So, I’ve kind of always had a thing for penguins. I still remember the first time I saw a penguin exhibit. I was 20, and it was at the New Orleans aquarium. They’re just so darn cute. Naturally, I wat totally excited when I had the opportunity to have a special preview of the Laura P. Nichols Penguin Pointe at the Little Rock Zoo.

Penguin Pointe is fantastic, and if you’re in the Central Arkansas area, you should pop in to the Zoo this Saturday (March 5, 10am) for the Grand Opening. Or at least get on down there sometime soon.

Here are a few tidbits about Penguin Pointe:

• The exhibit is designed to allow you to you see the penguins both above ground and underwater. I thought this was awesome. When Sadie and I met up with Stephanie, Sean and Jasper at the Memphis Zoo last fall, Sadie was really into the penguins. But we weren’t able to see them swimming from an underwater perspective. This makes a huge difference.
• As of now, there are a total of 11 penguins living here in Little Rock, and they are all African blackfooted penguins. In the exhibit itself are seven males and two females (one bonded pair so far!). Two additional penguins, Laura ans Skipper, live in their own quarters so they can attend presentations, events and school visits.
• Laura and Skipper are available for educational birthday parties! Yes, please.
• All of the penguins were bred in captivity as part of the Species Survival Plan.
• The African blackfooted penguin is an endangered species, so the Little Rock Zoo is doing its part to help conserve these awesome little creatures.

I’ve, uh, been blogging somewhere else. And there’s so much more to do over there. Here are links to the Heifer Blog posts I’ve done about my Africa trip so far. (If you make it to the bottom of the list, you’ll be rewarded with the two funniest photos of me from the trip.)

Biogas/Appropriate Technology

Biogas in Uganda–Any Questions?

Biogas is Important for Rural Women

Biogas is Important for the Environment

Biogas is Important for Rural Children (I made a video!)

Appropriate Technology Keeps Your Hands Clean

Uganda

The Storks of Kampala

The Roads of Uganda

Heifer

Pierre Ferrari Samples Local Yogurt

The Casual Conversations

The Top 5 Reasons Heifer Africa Rocks

Energized and Heiferized

Changing the Way We Look at Rural Development

That's a monkey. About to eat a peanut off of my head.

It is shocking. How huge and thick and slimy a giraffe's tongue is. Shocking.

Heifer Blog | The Official Blog of Heifer International: Biogas in Uganda.

Here’s another one, y’all.

Heifer Blog | The Official Blog of Heifer International: The Storks of Kampala.

Hey guys, here’s my first post on Uganda. If you’re interested, please leave comments! Comments are lacking on most of the Heifer Blog posts, but I’d really love it if I could start changing that!

Principles of Healthy Diets.

This is really fascinating stuff. I’ve been thinking more and more lately about my diet (and Trevor’s and Sadie’s), and while I think we are generally doing really well, I think there’s still room for improvement. I’ve become increasingly bothered by my cravings for sugary foods (I’m not even sure if “cravings” is a strong enough word), and I wonder if some of it might have to do with my overall nutrition. Another thing that has recently occurred to me is that, while I felt like I fed myself decently during my pregnancy with Sadie, I’d like to be in an even better place nutritionally whenever I become pregnant again.

So, I think I’m going to make this a challenge for myself. As the primary meal-preparer in the house, this will obviously affect our entire family. Maybe I’ll tackle one of the guidelines a week (of those we don’t already follow). I think the biggest challenges will be that I really do rely on the online meal planner I use (though I think the recipes are mostly adaptable to this kind of eating, I may just have to get creative), this will likely cost more money than we’re already spending on groceries, and I know I’ll have to cut out a lot of the “convenience” snacks we’ve been using for Sadie (while the graham cracker sticks and bunny crackers are natural/organic/etc., they’re still way processed and contain white flour and sugar) and replace them with snacks I’ll have to make myself.

I’m a Monday-starter for projects, so I think I’ll get going next week. The first guideline (“Eat whole, unprocessed foods.” ) is a bit too general. So I’ll start with number two, “Eat beef, lamb, game, organ meats, poultry and eggs from pasture-fed animals.” Obviously we eat the eggs our chickens lay, so that’s a gimme. But we don’t eat game pasture-fed meat every week. In fact, sometimes we’ll go quite a while without cooking meat at all. But we might eat meat while dining out–and we can pretty much guarantee that’s not healthy meat.

So the change for week #1 is to prepare and eat our chickens’ eggs at least three times a week (we go in and out of this pattern anyway), to prepare and eat at least two meals with game or pasture-fed animal meats, to entirely quit eating meat from unknown sources (of course, I’m not going to MAKE Trevor do this one, but hopefully he’ll consider it), and to quit feeding Sadie the lunchmeat I’ve been feeding her (it is free of additives and preservatives, but it’s a far cry from what I should be feeding her).

Potential roadblocks for this first challenge–getting sick of eggs; the cost of adding pastured meats to our grocery list (this is usually more of a treat); the temptation provided by things like Purple Cow’s chicken salad sandwich or my Aunt Margie’s pot roast; my inability to prepare our dinner while caring for Sadie–I almost always have to fix her a quick dinner (mostly steamed veggies, cheese, fruit, etc.) and then do the more labor-intensive cooking after she’s asleep; and the common problem of not having any meat left over from our previous night’s meal to give to Sadie, which led me to the lunch meat in the first place.

Otherwise, this should be plenty of fun. We enjoy eating meat. We like good meat.

I miss you, Sadie; look, some ducks!

Is not that hard to make. I recently made my second batch, and I remembered to take some (not so awesome) pictures while I was at it.

All you need to do is:

1. Get a clean container and a scoop;
2. Grate one bar of plain Ivory soap, and put it in the container;
3. Add one cup of washing soda;
4. Add one cup of Borax;
5. Add one cup of Oxyclean (the kind without fragrance or any other extra stuff);
6. Put a lid on the container and shake to mix;
7. Add, five drops at a time–shaking to mix between–15 drops of tea tree oil; and…
8. Wash your clothes.

It takes maybe 20 minutes to do, and our first batch lasted a good long while. I’ll see how long this batch lasts.

There are a lot of homemade laundry detergents out there, even liquid, if that’s your thing. Here’s where I got started.

This can be messy!

Contrast between washing soda and grated soap.

Oxyclean.

Ingredients and finished product. I can get all of these, except the tea tree oil, at my nearby mainstream grocery store.

In a moment of spontaneity, we decided to take Sadie on her first camping trip this past Saturday. Trevor had a bike race on the Womble Trail, just outside Mt. Ida, Sunday morning. Trevor’s first race season, I went with him a handful of times, and we would camp out Saturday nights and hang out at the race Sunday all day. I had a baby shower to go to Sunday afternoon, so we had planned that Trevor would go up by himself Saturday night. But once Friday came, I was itching to do some fresh-air sleeping!

I had this grand plan that I would get Sadie ready for bed before putting her in the car–nighttime diaper, pjs, lovey. It would be perfect…she’s fall asleep in the car on the way, we’d get the tent set up, and lie her slumbering body in the tent, where she would sleep blissfully all night.

Don't let her smile fool you. Although she LOVES camping, Willow does not do well in the car. At one point we moved her to the front seat, and she still managed to throw up. Twice.

But, of course, we live in reality. A place where the summer sun doesn’t set before 8:30 and where car windows don’t have blinds or blackout curtains. Sadie cried the WHOLE WAY. Except for when I nursed her–oh, yes, I nursed Sadie while she was strapped in her car seat and while I was in my seatbelt. Or when I gave her my phone to play with. And even then, none of those “fixes” lasted all that long. But, we made it. Trevor pitched the tent, the dogs ran like maniacs, and we were all asleep by around 10:00.

Sadie actually did pretty well sleeping in the tent. I made a pallet for her next to me, and she mostly slept there. She woke up and wanted to nurse a few times, and she was kind of jazzed about waking up with the dogs sleeping around her (dou! wofwof!).

It had been a long time since I’d been camping last. We went twice while I was pregnant with Sadie, but that was long enough ago for me to forget, apparently, some key camping tidbits.

Like, frost. When it’s 89F when you’re packing up the car, it’s easy to forget that it just might be chilly and dewy when you wake up in the morning. At least, it was for me. Which would explain why I forgot to pack anything remotely warm for Sadie or myself. Sadie didn’t seem to mind, but it was kind of a bummer when she dumped the dogs’ water bowl on the leg of her pajama pants (her warmest article). It’s a good thing I don’t mind Sadie getting dirty, either, because the wet, freshly cut grass was sticking to her everywhere–not to mention her food. She loved it, though. At least I think she did.

We only hung around for about an hour and a half or so, because we had to shuttle Trevor and his teammate to the start of the race, and I needed to get on back to town for the baby shower.

Come. On. Nari.

Well, if you can't beat em, join em. Watching for Dad/The Boy to return.

I think you can see why Tuesday is my favorite day of the work week.

Last Monday, I shared a post with you about how we’ve adopted an online menu planning service as our method of improving the healthiness of our dinners. Now, I’d like to show you another tool that I use to help us eat the most nutritious food we can.

LocallyGrown.net is essentially an online farmers market; and, as you can see from the map, there are loads of them across the U.S. (and so far one in Canada). We use the Little Rock Locally Grown Food Club, which is run by the Arkansas Sustainability Network. From our Food Club website:

The Local Food Club connects members with the local food system. Members have a weekly opportunity to interact with local farmers as a participant in our local farm buying cooperative. Members get an inside look at what’s available locally and can get to know their local farmers through the buying cooperative.

Our buying cooperative, in conjunction with other fantastic local food programs, can help stock your kitchen year-round. Healthy, accessible local food and viable local farming operations are cornerstones of a more sustainable community.

How it works

Unlike other co-ops, buying clubs, or CSAs where everyone gets the same box of stuff (and you don’t know what you’re getting until you get it), with Locally Grown you get to order what you want, in the quantities that you want, from the farms that you want.

• First, sign up for an account by clicking on “Your Account” at the top of the page. Once you have an account you will be notified each Sunday when the market opens and you’ll be able to place your orders until Tuesday evening.

• Order conveniently from the comfort of your home computer by visiting the market page for the weeks offerings; or if need be by responding directly to the e-mail, or by phone. You will receive an email confirmation of your order.

• Know what you are purchasing with more information about the vendors, their practices and their products on our grower page.

So here’s my entire process:

• Every Wednesday, I get my email newsletter from The Six O’Clock Scramble.
• The following Sunday, I sit down with the newsletter and determine which meals I want to make in the coming week and create a PDF of the recipes and corresponding grocery list.
• Sunday evening, I get an email from ASN telling me the Food Club is open for ordering.
• I go to the website and compare the grocery list from my Scramble menu, and I order everything I can on my grocery list from the Food Club*.
• I also browse the other available foods to see if there’s anything else I want for the week. I sometimes like some zucchini bread; I always get our honey from there (sometimes I can get honey from the next neighborhood over); and we’ve even ordered an apple tree sapling, three blueberry bushes, and various vegetable seedlings for the garden.
• I “check-out” pretty much like any other online shopping experience, except that I don’t pay right then.
• I get an email with the contents of my order, and I’m done with thinking about that part of my meal planning for the next week.
• That following Saturday, I go down to the pickup site, which happens to only be about three miles away from our house.
• Volunteers are there to help gather orders; and after going a number of times, it’s kind of become a social event for Sadie and me.
• The next day is grocery store day, and I buy everything else I couldn’t get through the Food Club.

*Sometimes, if, say, there aren’t any chicken breasts being sold (rather than the whole chicken), and I had a meal using chicken in mind from the Scramble, I’ll either swap out that  meal or plan to substitute tofu from the grocery store.

I’ve been using the Food Club for a good few months now, but I really can’t wait for the spring and then summer crops to really be coming on. I’ve got big plans for canning jams this year instead of freezing them. And I might even try making and canning tomato paste. I’ll still visit the farmers market now and then, but it really is convenient to be able to order in advance with my meal plan in hand. There are some people who can just peruse the farmers market and pick up a little of this and a lot of that and manage to eat it all before it goes bad, just tossing together meals from whatever they bough. I am not one of those people, so I’m really glad I’ve finally come up with this system!

If you have a local food club (check the map and list on LocallyGrown.net), I highly recommend checking it out.