Home and Family
sastyk | June 29, 2010For someone in her mid-30s, I have a fairly large experience of being someone's caregiver. In high school, 'I began working in a nearby nursing home. I can't remember quite what drove me to seek that work out - it was not the kind of work that most teenagers I knew did. I think what intrigued me about it was its importance - as a teenager seeking meaning, caring for people at the end of their lives seemed urgent. It was only later that I came to realize that taking care of the elderly and disabled was, in our society, viewed as not onlyl not urgent, but not integral or important. Even as…
sastyk | June 24, 2010At my house today it was 82 and humid. It is hot, but there's a breeze, and shade from the trees. The air is heavy and moist, but rich and green and earthy as well, and my house stays cool downstairs. In New York City today, the temperature was above 90, and I can still smell, from my childhood in other cities, that shimmering hot urban mix of garbage, asphalt and pollution. Don't get me wrong - I love cities. But hot town, summer in the city is not always when urban life's virtues shine.
I was an urban kid for part of my childhood, which is why I remember so strongly and passionately…
sastyk | June 1, 2010Nine years ago today we moved to our farm. We brought with us some boxes of stuff, some furniture, four cats, our then 15-month old son (Eli, now 10 and 5' tall), Simon, packed conveniently in my pregnant belly, and my Mom (who went home after a day or two of helping us with the little guy). I was 29, Eric was just about to turn 31, and we were about as unprepared for life on a farm as any two (or three) people could be.
Eric had grown a garden once or twice with his Mom as a kid in various apartment buildings. I'd had balcony gardens all through college and grad school, and once a year,…
sastyk | May 25, 2010When we bought the property, the creek was frozen over, and from the property survey, we weren't entirely certain that it would belong to us. We never realized that the pretty little body of water that passed along the north side of the house would become the center of four worlds.
For the first few years that we lived here, we enjoyed the creek - my toddler children loved to visit with parents in tow, picking up stones or chasing frogs during summer, when the creek sank down to manageable levels. We enjoyed listening to its music through the open windows at night. We watched the birds…
sastyk | April 20, 2010I've been sadly slack on content the last few days, but well, it is spring and I'm busy. And tired at the end of the day. And Stoneleigh of The Automatic Earth was visiting. And well...hey, it is 66 degrees, sunny and beautiful. I'm in the middle of a piece answering a reader's question about why even economists should be concerned about peak energy but it lost to the sunshine. The problem is that the computer is in the house, and I don't go there this time of year if I can avoid it ;-).
On the other hand, what I do have, for the first time in a long while, is a working (until one of the…
sastyk | April 16, 2010Hat tip to Rod Dreher for pointing out what he deems the most depressing toy ever - yes, your little one can have his or her own cubicle! Has your two year old been falling down on the hard, tedious job of being a child - here's a way of ensuring that she's ready for a life of dismal monotony!
Now you can make home more like the office, enhance the number of hours of screen time (children between 2 and 5 years old only get a measly 32.5 hours of screen time per day on average, gotta get those numbers up!) and bring Dilbert to life for your child.
It is every parent's dream!
Sharon
sastyk | April 8, 2010When Eric and I first wrote a letter to Eric's grandparents, asking them to consider living with us, the response was very mixed. Grandma and Grandpa's generation of friends and family were mostly very pleased and thrilled - given the bad lot of options available to many of them, finding a compatible home with their grandchildren looked pretty good. Most of them had cared for their parents, and so somewhere inside them, this seemed like a normal relationship. Some of my friends were frankly jealous - they'd lost their own grandparents, and wished for something like what we were going to…
sastyk | April 7, 2010It is a very good thing that sound and image do not travel through the internet without forethought and intent. It permits me to write sentences about my life that seem admirably clean and functional, without actually conveying the way they play out in reality.
This allows me to write things like "Eli, my autistic eldest is on school vacation and is creatively working on fine motor control using local fibers." Now if you could see what this actually means, you'd see that Eli is taking my yarn, lovingly preserved for knitting, and wadding it up, making spiderwebs and spreading it all over my…
sastyk | March 23, 2010Simon came in the door calling "Moooooooomm....Moooooommmm!!" It didn't sound like the "someone is bleeding to death" call or the "Isaiah said my hat looked funny and I beaned him one with a rock and he had the temerity to hit me back and it hurt..." cry, each which has a certain urgency too it. Nor was it even the much more relaxed "by the way, I haven't seen my littlest brother for a long time, like since before lunch, and you told me not to let him fall in the creek, but I really wasn't paying attention" one.
No this was a "Mom, I've got something cool to tell you" call. What, I…
sastyk | February 9, 2010This morning, during school time, Isaiah asked me just how many Aunts and Uncles he had. Asked to clarify what the parameters of the question were, Isaiah asked me how many people he would call by the title "Aunt" or "Uncle." Which led me to do some quick addition - and to a number that came out above 70.
Now Eric and I don't have that many siblings. In fact, I have two sisters, and until into adulthood, Eric was an only child. Nor do my parents make up for it at the great-level - each of them had one brother. So how on earth do I get 70 aunts and uncles for my kids?
Me, Eric and the…
sastyk | February 4, 2010As you all know, I live with five males, ranging from 39 to 4. As a woman raised in a mostly all-female household (mother, step-mother, two sisters), I try gamely to fit in, but find myself occasionally mystified by the guy-ness, or inadequately equipped for things like appreciating how cool it is to write in the snow with your penis. This was clearly one of those moments.
Me, (coming downstairs for a cup of tea before returning to my book) "What's with the sledgehammer, honey?"
The boys: "Daddy is going to let us smash geodes! Awesome! We tried it with the hammer, but it didn't work, so…
sastyk | January 5, 2010Today is the first day of Aaron's and my new "Finding Your Place" Course (for anyone who would still like to join, we've got two remaining spots and since the class is asynchronously online, you won't miss anything by starting today or tomorrow - email me at Jewishfarmer@gmail.com). I've been teaching Adapting-in-Place, for people who intend to stay where they are and want to lower their resource consumption and build greater resilience for several years now, but this is the first time Aaron and I have taught a similar class for people who are either considering relocation or definitely…
sastyk | January 1, 2010In the comments thread to my previous post, Greenpa, who apparently gets a kick from watching She Who Cruncheth over at The Crunchy Chicken and me competing, suggested that I ought to try to top her "latest post." In the interim, La Crunch put up a fascinating post about bull semen and the genetic diversity of dairy cows, which left me deeply, deeply confused. Was I supposed to top her by talking about some other crisis in genetic diversity? Spotlight some other species' semen? Or was I supposed to put my own contributions to species diversity up for scrutiny? (Sadly, we don't pass muster…
sastyk | December 18, 2009When I decided to switch over to science blogs, I told Eric that he had to go with me. We've talked for years about doing a project together, but have always worried that a book or something would kill our extremely happy marriage, that we'd end up fighting over grammar (he's much more of a stickler on this than I am, which is sort of strange given our respective backgrounds). But blog posts, well, we could presumably do this together with minimal risk of homicide. So next week (this week is grading hell week for the honey) we'll start our "Apocalyptica and the Astrophysicst" series with…
sastyk | December 18, 2009Just went downstairs to see a sign, made by Simon. It says:
Simon's Bar: Drinks, Uno, Tick-Tack-Toe (sp), Math Drills and Dreidel.
Yeah, that'll make money. And no, I didn't ask what they will be drinking.
Sharon
sastyk | December 17, 2009Note: Another new reader asked if I could say a little more about the goats. Here's more.
If you were to come to visit right now, you wouldn't see The Milk Truck until you started to get out of your car. But the moment you opened your door, the little vacuum cleaners would stick their heads in, just to make sure there's no food on the floor. You see, at my house, there's always food on the floor. My children drip crumbs and leave apple cores, and the litte vacuum cleaners feel it is there job to clean up.
But let's back up. The little vacuum cleaners are Tekiah (Tekky) and Arava. They…
sastyk | December 17, 2009The second night of Chanukah, my sons got clothes from their great aunt, which they received politely but unenthusiastically. As we were heading to bed that night, after a late night at our synagogue's annual Chanukah party, six year old Isaiah asked me "Mommy, will tomorrow night be another clothes present night?" When I told him I suspected not, since the next night's gift would come from Grandma, who likes to give toys, he sighed and said "It is ok if there's clothes, but I just needed to be ready for them." It can be tough to have good manners when you are little. We expect the kids…
sastyk | December 3, 2009I may be a happily married woman, but I'm not immune to seduction - who is? So when a lovely woman named Erin came around offering to fulfill my wildest fantasies, I was intrigued, if a little nervous. She promised me the moon, deep stimulation, plenty of aroused excitement, the full range of delights. It was intoxicating. And so I allowed my self to be swept away by the titillation of more and bigger and deeper. She was even open (shocking!) to getting my honey involved (more on this below). And thus, I find myself here at Science Blogs, ripe and panting to begin. The lure of more…