Here are two legitimate reasons to get discouraged if you're a working parent trying to follow the Nourishing Traditions diet:

1. When do you have 12 consecutive waking hours in which you can dry soaked grains or nuts in the oven?
2. Likewise for simmering broth on the stove top, except here you can use a crock-pot.

Everything else in her regime simply takes a little bit of planning and not that much extra time. I am trying to make granola with the frozen and then thawed spent grain from Matt's brew day several weeks ago. Soaking is no problem because you can walk away from it for a day at a time, but drying the granola is difficult to pencil in. I am prudently afraid to leave the oven on, even at 170 degrees, overnight or while I'm at work.

I think it's going to be really good, though. The sharp spiky bits of the barley hull have softened completely by being frozen, thawed, and then soaked again, and the grains smell sweet and beer-y. I'm going to test a small batch with very little sweetener.

I have felt so happy and peaceful since I got off Faceborg again. Maybe it will be for good this time. But everyone would be sad for at least 4 minutes when they heard that I had a baby and didn't put pictures on Facebook. That adds up to about 2400 minutes of sadness!! Could I bear the culpability? Matt doesn't really have a FB problem so it's spiritually safe for him to keep his account, but he's not friends with very many people, so his account is sort of useless for communicating big news to more than like a hundred people. Perhaps we don't want to post pictures of our baby on the internet, though. I wouldn't want to grow up with an internet identity before I even chose it for myself. If you, reader, want to see pictures of my baby, ask me and I will email them to you, provided you display the proper credentials.

A funny thing has happened since ditching FB this time; I've lost my taste for NPR. I couldn't say exactly why, other than to speculate that perhaps I don't feel the need to have an opinion about the news right now, since I don't have access to anyone else's opinions about it. One does hear interesting things on the radio but it's mostly unhelpful, and often annoying.

Making a baby shower registry is stressful and makes me feel simultaneously warm and fuzzy AND avaricious.  Warm and fuzzy because the stuff is so cute, avaricious because I WANT IT ALL. Except the things with monkeys on them! I do not like monkey motifs, or monsters! The jungle theme in general is not appealing to me. I would put bees on everything if you asked me at gunpoint what images I was going to swathe my child in. Anyway the whole baby registry thing feels a little bourgeois, n'est ce pas? After growing up Goodwill, asking people to pay full price for new shiny things makes me a little uncomfortable. Oh well. People want to do it for you, and it will probably never happen again. And this stuff is really cute...

My husband has gotten into two schools so far! One might give him some money, although probably not enough to live on in the extremely dear city where it is located; the other doesn't have any money to give him so we will not be going there. But it is nice to have two acceptances still. Waiting to hear from the three others, one of which is the dreamiest option. If worse comes to the very worst, and he doesn't get any feasible offers, who knows? Teaching in a good high school is still attractive to him (in fact he would like to do that after getting a PhD anyway) and that might be where we'd look next. In the meantime our child would have a bit more time here with its grandparents so that would be good in a way too. God knows!