What’s New?

I haven’t been very good about keeping up with my blogging. (That said, the husband and I have semi-resurrected our former online magazine, The Green Room, recently!) I’ve been too busy living (and restructuring!) my life, to sit down and blog about it.

• After 10 months of unemployment, O started a new job in May! Just over a month into it, he’s still very much enjoying what he’s doing.
• When my temporary assignment with the Census ended, I began taking on new projects, and honing my skills toward what I really want to do with my professional life. This has included volunteering in the office of the local Unitarian Universalist church once a week, editing the monthly and weekly newsletters for the same, and recently starting some work with a local group dedicated to environmentalism and peace.
• L started attending a Montessori preschool, where he spends 5 mornings each week, and he is happy as a clam there!
• We bought a new-to-us car. *
• Next month, we’re headed to NY to unload the storage unit we’ve been renting since August (and of course to visit family and friends up there!), and we’re on the hunt for our next rental home.
• … and I’m going to the gym three times a week.

All together, this whole list means that we’re finally starting to put our lives back together. I spent SO long saying, “I want my life back!” after we moved down here. It feels so good to be moving forward again. We’ll never have the life we left behind, and I’ve accepted that. But now, finally, it feels like we have a reasonable substitute. A new beginning, and a stable foundation upon which to continue to build. I still yearn for more in the way of socialization, but the pieces that were previously scattered or missing are now starting to fall into place.

Life doesn’t feel quite so broken, anymore.

* More on this topic in a future post.

Read for Earth Day

It’s Earth Day. I have to admit, I hadn’t really given it much more than a passing thought this year. This may be a surprise for some of my readers, as I tend to be considered the Green one among my friends. But really, I don’t celebrate the Earth any more today than any other day.

Michael Recycle by Ellie Bethel

All that said, I did choose an Earth Day themed book to read to my son before his nap today. The book, Michael Recycle was a gift from his grandparents in Italy, and I hadn’t yet taken the time to read it to him. O and I both looked through it when it first arrived, but Buggie wasn’t really in a “read to me” stage at that time. Now, he loves books, and we read to him every day. So today, this was my choice. I’m sure that at 16 months, he doesn’t yet understand words like “recycle” and “sustainability,” but I want him to grow up with them. Books are an excellent way to achieve that.

Eco Babies Wear Green by Michelle Sinclair Colman

As such, I was thinking of other “green”-themed books we have in the house. For Buggie’s first birthday, he received a copy of Eco Babies Wear Green. It’s a board book, and is an amusing take on ecological concepts, as they pertain to children. For the most part, its humor is there for the parent or other reader. And if you’ve ever read to a young child, you know that board books can get monotonous, so humor is a nice touch.

Gaia Girls: Enter the Earth by Lee Welles

Now, if your young reader is old enough to start on chapter books, I heartily recommend the Gaia Girls series. At present, there are three books, with a fourth due sometime this year, according to their website. So far, I’ve only read the first, but I was very impressed. It’s written for the YA audience, but even as an adult, I found it enjoyable. I’ve no doubt that the rest of the series is just as good.

Take a few minutes today – with your child, or on your own – to pick up a book, and to learn a little bit about the Earth.