Taking Farm Visits to the Next Level

I am just like you, City Mom. 

I work a full-time job and have two wonderful daughters in elementary school. I am a Girl Scout leader, a menu planner and a recipe experimenter.  I volunteer for the kids’ school and I try to have a life of my own and work out once in a while, but mostly, like you, my number one concern is my kids, their health and their happiness.  

When I can, I get my kids away from the traffic, and the cars, and the concrete and we visit forests and parks and rural areas.  We love going to pick apples, berries, and pumpkins.  I love being on the farms and fantasize with regularity what it would be like to live out there, with the land and the air and the trees. What would it be like? 

Then, miraculously, I saw a link to the Illinois Farm Bureau’s program for City Moms. The program allows a group of moms from the city and suburbs unparalleled and unprecedented access to working, family farms in Illinois. The program only asks that you commit to it and write about your experiences. I immediately applied – what an opportunity. 

This is a level up from apple picking, I can tell you that.  It is behind the scenes, no holds barred all access to an industry that has very strict guidelines on visiting. (This is all for the health of our food supply, I can assure you right now and not because of any dark secrets). 

 I have no regrets. I have been able to ask hard questions about animal welfare, husbandry, bees, GMO, crop cycles, weather, food of the persons directly involved. I have seen a farmer emotionally moved about the loss of an infant pig. I have seen a farmer plea with us to understand that science is not our enemy.  I got to hold a baby pig and watch the bloom of a soybean. 

Has my mind been changed about hot button topics? Not entirely. But I will tell you that it has been informed and transformed thanks to this wonderful opportunity.  My curiosity is still searching for answers, but I know more than I ever would have without this program. 

Guess what City Mom – YOU too can have this opportunity. Now is the time to apply for the 2015 City Mom program.  Simply visit http://www.watchusgrow.org/about-us/tour-our-farms and apply. It is the chance and experience of a lifetime. 

 

If you are curious about farming – you should do this. 

If you have burning questions about food production – you should do this. 

If you have doubts about the safety of the animals you eat – you should do this. 

If you want to learn – you should do this. 

If you want to meet some of the most wonderful people you would never otherwise meet – you should do this. 

If you want to ask me any questions about my experience, feel free to comment below and I will respond with honesty.  

Take advantage of this wonderful opportunity. I would do it all over again!

Winter. It's come.

Winter.

This morning on my commute through the city into the suburbs for work I noticed everything looking so... grey.

I composed this on my voice recorder... and edited here for your pleasure.

Winter in Chicago
Cold.
Dreary.
Grey.
Everything the color of ash
Everything the color of death
really everything the color of not waiting
but of having given up.

Underneath the summer waits.
Bouncing green sprigs of grass.
The ridiculous foliage of the trees in August.

It's waiting.
Its more like
Less Like
Hibernating
More like waiting to be resurrected like the bird born of ash
you know the one.
That's the beauty and magic of Chicago.
If you can get through the disgusting winter, the ash, the death.


Ok. It is a little high school melodramatic, but I am so tired of the colorless sky and earth. Everything the same shade of dirty. Yearning for the pop of pink in a little girl's snowsuit.

Lucky Thirteen

Lucky thirteen.

 It has been thirteen years since we first arrived in Chicago... kids from Denver looking to make it in the big city. And thirteen years later, I still sort of feel like an alien. Thirteen has always had some significance to me ... likely to all the moody kids who grew up thinking that Thirteen was magical, so I am sure, in a sense that it is, in fact magical.
Which leads me to the utterly un-magical way I feel about where I live right now. I wanted this blog to be a way that I identified with my life as an urban, working mom. The number of posts show how awesome I have been at that. So, today, I am making the choice that this blog will be what I do better... what has always resonated with my audiences no matter what format it comes to them in... it will reflect my honesty.

So honestly, I kind of hate the city.

I kind of hate most things about city life.

 I kind of feel like I am stuck here forever in concrete hell.

 But I honestly feel like I am not dedicating energy to much more than hating it. And this has got to stop. So, I am just going to write out the stuff I need to write about.

And I am going to try to start to change my ways. I am going to try and adapt to survive. The only way to adapt is to make the choice to do so, and so today. I am pledging to you, my invisible audience and my husband and my kids. I am pledging that I will seek to weave magic into our lives. That I will embrace it fully and unconditionally. This is what I need to do to survive. Otherwise, that mom and wife and friend you glimpse from time to time will disappear. I like that person. I think you do to.

But I guess she lives in Chicago.

 Okay. Home. Sweet. Home. Find it.

And I promise.... someday there will be pictures. 

Summer in the City

It's been hot, we will all admit.

This is when the City really shines! I love summer in Chicago. The festivals, the lake, the clinging heat.

Yes, I LOVE the clinging heat.

Somewhere in my Irish, French, Native American, English, German (insert other northern European Country here)blood - lives the unquenchable fire of Italian Gypsies. Yep. I know its there. Well... we think we know. But none the less.

I fell in love with Humidity in Italy and summer in Chicago is nothing short of that promise of swealter.

Besides. Things I can do with the girls - splash parks, third floor pool parties, lake visits. Its the best.

I love summer in Chicago, when the beach beckons and I can pretend I am at "the Shore" when startling greenery pops out and laughter comes easy...

A blessing in muggy green and heat.... Yes. Yes!!!

Okay, but lets be real here. I cannot use my oven. This is really what the urban experience of summer has to be. I cannot make a chicken nugget without heating my entire third floor apartment for hours. What I would give for central air - or a window without bars in there. The bounty of the summer thrown on the grill children begging for lasagna of all things... Oh the Urbanity!!!

Thank God(dess) for watermelon.

I'm an Urbanite?

So, I have been living in the City of Chicago for over 10 years now. I guess that makes me an urbanite. I say, I guess, because this has only recently occured to me - and it has only recently come to my attention what the differences might be.


I am really not that slow.


I think, rather, I was a bit in denial and had some expectations about what my life would magically transform into once we had kids.


I am an urbanite with kids.


Wow. Yes. Incredible. As if no one has ever done that before!


Okay, well... no one in MY family. So no frame of reference and dead set on the urban experience, here we go. I am an urbanite. I find things at IKEA speak specifically to my situation. I feel like if only I had a very tiny washer and dryer life would be easier. I haul two kids and grocieries up three flights of stairs every week. The kids every day! I roll up in my minivan with the top preschool hits a blasting and park in the crazy gravel in our alley. Oh, I do drive, so points off for that I guess. And the Minivan is not exactly urbane.

Also, I am not a stay-at-home urban mom. I think that this rype of new-urban staty at home momis a very different type, and I know there is a lot out there to connect these new kinds of moms and families. I work, my husband works. Both of us at not-for-profits, trying to do good and get by in the world and teach our lovely girls about the things that are most important...

But I digress.

It occured to me today that not only am I an urban mom with kids - I so don't want to be one of THOSE urban moms. You know the ones who totally change the face of the neighborhood or who never partake in what the neighborhood has to offer. "Look girls, that graffiti is called tagging, can you say I have no affliation, take my wallet and go? But hey, isn't it nice to have public art?" I don't want to lose the artistic hip edge that made us move to the awesome City of Chicago in the first place, because really then we should just go to the suburbs. It occurs to me that I am writing this blog so that I will not live in fear of raising my kids in the city -that I will embrace what it means to be an urban mom.

I am learning to cope with the smell of urine in many ways, what an awesome journey this will be.