Spring

I spent today seeding onion soil blocks and organizing the greenhouse. It was 55F and sunny outside, with a warm breeze. It must've been 90F in the greenhouse. The fields are still covered in snow, but it is melting fast, and there are puddles everywhere. Bare spots are appearing and even though it's soggy, it fells so good to see the ground again. While working in the greenhouse I could hear different birds singing and calling - a morning dove in particular has been very vocal over the past week or so. There are other signs of spring too. The cows are shedding their coats in great clumps of hair that come out in when I run my hands over them. The spinach in the greenhouses is growing visibly from week to week. We'll be harvesting some tomorrow and selling to the food co-ops in Willimantic and in New London.

Things are going well with Aiyana. She's been taking her thyroid medication for a couple of weeks now, and is doing fine with it. We've all been off gluten for the past couple of weeks as well, and we don't miss it. I've been cooking a lot more corn, which we grew last year, and it's delicious. I've also been more mindful of blood sugar balance and cooking with that in mind.

We met with our naturopathic doctor for two hours last Sunday and he was very helpful. We're going to be doing more blood work and other tests to figure out if there are any food sensitivities or other things that could be flaring up Aiyana's immune system. I feel like we've got a better understanding now of what's going on and what we're going to do about it than we did a week ago.
We're going to continue to read and find out info on Hashimoto's (got two books in the mail today), but in the meantime I am relieved that Aiyana is doing so well with it, and seems to have no symptoms.

Sena and Aiyana did their yearly farming presentations again over the past three weeks. They presented to a total of about five hundred kids, from 2nd to 4th grade. They love doing it, and it's good to see how comfortable they both are speaking in front of large audiences. At the end of the presentations they take questions. That's always interesting. One question that seemed to cause a lot of confusion was whether the chicken you buy at the supermarket has a head. Sena and Aiyana had shown pictures of their (live) chickens and talked about how they care for them, but for some reason the kid who asked this question just could not reconcile the fact that those chickens are the same as the chicken his parents buy at the store, and that that chicken did have a head at some point.
Another major source of confusion was the cows and their milk. How do they give milk? Why do they have to have a baby to give milk? How does the baby come out? To this question, Sena said "the same way you came out of your mother" and left it there. It's sad, I think, for these little kids that they are growing up so disconnected from real things.

I've been reading the Tao Te Ching again, and found it helpful over the past few weeks when I felt unsettled. Sena and Aiyana have been copying excerpts from it in their calligraphy notebooks. They love doing that.

Peace