We are each other's shelter

Tribute to Light: memorial lights turned on every year on 9/11 at Ground Zero

I waited to tell her.

She was born into a post-9/11 world and I never knew quite how to tell her what had happened 18 months before I was lucky enough to become her mom. Every time she's ever been through an airport, she's had to take off her shoes, put liquids into baggies, wait through the long lines. When she was four, she had to poo in her pants even though she was potty-trained because once they put you in the high security line, you are not allowed out, no matter how badly your child cries. And you can't get anything out of your bag, not even a clean pair of pants or some baby wipes. And believe me if the others in line start to complain on your behalf, well your bag gets searched even longer.

But today, after hours of watching the footage over and over again, the very first CNN coverage when no one had any idea that people would take over planes full of other people and use them as weapons of mass destruction...today, I gained empathy for the TSA agents I felt were torturing my child beyond anything they would make an adult endure. Because today I realized that as shitty as their job is, they are trying to protect a people against another attack. Not on their watch. And I have come to respect that now.

I've seen people all day bellyaching about their civil liberties that have been taken away ala the Patriot Act. I myself have reacted in outrage for 10 whole years at how our leaders cowboyed up from the very first press briefing, through years of searching deserts for non-existent weapons and hidden terrorist leaders, draining our coffers to finance a war on terror, a phrase that from the moment I heard it I thought it was a ludicrous oxymoron meant to instill fear not fight it. How can you have a war on an emotion? But my point is, I have played what many would call the "unpatriotic" tune for a decade but today watching those videos, inwardly I nodded when W called them "acts of pure evil" and inwardly I cheered when he vowed to "hunt down those responsible and anyone who harbored them." Seeing the wall of faces of first responders who lost their lives, hearing the names of parents read aloud by their still too young children, it finally hit me why and how the desire for revenge could run so deep.

I still wish we had chosen a different way to respond. I still wish, as my friend Robin said today, to "let kindness fill the breathing space of our differences." And this is the message I wish to somehow convey to my daughter. So on this day, ten years later, at 8.5 years old, I decided maybe she was old enough for me to tell her about it. I'm not certain that it was the right choice at all, now in hindsight. I started by watching the CNN footage with her, with a lot of age-appropriate narration from me. Then switched to NPR for some of the tribute footage from today at all 3 locations. Then looking at video tributes on YouTube, with and without cheesy music accompaniment. Then we played some games, went to the park, but on the way home, she wept. She told me she didn't know if she believed in God after all, if he wasn't able to stop such a thing. I explained why I think God lets us make mistakes and then allows us to learn from them, that there are some things that are definitely wrong in our world and when something like this happens, the people left behind can either live forever hurt by it, or they can chose to try to change it. I offered that maybe she and I could be part of those people who stand up and insist we stop doing the things that make other countries hate us (though all day I grappled at even being able to explain to her what those things are). I tried explaining that while we have bad things in our world like diseases and disability, it is because of those bad things that people have learned how to make medicine and wheelchairs and surgeries that heal and help people. I explained that if God swooped in and stopped all tragedy, that we would never change our world or learn to fix the broken things on our own. She said she didn't want to talk anymore and just held my hand from the backseat of the car until we got home.

Hours later, she still she needed to be rocked to sleep like she hasn't needed in years. My big eight and a half year old girl who barely fits in my lap anymore. 

That's how I spent my day and night. In between it all, I'd scan what my friends and acquaintances were sharing about 9/11 on Twitter & Facebook. Then I treated myself to a sitter after my girl was asleep and I went by myself to hear to Ray LaMontagne in concert, outside under the stars and the full moon overlooking the ocean. Ray crooned "When you came to me with your bad dreams and your fears, it was easy to see you'd been crying. Seems like everywhere you turn, catastrophe reigns. But who really profits from the dying? Now I could hold you in my arms. And I could hold on forever. And I could hold you in my arms. I could hold on forever." That song is called Shelter. While he sang it, I looked around at this sleepy coastal town that is my shelter and I counted my blessings. It's all I could think of doing. I thought of loves lost and lives lost and maybe a little too much of my daughter's innocence lost. I feel both lost and found in this town, sometimes. After the concert, I walked down the steep path to the parking lot, deeply inhaling the chaparral and sage and olive trees that grow on the hillside and I felt lucky, so lucky to be alive, to be smelling these beautiful smells here in this beautiful world, and lucky to have a sweet, small girl who depends on me to filter the heavy smoke of this story from her eyes and her lungs, so that she can breathe the sweet night air without fear. 

And I realized how every mother's child depends on all of us for this kind of protection. It's the job of each of us to do what we can to bring peace to this world. We cannot sit back in our comfortable worlds and think that this has nothing to do with us. We must never forget and we must hold on to one another and never let go until we all feel safe, until every last one of us can fall asleep finally without fear. We are each other's shelter.

Setting it free: My poem 10 years later

It's 1 am and I can't sleep.

4am on the east coast.

I walk to the kitchen to get a glass of water.

Place a finger beneath my daughter's nose to make sure she's still breathing.

Can't shake the feeling that something's not right.

4am on the east coast, 9/11/11.

Ten years ago, thousands of people still sleeping in their beds.

Deep in their peaceful REM cycles on a crisp fall morning,

Unaware that they'll leave their homes for the last time that day.

Unaware that something is just not right.

What did those people leave undone that day?

Lawns unmowed, fish unfed, dishes unwashed?

Last month's electric bill past due and fallen between the desk & the wall.

Who were they and how did they live, how did they love?

And how do the people they loved continue to go on without them?

And what, I must ask, what in their names, have WE done?

How many times has a mother in Bagdad felt every day for the past 10 years

What the mothers of this nation felt on that one terrible day?

Waiting to hear if her children have survived a battle zone.

Waiting for someone to walk thru the door who will never come home again.

And what, if anything, do we still need to do, 10 years later?

Is it even possible for us to choose peace?

Is it possible for us to rise up and say that we were wrong?

Can we ever convince our leaders that a war on fear

Is like smacking a kid to teach them that hitting is wrong.

It's 2am and I might sleep.

I might dream of the stories of my friends who have started to share

Where they were and what they saw and what they remember.

In the sharing of memories and emotions, we breathe it out, and we honor it.

We honor the dead and the grieving and the wounded by sharing and setting it free.

refining

It all started when a friend made this her Facebook status:

"I am everything I never thought I'd be and disapproved of in others. Someone tell me that's a positive thing."

To which I replied:

"i have to say i am feeling the EXACT same way. and i think it has so much to do with what a commenter said above, caring about who you are and scrutinizing yourself harder than before. or finally being mature enough to handle facing the things you want to improve about yourself. we spend a lot of our 20's and 30's thinking the problem is the other guy. somewhere right about now, i think we start getting real and seeing we may indeed actually have bad traits we want to fix. i am trying to learn to rise above simply stopping there and being harsh on myself and trying to find my way to problem solving those things...that is the hardest part for me, not condemning myself so harshly. so maybe you're there too and we just need to keep aging and finding our way through. i think it's something akin to taking a rough gemstone and grinding, cutting, polishing it to a beautifully cut jewel. i am sure if the jewel had anything to say, it would say that the process of refining hurt like hell."

And then I realized I maybe a lot of people who are 40-ish might be feeling something similar. So this is my call for submissions. I'd like to open a conversation around this. Ladies, gentlemen...any advice? Anything similar going on for you? How do you think you might go about solving it? Anyone beyond their 40's who's "been there, done that" have any words of wisdom for us?

If so, please consider sharing your thoughts or struggles in the comments below. Maybe something good can come of sharing and witnessing with others around the world who collectively are going through it too.

blessings to you and yours!
~hipmama

And p.s. new visitors, please disregard my swearing post at Google below as well as the lack of any photos on this blog (refraining from swearing at Google one more time, because case in point, I really was the dodo who didn't read the fine print!).

damn you Google+

Crap. Google owns Blogger. Google came out with new social networking site, Google+ recently and I just got signed up for a Beta account yesterday. Noticed that without trying, I had some photo albums there, that Google somehow pulled thru feeds of mine that they own and decided to help me out by putting up some photo albums to me, sort of a house warming gift, I suppose, to welcome me to Google Plus. Well without reading the warning, I started deleting these albums, because I never put them there and they contained photos of my child, so I was feeling protective, when suddenly I realize that the fine print says "are you sure you want to delete these photos? doing so will delete them from all Google owned sites, including Blogger and several other sites, and will be irreversible."


What???


So I come over here and yes indeedy, all the photos I've uploaded in the nearly 6 yrs that I've been blogging are gone. This was supposed to be a tribute to all these years of mothering my girl and poof! the photo journal aspect is vaporized. Why the heck did they need to link it all like that? Why would the action on one Google site affect the content on other sites? Who would be expecting that? Kinda scary how much Google controls and can link together like that.


Ugh. Hope I can find these sweet photos still...

lightening up

wow. it's been a loooooong time since I hit a stage in a dance piece. i mean a long long time. before Sophia was born in fact. Sophia and I are going to dance in a flash mob performance here in Santa Barbara in the coming weeks, and we've been rehearsing every night. i have many observations.

1. First, I am watching myself in some of the videos and I am twice the size I used to be when I danced. Not kidding, I literally wear double the size I used to wear. I realize how much more I carry around with me and how that affects my posture and the accuracy of my movements. I am slower and I look less sharp, less crisp. I look at other dancers in the video and in my mind, I think I move like them, think I look like them, but when the camera is on me, I now realize, in watching it, that I do not look or move like them. Woah. It's a major wake up call for me to get into shape. The elliptical machine has been dusted off and plugged in. I am going to start working out again. Please blog followers, help keep me honest!!

2. Teaching the moves to Sophia is hard! I already have my own personal frustrations with how hard it is for me to learn the piece. And poor thing, she has them too, her own insecurities, but then mine are layered on top and she is learning to stress about not picking it up fast enough by seeing me do it. I used to use dance as a cathartic therapy, where I faced my self-doubt demons and fought hard with my dad's voice in my head and found myself near tears at the most unexpected moments. And right now, for the first time ever, I am going thru all that with a little witness watching me, soaking it all up like a sponge. Not sure it's the best thing for her. Or for me. Maybe I need to reserve dance for it's own special medicine that it is for me and not do this together with her. Or maybe I need to suck it up and step out of myself and just do this for her. But since we both are performers in this piece, it's very hard not to go into my own process around it. Let me point out that all of this is internal, not much of it shows on the outside, but my girl, she's pretty in tune with me, so she's feeling it. Not sure if it's better to make this all about her, and then be inauthentic with myself, or to just be real and be me and maybe that's better for her.

3. Poor thing, she has a lot of stress around getting it right. She always has. I gotta learn how to support her in that...but sadly I have that too and haven't really learned how to support myself in it, let alone someone else. How do I make it fun for her, and not all about working out our neuroses?? When and why did she develop her own neurosis/es in the first place? I thought I've always tried to instill self-confidence and playfulness in her, fighting hard to not raise her with body issues, self-consciousness and perfectionism. Are those things just contagious, so she got them from me subliminally?

Well that's pretty much it. Tough stuff for what is supposed to be a lighthearted fun experience. Working on lightening up in so many different contexts here. Hopefully it will just end up being fun!!

Here's a video of our piece so far:
http://www.flipshare.com/view.aspx?nRecipient=&nFrame=QjkxNTE3QkEtRDEwNy00RTQxLTg3MDItOTAyMzU5MUFGM0M2&nMedia=QkU4NjY2QTgtOUY2MC00QUI5LTkyN0YtMDgzQUFCRjg0NjM5&nT=

Pretty cool, right?

blog spawn

Woke today around 6:30 am to the sound of "Mom, Mom, MOM, come in here!!!" I come running in, bleary eyed and half-robed, expecting blood or fire. Instead I find Sophia beckoning me to get in bed with her and look out the window. "Look Mom, you can see evaporation!"

It has been raining hard here for a few days and our patio furniture cushions have gotten soaked. This morning the sun broke out but it was still super chilly out. Sophia noticed the steam rising from the cushions and got so excited, since they are studying weather and water cycles at school right now. She wanted to know if I could take a video so she could show her class. So I pulled out the iPhone, we threw on boots and bathrobes and went out in the cold to film it (couldn't see thru the window so well).

Then she asked if she could make a few more science videos on her own. Happy for a few minutes to jump back under my comforter, I showed her how to work the phone and let her at it. The result was 8 videos she made all on her own. After showing them to me, I suggested we make a blog with them, since she's been wanting to make a website for quite some time. Apple fall far from the tree much?

So one day after my own blog renewal, here is the spawn of my blog, er the blog of my spawn, um the daughter of all blogs...well ok my puns are drying up so here's the link, if you wanna check it out!

http://anothersciencevideo.blogspot.com/

Enjoy and feel free to comment or post, she'd love it!

purifying

What is it that cleanses our psyche

the way a long, hot shower

washes away the sweat from a hard run?

Sometimes it's a good cry

or months of crying

that washes away the residue left behind

from one experience to the next.

Some people shop,

shedding last year's skin

for the fashions of a new day.

Me, I move.

I pack it all up into boxes and put it away again

into new cupboards and closets and shelves,

touching each of the objects in my life,

one at a time,

deciding whether to keep it

and if so, where does it go now?

Transferring the dust

gathered from one chapter of my life

into the next,

watching it wash down the sink

in little gray drops

every time I wash my hands.

fast forward to 2011

Thought I'd drop back in here and write something. It's 2011, February. I moved to SB originally in Feb 1993, so something about February always gets me to reminiscing. Just in the midst of a house move, moved into a lovely place and am buried under boxes, slowly but surely unpacking them under the drizzle of rain and distant rumble of thunder in the hills. I wanted to write something and thought to myself, where do I write these days? On paper? On Facebook? I looked at my friend Pema's blog (www.storycharmer.com) and then I remembered, oh yeah, I have a blog!

So here I am, back on the blog, with somethin' to say. See next post!

I claim this day for joy

Been harping too much online about the crappy things happening. wah, whine...but no more! today I stake my love flag in the ground, I claim this day for joy!!

dive right in

Sophia, my girl, someday I hope you get to read this blog, that the technology will still be the same, that I won't get too old to remember my password, etc. etc. (just kidding). The reason I want you to read this is to feel proud of yourself for how you always just dive right in, fearlessly, to everything you want to learn.

like swimming. at first, as a baby, you didn't like pools or the ocean. but one day, something clicked and you were no longer afraid. you just went underwater and started to swim, do flips, sit on the bottom of the pool, hop waves, boogie board in the ocean, etc. fearless, you just wanted to do it and you did it.


like writing. at first, as a preschooler, you'd ask me over and over how to spell things. but one day, something clicked and you were no longer timid about the written word and you just started writing sentences and stories on paper bags, post-it notes, little books you'd staple together yourself. fearless, you just wanted to do it and you did it.


like loving, like climbing, like math, like dancing, like everything you become impassioned about...my fearless girl, i will always admire the side of you that dives right in and grasps hold of what you love to do.

Easter eggs

This year, we tried a new technique, thanks to my friend R from work. We picked various flowers and leaves with interesting flat shapes from around the neighborhood, mostly our own yard:

Simply place botanical on a hard-boiled egg, wrap with nylon pantyhose, tie snugly:


Then dip the wrapped eggs in any kind of dye you like. We used traditional Paas dye from Kmart, my friend R went way cool and made her own natural onion skin dye. Both turned out beautifully!

See my Flickr page for more photos.

And here's the happy egg artiste, with her collection of found eggs after Easter egg hunt 1 of 2 so far this year:

Family Photo

Yes, the classic "camera at arms length" photo, this one taken in the boat about to go into "It's A Small World" ride at Disneyland. Went there for Sophia's 6th birthday, her dad came with us. Fun time was had by all!

growth circles

we're social creatures by nature. not quite pack animals any more, but many of our cultures were at their best when living intergenerationally or in tribes. and why is that? because part of our growth comes from giving and receiving with each other.

these days, friends and family are blown to the four corners of the earth. when we do have those rare chances of finding people we truly connect deeply enough with that we can carry on meaningful and growth-inducing conversations with, they usually live across town, across the country or around the world. these moments do not come effortlessly as often as we need them to. we rely on technology to help us achieve it, but those come without the perks of eye contact, human touch, or the warmth of an embrace at a much needed moment. so our growth is stunted. we need these exchanges to grow, we need full sun, but we've placed our pots in the shade of the distance between us, so our roots don't go down as deeply as they should, our stalks grow thinner than is healthy as we stretch yearningly toward that warmth & light we don't get enough of.

tonight, i had the thinned out version of one of those conversations, watered down by the medium of Google chat, a conversation 8 months later than it should have been on the last time we saw each other in person, by mere virtue of the fact that we live 100's of miles apart. if we lived in the same camp, bathed in the same river every morning, gathered wood for the same cook fire and cooked over it each night, we would have discussed this already. but anwyay...

tonight my friend C and i talked about our relationships. she was talking about a recently ended love affair, how she'd lost herself in it, and what she was doing to find herself again. i shared some tidbits of wisdom wrought from my own rendition of that same experience, which i've repeated several times in my life so far. i'm about 3 years older than C. i shared with her my two cents, and then after we stopped chatting, i realized how sharing those insights with her was giving me so much to reflect on for myself at this point in my life. and it was then that i realized that by sharing our wisdom together, we teach both ourselves and the other person at the same time. we grow together. and think how much more quickly we would grow to be strong healthier adult plants if we did this more regularly for each other? if we'd had this conversation 8 months ago, how much further along in our own self-discovery would both of us be?

we think in this civilized modern age, we are so much further along than our tribal ancestors. i beg to differ. i think we lost about what (or more than) we gained when we forced our "civilization" upon our forebears and stripped the tribe from the tribesmen.

-----

what i shared with C tonight was that sometimes when you've been not yourself, you need to return to the place where you found yourself in the first place. for her, and for me, that place is Santa Barbara. well, for me, it was first Nashville, then Santa Barbara. i lost myself when i went to Iowa, had to go back to Nashville to look for pieces, then continued here to SB to find the rest of me, the whole me. a few times now, i've left (to San Diego and Portland), both times chasing something that wasn't me, and i had to return here.

and now, i am here and never really plan to leave. i tell myself it's because i want to give my daughter roots and somewhere stable to call home, rather than the constant moving around my parents gave me as a "foundation". but tonight, after chatting with C, i wonder if i am merely digging my heels in and staying here is because i am scared to death of losing myself again?

see, tonight, i shared my insights with C, she found them helpful, and then in turn, i also helped myself to dig a little deeper into my own path and my place on it at the moment. and i'm sure when C has more to share with me next time, it will reciprocate back to her as well. but i sure hope it doesn't take 8 months again...we're not getting any younger!

end of a historic year

Every new year creates a bit of history, now doesn't it? But this one is holds so much, both personally and for the world at large.

Sophia & I did our part in electing the nation's first African American president. I am so proud and awestruck that we did it...hard working volunteers around the nation pitched in and made it happen. My 5.5 year old learned so much about the electoral process and about fairness and what we as a family value in the world, by talking about what Obama represents, why we are so lucky in this country to have a chance to vote, and how far this nation has come in regard to how we treat people with different colors of skin. She watched as I volunteered, she even pitched in herself numerous times. It's her 2nd presidential election to volunteer for, but the last one she rode along asleep on my back for most of it.


Then there's Prop 8 in California and all the other anti-gay ballot initiatives which took us backwards in the civil rights movement, in my opinion. These were stunning blows, I worked tirelessly in phone banks on Prop 8, and it paid off here in Santa Barbara county, the only southern California county to vote No on 8. I'm still working for the cause and will not rest until this issue is moot. I for one am not willing to pass this fight on to my daughter. I pray it's resolved before she even thinks about going on her first date!

This year, personally, I have come to realize that while I have come a long way, I still have a long way I'd like to go on my journey. I want to stop being so critical. I want to feel happier, laugh more, love more, work less, live in my gratitude more. I have gotten a bit weighed down. I want to shed those things that don't lift me up and I want to dance, rejoice, giggle, cuddle and play more. I don't want my daughter to feel disconnected from me. I want to meet her where she's at, even if that means giving up on cleaning the house or volunteering for a cause, and sitting on the floor playing Littlest Pet Shop for an hour!

So if you don't see a blog post for a rather long time, you can imagine I might be having a tea party or dressing these way too teeeny tiny Polly Pocket dolls in their itsy bitsy rubber dresses. I sure hope that's my excuse next time!

fall

it's fall. i was talking to a friend tonight briefly about what we both love about fall, why we love it. right now, fall in santa barbara means a shift in the weather, a cooler crispness to the air, some leaves (not many) on the ground, and today, rain. not heavy rain, but rain.

i know it's fall because i hear the wind. i hear damp leaves being blown around in the cold night air outside my door. in the air, i smell the plants giving over to the change of seasons. leaves falling, rotting, becoming earth. i sense the trees going dormant, the gardens shriveling up, the ground getting fallow and sleepy, ready for winter. i pile another blanket on the bed, close the windows i have had open all summer, and i feel the dread in me of longer nights, less sunlight. i feel myself shrinking inward, wanting to get into the warmth of hearth and home, out of the darkness and cold.

fall is about going inside, turning inward. i love this and need it on a deep level, though at the same time, i grieve the loss of the light and time outdoors, face turned upward, heart turned outward. now is time to reflect, recharge, and hibernate, later to emerge into the glorious sunlight once more.

insert recent picture here

questioning a blog

long time, no bloggy. i know. i say it every time i come back from a lapse. but i think this time, i get why i go away and then come back.

i think this blog no longer matches what i want/need to write about. there is a shift in me, whether planetary or just in terms of my own personal growth path, from what this blog has been about in the past. this blog seemed a dumping ground for me in my path as a mother. a place both to ponder and wax poetic about motherhood, but also, and more often, a place to whine, complain, seek guidance, or just dump all my grief, pain and tiredness that i collected along the mothering path.

so my quandry now is this: do i start a new blog or do i shift this one to match my own shifting? i would feel more energized by a new blog, give it a fresh facelift and start anew. but i started this one as a tribute to my path with Sophia, a legacy to hand her one day that she could read thru and get a glimpse of a time in her life which she may not have clear memories of. so why not show all the twists and turns that path contained? why not keep the good and the bad together, as a real composite picture?

i'm leaning toward that latter option, just riding it out. i might give it a new design to help infuse new energy and reflect how i really feel in my journey right now. it is in its 2nd graphical look since inception anyway. i've changed my hair color at least that many times since i started this blog, so why not the design too!

ok i talked myself into it. new look on the way. but i really have to make sure that i don't let the energy of what i know is lurking in the archives drag me down. because i really want to keep writing here. so if a new blog is what will help me keep coming back, then i might have to keep that option on the back burner. but for now, i re-commit to the original intention of this blog. onward!!

Help!

Not sure I even have readers out there anymore, but I am stuck. Sophia started kindergarten last month, and comes home in tears almost every day. Usually because of older kids teasing her, mainly because she doesn't know how to fit in to this huge school full of so many kids from so many backgrounds and who really don't want to play with a kindergartner. She's in a K-1 class at one of our local alternative charter schools, but it's still so hard. There are rough, mean kids in her class. They tease relentlessly. They steal stuff from her backpack. She should stay away, but she is drawn like a moth to the flame, wanting to play with these older kids. But they want no part of a little kid hanging out with them.

She also attends the afterschool program, since as a single mom, I need to be working to support us. So it's a long day for her. At 3pm, the older kids (up to 3rd grade) join the afterschool program and then there are even more big kids for her to be drawn to. Wash, rinse, repeat.

But I am ready to challenge my status quo. Do I really need to work fulltime? Do I have it in me to do what it takes? And what, precisely, does it take? I know so many of my friends have done it, but how? I have no idea where to begin and I am soooo not used to not knowing that. I have a good paying 9-5 job, really good for this area. And this is one of the most expensive places in the US to live, so it's not like I can just start knitting from home for income. I don't know what to do.

If anyone has ideas for me on how to transition into homeschooling, please send along. I really appreciate it!

Apricot Peach Cobbler

A friend gave me a huge bag of fresh apricots and 3 peaches picked from her backyard today. Way more apricots than we could possibly eat, and quite a few of them were very ripe, so they needed to be made into something. So I consulted 3 different cobbler recipes (2 found on Foodlab, thanks Cyndi and Nittany) and one from a gluten-free cookbook. I then made up my own recipe, to account for my personal tastes and improvisation due to not having all the ingredients.

Two notes for you to factor in with your own personal tastes:
1. Some recipes call for adding sugar or starch to the fruit filling, but I really think fresh fruit needs no additional sweetening, and don't mind the juiciness. However, if you like a thicker, more pie-like filling, you might consider adding sugar and/or starch to the fruit first.
2. I wanted a topping that was sort of nut meal-y/oatmeal-y (without oats) and that was also sort of cake-y/crumble-y. I'm happy to say that my 5 year old actually asked if there was oatmeal in it, so I think I achieved that goal.

I am making up words left and right here, but let's just say it's part of the creative process of making up a recipe. And for the record, this is my first ever recording of a recipe of my own invention, so I am a little nervous about others trying it, but here goes! It's also my first food photography, so some are blurry.

Apricot Peach Cobbler
This recipe is vegan and is gluten, dairy, egg, soy and corn free!

Filling:
- 26 apricots, 3 peaches (freshly picked)
- 1 orange (or a lemon would work too)
- Ground cinnamon

1. Cut apricots in quarters, and slice peaches (cut so all are even-sized chunks).
2. Spray rectangle baking pan with canola or other non-stick spray.
3. Spread fruit evenly across bottom of pan.
4. Sprinkle with cinnamon.
5. Squeeze the juice of lemon or orange over the fruit (I did this to offset the sweetness of the apricots, I wanted it to be a little more tart. If you use more peaches and less apricots, you might not need the citrus juice).
6. Set aside. Preheat oven to 375.


Topping:
- 1/3 cup vegetable shortening (I used palm shortening)
- 1/4 cup organic raw sugar (optional)
- 1/2 cup each of potato starch, flaxseed meal and finely ground walnuts (or preferred nut)
- 1/4 tsp gluten-free baking soda
- 1.5 tsp xantham gum
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/2 gluten-free vanilla
- 1/2 to 2/3 cup milk (I used almond milk)
- 1 to 2 tbs honey

1. Mix together all ingredients except milk and honey by hand.
2. Slowly add milk and honey until consistency is thick, sticky, but smooth (like thick biscuit batter).

3. Drop the batter all over the top of the fruit in the pan, either by the spoonful or by hand.

4. Bake 15-18 minutes or until topping is lightly browned. Allow to cool and serve slightly warm, with ice cream (soy dream, rice dream, etc) if desired.

Turned out really tasty! It gets less liquid-y the cooler you let it get. I highly recommend serving with tea in tiny princess teacups and serving at a tea party in your daughter's bedroom. Wearing evening gowns, high heels and tiaras, of course.

yuh-um

I made Cyndi's dairy free pesto tonight, over brown rice spaghetti with sauteed mushrooms and spinach. Amazing, delicious, and really, really easy! Sophia picked basil, arugula and mint from our garden, and she helped chop the mushrooms too, so that made it extra yummy!