Four Good Reasons For My Blogging Break

Can you guess which member of our family made this mess?
This is pretty indicative of the state of our lives for the last few months.

I haven't blogged since September 7. But now I'm back! I hope that's good news to someone. :) It's good news to me, because I love sharing what's going on in my kitchen with people, and helping them learn to cook healthy food for their families. It's one of my favorite things!

But here's why I've been strangely silent for almost two months:

Four Good Reasons For My Blogging Break (which just ended)

1. No internet. Yeah, that'll do it. Ok, I sort of had internet, if you count a very weak signal from the neighboring college campus. But using it involved clicking "turn airport off" and "turn airport on" countless times, and then reading unhappy messages like "searching for wireless networks" and "invalid password" (even though it wasn't) and "connection timeout." Totally not worth it for anything more than checking email once in awhile. But after 10 weeks of waiting for AT&T to get their act together, we have working internet again!

2. Husband taking the laptop to class.  It's difficult to blog when your husband has the computer most of the day on most days, even if the mysterious Spirits of the Internet are being kind for once. We do have a desktop, but the toddler likes to climb on my lap while I use it and push buttons. No Go.

3. General Busyness. Between having a husband in seminary, raising a toddler, teaching dance three nights a week, and cooking for our CSA pick-ups, I have barely have time to cook dinner, let alone blog about it. But that perhaps could have been overcome, had it not been for number 4....

4. I'm pregnant! Yay! We are certainly excited, but that doesn't mean I'm bouncing off the walls. I'm beginning my second trimester and I've just. been. so. tired. I think the nausea is mostly behind me, but I'm still can't-get-off-the-couch-tired many days. So I've had to simplify. I haven't been baking everything from scratch like I usually do, or soaking nuts, or soaking grains much of the time, or even planning meals.  For many weeks, meal planning made me nauseous. Until last week or so, I'd been relying on a day-by-day sort of living in which I ask myself that morning, "What sounds good to eat today?" Usually it's only one thing, like cheesy rice with broccoli, or fried eggs with toast, or indian butter chicken. So that's what we go with. And such last-minute meal-making is not very conducive to blogging, especially when I'm running off to teach and I can't find the camera and it's too dark to take a good picture...you get the idea. It wasn't working.

But I'm hoping several things will help me get this blog back into some kind of groove:

--having working internet again (woohoo!)

--my CSA cooking commitment ending for the season

--the end of the first trimester and a hope of renewed energy

--the toddler suddenly taking awesome afternoon naps most days (he has never been a "good sleeper").

That sounds promising to me. I'm hopeful. :)

Here are some things that are in the works for the coming weeks:

--real food snacks for toddlers (and pregnant mothers of toddlers!)

--my pregnancy food diary (including supplements)

--balancing real life with real food, including some thoughts on a Sabbath for your kitchen (and therefore a Sabbath for you!)

--delicious, seasonal, real food recipes using things like squash, greens, and everybody's favorite...root vegetables! (I'm partial to the rutabaga, myself.)
--informative posts about why we eat the way we do, and why you should too! :)

I have no idea what frequency of posts is gonna look like. We're gonna play it by ear and stay balanced. It will help if I start seeing less of that picture at the top of the post, and more of this (did I mention that dirty dishes have been the cause of several meltdowns so far this pregnancy?):

clean dishes!

more clean dishes!

I'm glad to be back!

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