Laundry and gardening.

Our progress so far! Check out what it looked like before. There is a photo at the end of this post. Those strange looking vegtables are our little people. How do you deal with all the dirty clothes that playing in the mud brings? Well..................

Ok the hand washing soap experiment may have been a disaster. That stuff came out watery and the most disgusting colour you can imagine, really pukey green so I am back to good ol' hypo allergenic.

However, after a bit of bubble, bubble, toil and trouble in the kitchen last night we have our own laundry detergent. Even if it does not work it was great fun to do and produced vast quantities of detergent which I have to say is the most snot like consistency. For the cost of, I reckon, 80p we have filled two bottles those four containers.... yep that is detergent not milk. (Worry not I have clearly labeled it! That amount of snot in your cereal would be exceedingly unpleasant.) And yep one load of clean fresh smelling washing!! We will have to see how the kids eczema responds tho because we will not mess around with that at any cost.

We spent a few more hours down on the "allotment" today. At the moment we are still clearing. Tedious hard work but there is a sense of achievement and the fresh air is so good for us, away from phones and emails. This picture is encouraging to see how far we have come.

Now all we have to do is decide what we want to plant. Actually it seems to be a lot to do with what will grow well this far north. Funny things is that I have never considered us to be that far north!! The map begs to differ, as does the climate.

Sobering thoughts

Last night as I met with friends from church, friends I get together with regularly, I learned that the average life expectancy in Malawi is 39. This hit me hard. Tonight in Malawi there will be a mother, ages with me, with a little girl and a little boy just like me who knows she is in her final hours and is powerless to do anything about it. She is probably not dying of some complicated disease but something that is totally avoidable and totally treatable.

As we enter into this season of Lent, Mike and I have committed ourselves to making some small changes, to do without a few things and let me be totally honest these are things I like, that make my life extra pleasant not anything I trully need. We want to create some time and some focus into considering the whole issue of faith. What are we basing our lives on? How do we center our lives around the truth of all God is. It is not enough to just live at a getting by level. I do not believe that God has called us to just get by.

And as I consider, reflect and pray I commit myself again to maladjustment. I owe it to those whose lives are every bit as meaningful as mine, but whose time to live is predicted at half of mine. I have to be committed to seeking justice.

Light nights, soil and laundry!

Spring is definitely some where in the neighbourhood. Since the car is completely frosted up this morning it ain't quite here but I almost managed to get the washing dried outside on Sunday. In fact if I had managed to get the load done and hung out before church it would have been dry. I get as excited about that as I do the first snow drops and crocus. I love the tumble dryer and it makes a big difference to the eczema allergy conditions that are currently living in our house but I do not like what it does to the electric meter which appears to have a bout of hyperactivity whenever the clothes are drying. Not good on the eco or the wallet front!

We have been digging for all we are worth down on our allotment. We will soon have a decent area to plant up with some veggies. As allotment novices we need to work out what to plant. The packets all say sow in February ...now is that a Scottish February or a balmy south of England February. (Yep this year it was not so balmy down there either!!)

Whatever we are enjoying the days getting longer!

A fab ECO Christmas present from Aunty Bethy and Uncle Adam. Hours of fun and happy mess. We are now ready to go where no little people have gone before!

http://www.oxfam.co.uk/shop/productdetails.aspx?catalog=HighStNew&product=HN269719

Let's take stock.

It is mid term and we have three glorious days off school. OK I normally have these three days off but there is something nice about not having to get me and the little people dressed and along that road to school, either a leisurely walk or a quick march depending on the time. Our little girl is thrilled at having the days off......maybe a little too thrilled actually. I'm kind of concerned that she already has an adolescent approach to education.

Anyway, anyway... I got thinking that as this is halfway thru the school year and our kids have had mid-session reviews I should give my targets a bit of a reviewing.

Avoid the shops..................... for me that has not been hard. I have made some good purchases of late and actually enjoy a browse thru the clutter in a calm sort of way while the shopping centre has me actively concentrating on my breathing. We failed on a jacket for Mike, saw one in Tesco's (not exactly high end shopping admittedly) and had it bought and worn before we remembered our target. Kids clothes, grandma is still kitting out the kids. Osh kosh b'gosh! Charity shops do not stock kids clothes. Where do they all go?

Clean the house chemical free. This is not a tough one. My spray bottle of water and soap is my absolute favourite. And I clean tougher stuff with bicarb either sprinkled directly or mixed with soap and water. Hey... if you have not considered it then do. Honestly saves you a fortune and it keeps those chemicals out of your house and your lungs. This target has kind of sent me in to another one of reducing the chemicals in products we are using on us. Check out www.froogrecipes.com for some more stuff that Beth is working on.
(Note to Self - maybe not the smartest to blog about the shampoo reduction thing. Wiser to do it when folks are none the wiser and do not then start conversations with "which hair day is this?" !!)

Our diet................. . We love our local farm. It is not organic but the food miles don't even reach a mile! Everything tastes so good. Sadly it is only open six months of the year. We love Nancy too and the cows. It is quite the outing for us. We went up last week, me and the littler boy. Phew it stank. They had just spread the manure, and chicken manure at that. Now anytime the littler boy smells something bad he says with great certainty "I can smell Nancy's farm."
We are eating very little processed food. (Does Bailley's count as processed?). The littler boy's diet is still not full of obvious fruit and veg but we are seeing very small steps of progress and a lot less fighting and gagging. And take it from me, that is GOOD!!!!!

Our allotment project has taken a bit of a hit with the weather but we are still committed to it. we took a trip down a few weekends ago and the little people were highly entertained by their father's Tigger impersonations to cut off a couple of high tree branches snagged in the telephone wires. We had forgotten to put two pairs of socks on the little people tho so only got an hour of clearing done. We need the temperature to go up a little as you would need a pneumatic drill to break the ground up now.

And Christmas, well that has been well chronicled but we will be seriously on the look out for package reduced Easter Eggs!

Change is often hard. We were given a new computer this week by Mike's Dad. Very generous. We really like it but on Thursday night as we were making system restore disks (....two hours those things took to make, two hours.....), loading antivirus software, trying to remember exactly which password we had put on the Internet account, it just seemed like it would be a whole pile easier to stick with the old, familiar and decidedly decrepit computer. Yesterday I really struggled with not washing my hair, yeuch it looked pretty awful. I wanted a sign for my forehead which would read something like.................. well I am not exactly sure how I would explain it, a hat or indeed a bag for my head might have been easier. Two and half weeks Beth reliably informs me, or at least Meredith's book says, for our hair to adjust to a different routine.

How long I wonder for me to adjust to a different pace? I do not want to do less. I just want to be more effective in what I do. I changed the header quote today. Justice. Mercy. Humility. These I want to pursue. And Dot's comment on the previous post is really worth the contemplating..... .

Check out http://www.thebodiebunch.blogspot.com/ Wednesdays entry-Wants and Needs http://www.iblamedorisday.blogspot.com/ Fast and slow.
It is encouraging that there are others who get this, and get it clearer than me.

And as for my hair on a significantly shallow note, I am adjusting a bit at a time. every second day for a month or so and then we will move on to three days. Either that or I need two and a half weeks somewhere I know nobody. I have a lot of pride to deal with.

Pure and simple.

I may not have been blogging much in the last few weeks but I certainly have been doing some thinking. Turns out it would take me washing my hands for two hours, yep two hours steady contact with that anti bacterial soap on my fingers, to kill some of those germs. Yeah right! My son has just been learning hand washing at nursery. Rub that soap in and sing "Happy Birthday" twice. A good aim I feel and in our house, if I can get this soap recipe to work... a little on the watery side but hey it was a first go, then pure olive oil has got to be better for us.
Why am I so easily conditioned to believe that I need to be buying these products? Why am I so adjusted to consumerism?
And........ I have found myself in chats with folks in the last months about the amount we wash our hair. This weekend Karen, our hairdresser and a fab one at that, was appalled that I would be washing my kids hair as often. Once a week full stop. (Now our eczema creams come in to play as they do get into their hair but I am hearing her) And for me once or maybe twice a week unless I am sweating up a storm at the gym. (Me?) We are stripping out all the natural oil. Again I am really irritated that I would get so easily sucked in to this idea of progress with the increase in products available. It is not progress, and it may actually be damage, as we pour a pile of unnecessary junk in and around our bodies.
A friend who gave me a great clean green book last week ( I am thinking of holding some kind of green clean party where we can share ideas and learn!?) suggested to me this week that maybe the whole cleaning/products thing had a parallel in the spiritual with me. I laughed at the time but I think she was right. There is a deep desire in me for the simpler yet more effective in everything. It is hard for me to blog this well and there has been much back spacing in the last ten minutes.
So I pause here for some more thought................... .