Meow.

Go local!!

Our good friends at Bramble Hill Farm have, along with a few other local family farms, begun an organic farmer's market in Northern Davidson County and it opens Saturday June 2!!

Pictured above is Ziggy with the Bramble Hill boys, and all the market info from their mama is below.

Greetings Fresh Food Enthusiasts!

I am very pleased to announce the opening of the White's Creek Organic Farmers Market.

WHAT: A New Organic Farmers Market in North Davidson County, starting this summer

WHEN: SATURDAYS FROM 8AM TO 12 NOON, STARTING JUNE 2

WHERE: Earthman General Store, 4409 Whites Creek Pike, Whites Creek, TN 37189

FEATURING: Fresh, organic produce from these local farms: Eaton's Creek Organics (Joelton), Hungry Gnome Farm (Whites Creek), Sonfarm (Joelton), Bramble Hill Farm (Goodlettsville).

Mark your calendars, it's just a little more than a week away. Our first market we'll be offering a variety of early season produce, including: lettuce and various greens, fresh herbs, beets, turnips and other root vegetables, onions, squash and other surprises as the weather allows. As the Spring has been dry, we are all hoping for lots of rain in the near future!

Earthman General Store is located just south of the intersection of White's Creek Pike and Old Hickory Boulevard just 15 minutes from Downtown Nashville. You can get there by taking I-24 to the Old Hickory exit (go west to the 1st stop light, which is White's Creek and take a left- store will be on your left) or take Briley Parkway to the White's Creek exit and go North on White's Creek (the store will be on your right just before the Old Hickory intersection). The market will be in the lawn next to the store. For more specific directions, just e-mail me or call and I'll be glad to help.

Also, note that Earthman General Store just opened this past week and I encourage all of you to check out this beautiful historic building that features a lunch menu, various crafts and antiques and houses the office of a local newspaper. The grand opening of the store will be on Friday June 1.

The four farms (above named) involved in this market are also in the planning stages of forming a future cooperative - maybe a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) of sorts, or a weekly order opportunity for subscribed customers. Please give us your opinion and tell us what you would like to see.

PLEASE forward this information to anyone and everyone that might be interested in the market or a future cooperative. I will be sending out updates regularly and am happy to add anyone to my e-mail list who is interested. If you are not interested in recieving these e-mails please reply with "unsubscribe" in the message.

We're looking forward to a great season and hope to see you at the market!

Thank You,

Nancy VanWinkle

Bramble Hill Farm

(615) 876-3947

Bits and bobs.

As a work at home mother juggling solo parenting the majority of the day seven days a week, I've come to be more permissive about television than I'd have ever previously believed. I came into parenting with rather a lot of ideals and still certainly aim for them, yet have grown to find compromise of some of those ideals as essential to maintaining the overall balance and health of our family. Thereby, Teletubbies, Thomas and Friends, and Sesame Street have made their mark on our home in recent months. Oh, and Jakers! (Zig's understanding of the quirky expletive, however, is that it's the name of a pig, therefore he hollers out "Jakers" upon seeing pictures or models of piglets; soon enough, they'll all be Wilbur, I am sure.) On demand programming allows us to settle in for a small time when called for together, and on occasion, I'll set Ziggy up with a "show" when other options fail and I've no choice but to meet a deadline or complete a conference call. I suspect there could be far worse than my child learning Brit speak from Thomas, inspiring his comment to our beloved friend Kate as she frowned over sweeping, "Cheer up, Kitty Cat!"

Perhaps it should make me wrinkle my nose in disgust, according to those previous held ideals, but I can't help but laugh when Zig says "PBS Kids."

I think, too, that the recent obsession with big and little, introduced in conversation and multiple books over the course of a day's reading, may well be shored up by the big / little talk on his "shows" leading to talk of "big button, little button," Daddy's "big pants" and Ziggy's "little pants," and the one that makes me laugh so much: Mommy's "big bip" and "other bip," which is a dead on representation of the slightly unequal proportion of MBH's super full nursing mama bosom.

So Ziggy was nursing evening before last and suddenly stopped to point to my face, saying, "Eyes, Mommy. Blue eyes. Mommy blue eyes."

He also lately talks about Mommy's brown hair, and sight unseen, told me that Diggy also had brown hair.

He's known his colors since early on -- a fact which came clear to me when over a period of days he repeatedly said "green diaper" each time a particular nappy came into rotation. That was January, as Em gave us that stash in exchange for childcare just prior to Christmas. Zig was 16 months old.



Earlier in the same day, Ziggy rejected the blue batik tee shirt I'd put him in and asked for me to "Help put on" a little baseball jersey that buttoned down the front. Promptly he sat on the bed's edge and pointed from top to bottom, "One button, two button, three button." My Beloved Mister and I can not agree on whether this is counting. He says it's merely a sequence, which I believe to be counting itself. The Mister says counting is seeing three objects and saying that they are three. Me, I call that addition.

Regularly, Ziggy "counts" the moles on my breast and belly while nursing and cuddling.

Color me amused when he then turns to the mole on his wrist and tells it, "Come out!"


Yesterday, while nursing (something that happens so often & naturally through our days that I can not relate to mama friends with babes and toddlers who have a schedule of any kind, even self imposed, and nurse a countable number of times a day-- it's simply foreign to my experience) Ziggy pointed to the tag moles under my arm and announced, "Nipple." I explained that mama's body had made lots of tag moles since pregnancy with him. (Seriously-- they're everywhere! A year ago I had to get a mole on my neck taken off, as my seat belt was seriously agitating it. The doctor, a young man whose wife was expecting their first child, seemed somewhat aghast that my vanity didn't declare his removing the tag moles on my eye lids and underarms and legs a financial priortity.)



We planned a library visit for yesterday morning, in an effort to just have some normal around here. The Mister departed for work while the boy slept late (unusual, but we're all still so dang beat) and it was a bumpy transition from waking without Daddy in the house and onward. "Hold you, Mommy" and "Stroller!" and "No!" were the declarations of the morning and while I thought I was navigating this all quite gently, it did not prepare me for the snot flinging, body slamming, hysterical fit that took place for twenty minutes on the front porch and in the front yard by the car.... While Ziggy raged and crawled backwards all into my flower beds, I merely lowered my body to the ground, sat quietly and told him I knew he was frustrated. I told him I'd hold him if he wanted, or wait until he was feeling better. At last, Ziggy sat and sobbed and told me he wanted a graham cracker and he was "ready for seat."

Ziggy insisted to "stay in stroller" for most of the library visit, save for an ever so brief jaunt into storytime, in which after presenting Mary-Mary with a MAU Handbook and taking note of Tommy Dog's appearance, Ziggy merely wanted to join the Professor on stage for dancing, singing and juggling and was such a busy fellow we had to take off for the out of doors lest he disrupt the other storytime goers further. Once outside in the glorious courtyard, Zig tickled me by recognizing rosemary by sight and smell. We did get a whole passel of books for both the boy and the mother (who has a renewed goal of reading even a little bit daily) but checking them out with the card Ziggy wore on the lanyard around his neck proved quite distressful. The boy LOVES wearing his library card, and it was even MORE upsetting to remove the copy of Thomas Gets Ticketed & Other Stories and Kevin Henkes' A Good Day from his hands to get scanned.

The remainder of our day progressed with great tenderness meaning that little work was completed and supper and bedtime were drawn out exponentially. The Mister and I are working in what I tell Ziggy is "cooperation" to find a meaningful and consistent rhythm to our evenings, which don't start as a family until later than would be most desirable due to Daddy's work schedule.

Even this morning, as Ziggy slept fitfully, calling out, "Mama! Nurse! Nurse!" (reverting to calling Mama rather than the "Mommy" or "Hey, Paige" he has favored of late), he seemed to be processing leftover anxieties of last week's hospitalization as well as all the new stuff that he's over stimulated and excited by. Post nursing back down, Ziggy wiggled and laughed in his sleep saying, "Re-bo, bebo, re-bo, bebo.... funny! Pick up truck. Put up, put up!! Sit down, Bert. Fall down, Mommy." The rhyming, like so many other things, I'd not yet expected, but our boy is on his own jublilant path and everyday, a new adventure.

My fellas.

IM000413, originally uploaded by paigelabab.

Oh, how I love them.

This day: safe, sound, at home.

On the radio.

This evening, I'll be on Nell Levin's Radio Free Nashville show, Tennessee Progress Report, which airs Mondays, 5 - 6 Pm. I'll be talking with Nell about Mothers Acting Up nationally, and here in Nashville, where we've a thriving community. Tune in on your dial, or online.

Drumstick.

So a week ago I was basking in a successful Mother's Day Reclamation event here in Nashville, and taking joy in the news that was coming in from the twenty five other Mothers Acting Up and sister events from all over the country.

So Monday morning, one week ago, Ziggy and I headed out for the early part of the day to play and run errands, fully anticipating an afternoon of putting in the lasagna garden beds in our little backyard.

Alas, while at Wild Oats, Ziggy woke with what shortly became excruciating pain in his tummy. Long story very short, we ended up at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital and not coming home until Wednesday night.

It was a traumatic time for all of us, and one which we're still processing all the while digging into the normalcy of our life together.

I'll be writing more in the coming days and weeks of this time.
For now, a simple image with the lightest caption we can give it:

So busted tired after weeks and months of hard work and then the emotional and physical tumult, drain and fright of Ziggy's illness, I tucked him into bed and fell into it myself, to be awakened shortly thereafter by My Beloved Mister who stumbled in over my leg and hip, which didn't even make it into the big family bed before the rest of me completely surrendered to slumber. Morning came, and my Mister said of the sprawl, "It was like the fridge door came open and the chicken leg fell out."

Gratitude and the Cosmic scrambled egg.

This Mother's Day week, and those that have led up to it, have been packed full of activity tempered with family downtime and fun.

For me, the flurry of activity has meant organizing our local Mother's Day reclamation event, coordinating the twenty some-odd Mothers Acting Up events happening across the country for this weekend, a string of congressional and senatorial visits with local mamas and babes in tow to speak out for peace, many hours daily on the phone and online, meeting upon meeting, and somehow, strengthening not only my professional, but my personal life. I feel more connected to My Beloved Mister than I have in quite some time, and ever more tuned in with my mothering, with my friends, and even my extended family, though I see them less often.

The thing about doing a job that doesn't feel like work most of the time, but far more like simply doing as an extension of the living in my own livingroom, is that it feels comparatively ego-less. Now, I think I have to say that I broke my own heart week before last when on deadline with multiple tasks my toddler had a whiny meltdown and I yelled at him. Those moments of losing patience with him are few, though the trying times AND the amazing times, grow more intense through this period of differentiation. And it is quite something to work as an advocate for the world's children and also take the time and the care to tend my own boy with the attention to detail I think is important. I have, in fact, had to adopt what I've heard called benign neglect (by acquaintance and writer friend Katie Allison Granju and others) in order to complete my tasks, and yet when I learned that a most revered peace activist disclosed to a dear friend of mine that she, the big famous activist who up to that point I'd admired so heartily, had children who hated her for her absence in their lives, it was a lesson in exactly what NOT to do. I honestly feel that my work for other children, and my work toward peace, would be undone if my mothering were not at the core of the way I approach what I do. And for this reason, as well as those of basic email misunderstanding, I was terribly hurt and even offended (guess the ego wasn't so absent there, eh?) when a friend I admire as a mother and a human suggested some time ago that my illnesses (I never *did* write about the breast lump, did I?) might be telling me that I should not be doing the work I'm doing, rather might consider farming Ziggy out among friends so I could do something that asked for less self directed responsibility for me. At any rate, each day, I am simply hopeful to rid myself of the most toxic gunk, and to get clean enough to be the vessel for the good stuff to flow through. Call it God, Life Force, the Universe, whatever. It is my daily challenge and beloved task, to step aside that the work be done, through me. To do this with joy is the goal, and stumbling and tumbling into womanhood at forty is just what happens. As my friend Karen beautifully forgave her tulips for their late bloom so many years ago-- a gesture I hold to far more often than I suspect she ever intended-- I absolve myself (and others), make amends, move forward, trundling on as I go....

Yesterday, I did an interview with the Maria Sanchez Morning Show out of Ventura County, California. My decidedly less esoteric though no less sincere Mister made my morning when after hearing me do the interview, said that it solidified for him that I was doing the work (mothering, homemaking, activism & organizing) that I had been called to do on a Cosmic level.

Without taking myself too seriously, yet expecting more of myself than I ever previously have dared, I find myself most content, connected and conscious. And calm. Bursting with enthusiasm and energy, yes, but channeling a great deal of what has at times been anxiety, discomfort and unfocused ambition into some kind of place that feels quite natural, and for now, a good fit.

I hear it in my voice and see it in the way husband and son respond to me when I'm near, and seek me out when I've strayed too far. It's a dance, this life of ours together. And a whole lot of the time, it's really amazing.

Bits and bobs of life with boy.

Ziggy woke me about an hour ago, crying in his sleep. I asked him what was bothering him and he kept saying, "Pants, pants, pants, pants...."

I felt his pajama pants to see if we'd had a diaper mishap, but no.

I asked what happened to his pants, so Zig said, "Pants fall down. Fall down. In the backyard."



Poor fellow. He's a sleep talker and heavy dreamer like his mother, it seems.

(He woke up two mornings ago for the day crying and asking for "Mo' ice cream?" as we'd had special Pied Piper ice cream earlier in the week!!)




Recently while eating a piece of pizza, he held it out and said, "Airplane!" Sure enough, he'd bitten it into that recognizable shape.




Evening before last, Ziggy colored with markers at the table while his father and I finished supper. He's known his colors and announced them for several months now, and undeterred by the mismatched tops on the markers (shoved on in haste when last used for a children's craft for Mothers Acting Up), Ziggy named each color and began to mark up his paper, then his arm. He drew big fat V looking wings on the back of his hand and arms and told us, "Butterflies."

While painting and coloring have been much enjoyed activities for some time now, this was the first time he drew something specific and named it for us.




Interestingly, Ziggy calls the remote control "Daddy's," and the reel mower "Mommy's." And so it goes at our house. Despite the fact that Daddy has mowed the front lawn on his own last and we split it out the time previous.





In the last month our boy has begun to play with words, one day suddenly piping up, "Goodnight, Junie Moon," cleverly punning on a favorite story and our recently returned runaway rescue Maine Coon.

Likewise, he has turned his refrain to the dog "Go away, Bert. Back up, Bert," (which he actually says in jest, with a sly little smile as it is he who pesters Bert the Dog relentlessly) into something he is trying on with people now. When friend Suzanne and her four lovelies came by the other morning, Ziggy began to say to her youngest, "Go away, Ocea." Despite this, and despite the kicking that he tried out on both Ocea and his brother Kai, Ziggy adores these children and speaks of them many times a day.




And so, we've taken the God Blesses of my own childhood-- uttered to the point of delirium at bedtime prayer, wanting to get everyone I knew and loved named and blessed-- and made a sleep inducing chant of gratitude of all the names of our family and friends. So doing one night early in the week, we'd gone through everyone (I thought) two, three, four times.... and it appeared that Ziggy was just shy of slumber when his eyes flew open and he popped up to say, "Mason!" He was right. I'd somehow forgotten Mason. And, as Zig reminded me, his parents, Jennie and Jake, who as of two mornings ago, have a new baby girl. "Ivy," says Ziggy. "Baby Ivy."

Ziggy Models Nashville MAU wear.

... that the great human family may live in peace.

MBH Explains All on Mothering Chat tomorrow.

Come visit with me this Mother’s Day week about Mothers Acting Up reclamation events and community building on Mothering magazine’s Mommy Chats.

I’ll be ready to “talk” with you and answer questions tomorrow, Wednesday May 9 at Noon Central (you do the math from your own time zone, please); read my bio and more about what to expect including how to access the chat here.

Last month’s chat proved to be well attended, informative and fun and resulted in the birth of a MAU community and Mother’s Day reclamation event in Temecula, CA. Pink collars up and aprons off to Tiffany!!

Come on by, I’m looking forward to it.

Home.

Joy Nash Rules.

... and she's fat.

So am I. (What, did you think I didn't know?)

Local Mamas to participate in final senatorial visit as part of Occupation Project.

We'll be headed this way....

Local Mamas to participate in final senatorial visit as part of Occupation Project.

Mothering chat.

So I'll be back on Mothering Magazine's Mommy Chats next week (can it possibly have been nearly three weeks since the last one?)

Here's a transcript of what transpired at April's "talk."