July 18, 2006
Hiking in the Mountains
This morning I took the children on a short hike. We walked along the path behind NCAR in Boulder which is called the Mesa Trail. It is a perfect hike for a three year old and Ben had a great time climbing on the rocks. It was very hot, but we only stayed an hour or so.
Hatch kids hiking in Boulder
Flatirons
Rock Climbers strike a pose.
Posted by Jenny Hatch at 8:11 PM
July 17, 2006
Amusement Park
We took the children to an amusement park the other day. Here are some photos. It was really fun.
Posted by Jenny Hatch at 11:37 AM
July 4, 2006
One Year Anniversary
One year ago tonight I was uploading the file for my Introduction to this blog. I had spent weeks writing that first entry and decided to start the blog on July 4th, as it is my favorite holiday, and significant to the themes of my writing.
I just checked the years traffic and was astounded to see that my overall unique visitors for the year was at 135,740 with 636,890 hits overall. One of the most exciting facets of this effort has been the international traffic. Welcome to everyone who is coming in for a look from all over the world!
I don't plan to ever again post numbers in terms of traffic, because I don't want to be distracted by thinking about how many people are reading. The first month I had 522 unique visitors and I was just as excited that first month as I am today. It is such a privledge to write something that others find interesting and informative.
I have been surprised that the spiritual entries get the most traffic, and the cooking entries are the most shared. I promise to spend quality time this next year doing whole food cooking entries and will share all of my sunday school lessons.
Today we had a nice holiday. We celebrated with our church congregation at a picnic over at our local park. It was a fun gathering of good friends. The guys played football and the kids played on the toys, and the moms talked and we shared some nice moments. This afternoon we have just been kicking back relaxing and right now Paul is getting the children ready to go watch fireworks.
I purchased Ann Coulter's Godless yesterday and have spent a couple hours reading it this afternoon. She is spot on in her analysis and I applaud her taking the time to write such a great book.
I need to run, but please know how grateful I have been for all of you taking the time and energy to stop by for a look!
Happy Independance Day!
Posted by Jenny Hatch at 8:46 PM
June 29, 2006
Denver Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
On tuesday my husband Paul took our three oldest children down to the Denver Temple to perform Baptisms for the Dead.
Jeff recently turned 12 and so it was his first time attending the temple. I stayed home with our two youngest sons, but I prayed a couple of times for Jeff. Prayed that he would feel the spirit and that his heart would be touched by spending some time in the House of the Lord. I also prayed that he would get a sense of the importance of temple work, and how beneficial these proxy ordinances are for those who have passed on.
When he came home I asked him to tell me about the experience and he said it was "the best day of his life". He told me that he had never felt such peace in his heart.
I just cried as he shared this with me. Tears of joy. It is such an amazing experience to observe my children maturing spiritually.
Here are some photos of the Denver Temple that I took the last time I attended a few weeks ago.
For me, attending the temple gives me respite from the cares of my day to day life. I can walk into the temple and leave the world behind me and focus on the things of eternity. Paul and I both feel so blessed to live close to a temple.
Posted by Jenny Hatch at 4:40 PM
April 16, 2006
Easter Sunday
Jeff and Allison have interviews this morning with our Bishop. Allison is going to receive her Young Woman Award this morning. It is on a par with an Eagle Scout type of Award in the church.
Jeff is going to turn 12 in a couple days and he also has an interview for graduating from Primary and so he can receive the Priesthood. This is a great blessing, and we are very happy he has decided to live his life so that he can become a Deacon in the Aaronic priesthood.
Hatch Men
Allison with her necklace and Temple Statue which symbolize her award.
Posted by Jenny Hatch at 9:42 AM
April 15, 2006
Recent Pictures
Here are some recent photos.
Ben has been on two easter egg hunts in the past two days.
The children colored easter eggs this afternoon
We went to a picnic last night and the boys went boating with friends
The Peacocks on the Estate were curious and wanted to sample the supper!
Some of the Peacocks did get a taste of the salad when the children were playing!
The crabapple tree in front of our house is in full blossom, the scent is simply divine!
We have a nice Easter holiday planned tomorow with our church services and a gathering of friends for Easter Supper. I made twice baked potatos this afternoon and plan to put together a salad and a vegetable side dish to go with the Honey Baked Ham my friend Patricia has for the main dish. Should be fun. Five families, lots of children.....twenty children total. We plan to play games and take a walk to the park.
Posted by Jenny Hatch at 10:57 PM
April 12, 2006
Sabbath Walk
http://www.naturalfamilyblog.com/archives/2005/07/index.html
We went on a walk the other day to enjoy the beautiful Colorado sunset.
It was just a perfect day!
Paul and I enjoyed the time with our children, it was a nice way to end a perfect Sabbath Day.
Here is another shot of the sunset.
Final thoughts for the day:
I have spent the past week or so doing research on CSS (cascading style sheets) and attempting to up my skills with movable type. I still have a ways to go in learning these tricky codes. At one point last week I completely erased my archives from the Blog. Thankfully Paul helped me get those back, but I have yet to figure out how to make the side bars come back up on the side as compared to running at the bottom of the text. I also am befuddled to know how to get the double posting to go back to single.
In the morning I plan to attend a prayer group with my friend and then I have a baby shower in the evening. Next week begins the final two weeks of the play I am Music Directing, so I am anticipating blogging to be very light for the duration. We have still not decided if we are going to move this summer, but it is getting down to the wire on that decision. If we do go, I am anticipating this Blogging adventure to be toned down somewhat while I do the work of moving. Enjoy my archives!
I really wanted to do a great blog post on these articles:
No Massive dosing on vitamins during pregnancy
Both of these newsmax articles made me chuckle.
On vitamins:
"Women should not self-dose on high-dose vitamin C and E supplements. These are available across the counter and, we suggest, are now contraindicated in pregnancy."
The powers that be are getting ready for Mercks takeover when Codex really gets going in America in the next year or two. I took upwards of 5 grams of vitamin C and 1200 IU of Vitamin E during all of my pregnancies and the day I gave birth to my second daughter by C-section I ate 50 GRAMS, yes that is GRAMS of vitamin C to ward off a post opperative infection. No diarrhea. If you get the runs after taking high doses of C it is a sign you have saturated your body. These water soluble vitamins easily pass out of the tissues of the body, and are necessary nutrients for pregnancy.
What cracks me up is the double standard. Pregnant women can take Anti-Depressants....even at the highest doses, but Heaven forbid if she wants to take some extra C to help with building her placenta or making sure junior has a properly built immune system.
The bottom line of these articles:
Vitamins = BAAAAADDD / Cesarean Section = GOOD
As for the C-section article, it is just loaded with lies:
"Potential benefits of CDMR as compared with planned vaginal delivery include a decreased risk of hemorrhaging for the mother, and a reduced risk of certain birth injuries for the baby."
National Institutes of health mulling, and mulling, and mulling while doctors and hospitals reap a bounteous harvest from the wombs of unsuspecting mothers and babies all over the country.....cha ching, cha ching...
"But proponents of elective C-sections say the worst risks are extremely rare, especially for a healthy, rested woman, and that vaginal birth has its own problems, such as vaginal tears or the use of forceps."
"At the end of the day it should be the mother's decision," said Linda Dyson, a New York public relations executive whose first baby was born by a medically necessary C-section but chose to have her second child the same way. "Honestly for me, I thought a C-section was safer."
And therein lies the problem....women are NOT being taught the facts about surgical birth.
Mommas....take personal responsibility for the health of your baby, your birth, and your family life. You are the one who has to live with the long term consequences of your birth choices.
My question is....when is it going to stop??? When the C-section rate hits 75%? 85%? or are we just going to get to the point where we have a section or an unassisted home birth?
I need to go to sleep.
Posted by Jenny Hatch at 3:25 AM
March 31, 2006
Kite Flying on a perfect Spring Day
Paul and I took our boys kite flying yesterday. It was windy and cool, a perfect day for going to the park and flying Ben's new Eagle kite.
The children wanted to play at the park first
Paul and Jeff set up the Eagle Kite
Ben played on the slide
All of the children playing on the slide
Ben age three
Ben and I tried to get the kite up in the air first
All of the kids going down the slide
Here is a distant shot of the arboretum where I like to walk
The Eagle Kite!
Paul and the boys get the kite airborn, you have to look close to see the kite from that distance...it really did look like a real bird flapping its wings in the air.
Here is a shot of our home town, Louisville Colorado, you can see the Boulder Flatirons in the background.
Posted by Jenny Hatch at 11:37 PM
March 24, 2006
Whole Wheat Organic Waffles
I make a double batch of Whole Wheat Waffle dough almost every week. Everyone at our house loves to eat waffles, and Waffles are the most requested "breakfast in bed" birthday meal. (My family chooses a day's worth of food to help us celebrate). Waffles, Whipped Cream, and Strawberries are usually first choice.
I serve waffles for supper sometimes, and I like to have dough in the fridge for our children to cook themselves when they are hungry. I have used Kamut and Flax, Barley, Brown Rice, Spelt, Red Wheat, and Rye to make waffles, but my all time favorite grain to use is White Wheat. It is simply delicious.
Whole Wheat organic Waffles
Here is my recipe for a double batch of Whole Wheat Waffles
8 Organic Eggs
1 Quart Enriched Rice Dream Rice Milk
1 Cup Olive oil
1/4 Cup Brown Rice Syrup
6 Cups Organic White Wheat Flour (fresh ground)
1 Tablespoon Sea Salt
2 Teaspoons Baking Powder
1 Teaspoon Baking Soda
First I separate the egg whites and whip them up in my mixer on a high speed.
Whipped Egg Whites
Then I grind up about five cups of Organic White Wheat in my Electric Wheat Mill.
Organic White Wheat
Fresh Ground Whole Wheat flour.
When you take the time to grind your grains fresh every day, you start to live the principle of Daily Bread. As in Give us this day our Daily Bread! This has a couple of benefits for the family. One, the oils in the grains (Wheat germ oil in this case) are not rancid. Once a whole wheat berry is cut, the oils in the grain go rancid in about twelve hours. Two, the flavor of the food is incredibly good. Three, the moisture in the grain stays intact making whatever you cook delicious and moist.
After whole wheat flour has sat around on a shelf for a couple hours, days, or weeks, it is a dried out, rancid package of overpriced bran. The bran is healthy and beneficial to the diet, but the rancid oils create anti-oxidents in the body, and the food created from this flour does not taste very good. For maximum nutrition, daily grinding, baking, followed by eating the foods fresh and hot out of the oven are the ideal for whole grains. Nothing can prepare you for how good these foods taste when they are cooked this way.
Whip the egg yolks until smooth and then add in the Rice Milk.
Olive oil added into the mixer
Brown Rice Syrup contains B-Vitamins and is a nice sweetner to add into baked goods.
Mix the leavening (Soda and Powder) and Salt with the flour and slowly add it into the liquids in the mixer.
Fold in the egg white and gently mix the dough. Then I put this huge batch of dough into two plastic covered containers. One goes right into the fridge, and the other I use to make breakfast with. Any leftovers go back into the covered container and it is ready to use for a couple more days.
The dough that sits in the fridge is actually more tasty after a couple days of fermentation, aligning well with Weston Prices principles for proper preparation of grains found in Sally Fallons Nourishing Traditions cookbook, which is one of my favorites.
Cook the dough in any waffle iron, and then serve with fresh fruit, butter, maple syrup, and any toppings you enjoy!
Posted by Jenny Hatch at 11:23 AM
September 7, 2005
Andrews 9th Birthday
It is late. I can't sleep. I've been blogging for a couple hours now while baking treats, and just wanted to write a little about Andrew, my second son and fourth child. Tomorow September 7th he will be nine years old. I have had quite a bit of time now to process through the various feelings and emotions tied to his birth.
Expecting Andy - giving Michelle a foot massage while Allison makes a face...
Some ironies for this Natural Mother; During my pregnancy I ate no refined sugar. I was a disciplined Vegan and ate no animal foods, and basically built this child on grains, beans, carrot juice and green leafy vegetables with an abundance of soy protein.
Want to know what Andy's requests were for his birthday meals??? Bacon AND sausage for breakfast with donuts and hashbrowns. For supper, just one word: Steak. That's it. Just Steak.
For his cake - Chocolate cake with icing, and for his fourth grade class? Chocolate brownies, homemade of course, with chocolate frosting. (I have never in my life made brownies with frosting, but I just ate one, and man they are GOOD!) I learned a long time ago, that this particular age group of children has an emotional need to be "just like the other kids". No tofu surprise/grated carrot and zuchini muffins for his class!
Andys teacher informed his class that she "loved homemade birthday treats, and for the kids to ask for their moms to bring home baked goodies for the class". I would have bought him a big sheet cake and/or store bought cupcakes if I could, but NO, he wanted Mom to make it to please his new teacher. So I have been baking all evening, and this afternoon my husband went to the store and purchased all the meat.
I am still mostly a vegetarian, and so to have to cook up all this fleshy food is rather nauseating to me, but I have promised the children that I will cook whatever they want on their birthday, and make them as gooey a cake as possible. So, three pounds of butter, twelve eggs, and ten CUPS of sugar later, here is what I came up with. (I did use freshly ground whole spelt as the flour though for both the brownies and the cake!)
Cake and brownies
and the meat...
Andy's complete birth story is on the birth love web site, but I can't link to it because it is a members only site. I don't have the gumption to rewrite it now, the complete story is in my book A Mothers Journey, but I will take a few minutes to write some thoughts about this beloved son of ours.
The morning of his birth was a life changing moment for me personally. I had done my own prenatal care and was five weeks overdue. My husband had given me multiple priesthood blessings promising me that he would be born in the "due time of the Lord". I held fast to those blessings during those sultry hot nights in late august when I was so big, and so ready for him to be born.
During the three hours of his labor, I felt the veil part and angels were in my bedroom while I danced him out. I felt that all of my life to that point had been in preparation for this one moment in time. A time to birth. I pushed him out in three painless contractions. And when I held him in my arms for the first time, I just marveled that he was really here, whole, beautiful....but not breathing. We could not get him to take a breath.
I could tell he was a large newborn, but did not know until a couple hours later that he was eleven pounds and twelve ounces with a fifteen inch head and 23 inches long.
Why wouldn't he breathe? We prayed, Paul gave him a blessing, I tried a little CPR, and he was just so still. At that moment a scream started in my heart. "No, Father in Heaven, NO! Do NOT let this happen. Please let it be perfect...please don't make me face them." And then the whirlwind began. It's like a dream in my memory. Paul dialed 9-11 and within minutes they started to arrive....
Andrew two days old at the hospital
Three and a half days of horrifying scrutiny, questions, mental torture, why, oh why did you give birth alone??? You had insurance??? If only YOU had come to US, none of THIS would have happened. You must be a gestational diabetic, nobody has a baby that big, whatever were you thinking? And it went on and on and on until I wanted to scream. But I didn't, I stayed quiet and just quietly stuck up for myself and my son when it seemed appropriate to speak.
Andy on his blessing day - three weeks old
I believe I heard the words brain damaged home birth baby thirty times in those three days. Every doc and nurse at both hospitals reassuringly informed me that my oxegen deprived child would most likely be brain damaged.
I've spent the past nine years watching and waiting for the "damage" to appear. It never did. He is perfect. He is one of the nicest children I have ever personally known. He is thoughtful, kind, and ever since he could hold a crayon in his hands he has drawn me beautiful pictures of flowers, trees, the sun, with the words, "I love Mom" on them, which we proudly display on the fridge. I taught him how to read in our home school and by the age of six he was reading chapter books.
When he was about four, I asked him if he remembered his birth. I have learned that it is about this age that they start to forget. He told us, "when Mom came to the hospital to get me, she wanted to beat up the doctor". Yes, that's right, I did. That particular doctor, I asked that she be removed from the case, as she had done some unethical things, and I did not trust her. And it is true for a time I wanted to beat the snot out of her.
I have often pondered on the words of the nurse who moaned to me "if only you had come to US, none of this would have happened". She is right, most likely I would have been induced three weeks before he was ready to be born, perhaps resulting in a C-section, and the thrill of giving birth in my own bedroom surrounded by angels and in the sanctity and purity of my own home would have been lost.
Andrew 6th birthday
Do I have any regrets about the way things went? Sure. If I could have prevented Andrew from being pummeled in the NICU for three days I would have, but I like to think that some of my efforts during those days lessened his time there, as they were talking about keeping him for a month, but when they could not find anything wrong with him they sent us home.
I kept asking everyone "Why are we here? What is wrong with him?" The first doc that I fired kept saying to me when I first showed up, "you have a very sick baby". I thought as she said it, "I have a very drugged baby - but please, define sick". I didn't say that to her, she was the wrong type of doc to say something like that to, but I did say it to some others and in the end, they agreed and sent us home.
For a couple years I felt alot of guilt for what he experienced during his three days in the NICU. But you know what? I did the best I could. And I think he knows that. We had three wonderful years of on demand breastfeeding, and now he is growing up so fast, so tall, so full of life and love.
Paul with Andrew on his Baptism day
As the peacemaker in our home, he is simply a joy to have in our midst. It was worth every second of pregnancy misery, after birth medical trauma, and unending questioning by everyone in my life to know WHY I gave birth at home alone. I would do it all over again to have the blessing of him being a part of our family.
I figure we are at about the halfway mark of his time in our home. May these next nine years simply be more of the same, just enjoying his quiet, thoughful manners, and curious insights into how he views the world.
Jeff and Andy dress up 2002
This post is dedicated to all of you mothers who are on the fence in regards to UC birth. We mothers don't have any guarantees in life. When Heavenly Father asked us to "walk by faith" during mortality, what that means is that we sometimes have to take a flying leap out into the darkness, and simply trust that the savior will be waiting with outstretched hands to catch us if our leap into the unknown sends us in the direction of the sharp rocks and briars of life.
Some would look at Andy's birth and say it was a failure. Instead of thinking of the blood loss (My crit was 4.7 right after the birth)and the baby not breathing, what I remember is the sensation of being in a standing position while I pushed and how powerful it felt to be on my own two feet instead of on my back.
To feel the unfettered flow of pure spirit and love as he was born, and to grasp him in my own hands and pull him up into my arms. Although my triumph quickly melted into abject terror at the thought of having to transfer to the hospital at that moment, I will never forget the high of how it felt to give birth alone and in my own bedroom.
I need to sleep - but God bless the birthing mothers where ever they may be this night; at home, in the hospital, in the surgery wards, and in the recovery rooms, and Please God, bless the babies...
UPDATE: September 7th
Andrew the morning of his ninth birthday, holding his chocolate cake!
Posted by Jenny Hatch at 1:08 AM
July 24, 2005
Till death do us part? Or Forever and Ever....
Modern Couples are coming up with some new wedding vows, that fit our modern society.
"Vows like "For as long as we continue to love each other," "For as long as our love shall last" and "Until our time together is over" are increasingly replacing the traditional to-the-grave vow — a switch that some call realistic and others call a recipe for failure.
"We're hearing that a lot — 'as long as our love shall last.' I personally think it's quite a statement on today's times — people know the odds of divorce."
I love the idea that our Marriages can be Eternal, Forever, and Last throughout Eternity. For the Mormon take on Wedding Vows, Please
Go Here.
Read the Introduction to this Blog
Posted by Jenny Hatch at 8:51 AM