If you make any of your meals at home, or have gotten at sucked into the urban homesteading movement (backyard chickens, gardening, or composting?), you may have found yourself making something extraordinarily time-consuming from scratch and wondering if it was worth it. I know I have.
Make the Bread, Buy the Butter: What You Should and Shouldn’t Cook from Scratch, by Jennifer Reese of tipsybaker.com is part cookbook, part journal, and although I hate both of these words, utterly delightful.
When I was a kid, I was the girl chasing my little friends with a toad. I was fascinated by the little amphibians’ bumpy skin and soulful faces. Baby toads amazed me with their tiny details. My kids have a similar interest in natural science, although unfortunately, no toads live in our yard that I know of.
One of the things I love as much or more than toads is finding a book that either presents a new perspective of a historical event, or one that introduces a new person from history. When I discovered The Bug Girl: Maria Merian’s Scientific Vision, by Sarah Glenn Marsh, illustrated by Filippo Vanzo, it had me with the first pages inside the cover of Merian’s drawings of plants and insects.
Between the Chaplain, myself, and One’s bio dad, we are one 400 level course short of 9 college degrees (and One is the reason I didn’t finish that course), including three Masters and an assortment of undergraduate degrees.
I always figured my kids would go to college. Both the Chaplain and I are readers and we both place a high value on education.
But for One, the shoe never really fit.
One of the first things I came across the morning of July 4th was this post on my Instagram feed from @themelanatedbirth:
While you’re out popping fireworks, lighting sparklers, and barbecuing with your friends today, I ask that you pause and reflect on the fact that the over 300,000 slaves that were brought to this country did NOT gain freedom on this day in 1776.
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Think of the natives who were killed and displaced to colonize this country, so you can tell folks to “go back to where they came from”.
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Likewise, consider all of the men, women, and children who are spending today in the horrible conditions that are the “detention” 🙄 camps….those people who have come to this country, not to steal, kill, and rape, but to provide better lives for their families.
Consider them as you scarf down those hot dogs and drink your beers because ‘Merica.
I was already having some real mixed feelings about this holiday.
One of my favorite prayers is, “Forgive me, Father, for my unbelief.”
I think it started as a kid when I was asking my parents about who wrote Genesis. When I found out how long after Creation it had been written, I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
How could some dude who lived hundreds of years after the Creation of the earth have any accurate sense of how it had happened? It didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t care if he was inspired by God.
I have always believed deep down that science will confirm what the Bible says about how the earth was created, but when I was a kid, it was very important to evangelicals to believe in Young Earth Creationism instead of Evolution, and the two ideas were considered completely incompatible. Since then, discoveries like Mitochondrial Eve, established a much more recent beginning for humans (and confirmed we didn’t come from apes, which was one of the things I remember evangelicals being upset about).
A dear friend and a bit of a nemesis in high school confronted me with the conflicting accounts of different events in the Gospels. I bluffed my unconcern at the time, but I was horrified. If that was true, why hadn’t anyone told me?
Then a professor in college suggested that maybe God wasn’t a man.
