Getting Ready

It's Sunday night and I'm sitting at my computer researching Chicago: researching transit options on how I will get around during my three-day whirlwind trip there for The Climate Reality Project's Climate Leadership Corp Training; and figuring out what I want to see during my one morning of sightseeing before the training starts. I'm excited to be in the same room as Al Gore and more than 1,000 other people who feel as passionately as I do that climate change is the biggest threat humanity faces. I'm excited to learn how to speak more articulately about it, and how to inspire others to get involved. I'm also just excited see Chicago, a city I've never been to except for the airport back in 1998. I'm excited to reconnect with old friends, albeit briefly, who have established roots there.

I'm also a bit nervous. Nervous to navigate a new city by myself, and to be in a large conference setting where I don't really know anyone. But the biggest reason is because I will be leaving my kids for the first time ever. It will be a shock to my system, as well as theirs, to be without them for 72 hours. I'm the kind of mom who, even after a difficult day when all I want is for them to just go to sleep already, will settle down after the bedtime routine is done and scroll through the pictures I took of them that day playing and smiling. They will be fine in the good care of their dad and grandmothers. I know we will all be better off for having a little time apart. They will quickly learn that Daddy, Grandma, and Nini can do many of the things for them that I do. It will be a chance for me to remember (or prove) that they can function without me for a few days. Afterall, one of the badges of a good parent is giving/allowing your child the self-confidence to be independent. It will also feel good to be an adult functioning in the adult world, and will give me renewed energy to come back home and be Mommy.

Plastic Kid Stuff I Cannot Wait to Outgrow

Breastfeeding your infant is easy in that it requires no bottles, mixing, warming, or clean up. Sooner or later your child needs more than breastmilk and will want other liquids such as water, non-human milk, formula, or juice and solid foods. This means the introduction of all the food and drink related plastic baby accessories: sippy cups, straw cups, net feeders, plastic bowls and plates, spoons and forks. All these items can be purchased at an ordinary grocery store.

As cute as they can be when brand new, all these products quickly become digusting and potentially hazardous when they are being used around the clock and every day of the week.

Sippy cups and straw cups are nice because they are generally spill-proof. The problem is they always have ridiculous, unreachable crevices which quickly become a haven for mold. Did your toddler leave a sippy cup of juice or milk into the corner of the room and you found it a day or two later? The cup has become a petri dish of mold and ick that often needs to be thrown out due to those uncleanable crevices. I think it's a conspiracy by the baby cup companies to make us buy more and more plastic cups. My son is (mostly) beyond sippy cups, thank goodness. My daughter loves real cups but is not good at using them yet. Hopefully she will outgrow sippy and straw cups sooner than her brother did. Three years of desperately searching my cabinets for a suitable spill-proof cup after having just thrown out a bunch of gross ones, is a long time.




Netfeeders are actually pretty great in a way. You can give your 6 month old some chunks of fruit or other soft-ish foods without fear of them choking, and your baby gets the satisfaction of sinking their gums (or perhaps teeth) into something with substance. The problem is the nets themselves because just like sippy cups they are hard to wash so get moldy and yucky pretty easily. Companies do sell net refills, but that still requires buying more product just to keep the product usable.




Plastic Bowls and Plates are handy because they don't break when your child knocks it off the table. Still, they are plastic so they start breaking down and looking cloudy after frequent washings. The plastic doesn't wash well in the dishwasher (at least not in my dishwasher), and if you ever cut your child's meat or other large food on the plastic plate with a real knife the knife cuts the plate as well as the food. This then leaves cracks that can collect stains and other residue. Once again, the solution is to simply buy replacement plates. Did I mention I don't like being required to always buy more plastic stuff?



Plastic Forks and Spoons are made to fit well into little mouths and are gentler than metal utensils. Once again the plastic breaks down and starts looking cloudy and in generally poor shape. They also have a knack for getting into my garbage disposal and then coming out a chewed up mess. Once again the solution is to simply buy more. Not to mention that plastic forks can be frustrating for kids once they start feeding themselves with utensils. Ever try stabbing a slippery noodle with a plastic baby fork?



There are plenty of aspects of life with babies and toddlers that I will miss once both my kids have grown out of this stage, but I cannot wait to be done with all the plastic feeding items. The highchair/booster seat is another one that I will be happy to get rid of. It requires constant cleaning between mealtimes and snacks and like child dishes, has plenty of places for food to get into and hide. At least it doesn't get moldy and hazardous. Pepper will miss the highchair though!

Pepper helps clean up

Reducing My Family's Carbon Footprint

A big motivation for me to write this blog is my worries about climate change and what it will mean for my children's future. Climate change is already here and is already a force to be reckoned with in our daily lives. Vermont had record spring flooding and was struck by Hurricane Irene in 2011. In 2012 we faced a drought, though not as severe as in other parts of the nation. Now in 2013 we have once again had heavy rains and serious flooding. Climate change is a daunting challenge that will require unprecedented global cooperation to solve. But I choose to focus on positive actions that I can take.

One way I can feel a little better about the climate crisis is by actively working to reduce my own family's carbon (dioxide) footprint. I know that reducing my own carbon footprint doesn't really add up to anything in the grand, global scheme of CO2 emission reductions needed to avoid catastrophic climate change. Yet, I still feel that I have to try and do everything to wean myself off fossil fuels and live more lightly on the earth. I need to practice what I preach, and if I can't reduce my own carbon dioxide emissions how can I expect others to? There is great strength in collective action.

In addition to doing smaller things like trip-chaining, telecommuting when possible, or foregoing car trips all-together, recycling, composting, consuming fewer goods in general, supporting local farms, etc, there are three big actions my husband and I have done in the last 18 months to reduce our personal fossil fuel dependence:

1. Going solar *
In 2011 my husband and I debated getting a solar hot water heater like my in-laws have on their house. Building Energy from Williston, VT came to our house to assess our solar potential. They told us that solar hot water was not the most practical option for us given that our house is a two-story colonial with a walkout basement, aka three stories. The distance that the water would have to travel between the solar panels on the roof down to the basement where the boiler is was impractical. It was also impractical since all our hot water is currently provided on-demand by the boiler in our oil furnace. We determined that getting a photovoltaic (PV) system to power our electric needs made more sense. Our power company (VT Electric Cooperative) offers net metering, so buys back any excess power that our panels produce. This means that during the summer months when our panels produce more electricity than we use we earn credits on our electric bill. This credit gets eaten up during the winter months when electricity produced by our panels drops due to shorter days. Overall, our bill more-or-less zeroes out over the course of a year. The payoff time for the panels is about 15 years, but the life of the panels is more like 30 years making this a decent return on our investment. Our system was installed and activated on the last business day of December 2011, so we got all our state and federal tax incentives back almost immediately (instead of having to float 1/3 of the cost for a full year if it had been installed in January), which made it much more affordable.

This leads me to why I put an asterisk on this action. If we had gotten a solar hot water system we would have reduced our use of oil directly because all our hot water currently comes from the oil furnace. That would have been a big win. Getting a solar PV system isn't really a direct reduction in emissions in our corner of Vermont because VT Electric Cooperative buys the bulk of its power from hydroelectric sources like Hydro Quebec. Hydroelectric power (producing power from waterfalls and dams) is already a non-fossil source of energy. If I lived in an area that got its electricity primarily from coal sources this would be a huge win. I am happy that I know several other households in the islands who have gone solar too! The movement is spreading. If Vermont can go solar why not cities and towns in our nation's sunbelt?? But I digress.

Avery with our Solar Panels (ground mount)
 


2. Getting a Pellet Stove
Originally we explored getting geothermal heat because there is a guy up here in the Islands who specializes in geothermal installations. Geothermal can provide all your heating AND cooling needs by drawing energy from the ground or from a well. Once again the setup of our current house made geothermal impractical. It would be an expensive, retrofitting nightmare trying to install all the vents we would have needed and it was expensive. However, if we built a house from scratch it would be much more feasible from both a cost and installation perspective. So our best option was to install a pellet stove in our existing fireplace. The pellet stove is sort of like a lazy-woman's version of a wood stove--much easier to run and maintain, just pour in the pellets and flip the ON switch. Wood pellets are cheaper than oil, and a renewable resource. The brand of pellets we use are made right here in Vermont too. Our pellet stove doesn't heat the whole house, only the downstairs "zone." Each of the bedrooms on the top floor have their own heating zone operated by hot water baseboard heat, run of course, by that darn oil furnace. We do what we can in this 1970s Colonial. And the warmth and ambiance provided by the pellet stove....heaven on a cold, winter day.

Me toasting myself in front of the Pellet Stove



3.  Efficiency through Energy Audit and Insulation
We hired Building Energy back to do an energy audit on our house to find where all our precious heat was leaking out. We always kept our thermostat low (about 62-64 degrees) in winter because oil is expensive and we are not above putting on extra socks and sweaters, but still, the house is drafty. Poor Nini was freezing when she first moved in the apartment last fall. Building Energy came and did a blower test where they put a giant fan in your doorway, and then see where the air leaks are using infrared imaging. The audit recommended insulating our basement and eaves with spray foam and adding more cellulose insulation into the attic. The audit estimated that we will cut down on our heat energy use by a third, save us $1,200/year, and reduce our annual CO2 emissions by 7,000 pounds! The payoff on this investment is also about 10 years. It is not cheap up front, but it is worth it.

Green foam insulation in our unfinished basement

I just want to stress that renewable sources of energy and energy efficiency are an investment whether done on the individual or national scale. We heavily invested in fossil fuels back in the day, and now that we know better we need to seriously invest in energy efficiency and clean, renewable energy. The sooner we do it, the better, because the cost of inaction will continue to rise.

Lastly, if you've been following me and wondering--yes, our little city house was renovated to be very energy efficient. It had natural gas heat, which is its own can of worms because of fracking, water contamination, and methane leaks...but that's at topic for another day.

Blueberry Picking

Important lessons from childhood, in my mind, include being in a garden and eating food straight from the earth. That's why we have gone berry picking every summer since my son was one year old, (being a spring baby he was too young his very first summer).

The summer he was one, we went strawberry, blueberry and raspberry picking several times. We went to Sam Mazza's in Colchester, Pomykala Farm in Grand Isle, and Blue Thumb Farm in South Hero. I was amazed how readily he picked the berries with his pudgy little hands and knew just to eat the ripe ones. He also bonded with his grandfather picking strawberries from Grandpa's own little strawberry patch in the yard.

The following summer we went strawberry picking at Pomykala Farm and blueberry picking at Blue Thumb Farm more than once. Being two years old, he was in the "you do it" phase. Mostly he would spend his time trying to eat berries out of my bucket, much like the little bear in Robert McCloskey's book Blueberries for Sal.


Image from Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey

This summer he is three and once again we have gone strawberry picking multiple times at Pomykala Farm, and we just did our first blueberry picking outing at Blue Thumb Farm this morning. Actually, since my son is a berry-picking-extraodinaire, today was really his second blueberry picking trip. He went to Blue Thumb Farm with his aunt and grandmother this past weekend too. Avery was so helpful filling up the buckets and liked to have contests about who could pick the most berries. He always said he won no matter what though, hmmm... The extra fun part is that today was his little sister's first time blueberry picking (or picking at all, she was asleep for the strawberry picking last month). Just like her brother, she was phenomenal at eating everything she picked and only picked the bluest of the blues.

Blueberry Picking 2011




Blueberry picking 2013

From City Mice to Country Mice

Having the background of an environmentalist, a city planner and a transportation planner who thoroughly supports the theory of New Urbanism, I knew I wanted to live in the city when we moved back to Vermont from Los Angeles. That meant moving to Burlington. The lovely little house we renovated was located in the Old North End of Burlington was it was perfect. It was in a mostly residential area right next to downtown. I spent many days when Avery was an infant just walking around the neighborhood, to the waterfront, and to downtown with him in the Baby Bjorn and our dog Pepper happily trotting along with us. We walked anywhere we wanted to go, laughed at traffic during rush hour, and at the traffic trying to leave after events like the July 4th fireworks. We ate out constantly, we met so many young, friendly people. It was a diverse neighborhood with people from all over the world who had settled in Burlington through the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program. It was all cute, historic, human-scale streets. We had more than one park within easy walking distance. We even had our own little grassy backyard that we mowed with a mechanical pushmower, barbequed, threw parties and played games. Our own slice of paradise.

Meanwhile, my husband's parents still lived in his childhood home in the Champlain Islands and the house next door to them had come up for sale. At first I resisted. Our little city house was perfect, and we had spent so much sweat equity making it so, and the LOCATION, how could we leave the location! But then again, this house in the Islands had almost 4 acres of land and an attached apartment.

One hot July day it all started to change. Our neighborhood that I loved so much was considered sketchy by many of our friends. To be fair, the Old North End does have a lot of poverty, plus issues with crime and drugs, but there are plenty of "good" people there that it was ok. That summer the apartment house across the street from us started having a lot of undesirable activity: people shouting obscenities in the streets and Police responses to the premises on more than one occassion, and a biker gang who liked to park out front and rev their engines. "What if we do just go look at that house?" I asked my husband. "Really??" was his response. "Yeah, but could my mom live in the apartment if she wanted to?" That was my stipulation and he agreed.

We went to see the house on another hot July day. The house was musty from being closed up for a long time. It was still full of lots of the seller's stuff, and nothing had been updated since the 1970s when it was built. There was orange shag carpet, turquoise shag carpet, and an old red carpet that was more like a blanket on the floor because all the glue had long ago dissolved. Nevertheless, it was large and had lake views. There was a fireplace, a big kitchen, and then what really drove it home was the big screened-in porch on the back. "Uh oh." I told my husband. "I really like it."

We made an offer, it was accepted. We put our cute, little city house on the market. We closed on the country house on October 1st. We closed on the sale of our city house on October 31st. While in negotiations to sell our city house there was a murder just a few houses down the street. It helped me feel like leaving our perfect little city house was the right move after all.

Now we have egg laying chickens, a garden, and goats. We tap our own trees to make maple syrup. Maybe my next career will be farming. Our dog loves roaming the almost 5 acres of "the compound" as my mother-in-law affectionately calls our living arrangement. She (Grandma) and Grandpa live next door and adore playing with their grandchildren. My mom, known as Nini to the grandkids, lives in the attached apartment and we love sharing meals with her. My kids have an amazing (and rare) experience to grow up knowing all of their living grandparents extremely well. Life is good.

Below: Pictures from the backyard of our city house






Below:  At our country house with the chicks and our first garden in the background.

 

Below: Putting taps in the maple trees

A Difficult Road to Motherhood

I got pregnant for the very first time in 2008. Around Thanksgiving I was only 5 weeks or so along, but my husband and I decided to share our news with our immediate families even though we knew it was probably early for such announcements. Things progressed well, and by Christmas we made announcements at the large extended-family gatherings. We had our first ultra-sound and everything looked good. By January 2009 I was officially out of the first trimester and went to see Barack Obama inaugurated as President. On that trip I bought my first maternity clothes at a mall in Maryland. By March we went on a vacation in Florida and I happily wore maternity clothes to show off my growing bump. When we got home we had our big ultrasound appointment to look forward to. We were so excited to find out if we were having a boy or a girl! I was 22 weeks along at the time of that appointment.

The day before the big ultrasound I started getting nervous. I hadn't felt many movements up to that point, and suddenly I felt movement that just didn't feel right. At the ultrasound, the doctor brought our baby up on screen but wasn't saying anything, just moving the sensor around for several minutes as we pointed out features we could recognize by ourselves. Then she quietly said she was going to find another doctor to look because she couldn't find the heartbeat. My heart was sinking because I already feared the baby was dead the night before, but denial is a strong emotion. The second doctor came in and confirmed that there was no heartbeat. I didn't know how to react, so I don't think I did much of anything. I was numb. I feared that somehow I had caused the baby's death. The doctor said I could go to the hospital that day to be induced if I wanted to, but I said no because it was all too much.

Later that day I changed my mind. The idea that my body had become my baby's tomb was too unsettling. I checked into the hospital at noon the next day, by midnight our baby girl was delivered. I was medicated with morphine which helped numb both the physical and emotional pain a bit too. It was devastating for my husband and I to go through labor without a newborn's cries as the reward for all the hard work. The onslaught of nurses, residents, social workers, and doctors asking us questions about naming our baby, burying our baby, and other topics we couldn't even begin to digest 24 hours after learning our baby died made the experience even worse.

We wanted to hide just the two of us, we cried a lot. Suddenly it seemed like every tv show and commercial featured pregnancy or babies. It just seemed cruel. Even seeing my niece or friends' young children was hard. An autopsy showed that our baby, who we named Delia, had Turner's syndrome, a chromosomal defect that only affects girls. Many babies with Turner's syndrome don't survive to birth due to heart defects. That was the case with Delia.

It was hard facing well-meaning relatives who made well-intentioned comments that were just hurtful, or intrusive. I struggled with wanting people to acknowledge our loss without telling us "it was for the best because of her disability," or prying too deeply into our crisis. To deal with everything I did a lot of reading online about stillbirth and late-term miscarriages and grieving those losses. Then in April, three weeks after Delia was delivered, I had a delayed postpartum hemorrhage and lost half my blood volume. It was insult in addition to injury and I felt scared and lost. I didn't trust my own body. I went to see a therapist, and fortunately after about 6 sessions I started to feel more like myself. Several weeks after losing Delia and recovering from the hemorrhage we had a graveside burial for her with our immediate families in attendance. She is buried with my father, her grandfather. It provided some closure and we could begin to really heal.

By June, 3 months after losing Delia, I was pregnant again--excited but very cautious--worried that we would lose this baby too. We didn't tell anyone until the second trimester this time, and even then I didn't talk openly about my pregnancy. I felt awkward when strangers would ask "Is this your first baby?" and feeling like a liar when I answered "yes" just to avoid the awkwardness of sharing my story. No one likes to talk about pregnancy loss. Luckily, I found an amazing OBGYN who treated me and my husband with tremendous empathy and she got us through our angst. Happily, one year and four days after delivering Delia, her brother was born!

I still think about Delia and her short existence. I have a mother's necklace that has a gemstone for her as well as ones for her brother and sister. Delia's stone changes color. In sunlight it's green, in the absence of sunlight it's purple. Whenever I meet a little girl named Delia I pause to think about what my Delia would have been like had she lived. She would have turned 4 this past summer. But time heals all wounds, and she will forever be in my heart.

First Blog Attempt: My Motivation

I am jumping on the bandwagon and starting a blog. I have lots of parent-friends who write blogs, even my husband recently started a blog about civic engagement. So, why am I doing this?

One motivation is that I am interested in becoming a writer for the Burlington VT Moms Blog, but since I have never blogged before I figured I better start practicing before the August 9th application deadline. I need to find out if I can come up with something that people want to read on a bimonthly basis.

A second motivation is that lots of my blogger friends have said that blogging is a way for them to document their lives during early parenthood so they could remember how they felt once the kids grew up. This seems like a good way to document this stage of life and the antics of my precious babes and myself as a stay at home mom.

A third motivation, and probably the most important, is that I am passionate about climate change and a blog just might be a good way to raise awareness about it through the lense of a parent. After the birth of each of my children, worries about climate change kept me up at night more than any parenting inadequacies I might have feared. What kind of world had I brought them into? What future would they have? Next week I am heading to Chicago for a Climate Leadership Training conference organized by Al Gore's The Climate Reality Project. Part of my task for completing the training is that I must do ten actions to spread the word on climate science and policy (or lack thereof). These actions can be presentations, op-ed pieces, or even blog posts.

So there you have it, dear readers. I hope you enjoy my posts.

On Becoming a Stay At Home Mom

If you had asked me as a teenager what would I be doing with my life by my late 20s/early 30s, stay-at-home motherhood would not have come up. Discussions in my household growing up included things like becoming a flight attendant as a way to travel and see the world. My parents lived an international life between Germany and the US for their first several years together. We traveled to Germany and other places as a family when I was a kid. As a teen I grabbed every chance to travel more independently: a high school exchange to Germany, an environmental education trip to Kenya, and a semester traveling and camping throughout the Southeastern US with the Audubon Expedition Institute. I imagined this pattern would likely continue into adulthood.

Then a funny thing happened. I fell in love with a local boy. I really got to know and fell in love with the region that as a teen I only imagined leaving and trading it for bigger and better, more worldly places. Even so, my local boy and I started traveling together (St. Croix, Ireland, Paris). We moved cross country together, to Los Angeles, to pursue a masters degree and a law degree. These adventures, though great fun, only made us appreciate our little corner of Vermont more and we knew we wanted to come back.

Upon moving back, with a fresh masters degree (in urban planning) in hand, I married my local boy. We got jobs with steady incomes. Jobs that allowed us a new adventure of buying a ramshackle house and totally renovating it. We worked all day at our jobs, ate a quick takeout dinner in the conference room of my office, then went to work on our house in the dark, and freezing cold winter temperatures for a few hours each night and every weekend. It was quite romantic actually.

When the house was done we decided we wanted a baby. But by then it was fall of 2008 and the Great Recession started. I lost my job. I  looked for new work but was conflicted. Conflicted about interviewing for jobs I didn't know if I would keep because I didn't know what kind of mother I wanted to be. My mother was a stay at home mom, and so were many of my friends' mothers growing up, so it was a familiar path. Yet, I had just recently gotten my degree and felt like I had better use it. The economic crisis wasn't making finding work easy so I found a part time, temporary job while I was pregnant. When my son was born it just felt right to be home with him. I didn't want anyone else raising him. I didn't want to miss all his firsts. The decision was made.

I have been a stay at home mom for 3 years now and it has been so rewarding to watch my son and daughter grow. Difficult and grueling at times too, but worth it. I have tried to always keep one foot in the professional world. I did some consulting for a former employer, and I also serve on my town's planning commission and zoning board. There are times that I worry about re-entering the workforce, will my skills still be relevant, who will hire me after so many years of "not working." There have been times when I'm the only stay at home parent in the room and I do feel less valued because I don't have my own paycheck and any office stories I have to add to the conversation are 4 years old. Still, I wouldn't trade this time with my kids. The memories we are making are absolutely priceless. A free-spirited friend of mine from college told me "We are more than what we do to earn our daily bread." I think this is true. I have a very fulfilling life raising my children, and a very important job guiding them to be conscientious, intelligent, and caring individuals. There will still time for another professional career someday, and time for family travel adventures.