Hi! I'm Christine, I am 27 and wife to James, Mother to Andrew, Matthew and Noah. We live in Oregon on the coast, though I am a native of Central Washington and James has lived most of his life in the Vancouver, BC area.
I have at various times pursued as a career law-enforcement, accounting, voice (singing), nursing, computer information sciences and spanish language translation. As of yet I have only completed a Medical Assisting course and due to my surprise twins am a stay-home mother. When or if I should return to the for-pay world of working I plan on mentoring with the direct-entry midwives who delivered Noah and eventually earning my CPM (certified professional midwife) degree. Oregon is blessed to have several good midwifery schools. For more information on midwifery and homebirth you can check out my links page.
Over the last couple years James and I have been working on the simplification of our lives. We both loathe the frenetic pace of modern life and long for the simpler days. To those ends we have moved to a very small town, bought a house with ample room for gardening and are growing an organic garden which will hopefully provide the bulk of our vegetable needs. In the next year or two we plan on planting some fruit trees and berry bushes to compliment our garden.
We were lured to this idyllic little town on the coast by work that was 8 hours less per week for James but still yielded the same rate of pay. The bonus was that cost of living is lower here than in the 'big city' from which we moved. Now that we're here neither of us can imagine ever leaving so come what may we'll make it work!
We have recently finished reading the book Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, what an eye-opener! We thought we ate healthy before, but indeed it seems we hadn't! We were vegetarians who ate mostly vegan, but aside from the blatant lies of some fast food chains we still didn't have a clue about the rest of our food. We do now! We have switched to as organic a diet as we possibly can and avoid 'natural' and 'artificial' flavorings as much as possible as well. Far from the bland and boring diet it sounds like we are enjoying food with far more flavor and texture than before! We're totally sold on organic (which isn't even mentioned in Fast Food Nation so don't worry about being sold on that by reading.. any deductions are your own).
The benefit to this change (as well as cutting nearly all the dairy products out of our diet) has been that we've both lost weight and feel MUCH healthier! As of this update I am 41 pounds less than when Noah was born and James has lost 15 pounds. You can learn more about organic and vegan eating and reasons for it on my health pages.
I am an active member of the Ovusoft community, having been a member there for 2 years as of the end of April, and enjoy helping others learn how to naturally monitor their fertility and plan or prevent pregnancy. Noah was concieved through this method and we are now avoiding pregnancy for a couple years using it as well. I feel blessed to have found this information because with the knowlege I have now I am not afraid of or ignorant of my body! How I wish everyone was given this information as pre-teens so they could learn to love and learn from their bodies!
The other dragon I slay is the homeschooling of my children. They are only in a loose preschool curriculum now, but when they are ready we'll be starting them in Home Study International. They are very bright and creative children and I look forward to helping them grow academically. They are currently very interested in reading and drawing (much to the horror of my husband and father who worked hard to ready our house only to see them now occasionally draw on the walls!!! LOL). It's certainly a challenge keeping them from becoming bored (which is when most of the misbehavior happens), but we're blessed to live in a community ripe with learning opportunities! Locally we have an aquarium on the waterfront boasting local aquatic life, a maritime museum with maritime artifacts dating back a couple centuries and even further in the case of local tribe artifacts, a Lewis & Clark interpretive center, a county historical museum (this area was first settled by the Astor family in 1811) and many other historical and informative sites. What fun it is to see their little minds filling with all of this!
Thank you for taking the time to visit my little space on the web and get to know my family and myself. God bless you and yours!
Christine
Below are some pictures I have taken of this area with my newest 'toy', a digital camera. |
