe in, but you can’t let go of.  It is believing that it is a personal affront if someone does something different and right for themselves and their family.   

The ill-fated, diminutive arachnid which ascended a rooftop drainage device prior to a precipitation event

Apparently, I am a failure for not pushing my children to sing, upon random relative’s command, a verse about a small spider.  I haven’t found it necessary to reinforce the motions of a preschool song, which they mastered and moved on from years ago.  They know the song, and could sing it if they desired, but I would never deem it an important enough song to ask them to perform for an audience, especially before they’ve had their breakfasts, and I certainly wouldn’t allow someone else to force them to sing.  Indeed, the children’s memorization lessons are focused on the character and faith reinforcing the words of our religion’s prevailing text.  Their music lessons come from the same source and encompass verses focused on extolling the virtues of following and believing in our God’s written word.  Yet, I would still never deem it necessary for them to perform these recitations upon the demand of someone they are unfamiliar with.

Aside from this sore situation of abuse, where I’ve allowed my children to pursue their current interest of astronomy by learning and memorizing the heavenly bodies instead of learning the musical importance of the ill-fated, diminutive arachnid which ascended a rooftop drainage device moments prior to a precipitation event, I have been informed that no one cares about the planets nor the constellations.  Which stands to reason that no one cares about the explorers navigated by those skybound objects burning in the night.  This means that the lessons the children learned immediately prior to setting out from home on this vacation were for naught.  We should have sung nursery rhymes instead of discussed the night sky.

So do not bother to question why we are here. 

Nor ask how people traveled in the past. 

No one cares about space.  Its all about the ill-fated spider. 

How do I know?  The previously referred to relative was a teacher for 30+ years.  She is an expert on what people should know, and she knows that no one cares about how the peoples of the world have traveled and redistributed population prior to GPS--or even how the global positioning system works.

Likewise, my crimes include not requiring my children to talk to people that make them feel uncomfortable.  I do not require them to make conversation when they are in the midst of acclimating to a wakeful state.  I do not require them to do the chores that are better suited to a person of adult stature and skills, without reasonable modification.  I also do not require them to clean up after more than themselves.  I know, I know, it’s a horrible thing to promote personal responsibility at the ages of 7, 6 and 3.  I must be failing my children by focusing on tasks that reinforce the concepts of cleaning up after yourself, taking care of your possessions and learning the best way to complete assignments via supervised learning. 

I wonder if this offended feeling will fade in time, or if its just the beginning.  I do know that I do not have to answer to a person who has spent very limited time with my children, and that I will limit my family’s exposure to such toxicity.  I suppose that this is something seasoned home educators have dealt with quite often, and I had no reason to expect that we would be exempt from such bias and attitudes.  I am just taken aback by the attack on a child who refused to sing the itsy-bitsy spider.