Love Is Cage Free Eggs

Usually, my husband and I do our grocery shopping together.  It may sound like a waste of time, but it works for us.  He keeps me honest and somewhat frugal, and I remember to buy things I've forgotten to add to the grocery list, like sweet potatoes and juice boxes.  On Sunday, Jamie went shopping alone; we had returned from a weekend away, and Duncan was exhausted, strung out, and asked to stay home.  Sometimes, it's eye opening to see what he brings home when I am not around to influence his purchases. This week's revealing item was cage free eggs; those cage free eggs spelled love.

If you're landing here for the first time, you need to know that I have spent the last several years slowly, steadily, determinedly encouraging my family to reduce their impact on the environment.  We joined a CSA, stopped using paper towels and napkins, and committed to packing waste-free lunches.  I stealthily joined the Meatless Monday movement and stretched my flexitarian lifestyle to include meatless Tuesday. I made it a practice to bake my own bread for our weekly grilled cheese night and started making soup instead of buying it in cans.  We took a hard look at our recycling practices and endeavored to be the best recyclers we could be; we started composting.  We've made a lot of changes, and we know now that we have a lot to go, but we work at it every day.

Working on our food choices has been a long adventure.  Ultimately, I'm trying to feed my family more local food, less processed food, and less but more humane meat.  It is not a perfect world, but we try.  I have been buying most of our meat from the farmers' market or from a local, organic farm; when I can, I buy eggs from the farmers' market or I buy the most local options available in the grocery store.  This weekend, Jamie returned with two dozen cage free eggs.  I know they cost more; I'm sure he doesn't understand why I care about the chickens, and I'm not going to launch into a diatribe about the lives of the typical, "factory" laying chicen.  But the truth is, I DO care about the chickens.  Jamie could have bought any eggs.  We had a rough week; I wasn't going to complain about his egg choices.  He may have to live with my choices, particularly in what we bring home from the grocery store, but I don't believe it's my business to criticize his.  Nevertheless, there they are.  Cage free eggs.  He had heard my concern for the lives of the chickens, the healthfulness of the eggs, and the carbon footprint of our food.

To you, they may just be eggs.  Cage free eggs in biodegradable cartons.  To me, they're love.

Glimpses

One of the things I find tricky about parenting is that you never know how things will turn out. Some days I feel like a good parent; on other days, I don't bring my best game. I have to hope that the good days will outweigh the bad days in the end. I hope that all the lessons I want to teach my son will take root and that he will end up a happy, productive, and healthy person. In the meantime, regardless of whatever happened today, I still have to get up and do it again tomorrow. Sometimes that means brushing off the fact that I returned home from work impatient and rolled my eyes when I had to play Grand Central Station with GeoTrax. Sometimes it means leaving behind my frustration with begging and whining and hoping that my child will be replaced with a pleasant and compliant pod person. Sometimes it means collecting those moments where I made my child giggle or when he thanks me for a gesture so small that it breaks my heart a little. "This is really good bread Mama. Thank you for making it." Sometimes it means appreciating that a four year old is proud that he knows how to make grilled cheese sandwiches and pizza and help bake muffins.

Tonight was one of those moments. We were working on cajoling Duncan to finish his dinner. I bit my tongue as he pulled the carrots out of his salad and stacked them in a pile on his place mat. A million voices screamed inside my head:  "Don't play with your food!" Then he put all the carrots in his mouth at once. A million voices in my head lectured:  "You'll choke." (Only one adult actually said the words aloud, and it was not me)  I was biting back "Don't play with your food!" again when Duncan pulled all the vegetables he didn't like out of his salad bowl and piled them on his plate. And in the silence where I was actively working on NOT nagging my child, he said "I'm going to put these guys over here. This can be the compost pile."

And I will save that one in my mental scrapbook to remind me that this child is really learning all the lessons I'm trying to teach him about the environment. He is learning that we don't use paper napkins so that we can save trees. He is learning that we don't buy individually packaged snacks so that we can use less plastic. He is genuinely learning that vegetables and eggs come from a farm and that farmer Dan works hard so we can have lettuce. The compost pile has become part of his everyday life. I see a glimpse that this child of mine will grow into a good steward of the earth, and it makes me hopeful; not just hopeful that he will turn out okay, but hopeful that he and his peers will make a difference on this planet. They will grow up learning how to put it right.

Talk about a leap of faith.