Sick kiddo, TV, and Consumerism

Hippo is sick today with a fever and diarrhea :( The three of us (me, Hippo, and Baby
Fish) have spent pretty much all day in bed.

We don't have cable or antenna reception. Until about two weeks ago we didn't even own a TV. Alas, Soulmate likes to watch movies, so we bought a used TV for $20 and a cheapo DVD player. Now he has a little movie den set up in the kids' room. The kids don't actually sleep there, they sleep with us. It's more a room to store their clothes.

Anyway, getting back on topic, we don't watch TV generally. Today I brought the laptop into the bedroom and we spent the morning watching TV online. Hippo has seen more TV today than he has cumulatively his entire life (he's 21 mos). I guess a little "Yo Gabba Gabba" won't hurt too much...

Everytime I watch TV, though, I'm reaffirmed in my decision to excise it from our lives. The shows are mostly dumb and don't hold my attention for more than a few minutes in most cases. What really gets to me are the commercials. This morning we saw commercials for a "machine" that makes aliens, a machine that you use to create pictures made from beads, a toy puppy that "grows" and talks, and a toy lion that will love you just like a realy lion cub would (!). WTF? I guess I've been out of it too long. I wouldn't buy any of these for my children, but the ads sure make them enticing.

The other day I was waxing nostalgic for my old Lite Brite.



I didn't take this - I found it online and, yes, I have a juvenile sense of humor. I also found that there's an updated version of the Lite Brite called the Lite Brite Cube or something. I don't really care. I'd pay $5 for the old-fashioned version if I could find one at Value Village. I suppose Lite Brite was considered hi-tech in its day, but I fondly recall playing with it.

Back to our TV watching today: I also found appalling the amount of ads for sugar/carb-laden/processed-beyond-all-recognition food. Who buys this shit and do they still live under a rock where no one talks about pesticides, the price of gas and the obesity/diabetes epidemic?!?!

W.T.F?

We ain't perfect out here and mama still enjoys her chocolate ice cream (Haagen-Dazs, please), but give me a break. Maybe the people who buy these products are the same people who are enthralled with Sarah Palin ("An Alaska hillbilly with porn-star looks who's on the ticket to sew up the white trash vote" Margaret Wente, Globe and Mail columnist)...but that's another post altogether.

Baby is here

Our second son, Fish, was born in the birth pool in our living room at 7:40 pm on Sept. 3. It was a beautiful experience especially since Hippo (our first son) was born via a cesarean section that I consider to have been unnecessary in hindsight. I have no idea how people give birth in hospitals. Being in my own space while laboring was a gift. Getting up to get a drink of water from my own kitchen a few hours after the birth was a wonderful feeling. Baruch H-shem.

First Cholent

I made our first cholent of the fall this past Shabbos. Quiche has been our Shabbos lunch staple for most of the summer. I just can't stand to have the crock pot on in the heat and neither of us particularly like cholent.

Fall has arrived in our little corner of the world, however, and cholent actually sounded good this week. Here's the brew I used (I practice free-form cholent making, so quantities may not be exact or even very important):

Cassoulet Cholent
* approx 1/5 c. dry beans - I used a mix of what we had on hand - speed soaked in boiling water
* fake bacon - one half-pound package - we get something here called "beef fry" - it's beef made to look and taste like bacon. Yummerific.
* 1 pkg Eppie's hotdogs
* a few golden nugget potatoes
* one onion, chopped
* splash of vinegar
* a few squirts of ketchup
* a few tablespoons organic molasses?
* about a tablespoon dry mustard powder
* a generous amount of Montreal Steak Spice (THE spice-of-choice in our house)
* water - I filled the crockpot about 3/4 of the way to the top of the ingredients

It was lovely. I'm not a bean person, but even I enjoyed this. There was enough water that the hotdogs plumped instead of shriveling. The fake bacon melted and gave a wonderful flavor. It was pretty runny, but we're low-carbing it these days. Adding a bit of barley would've made it creamier and thicker.

Will I make cholent next week? Who knows. We were watching the Food Network at my inlaws yesterday and saw a program on Hungarian comfort food. My husband's bio dad came from Hungary and DH grew up with that cuisine. We may try a goulash-y cholent next week. Or we may have Broccoli-Cheese Quiche!

Pregnant

As I mentioned in my first post, I am 9 months pregnant (K"H) with our 2nd child. I'm planning a home birth some time in the next 4 weeks, Gd willing. Stay tuned for updates.

Who are we and what the heck are we doing?

I've started dozens of blogs over the past few years. I keep one for updates on my family - aimed mostly at relatives who live far away. However, my family is not Jewish and we are, well, Orthodox Jewish, so the details of our religious lives get left out...

I have another blog about my journey towards a HBAC - a home birth after cesarean. Haven't let my parents in on the whole homebirth aspect, yet I felt compelled to chronicle the voyage (mostly for myself).

Yet another blog was started and abandoned on our life as a frum family here on the edge of the continent in a city with only a handful of other frum families. I felt constrained by this as I was reluctant to bring myself into the blog - in it I existed only as a frum woman, not as a citizen of the larger world.

Other blogs have started and failed. We recently decided that our children will be unschooled and I wondered if I should start a blog about my thinking on this topic.

Then, while loading the dishwasher at 5:30 this morning (one of my fun late-pregnancy side-effects is waking up absurdly early - 4:00 today), I had an epiphany (without the religious connotations). Why not combine all these topics into a single blog?

We are unique - frum, unschooling, birth activist, bucking the system, living on the edge...

So here I am. I'm sure I'll write most of the posts with my darling husband contributing occasionally. Come along with us. I'm enjoying this adventure so far and I'd love to share it with you.