Farm Day!

Connor knows exactly what day Friday is. Friday is Farm Day. Let me explain.

Every Friday morning, after Connor has had his breakfast and his medicine, I grab my insulated bags and my straw basket and we head down to the Olympia Farmer's market. Once there, we pick up a flat of blueberries (yes, I go through a flat a week. I really, really like blueberries, okay?) our meat, cheese, and mushrooms, and occasionally a jar of honey. We eat lunch at the market, and maybe do a little window shopping downtown. Then we drive to the Food Coop, where we pick up our milk, eggs, and any dry goods we need. Finally we drive to the farm, where we pick up our weekly share of produce from our CSA program.

This week the CSA included beets, carrots, cauliflower (it's orange!) garlic, spinach, summer squash, an onion, and a whole bunch of tiny delectable red plums. I drove down to my friends house-- we're splitting a share, as that's a whole lot of produce for me to go through by my lonesome-- and divided up the goods. It's funny, but we now have conversations that go something like this:

Me: I took the spinach last week. You take it this week.

A: But I've still got a huge bunch from the week before! You take it.

Me: Well, this is fresher. You take it.

A: I don't need it. Let's just divide it.

Me: Fine.

Our cups runneth over. I've never eaten so much spinach in my life. This sounds like a quality problem, I know, but I still find myself wanting to invite people over solely so that I can make them a huge salad and use up more of the spinach at one time, leaving me free to get back to eating my plums. What can I say? They're really good plums.

One very good thing that's come out of all of this produce is that Connor is getting a lot of fresh fruits and veggies-- I can blend just about anything up in the food processor, throw in a little whole yogurt to smooth out the texture and a little butter for additional calories, and he'll wolf it down. He especially loves peas, though we're kind of out of the season for them now. I'm going to try him on beets this week, though I'll be stripping him down naked, getting a bath tub ready, and putting down a painter's drop cloth over our carpet. Beets stain everything, including, I'm sure, Connor's white-blond hair. We'll see whether or not he has an interesting pink-streaked dye job by the end of the week.

It's also nice that we've gotten to know a lot of the vendors down at the market, and they all talk to Connor, telling him about what they do and where the food comes from. With his issues regarding adults other than Jer and I, the more friendly non-threatening people he comes in contact with, the better.

I sometimes wonder if his trust issues have anything to do with the fact that for the first year or so of his life, most of the adults other than Jer and me or our immediate families who were interacting with Connor were involved in the medical profession in some way or another, and so at any given moment he never knew if a person who had been smiling and cooing over him a second ago would be jabbing a needle into him the next. I'd be wary of adults too, if that was my personal experience with them. I hope that by exposing him to lots of friendly folks outside the doctor's office that he'll slowly learn to open up more.

In the meantime, I get a lot of tasty things out of it. Can't complain.

~Jess