mama be joy

every other sunday k, his roommate joe, and i invite people over for soup. the three of us take turns as the soup masters. this last sunday was mine and I made big heaping batch of minestrone with gluten free rice pasta. the recipe came from a book I gifted k before a winter letting him know how much I looked forward to spending another winter with him (especially if we could make soups all the time)! needless to say the book was Millie Katzen’s Recipes: Soups. 

 you all know who she is duh the Moosewood cookbook. anyways this soup book is just as wonderful and is really cute. it has a built in stand so it stands up so you can see the recipe as you cook all with keeping your hands free!

among our friends that have been making it regularly lately are be joy and catfish and they have been bringing their daughter Azalea Ruby over to our great joy. i have know be joy and catfish for almost eight years now. they are the fist of my friends that i have watched go through the process of having a child. no I don’t mean that in the i watched her giver birth way because i didn’t. i mean it in the way that here are these two people i have grown to know and love and now there exists a third person in this world like them and yet different all in her own right. i have always held a lot of respect for be joy as someone that embodied wisdom, nature, and artistic expression and from the moment i knew she was expecting i was so excited i could have burst. i knew she would be an excellent mother and raise the type of person we need more of in this world.

on top of being super-mom, having a job, and a social life, be joy has started an organic homemade skin care business. she is extremely knowledgeable on how different herbs and essential oils effect our skin and bodies. all her products are all natural and chemical free and produced in a as sustainable and mindful way as possible. what set be joy off on this path you might ask? well she asked why if we eat a diet of organic food and try to take care of ourselves then why should the things we put on (and then are absorbed by) our bodies be any different? in addition she found information he learned thins like the fact that we absorb more chlorine when we shower then we do drinking the same water. now if our skin operates in those ways image what we do when we put toxins on our skin. one thing that had always put a knot in my stomach is when I see people putting chemical loaded sun block on their children. it breaks my heart because obviously these parents are trying to do what’s best for their children by protecting them from harmful sun rays but all those toxins are quickly absorbed by the child’s pores as they open due to sweating. 

for the winter holidays i knitted Azalea Ruby leg warmers. i was very careful to get the correct gage for a child her age. however as we tried to put them on I realized that I should have been a little smarter and made them are little bigger for a baby girl that was almost 10 pounds when she was born. now at six months Azalea is 23 pounds, the average weight for a 15 month old. needless to say i needed to make some new leg warmers! I have since made two pairs and when Azalea Ruby showed up on Sunday to my great joy she was wearing a pair!