Reading '"The Omnivore's Dilemma" changed the way I feed my family and myself.

Even though there are so many books that have had an impact on me, few have caused me to make an outright lifestyle change.

Learning more about industrial farming practices and how harmful they are to not only the animals but also to all of us and the environment (a thing I already knew intuitively but was able to ignore by and large) made me take a long hard look at my lifestyle and what we choose to spend our money on and ways to support our community and sustainable practices.



With my husband currently laid-off I'm not able to stick to my resolutions as much as I had been over the last two years but we try to buy almost all of the meat we eat from a local farm in town. We pick and freeze quarts and quarts of berries from another local farm in the summer. I made and froze a bunch of applesauce from locally picked apples this fall and will do so again next season. In addition I keep expanding our garden every year to grow more and more of our own fruits and vegetables and look forward to getting a small flock of laying hens when my children are a bit older and better able to help care for them. I make a concious effort to buy as local as I can when I purchase staples and other foods from the grocery store (wild caught shrimp from Maine, King Arthur flour, and so on).

You'll find "Mother Earth News" atop my toilet

Today's prompt is an easy one for me. I love magazines and would subscribe to many more if I thought I could actually read them all!

"Mother Earth News"
This is one of the four magazines that we get and one of two I read front to back. It has tons of great articles and ideas on sustainable living, homesteading, gardening, energy efficiency, information about where our food comes from and probably more information on chickens and why we should all keep a few laying hens than most people care to know about.

"Time"
Time is the other magazine we get that I read cover to cover. Since I don't watch the news anymore it's a good way to get some idea of what's been going on in the world from a source other than the Internet.



We also get Utne Reader and Mother Jones. I always find thought provoking, interesting articles inside both but don't usually manage to read everything.

My fear of Puking

I've had the fear as long as I can remember - probably stems from my parents giving me ipecec when I was 2. Why this was the recommendation posion control made when they were afraid I'd swallowed kerosene I do not understand - wouldn't it burn the esphogus worse coming back up??? But nevertheless that was what they were told to do and that's what they did and I have never lived a time in my life that I can remember without this fear.



It's severe enough that it's rare for it to not enter my thoughts in some way most days.



I feel a lot better about it knowing how common it actually is but that doesn't help me deal with it better. I will overcome it someday...I hope.

About Those Octuplets

I resisted reading the stories after it came out that Nadya Suleman, the mother of the octuplets who are in the news daily these days, had other children and had used IVF. This was in part because I really hate how sensationalistic the news is (yeah a weird sentiment coming from a former reporter) and I hate how so many important or worthwhile subjects get buried under trite garbage. But more than all that I didn't want to read articles bashing fertility treatments or ones that offered anything less than all the facts about IVF.

It's strange because IVF is one of the things I'm totally open about with friends and strangers alike but it's also a subject that I'm extra sensitive to. Both of my living children were conceived via in-vetro fertilization. I am beyond grateful to the technology and to the people who helped us bring our son and daughter to life.

IVF is not something people undertake lightly. It can't be. It involves weeks of injections. After your body is regulated on a cycle of birth control pills, you first take hormones to put you into a chemical menopause and then you start taking hormones to hype your ovaries up into overdrive. Then you go through the retrieval process where all the eggs that appear ready to go are extracted. After that you wait a few days to see how many played well with the sperm and fertilized and then how many of those are growing. If you're lucky you go back and get one or two placed into your uterus. Then if you're super lucky after a nail biting two weeks you find out that at least one embryo implanted itself in the uterine wall and is growing. Four more weeks will pass (which often include Progesterone injections - so not fun) before you go in and see how the embryo(s) are doing and if there is a heartbeat(s).

Throughout this entire process you are driving to the clinic several times a week, if not daily, to get your blood drawn. One of my worst days during this entire cycle was the day it took 8 tries for the lab techs to get the vial of blood they needed. My arms were black and blue and green and yellow from all the bruising by the time our retrieval day arrived.

I haven't even mentioned all the testing, some of it quite painful, that takes place prior to reaching the decision to do IVF in the first place. For those who don't have a clearcut need to go straight to IVF there may also have been months of trying to concieve via injectable hormones that stimulate the ovaries or insemination.

Nothing about the fertility route to pregnancy is easy or cheap. It costs thousands of dollars for a single IVF cycle (10 to 12 usually).

There is also the fact, usually unspoken, that what is one of the most intimate and loving acts is now a group project between you, your mate (if you have one) and a bunch of strangers. You are exposed not only physically but also emotionally to a fair number of people throughout this process. I always thought of myself as a strong person but I found that notion both challenged and then ultimately reinforced after my experiences with infertility.

Reading the stories about Ms. Suleman has left me disturbed. Nothing in my experience as a fertility patient lets me just believe the story as it's being presented. It just doesn't ring true. It doesn't ring true that any reproductive endocrinologist (an IVF doctor) would put so many embryos back into such a young woman; especially a woman who already has children and who seems pretty upfront about not being willing to abort fetuses. Maybe she lied. It seems like someone is lying. Or maybe in the rush to push a sensational story nobody is taking the time to research fertility treatments well.