I’m living a weekend life right now.. trying to pack in the duties and fun of real life into two days each week. The other 5 days consist of work, work, picking up, dropping off, eating previously prepared meals (if eating at all), and sleep. I’m sure it will calm down. But it makes me really think about our society. I am a big believer in getting back to roots. When trying to get through those crazy newborn days, I often thought “what did my great-grandmothers do?” They didnt have fancy baby monitors, or indoor plumbing for goodness sake. It was a way to bring myself back to earth, to stop the incessant Dr. Googling, and worrying over every milestone.
What has really inspired this post is a paragraph from a book I just finished- “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver.
“Now what? Most of us, male or female, work at full-time jobs that seem organized around a presumption that some wifely person is at home picking up the slack- filling the gap between school and workday’s end. Doing errands only possible during business hours, meeting the expectation that we are hungry when we get home. But in fact June Cleaver has left the premises. Her income was needed to voer the mortgage and health insurance. Didnt the workplace organizers notice? In fact, that gal Friday is us, both moms and dads running on overdrive, smashing caretaking duties into small spaces between job and carpool and bedtime. Eating preprocessed or fast food can look like salvation in the short run, until we start losing what real mealtimes give to a family: civility, economy, and health. A lot of us are wishing for a way back home, to the place where care-and feeding isnt a zookeeper’s duty but something happier and more creative.”
Do I have the answer, or a solution? Wish I did. But I truly believe, for our culture to survive, there needs to be a time when everyone realizes that we are disconnected from our own lives. I’m doing my best to stay connected. Yes, I broke and hired a maid every other week. But in my opinion, I’d rather spend the time I might have spend cleaning, with my daughter, or cooking for my family, to ensure we DON’T eat garbage the rest of the week.
While Anneliese napped yesterday, I decided to bake some cupcakes to send to daycare with her, in celebration of her birthday on Tuesday. I went to go get a (organic, as if it matters) cake mix from the pantry, but then realized I had used it on a failed cake experiment a month ago. So out came my trusty antique cookbook.
Making a cake from scatch is actual as fast as using a mix, provided you have all the ingredients handy.
They taste a million times better than anything from a box. (Maybe the whole milk we now have in the house helped a little)
I have the same cookbook! It was the one used by my grandmother, all my aunts and my mother. It is the cooking bible I learned from!