Cloth Diapering

We've been doing some research on cloth diapering to decide which cloth diaper to get for when baby arrives.  We found a great Pocket Diaper called Bum Genius 3.0.  They are affordable, fit all sizes from infant to toddler (with out having to buy a different size for each weight group), and are environmentally friendly because they are washable and reusable.  I was reading a local blog that shares a lot of great information about "natural" parenting.  She also owns a local shop/cafe: momandpopplace.com

On the blog I found this great information advocating cloth diapering:

Reason Number 1: The Environment

            Disposable diapers are the third most common consumer product filling up our landfills today.  One baby will contribute at least a ton of waste the local landfill!  Not only do disposable diapers take over 500 years to decompose, they require toxic chemicals and vital resources to manufacture.

Reason Number 2:  Your Family’s Money

Disposable diapers cost about $1500-$2000 per child.  Yikes.  You can cloth diaper all your babies for under $500.  And you can use the same diapers for more than one child.  Even with the cost of water and detergent, you WILL save a ton of money.

Reason Number 3:  Your Baby’s Health

Disposable diapers contain polypropylene and other synthetics and chemicals, and dioxins from bleaching.   Their super-absorbency encourages caregivers to go longer between changings.  Many parents find that their babies suffer less diaper rash and irritation when diapered in cloth.  Soft cottons mean healthier bottoms!

Antarctica to Pyramids, lights dim for Earth Hour

Crowds in Times Square watched as many of the massive billboards, including the giant Coca-Cola display, darkened. This phenomenon happened all around the world on Saturday, March 28th from 8:30pm - 9:30pm local time as a coordinated effort to make a statement about global climate change. Visit Earthhour.org for more information and read full story at link below.

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Planning the Garden

Last night we started our garden planning (a little later than usual). Tim really wanted to expand the garden this year, but we've decided to stick to our little garden since we have baby on the way during September harvest time. We have to keep the garden manageable. This year we will continue to have our strawberry patch. We'll also grow green beans, cantaloupe, and we're going to try out the seeds we harvested from Roxie and Doug's paste tomatoes and green peppers. I want to try my hand at some more canning this year, and also some new methods of dehydrating. I got a great book, Food Drying with an Attitude, that gives unique ways to dehydrate and use dehydrated food. Maybe we'll also be able to harvest some apples and blueberries from our property! Tonight we'll start the seed indoors in the basement where we have the huge window with the nice hot sun coming through. That worked great last year!

Obamas Prepare to Plant White House Vegetable Garden

On Friday, Michelle Obama will begin digging up a patch of White House lawn to plant a vegetable garden, the first since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden in World War II. There will be no beets (the president doesn’t like them) but arugula will make the cut. This makes a great statement to sustainability! See the full article written up by the NY Times.

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We're Having a Baby!

I suppose the title of this post told what we have to share, but I'll say it again - We're having a baby! We are as excited as any first parents could be, and we are so blessed to have this baby on the way. The picture below was taken at 12 weeks and 1 day. The heart was beating, the baby was moving all over the place, and hands with fingers and feet with toes could be seen. It was simply amazing! I've been feeling really good, and I hope that that stays the case for the next 6 months :) The due date is September 22nd, which seems like a long time off, but I have a feeling it will just breeze by! In just 7-8 weeks we should be able to find out if the baby is a boy or a girl.  There is a poll on the page here where you can vote if you think baby will be a boy or a girl (to the left).  I won't tell you which once I think it is :)  What an exciting time of our life!

Baby!  Head on left.  Legs on Right.  

Picture doesn't show, but I saw feet and hands with fingers!

Getting Sunburned in the UP (in March!)

This past weekend was the best!  We decided a few weeks ago that if there was a weekend coming up with good weather in the UP we would head up to the property.  We were hoping for anything over 30 degrees, and that happened to be this past weekend! What an awesome time we had!  We left at about 6 AM Saturday morning and got up to the property at about noon after we dropped off our stuff at the cottage we stayed at.  We drove over to the property and were looking around and checking out the area by the road and out walks our immediate neighbor to the North.  We had a good talk with her and her husband and got lots of valuable information on our property and the neighborhood.  After the chat, we had to climb over the 8 foot tall pile of snow on the edge of the property.  (It was particularly deep there because that is where the plow pushes it all).  We thought we walked all over the place on Saturday, but as it turned out we really didn't walk all that far, but it was certainly a work out.  Most of the snow was between 2-3 feet deep, mostly hard and easy to walk on with snowshoes except a few spots where you seemed to sink in a foot.  We saw probably 20 or 30 whitetail deer throughout the day.  (Only two or three on our property, but a herd of about 50-80 hangs out by the neighbors because they feed them).   We were tuckered out and headed back to the cottage.  

Sun coming up in the east.

Looking South, this is the back field which we think is about 5 or more acres.

Fire that Tim built for us to enjoy lunch over.  It smelled so nice like camp and outdoors!

The "tree organizer" - where we hung the stuff we didn't want to carry while we snowshoed.

On Sunday we headed out to the land again.  We were a little more prepared to do some walking than the previous day because we knew better what we were getting in to.  We found a potential building spot for a house when we move up some day, but we will keep looking as we get to know that land more.  The property just seems bigger than we imagined!  Everything seemed bigger than our first tour of the property.  Since we were planning on staying through lunch, we paced PB&J sandwiches, crackers, and lots and lots of water to drink.  Around 12:30 we found a spot to sit.  There was a chair we found, and a big bucket that we flipped over to sit on.  Tim built a fire and ta-da...we had a camp!  We ate and talked about the property.  It was about 45 degrees, with a slight breeze, and was just lovely out!    On the way out we talked to the neighbor again for a while, which was nice!  They seem like very nice people and we are looking forward to getting to know them!

Overall, it was a great weekend and we learned a lot more about the property including more about the trees, landscape and space.   Oh, and regarding the title of the post, I am sunburned!  Between the sun and the snow, I am a bit red in the face!  So, who says you can't get a tan in the U.P. in winter? :)  We can't wait to go back!

-L

A Saturday Surprise!

Today for whatever reason we were up and at 'em by 6:30.  This isn't very unlikely for me, but for Tim, he doesn't even get up this early on the weekdays!  So, we decided that we would run our errands in Appleton this morning rather than later today.  We went in town for breakfast and then quickly realized that retail doesn't usually open until 9 or later.  When we finished eating breakfast it was only 8:30.   We ended up having plenty of places to go, including groceries, new glasses for Tim, and searching for a handheld GPS unit so we can use it while we navigate our new property.  

We came back home, had a yummy lunch, and then I had plenty of grading to do for my teaching gig.  I worked for several hours and completed my tasks so we decided to take advantage of the sunny day and take the dogs for a walk in the neighborhood.  On our way in we grabbed the mail.   To our delight there was a package in the mailbox. Since most the mail we get is bills or junk, we were fascinated....who could it be from?  To our surprise it was from the previous owners of the property in Michigan!  We weren't expecting anything from them so it caught us off guard.  We couldn't wait to get inside and open it.  I quick got in, changed into my slippers and took of all my winter layers so I could open the package.  Tim was just poking along, yet making me wait until he was with me to open the package.

We opened the package and out came 3 books, a handwritten letter, and a magazine article.  2 of the books are about Isle Royale, a National Park which has ferry access from the Keweenaw Peninsula.  We can't wait to go explore the island once we have been up to the property several times, or when we move there!  The Magazine article was also about Isle Royale.  The 3rd book is the History of Jacobsville (where the property is).  I am so pumped to read this!  I am intrigued to learn more about the history of Jacobsville, and possibly someday more history about the original use/owners of the property.    The letter, shared a bit of insight about their love and memories of the property (for the last 30 years I believe).  She also wrote "p.s. the blueberries are great in August."  We suspected their MIGHT be blueberries on the property because of the back bog, but didn't know for sure.  We are excited to search out the blueberries!  Blueberries are one of my favorite berries (nothing tops Strawberries), and the leaves can be dried and used for a delicious, all-natural, hot tea.   Yum!  

We are so excited and feel so blessed to have this property.  We are looking forward to visiting it throughout the seasons, and eventually, making it our full time home!   Thank you to our new friends, for sharing your great books with us!  It was a brilliant surprise and we look forward to having more letters or e-mail between us!

-Lisa

OUR Property

We are now the proud owners of 80 acres!  

I'll start from the beginning.  Last year some time we started looking for some land to relocate to in the future.  We were looking for a larger tract of land with no improvements so that we could build a new house and have some extra land as well.  We started looking in the same area that we live in now, but didn't find much in our price range.  One day we stumbled across some property on the internet in the Upper Peninsula and noticed that the property up there was much more affordable.  We were originally looking for at least 20 acres, but now realized we could probably afford more.

After months of searching, we hadn't found anything that really peeked our interest too much.  We were planning a trip in the early part of this year and were hoping to have a few properties to look at when we visited.   Then, one day we stumbled across 80 acres in the Houghton are of the UP and it looked pretty good.  It was mostly wooded and had some more open areas and some wetter sections.  We had just a few questions, so we promptly emailed the listing agent and found out that the acreage is on a dead end road and kind of in the middle of nowhere, yet still has electric by the road.  And, to top it all off, they actually plow the road during the winter.  Suddenly, we thought we might have found what we were looking for.

We did a little more investigation on the location and the surrounding areas.  The property is about 10 miles from the modern conveniences (gas, grocery, hospital, etc.) in Lake Linden and about 20-30 minutes from Houghton.  The property is literally in the middle of nowhere.  The dead end road that the property lied on was sort of the dead end of the area, there's nowhere to go beyond that.   What's very cool is that across the way is state owned land with a road on it that's about 1/2 mile long and leads directly to a beach on Lake Superior!  So, we get privacy, low traffic, and easy access to water! We had some concerns about the weather, as most of the UP gets lots and lots of snow.  Later we found out that the area where the property is doesn't really get all that much snow because of the land topography in the area....but, it still gets more snow than we're used to here!

Next thing to do was to motor on up to the UP.  We took a couple of days off of work and in addition to the weekend we had four days in the area.  It took us about four and a half hours to get to the general area and we found a cheap cottage to stay in for a few days.  We looked at the property on a Thursday afternoon and walked on about a 1/3 of it with snowshoes.  There are two open meadow areas and most of the rest is trees.  The south/north boundary of the property is a half mile long and the other side is a quarter mile.  We were in heaven (or as close as you can get on earth).  The property is just beautiful.  There are tons of white and red pine, some aspen, and many spruce trees.  There aren't really many hardwoods but there are some planted apple trees and one or two cherry trees.  As it turns out, the western quarter is a bog.  It is full of tamarack trees and, according to the former owners, there a pitcher plants growing as well.  We had about an hour on the property before it got dark and we walked the length of the property from north to south and that's about all we had time for.  On Friday, we drove around the area and got the lay of the land.  We also went all the way to the tip of the peninsula to Copper Harbor and saw all kinds of things.

When we got home, we had to decide what we wanted to do.  We found out that there was another couple looking at the property the weekend after we were so that created a really stressful week since we were very interested.  As it turned out, the other couple wasn't in a position to buy.  We put in an offer on the property right before Christmas and got a counter offer the same day.  We settled on a price and had an accepted offer for our Christmas present.  We decided not to close until the middle of February so we would have a little more time to save up some extra money before we had to start the payments.  We just got the closing all wrapped up on Friday and are really excited.

Unfortunately, we won't be able to visit until it gets a little warmer.  We will  go up to visit over Memorial day weekend (if we don't figure out some way to get up there earlier).  Stay tuned for some more pictures once we visit again and have more time to get around on the property.

- Tim

Here are some pictures that were taken by the realtor and then some that we took in December:

Apple trees in fall and building left from original homestead.

Part of the front 20, it's snowing!

The property is outlined in red and you can see how close Lake Superior is on the bottom right corner!

Organic Milk Does The Body Better

Organic IS better! When you drink organic milk you get more vitamins from it and less pesticides than non-organic. Although the price is higher, in this case, you pay for what you get! Tim and I have switched to organic milk. Although I'm not much of a milk drinker (not by the glass), Tim loves milk and says that organic milk is better tasting than non-organic. Give it a try next time your at the grocery!

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Snowshoeing

Well, another few weeks has past and I've been absent again.  It's been busy, we've been running around the state.  2 weekends ago we were down by Tim's Mom and I visited some friends, and then the next day my parents came up and we had some delicious Papa Murphy's pizza.  Mom made Pumpkin pie for Tim and Banana Cream pie for me - we are so spoiled!  This past weekend we got some stuff done around the house, went snowshoeing at my favorite local nature trail, and also took a trip out to Colby to see Tim's cousin perform in a community play called Bull in a China Shop.  It was the first time I've seen him perform and he was excellent.  The play was very funny!  

I wanted to share some pictures from our snowshoeing on Saturday, it was absolutely beautiful as the sun was setting while we were walking.  Here are some scenes for you to enjoy.

Moon over the path.

Sunset over the valley.

Sunset by the bird house.