Win Win Win

Since I can't bring myself to post any of my drafts these days and I'm swirling in creative blockage, I thought I'd give this a whirl and maybe win something to help me along! I know sorta contradicting the season, but well I guess that's nothing new round here... You can try too, go here: http://www.todaysmama.com/exclusives.php


Mama’s Holiday Wish List MemeTodaysMama and Provo Craft are giving away a sleighful of gifts this holiday season and to enter I’m sharing this meme with you.

1. What 5 items are on your holiday wish list this year?
More time off for Drew (with pay), any crazy handcrafted jewelry, new diapers for Sevi, shoes from el naturalista, a macro lens

2. What is your favorite handmade gift you have received?
bracelet

3. What handmade gift have you always wanted to tackle?
cheese!

4. What was the best Christmas gift you received as a child?
a Real Baby doll

5. What items are on your kid’s wish list this year?
too little to have a list

6. What is your favorite holiday food?
the pineapple cheese ball my mom makes

7. What will you be hand-crafting for the holidays?
um this year just...lots of food!

8. What is your favorite holiday movie?
Currently Love Actually...probably The Christmas Story if it was all time favorite

9. Favorite holiday song?
The Christmas Song

10. Favorite holiday pastime?
No presents, no fancy dinner, but a smorgasboard of fancy meats and cheeses, music, and playing games.

Mosaic Me

I've been devouring the amazing archives of one inspiring woman-mama-artist lately and have so much to say about reading her journey I will share once I've finished. But today I read an old post where she did this and I thought it was super cool. I absolutely LOVE how mine turned out.

Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr search, using only the first page, choose your favorite image, copy and paste each of the URL’s into the mosaic maker (3 columns, 4 rows).

The questions:

1. What is your first name? (Latisha)

2. What is your favorite food? (Mexican)

3. What high school did you attend? (White River)

4. What is your favorite color? (Green)

5. Who is your celebrity crush? (Johnny Depp)

6. Favorite drink? (Lemonade)

7. Dream vacation? (Patagonia)

8. Favorite dessert? (Cheese)

9. What do you want to be when you grow up? (Artist)

10.What do you love most in life? (love)

11. One word to describe you. (contradicted)

12. Your Flickr name. (bohomisfit, but nothing came so I just used misfit)

Credit for Mosaic Photos:
1. 2008-09-06 LaTisha Strickland - March Fourth Marching Band - Tour De Fat, 2. I ate 6, 3. Sunday cottage, 4. I wish to be a wild flower-FP, 5. Self Portrait, reflected. San Miguel de Allende, 6. When life gives you lemmons..., 7. I've reached the end of the world, 8. Tonight's Moon, 9. Untitled, 10. Fall in Love, 11. Your heart is never wrong...., 12. Learning to Fly...

Family Time

Drew played hookey today to finish our patio and go see the midwife with us. Hopefully we will hear the heartbeat today. I love it when he is home from work and we all get to hang out. Just feels like nothings missing. Talk next week!

Bounty

From Maya's CSA at the Farm at South Mountain in Phoenix, AZ: easter radishes, lemon basil, thyme, pak choi, anaheim peppers, free range eggs, turnips, baby arugula, butternut squash, lentils, wildflowers, cooking squash

It's hard some days to forget all we have to be grateful for. I'm finally nearing the end of this first trimester and am really hit hard by the exhaustion I feel this time around. I have a constant feeling of nausea all day but no real vomitty urge. But really it's the fatigue that has been wearing me out. The first time around, I could spend my extra energy on the house, cooking, or playing at what I wanted. This time, I need to spend it on Sevi. That leaves little left to keep house and cook decent meals. The guilt is bizarre. It spins its way into more guilt because I should simply be so grateful this baby is doing well as are we. I know the drill, I've read the books, taken the seminars, done the meditation. The midwife even felt compelled to give me permission to take it easy after I told her how many of Sevi's activities I've been skipping out on lately. But why is it so hard to just relax and be still and not feel guilty about it?

I'm feeling quite a bit better this morning, thanks to three days of green goddess breakfast shakes, I think baby loves those greens! So bear with me (I told you not every post would be amazing) today I'm gonna rattle off a few things to get me in the gratitude mood. Love to hear some of yours.

*Every Saturday morning at Maya's Farm to pick up our bounty of local yummies
*Drew works close to home and goes in late in am, giving us lots of morning family time

*My amazing herb garden starting to take off

* Our growing little bean that's sticking around

*A ridiculously talented husband that can make a planter box out of discarded wood in less than 15 minutes.

*A working washing machine

*Finding the perfect boho comforter to go with my new Klimt "The Kiss" curtains for less than $50

*Painting rocks

*Sevi helping make pickled watermelon rinds

*Lavender instantly healing the knife cut on my thumb

*Sunday afternoons on the patio with drew, a gardening magazine, and fresh brewed iced peppermint tea with a splash of watermelon juice while sevi sleeps for three hours

Commitment

You didn't really think I could stay away did you? Well 9 weeks in to this new pregnancy and already so many adventures. Emotions up and down in the shake of the salt pig (ended up on the floor), a little bit of fear and so many new things. This time I'm having a home birth, and well it's just a tad bit different. Like taking that first step up a mountain trail when you can actually see how far it is to the top, it takes a certain amount of commitment and I'm not talking about the labor part. I haven't even had time to think about that.

There's the whole nutrition thing.

Midwives are crazy about nutrition. My OB mentioned a few things and probably gave me some handouts but she really didn't put too much emphasis on it. The midwife model of care strongly believes nutrition contributes to many problems in pregnancy. There's a whole host of regular MD's who support this as well, Tom Brewer being the most known, but it's more of a passion for midwives.

So I'm making a commitment to track my diet a little better to make sure I'm getting all those vital nutrients.

Then there's the whole immune thing.

With the flu's running around these days we talked at length about how to prevent being affected. While she in no way believes these methods are foolproof, she doesn't believe the vaccine is either. I guess it's just another thing we can do to try and stay on top of our immune system.

So I'm making a commitment to including all sorts of crazy hippy shit in my diet to stave off the flu. (This was so interesting to me, I'll post more on it in detail later.)

Then there's the fear.

While nothing is completely without risks, even hospital birth, a home birth carries with it a special kind of risk. Nothing that most normal healthy women and babies can't endure, but you just never know. I've read, and continue to read all about home birth. I've watched and continue to watch all about home birth. I've spoken with seasoned professionals and mothers who have had home birth. I feel well-informed and ready.

So I'm making a commitment to kick the fear habit.

Then there's the knowledge stuff.

The midwife does a ton of the work before and after but there are a few preparations the family needs to make, gather, and prepare for this sort of thing. Right this second it is a little overwhelming and I am feeling like a little impossible. But I know I have time, and I trust her to help me out if I get stuck.

So I'm making a commitment to take it one step at a time.

Finally there's this space. I love it too much and since posting my last post, I thought of a million things I wanted to share here. I need to come here to keep a little bit about me and talk about all the fun boho stuff I'm proud of. I can't promise great posts, but I just need to show up every week.

So I'm making a commitment to Misfit Monday's (once a week blog posts).

These days I'm having a hard time stickin to any one thing for more than a few weeks. Commitment used to be something I was so flippin good at. Mountain tops schmoutain tops. More for control I think than anything else. Once you decide you are going to do something and stick to it, very little is unpredictable. Right? See ya next week!

Not much else to say

But I'm gonna anyway! Yes as you can see by the yellow stained stick, we are going for round two! This one's expected sometime around the end of May beginning of June. Sevi will be almost 2-1/2. Seems like a good spread to me. I have hired a midwife, and provided my health stays in good shape, will be doing this one at home in a cool pool. We are super excited.

Along with this fun news comes some less interesting news. I'm getting offline almost officially. I will not be visiting Boho Misfit much. I was thinking about setting it to private and just keeping it around to be able to read old stuff and follow those blogs I love. But I'm not sure, I may just let it sit here idle for me to come and journal when I feel the urge. It really depends on how much I have to say throughout this adventure.

Sevi is so much fun right now I hardly have time to blog, at least with the quality I want to. I'd really rather play along with her adventures and all my silly ones (I'm determined to learn to play the djembe African drum and draw botanical art before this baby comes...). I also started a book. A silly character-study adventure of a female 50-something letter carrier who's worked for the post office for 20 years and decides to start switching people's mail. It's stretching my imagination and loads of fun to meet her.

I also want to concentrate what free time I do have on our family blog which is really just pictures and anecdotes of how we roll, as many of our loved ones live in other states. I never wanted to be a mommyblogger for some reason and that is why this site exists. But alas, i am a mom and generally that is what fills my time. So I'm getting over it. I'm not sure what the sickness is that makes it not okay for us modern women to want to be labeled as moms but nonetheless I too, am stricken with the disease.

We are going to home school as well and I thought this would be a great way to share that journey. I've tried this before (pulling my two worlds together) and it sorta backfired but oh well. No time like the present to be authentic and give a big ol middle finger to people who have anything mean to say about it. That being said, I made the family blog a bit more anonymous. So if you want to take boho misfit off your blog rolls I won't be offended seriously I won't be showing up much anyway. And if you are interested in following along our family adventure send me an email (mamatortilla at hotmail dot com) and I'll give you the new site.

The Art of Drying Up

When we first moved to the desert, we were in love. Both working full time, we had a cute apartment off mill in downtown Tempe. We walked everywhere. We had freedom. We had money. We had time. We had this great weather. Even that first summer didn't seem too bad. We were so waterlogged from so many years in the pacific northwest, it felt kind of nice to dry out a little. We were flush, young, and living the good life.

But it all began with the second summer. With cracked lips and ashy skin, we started talking about all that meaning of life stuff and the future. Money was getting boring. Yes I said it. It just wasn't enough. Those sandal wearing days were wreaking havoc on my heels and I found myself at the salon more than twice a month. Trips to the salon were soon accompanied by a martini lunch and followed by a steak and wine dinner. The desert had cast a small cloud of denial over us and our ambition for progress. It was easy, being DINKS, to spend several hundred dollars a month keeping ourselves well moisturized on the surface, but inside we were drying up. The clarity of the winter sun soon rescued us and we decided to clean up all the dust. Enough drinking and debauchery. Enough $300 dinners. Enough meaningless circles of life. We were ready to settle in. We decided to have a family, knowing this would be an awesome place to do so. Easy to do when you have Thanksgiving dinner on the patio surrounded by a beautiful mountain sunset and all, almost all, the people you love.

Melting into another summer but this time pregnant, it became a tad more difficult to keep hydrated. But thinking we had it all figured out, we decided summer was like winter in the PNW. You stay in and watch movies a lot of the time, and instead of cocoa you drink lemonade. What we didn't fully realize was that with baby, another kind of drying up begins. The money kind. Steak and wine dinners had no white table clothes and three-page wine lists but marinated asada and a $5 bottle from Trader Joe's instead.

On a tight budget and committed to eating well (not just healthy people, well) we started looking at new ways to do food. I started reading about the days when people canned food, bought or grew bulk veggies and stored them for the winter. After trying several CSA's and buying clubs we finally found a couple of solutions and got to work. That next summer determined the speed we would finally take with food, slow. Now we roast, marinate, garden, can, wild ferment, brew and dry. We save money, support causes we believe in, and fulfil our need to create something. By no means self-sufficient, we are at least filling up our well again. And we are living the good life.

Dried Eggplant Chips

Make your favorite marinara sauce

Slice fresh eggplants, skin on, about 1/4 inch

Marinate in marinara overnight

Lay flat on dryer or baking dish lined with parchment paper

Salt to taste

Dry for several hours (8 to 10 on low setting) or bake at lowest oven temp

Keep in dry dark place.