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After hearing a piece on CBC a couple weeks ago about Colin Beavan and his year of living lightly on the earth, I set off on a google-chain to find out more about him and what he had done. Turns out, he’s working with The No Impact Project ,which is promoting a week-long campaign to get Jane Q. Public to try out the low/no-impact lifestyle. The experiment is laid out on their website and includes a wonderful how-to guide to walk you through the week.
So… we’re going to give it a whirl over here, and try decreasing our footprint in some way every day: reducing material consumption, using our own power to get around town, decreasing the energy we use in our home, eating food that is local and not over-packaged, slashing the garbage we haul out to the curb every day. I think it will be a great experience for the adults in the house, as well as for the kids (who have already expressed concern that “low-energy” days might conflict with the days they get to watch TV!). I also think it’s going to be more challenging than we know right now. But we’re gearing up, and are looking forward to it immensely.
I’m going to try to blog about it here (if I’m still allowed to use my computer occasionally!), and my hope is that all four of us can share some of what the experiment teaches us and the challenges and joys we stumble upon throughout.
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This one is for the lovely Tracy O., who always inspires me by making my everyday tasks feel impressive and worthwhile – thanks, gorgeous!
I have almost filled my freezer for fall… one of my favourite things to do as the fall harvests come in and our fridge starts to explode with tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchinis. I usually hoard these beautiful fruits and vegetables, incapable of refusing people’s glorious bounty when offered. There are so many months of the year here where there is nothing available that even resembles these beautiful things. And then after a few days, I curse it all for a day, wishing I didn’t have to come up with new and interesting things to do with vegetables my children profess to dislike. Then I shake it off and methodically go about filling my freezer with ready-to-eat meals for rushed fall and winter evenings. And then I sleep easy at night, ready for the next baskets of goodies I know are coming my way.
It started this year with tomatoes. On returning from the cottage, I was dying for a fresh, red, tasteful tomato. I found baskets of Ontario tomatoes at No Frills, and feeling overly ecstatic at the fairly half-assed effort on their part to promote semi-local, seasonal food, I snatched a bunch up. Then we received about three more baskets full within 24 hours from friends and family with prolific gardens and farms. I should know to be careful what I wish for.
Inspired by the desire to cook a post-partum meal for a dear friend, I decided to make the tomatoes into lasagna. An afternoon of washing, chopping, simmering and stirring produced a whopping amount of tomato sauce featuring a fraction of the tomatoes, zucchinis, mushrooms, onions, garlic, carrots, celery, peppers and red wine - one batch with tofu, one batch with beef. Step one – done. I mixed up some spinach and ricotta, and grated a ton of mozzarella and laid out six – count ‘em, six! – baking pans. I layered while enjoing the tail end of the red wine, and ended up with three meat and three vegetarian lasagnas. One for the new parents, five for the freezer, plus a big batch of ready-to-eat spaghetti sauce. Ahhhhh, I felt better already.
The tomatoes continue to dwindle – lots of sandwiches, but there is still more work to be done on that front.
Next came a desire to have quick and easy snacks for the kids, and a plethora of rolled oats. This morning, Leo and I busted out the mixer and made eight dozen oatmeal-raisin cookies – replacing the white flour with whole wheat even lets me feel somewhat virtuous about the number consumed today. Most are in the freezer, and some stashed away for everyday snacks.
I still had a few casserole dishes unused, so tonight’s enchilada supper also yielded a meal for the freezer… just as easy to make two trays as it is to make one! Spinach tortillas stuffed with garlicky brown rice, black beans, Monterrey Jack and enchilada sauce, served with sour cream and pureed chipotle peppers – a family favourite. We had a giant basket of beans crowding out the beer, and given that it was still four hours until bedtime, the beans had to go before the beer. We don’t have any passionate bean lovers here, so I waded through a few books to find something out of the ordinary to do. We ended up with a cold bean salad: beans just barely cooked, then tossed in a dijon oil and vinegar dressing, topped with bread crumbs toasted in butter, olive oil and garlic mixed with ever-so-tiny bits of diced hard-boiled egg. Divine.
I added the enchilada tray to the almost-full chest freezer, balanced precariously on top of the organic chickens, lasagnas, sauce, coffee beans, etc., etc., etc. Once the vegetables are long-gone, the anxiety will hit about what is at the bottom of the freezer, and we’ll eat our way through forgotten treasures for a while, until the whole beautiful cycle starts all over again…
The weekend will hopefully bear muffins and a large stash of trail mix, and I’ll have to wade through the rest of the vegetables we have – we have cucumber, fennel, tomatoes, and edamame at the very least, and there is certainly stuff I’ve forgotten about at the back of the crisper drawers.
But first… the triathlon. The next time I write, we will have accomplished this minor yet intimidating feat. Please think of us at 10:05 Saturday morning, as we launch ourselves into the Ottawa River and embark on our first mini-triathlon – here goes nothing!
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Two boys – count ‘em, TWO!! – went off to school this morning. So exciting. Max is there for the whole day, his first day of Grade Three. Leo and I went for a one-hour drop-in to Junior Kindergarten, and now he doesn’t actually go back for two weeks – they phase the JKs in slowly in small groups to make the transition a little easier. We found his cubby and he hung his (empty) backpack there for the hour we were there – very satisfying. Now we’re home, waiting anxiously to pick Max up and see how his first day in Grade Three/Four went. I’m happy he’s in a Three/Four split, and with a teacher he’s had, and liked, before… and hoping that he feels the same way.
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My passport arrived last week, so the boys and I headed to Alexandria Bay for lunch to celebrate the last day of holidays and the fact that the three of us are now able to cross international borders.
We had a great time – took under four hours to go back and forth. We had lunch and bought a ridiculous amount of fudge from a little shop in A Bay, and stopped to climb the skydeck on Hill Island on the way home. The boys each have an American dollar bill to remember the trip by and were pretty intrigued by the whole border crossing, new country thing. As we got onto Interstate 81, Leo asked, “Are the people really FANCY in America?” (I can now report that no, we didn’t see any fancy people whatsoever in our three-hour visit.)
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We had a glorious holiday – 12 days on the road – a weekend at our favourite music festival in our fabulous new tent, then nine relaxed beach days at the cottage. It was all any of us could have hoped for in a holiday.
The music festival was perfection – nice sunny days, great music, lovely people. The kids ran around, swam and biked all day, and fell asleep in our arms in front of live music every night; it was my version of heaven.
Our gigantic tent was the talk of the campsite (“look, honey, their tent has a BREEZEWAY!!”) – you can click through to a full photo set on our flickr account.
We opted against a late night drive to the cottage and spent the night in London at a cheap hotel, which saved some harrowing hours on strange roads in the dark, and provided an adventure in and of itself. Woke up and hit the road bright and early Monday morning and made the cottage by lunchtime.
We moved right into our strict regime of triathlon training followed by cold beer, Doritos, and napping. The kids and Matt spent a ton of time in the (wavy) water on the inner tube, we roamed the beach in search of rocks and waterglass, and ate from the charcoal BBQ every night. Leo discovered a crazy passion for fresh corn on the cob, Max became a super-star two-wheel bike rider, and Matt and I logged many kilometres on bikes, feet and in the water.
Paul, Tracey and Hazel found a silver lining to Toronto life – they can drive up to our cottage! We had a great weekend visit, the kids frolicked, we drank more beer, ate more Doritos, played board games… Dreamy.
David and Marta joined us for our last night, and we had a super campfire and fireworks display – a great end to a great week.
We took a long, but beautiful route home to avoid the 401 and Toronto, and pulled in around 11 p.m. on Tuesday, the 25th.
It was a truly perfect holiday, and wonderful to arrive home, too, and settle into our beds and lives here again.
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We get the midwives over for a real visit – with cake and coffee and no-one having to sit in a sitz bath afterwards.
These two wonderful women caught both our babies and introduced us to the world of woman-centred, informed choice healthcare – a life changer! And they guided us through Leo’s beautiful birth upstairs, truly making our house into our home.
The memories flooded back in snapshots today: my last wonderful pregnancy meal at Sol Latino on August 7, 2005, water breaking, gossiping in the living room with Karen, Claire and Pam through labour, a wee bit of eternal pushing, Claire and Max drifting in and out of the room – waiting… waiting…, Leo emerging into our bed and our lives, Max and Matt cutting the umbilical cord, Claire’s wonderful breakfast in bed, Max heading to my parents’ for the day, and a joyful, exhausted daytime sleep with our magical new family member rocking in the bassinet beside the bed.
Happy birthday, Leo – we’re so lucky to know you.
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Four years?! Is it possible? It seems like he’s been with us forever, but the night he was born also seems mere moments ago. Parenting time is strange.
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A late addition – the boys and I made some finger-lickin’ good ribs (thank you, Chez Piggy Cookbook) and set the table all fancy for a delicious and messy meal.
