Week in Review

I have stolen Katrina's title. But anyhow, so much has happened, I will try to recap quickly. We returned from the beach and met up with reality and schooling. Micheal started our first day of school with us and it was great. Got soooo much done because he played with Keaton. We had soccer practices all week and really did get a lot done. I love our new Chemistry book and even enjoyed teaching Keelin and Bryn a little Latin. Had I remained on my original path I would be fluent, as I thought I would start when Denali began. Her third year in and I am just learning Hello. I also love our Geography songs CD from Rainbow Resource. Overall it was a very pleasant week and I am glad we are back to firm schedules. It fits my personality so much more.

In my free (ha-ha) time, I have been reading and tonight I could not help but laugh out loud. The book I am reading is Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and it is a true tale of how she and her family moved out to a farm to become "localvores"- people who eat within a range of their house. They set up rules and planned to live a year like this to see what influences they could have and just change their perspective. Well, it is a book I wish I could read aloud and have someone in my family find as funny as I do. Maybe it is my lack of farm knowledge or maybe it is my desire to do something similar but my fear of failure that finds the story intriguing and hilarious. But tonight it was so funny that instead of calling all of my favorite people, I will put it in my blog- this paragraph or two that made my side ache at the idea of such antics.

Background you must have is that Michael has been Vegan at one time in our marriage and continues to be vegetarian. He and Denali both. While Bryn eats any and all meat and prefers it not to be marred with any other foods. Protein just protein for her. Lastly is Keelin who is vegetarian unless you count hamburgers, and bacon (which I do-- so she is not in my book a vegetarian). I am someone who eats anything lovingly prepared and placed in front of me because REALLY I am a mom who feeds everyone else first and rarely sits down. So with food and discussion of what is and is not meat and where things come from constantly surrounding me, all usually occurring at the dinner table, I am not a big fan of thinking of the life cycle of animals that find their way to my plate here and there.

So on page 90, Barabra is discussing turkey. Apparently the majority of them are of the same particularly dumb breed and are too fat to have turkey sex (trying not to picture this). She writes," So how do we get more of them? Well you might ask. The sperm must be artificially extracted from live male turkeys by a person, a professional turkey sperm-wrangler if you will, and artificially introduced to the hens, and that is all I am going to say about that. If you think they send the toms off to the men's room with little paper cups and Playhen magazine, that's not how it goes. I will add only this: if you are the sort of parent who threatens your teenagers with a future of unsavory jobs when they ditch school, here's one more career you might want to add to the list."

The question here in our house is- How long into the school year will I have to describe this job to one of my children in effort to get them to finish their schoolwork? And better yet, when can we move to the farm? I feel certain I can maintain being vegetarian there.