.Loved Relentlessly.

In November when the wind is red, and the leaves are cold, I feel old. I jotted those lines down today, stopped at an intersection in town.  I have felt that feeling before, but this is the first November that I've been able to put a name to it.  The name is, simply,  old .  I feel aged in November, as if, really, underneath this quarter century of experience there should really be three quarters.  Because I know what's coming.  I know that this turning of seasons in the natural is also a spiritual metaphor.  We are all turning.  Aging.  Changing.  Shifting. But the oldness makes me feel happier, somehow.  Not in some morbid way, but it makes me feel nearer to that which my spirit-man longs for.  Even as I rejoice in the coming spring of my baby's birth, I can't help but ache just a bit for my final autumn.  I feel old, in that I have begun to welcome the changing seasons.  I am not quite...

It's so funny to me how much can change in half of a year... The last blog post I wrote (and just now published) had to do with being a Health Food Nazi, or something or other.  Now, November 1, 2012 finds me being a Eat-Anything-That-Sounds-Appetizing-and-Is-Relatively-Healthy-For-Baby Nazi.  Haha...  Oh, the change time brings.  What felt important last April, now seems not quite so urgent. Our summer was so full of so many good things.  Summer camps at Peachtree kept me busy.  I enjoyed working with the kiddos for the second year in a row.  We did some hiking, kayaking, and cliff jumping on our mutual days off.  Sometime mid-August there were two lines on a pregnancy test... and, you know, we were a bit excited.  The very next week we left for a 7-day, much needed vacation, just the two of us, to Pensacola, FL.  Besides a bit of morning sickness making me feel woozy, we had a wonderful trip.  A week later, on August 31, we ...

As alot of my friends and family know, back in January I set out to be a Whole Foods Nazi.  (Ok, well, not quite...but I wanted to feed us better...)  Since then, my husband has watched as I have poured white sugar into the garbage can, choked down "Mean Green Juice", and almost cried over several whole wheat bread-baking flops.  We have certainly cheated, like with that horrible-for-you peach cobbler on the camping trip...or the hot fudge cake I just had to have at 9:00 at night...or eating out when my spring schedule was crazy.  But I think I can safely say that for the majority of the time we have eaten whole, real, like-God-made-them foods since the first of the year.  This has been even easier to continue since I've been out of school for the summer.  If I have learned one thing about feeding your husband/family real food, it's that you have to spend time at home to do it...at least, to do it without wanting to scream because you have to wa...