Baby Steps

Hello everyone!

I have been busy recently and I haven’t been able to keep up as much as I’d like to. I feel like I’ve gotten into a bit of a writer’s block-funk-type of thing and have been back and fourth a lot. But I did something recently that I can write about!

If you’ll take a look at the following image, you may get a hint about what it is…

If you guessed a bicycle, you are totally right!

Over the last few weeks with my venture into sustainability, becoming more eco-friendly and whatnot I have been making small changes to have the lifestyle that I want to live.

If you’ll look back at the picture, you’ll notice a fairly beat up car in the background, that would belong to Joshua. That is the second car he’s ever owned and he got into a pretty decent accident about 3-4 years ago which did significant damage to the body. Ever since then, I’ve referred to his car as a metal death trap. I don’t allow the girls to ride in it unless it’s absolutely necessary. Over the last few weeks S has been taking acting classes at the local theater and needs a ride during my hours at work thus forcing me to drive the metal death trap to work while Josh uses my hybrid. Every day for the last few weeks I spent the entire 5 minute ride to work thinking about how I would so much rather not be driving this car and it hit me- I should ride a bike. I put some feelers out to see if anyone had a bike they were looking to get rid of and was given the one pictured above. It was brand new, never been ridden and still had the tags on it. After riding it one time, about 2 blocks I was winded and also realized the tire was rotten so I invested in a new one. On July 5th, I decided I would try to ride it to work for the first time and boy was that a trip.

I googled the route and discovered it should only take 13 minutes (about 1.7 miles) to get from our house to my workplace. I made sure to leave half an hour early just to be safe and made my way. It took me half an hour. I walked a good portion of the way due to the numerous hills on the north side and I was so sweaty and tired by the time I got to work, I thought I was going to die. Josh picked me up from work and I decided that I would try riding it one way for now.

Another step we have made is incorporating more vegetarian meals into our weekly meal plans!

It’s been fairly easy! We signed up for a local farm share which has allowed us to broaden our palettes and try out new things that we wouldn’t have otherwise. Recently we tried rhubarb! I’ve never had rhubarb in my life, I’ve always heard mixed reviews about it and grew up a picky eater so I never tried it. In our first share ever, we got rhubarb and strawberries so I tried making strawberry rhubarb pie. It wasn’t half bad for my first time making pie crust AND strawberry-rhubarb filling. Even if half of it did go to waste…

I guess to conclude this post I’ll just say that making these changes is not easy! We get a lot of push-back from the teenagers, especially in regards to new things like veggie-burgers. However, I’m not going to give up that easily! The rule in our house is to try at least 3 bites of something before you decide you don’t like it. This is the same for all of the children, no matter their age.

Hopefully I will have more changes to tell you about in my next post! But until then tell me what changes YOU have made! Or plan to make in the future.