sastyk | March 7, 2017Four years ago we were foster parents to two wonderful children whose family was broken up by deportation.
The parents had overstayed their visas (ie, they entered the US legally), in part because their children were both born (while in the US, ie the children were citizens) with kidney disease and their homes in rural Central America had no hospitals to treat them nor adequate medical care. They left their country because they were part of a disenfranchised indigenous minority that was historically denied access to things like education - they could do better in the US. They also were a…
sastyk | July 11, 2016
These are two of my sons, Judah and Zion. Adorable, no? Yeah, I think so too. And they are so sweet. Zion loves animals, he wants to know everything about them. And anything that begins with the letter Z 'My yetter!" Judah is one of the sweetest natured kids on the earth - if someone tries to take something from him, and I tell them to give it back, he'll say "It is ok, I will share." He wants to help with every single thing in the world - he's the first volunteer to do anything, to clean, to help find something.
And someday they will be Black Men. Tall, and strong, with cars and hoodies and…
sastyk | May 10, 2016
As I mentioned some months ago, we are planning on selling our farm in Knox, NY (The farm is in the town of Knox, but the address is 43 Crow Hill Road, Delanson, NY - for reasons obscure to us even after a decade and a half, the mail goes two towns away) and moving to urban Schenectady. Well,"The time has come, the time is now..." We've loved living here and chronicling our adventures, and are leaving our wonderful home, our wonderful neighbors and our small nurturing community and school system with regret - and excitement about our new ventures.
The happiest thing for us would be to see…
sastyk | March 15, 2016More soon, but I can finally show you pictures of my whole family. We celebrated the adoption of Deniece, Rimonah, Judah, Malkiah and Hezekiah yesterday, to our incredible joy! I have professional pictures coming, and will do good ones of each individual child, but here's the best one of the whole family so far. Thanks to my mother, who bought the color-coordinated purple clothes for all 10 kids months ahead - when we still didn't know when there would be an adoption.
From left - Eli (16 in a few days), Me (43), Rimonah (6), Deniece (13), Malkiah (4), Eric (45), Kai (3), Judah (6),…
sastyk | February 10, 2016We came back from the developmental pediatrician yesterday in a jubilant mood. Two of my sons came to us with significant developmental delays. Both of them have made wonderful progress, so last night was an occasion for celebration.
A lot of parents have children who are delayed in some ways. Some kids catch up. Some catch up part of the way. Some never do. It can be a huge struggle to trust that you are doing things "right." After almost 16 years of parenting kids with significant disabilities, I've come to feel that as long as you are in there working to support your kids and get…
sastyk | February 10, 2016In one of my last posts, I argued that White children need to read Black children's books as much or more than Black children, and more importantly, need to read lots of good children's books with Black language, culture and heroes. They also need to read about other non-White cultures, but given the beginning of Black History month, I'm going to stick with Black books for today. Note, this is not a fully comprehensive list, merely a list of our family's favorites. I'm going to do this in two parts, the first covering picture books for younger kids, the second "read aloud" or "read…
sastyk | February 2, 2016Since Zion's arrival as a newborn in 2013, this blog has been quite quiet. First I wanted to give Zion the same time and resources that my other babies had. Then just as we started to get back on our feet, the flood of adding four kids to our home, including three under three (plus Zion who was 10 months at the time) took up most of our lives. As soon as things settled down, we had a difficult spring last year, and then got my foursome's youngest brother, and then spent our fall dealing with legal matters as the children were finally freed for adoption.
The update is that my sibling…
sastyk | January 26, 2016I don't know a single person on any end of the political spectrum who doesn't want to see an end to police shootings of black folk. I don't know a single person who doesn't want to make sure that shootings like the Charleston one never happen again. But most ordinary white people also don't have a clue how they could help with that, other than posting the occasional facebook meme or generally feeling it would be a good thing if something were done. Or maybe they'd like to do something, but are nervous about it - how will other people feel if they just show up to a protest or meeting? The…
sastyk | January 26, 2016But just in case you were wondering, there is basically no chance whatsoever that Climate Change could be happening without human intervention. I realize that we'll be hearing about this point 0.01 possibility until we all die, but just so we all know.
sastyk | January 20, 2016Are you new to this parenting gig? About to give birth or adopt or take on a foster placement? Or maybe you've had one easy kid, and are about to go to two and sense that things are about to change radically. Or maybe you have them, but you feel like you are missing something in the "how to stay sane and meet everyone's needs" department. I want to give you the single most important piece of advice I have - which is about how not to lose your mind as a parent. I know, I know the title isn't all that prepossessing, but stick with me.
Let's say you just had or adopted a beautiful baby.…
sastyk | July 13, 2015My children made me try a chocolate-covered gummy bear the other day. Now a chocolate gummy bear is not a local, sustainable or home-grown food, and frankly, I don't like gummy bears (the only good use I ever had for them was in college, where nothing would keep posters on cinder-block walls without damaging the walls like a gummy bear melted on with a lighter), and I'm not that big a chocolate person. But the kids kept telling me that this was better than either the low-quality chocolate used to cover them or gummy bears. I tried one, and they were right - it was better, an official…
sastyk | February 6, 2015Fourteen years ago, on a cold February weekend, Eric, our 10 month old son, Eli and I went driving around rural upstate New York, looking for a place to settle. We had actually wanted to stay in Massachusetts, but a combination of high land and real estate prices and Eric's grandparents' (who would come to live with us and whose needs for care were a big part of our motivation to move) false European perception that somehow Massachusetts was much colder than upstate NY meant that New York was our best option. We explored, we adventured, we fell in love with the Schoharie Valley and its…
sastyk | February 5, 2015If you've thought about foster parenting at all, even for a couple of minutes, you probably grasp that someone has to do it. Because the truth is that kids whose parents can't care for them has been a global problem for all of human history. It is a problem that could get better or worse with various interventions, (and I am 100% in favor of any interventions that make my work less necessary), but it is never going away. As I said in my last post, you won't stop being needed just because you aren't there.
While you've probably thought broadly that foster parents have to exist, you…
sastyk | February 5, 2015Take five little pieces of paper, and write down the five things that matter most to you in your life, whatever they are. Your parents. Your partner. Your kids, Your community. Your grand passion - art or the Red Sox, guitar or hunting or knitting. Your home. Your favorite chair. Your dreams for the future. Your best friends. Your free time. Prayer. Your dog, your cat. Your neighborhood, that place where everyone knows your name, your religious community, your buddies from work or school. Your music. Mint Milanos and a glass of wine with someone who understands you. That super-soft stuffed…
sastyk | September 23, 2014Writing books and essays about food, I hear a lot of stories about what people ate growing up. Because cooking was mostly women's work, those stories are almost always about mothers and grandmothers, and how the food made them feel - and how the memories of that food still do make them feel. There's a longing for the reclamation of the food of our past and our childhood. The food of love roots deep in us - the food we were given as acts of love by others sticks with us, gradually releasing nutrients that feed us deep inside for years, decades afterwards. I call it Mama food, even though…
sastyk | August 15, 2014I should have known, but did not, that being read aloud to was a learned skill. It never occurred to me to think about it from my privileged place in the world of literacy. I was, for a time, though a teacher of writing, a fish who swam in words without thinking of the water.
Like a lot of book-valuing, over-educated parents, I read to my sons from the moment they were born. Tiny babies snuggled on my lap as I read _Charlie Parker Played Be-Bop_, _Jamberry_ and Eli's favorite cliff-hanger _Who Says Quack?_. We graduated on to picture books, and then Winnie the Pooh, Little House and other…
sastyk | June 13, 2014
We adopted him on Wednesday, with 30+ family and friends in attendance. It was fabulous. The judge did a wonderful job of including ALL my children in what was a special day for our family, and then we partied.
The funniest moment was that the lawyer had spelled his middle name incorrectly (Raphael/Rafael) and the judge was clearly prepared to delay things to change the paperwork when I announced "Nope, we're good, we'll take your spelling!" I wasn't doing ANYTHING to make this take one minute longer.
It takes a little while to sink in, since he's always been my baby, but now he's my…
sastyk | June 13, 2014
(Some of my kids watching sheep mothering their babies)
Over the last decade a whole lot of babies have been born on my farm or brought home to it. We have had calves, chicks, kids (goat), kids (human), ducklings, goslings, kits and lambs. One of the most fascinating revelations of this is just how variable the instinct for parenting is among animals. Among closely related goats, for example, we have had among our best mothers, and our single worst one, a doe so dim that she would stand there screaming for her baby but refuse to move any closer to the baby who was screaming just as…
sastyk | June 13, 2014p>There are a number of possible answers to that question, but my current summer favorite is chicken-tortilla soup. You can do this with bones, bones and meat, a whole chicken, stock and some breasts, whatever you have, but since we have some smaller whole chickens available from some roosters that went in the freezer and need using up, that's what we are doing.
Make a big pot of chicken broth with bones or a whole chicken. 10 quarts is good. 12 might be safer, though ;-).
Sautee onions, carrots, some peppers if you have them, maybe a finely diced sweet potato or two and fresh chiles…
sastyk | May 22, 2014Exactly a year ago at the end of a crazy, long week (Eric's final grades due Tues, thought we were getting three kids Wed., annual "hey, let us look under your beds and in your closets" foster care recertification, which annually gives me PTSD because my limited cleaning skills get close scrutiny on Thursday, heavy garden push on Friday... we promised the kids a completely relaxing, laid back, nothing-going on Memorial Day Weekend. These would be famous last words.
At 3:30 on Friday afternoon as I was shaking off the compost from planting almost all my tender plants (a rare efficiency that…