Hello and welcome back! I can't believe it is September already. The sun rises later and later in the mornings. Now it doesn't rise until after my first yoga class is over.

I find myself juggling work and raising a child, which I both love and hate. I honestly think my job (be it ever so part time) makes me even more happy to be home with my little sweetheart than if I never left the house without him. But on the "on" weeks  (every first and third week I add health coaching to my yoga schedule) I've gotta admit, I feel a tiny bit overextended. I am always rushing off to meet someone, or making arrangements for babysitting.

B is working again. Ever since wheat harvest ended, there has been demand for manure and, with the rain we have gotten, now there is supply as well. At least in some feedyards. We are still dealing with ongoing issues with supply, but we are limping, as opposed to dead in the water. This means he is rarely home these days. I think he secretly looks forward to Thursdays because on those days, he can stay in bed at least until the sun has risen, since I have no babysitter for Thursday morning. I get home at 8:30, throw an omelet together for him, pack his lunch, and as soon as he is out the door, finally kiss my baby, change out of my yoga pants, feed the cats, and start my day. Which may or may not involve a nap after two hours of yoga. More often not, but some days the universe aligns and the baby falls asleep after I have gotten enough done to feel as though I have earned a little snooze.

I have done yoga many times, in many different places, with many different teachers, but never every. single. scheduled. day for nearly three months, as I have done now. For the first month and a half, I was doing seven hours a week. That has now been cut back to five. But I am starting to feel strong and flexible and I love it. All of that muscle shortening that happened when I was training for bike racing, all of the running and biking and lifting and neglecting to stretch, is being undone.

My chickens have all been moved to my mom's yard, since mine was a dangerous place for them. I just hate seeing my birdies get killed in Discovery Channel fashion. Nature is so cruel. Although it was domestic dogs that did it.

I have become obsessed lately with cooking as from scratch as possible. Mostly because I have decided to limit genetically modified grains from our diet, and most supermarket food comes with an extra helping of GMO ingredients. Especially out here where said GMO ingredients are grown. So I have begun spending more time in my kitchen, pounding out the staples. So far, I am making our own bread again (we try to not eat bread, but nothing really works in B's lunches except sandwiches. The man refuses to stop and eat, so everything he eats has to be one-fisted and on the fly. Plus, a sandwich, he can slide out of a baggie and never have to touch, since hand washing stations aren't exactly plentiful out in the blowing manure dust). We eat a lot of Mexican food, so I embraced a resource of my era and googled how to make corn tortillas from scratch (since it is hard to find non-GMO masa out here, without ordering it on the internet.) I am feeling pretty incredibly crafty about that. I start with corn. Kernels of yellow corn. I boil it with powdered lime, then let it sit for a day or two, then return to it and scrub the kernels until they are shiny and hulled. Then I feed them through my food mill, add salt and coconut oil, shape into tortillas, and bake. I just got my very own tortilla press the other day, so I can now combine those last two steps- instead of placing a dough ball between sheets of wax paper, then smashing it between two floor tiles by stepping on them, then transferring the tortilla to my pizza stone placed under my oven broiler, I can now just place the tortilla press on the burner (it's cast iron, not cast aluminum like most), and press. It cooks just enough to hold it's shape but remains soft, and I can finish it in the oven or on the stove just before serving. Add homemade pico de gallo, all ingredients from the garden outside my door, some sort of shredded, homegrown, free range meat (our options are beef or chicken), a bit of shredded garden lettuce, and oh, my. I can now add this to my repertoire which already includes Eastern European food (Bierocks with cabbage, carrots, and onions from my garden, flour from our local organic mill) Greek (Gyros made with locally grown and milled flour, filled with seasoned beef -no lambs have been raised around here-lettuce and tomatoes from the garden, tzatziki sauce made from garden cucumbers and garden garlic and sadly, supermarket yogurt) and Italian (homemade basil egg noodles with optionally one of our optional two meats, with either homemade marinara or homemade pesto. Minus the cheese, of course.) I had the option of raw goat's milk at one point, still would, if I were not too busy at this point to add a milk goat to my schedule. I would like to call my neighbor and see if I could just milk one for long enough to at least get some cheese frozen.

But at the moment, I am preoccupied with being a mama. And all of these things will (might) still be here in the future. My little boy will not. Not as he is now, that is. I don't necessarily feel guilty, as I hear other mamas say they do when they are away from their babies, I just feel sad when my baby isn't in my arms. I imagine I can almost see his little cells dividing, stretching him out, growing him up. This is the sweetest time in my life, and I cant really afford to share it with a lot of other projects. Not because I can't. Because I won't. I could choose to run around and be even more busy, I could choose to have a cleaner house some days because he is just fine sitting under the table talking to himself and unpacking the diaper bag. But my heart isn't in it. I would much rather be under the table too. When he sleeps, I want to sleep curled around him, smelling his shiny, silky hair that is losing it's baby black and turning little boy blonde. When he plays, I want to play with him. And somewhere in there, I have just enough time to teach yoga, cook at least two meals a day, work in my garden, clean my kitchen, keep my floors free of choking hazards, and every other week, spend six hours coaching clients.

It is a good life. This winter, we hope to leave town for a few months and go down to southern Florida to stay with B's dad, enjoying balmy gulf breezes instead of cold, howling, damp western Kansas wind. We are getting more excited about that by the day. It helps keep B trucking through his breakneck 15 hour days. It makes me feel as though there might be a time when I can get back on track with running or biking, because there will be someone to watch the baby and the weather will be nice enough I will want to be in it. (Even before B was working, it was always him outside working on yard and shop projects while I stayed inside with the baby. I have never been inside so much in my life!) As much as our little boy loves his bathwater, we cant wait to show him the pool, and even the gulf. Let him eat a little sand and taste a little salt water. And in the meantime, we keep doing what we are doing. Because it ain't so bad.