Once More, With Feeling

Aaaand … we are back.

Now our little family is four, adding our daughter Edie to the mix in December 2017. Tyson is still teaching and I am still at home with the kids, working a part-time job in a school library after hours. We still spend a crazy amount of time on food – thinking about it, planning it, shopping for it, cooking it, eating it and cleaning up from it. Unfortunately, the children are not tidy eaters.

Our values remain the same – live simply, eat simply. However, given the current state of our beautiful Earth, we feel the need to make changes in how we do things in our home. Single-use plastic is a plague. Climate change is frightening. The legacy we are leaving is one of destruction and environmental degradation. We have decided that we can no longer continue to do things the way we have always done them if we want our children to be able to live the lives we hope they will live.

We are aiming to dramatically reduce our consumption of resources, especially that of single-use plastics. Our initial goal is to cut our household waste down from one full garbage bin each week to half a garbage bin each week. This might not seem like a big deal, but having two small children means that we will be switching back to reusable nappies and wipes (except overnight), cutting out prepackaged foods as much as possible, and shopping in places that allow us to supply our own reusable containers. This isn’t a big deal when you can shop alone but dragging a two-year-old and a four-year-old to a bulk food store can be a bit of a nightmare. It is important to us though, and modeling these practices to our children is important too.

Thankfully, we have been making positive changes gradually for a long time now. It isn’t as daunting to us when we already have a lot of tools and information that will make achieving our goal much easier.

I’m planning on sharing the changes we are making and the effect it is having on our family. Please note that this will be about progress, not perfection, and that we in no way claim to be zero-waste, low-waste, eco-friendly, green, enviro-warriors or any other label you can think of. We are just a family trying to do the best we can.

A Change In Direction

Like all good things, life here at Anarchy Road has changed since I last posted almost three years ago. Our values are the same but our circumstances are hugely different.

Our duo became a trio when we welcomed our son, August, to the world in February 2016. We have moved from Melbourne to Geelong, back to the original home of Anarchy Road, back to our vegetable garden and chickens.

These life changes have also led to a change in direction for this blog. I am on leave from my job indefinitely, and the plan is for me to take the role of looking after our child and home while Tyson works. Anarchy Road is still about good food, but our focus has expanded to making a good home as well. And by good home, we don’t mean an Instagram home. We mean a home that is simple, clean and healthy, full of love and family and good times. We are taking inspiration from simple living advocates, our families, and our desire to live a simple, ethical and creative life.

Tyson and I have always considered the name Anarchy Road to be an overarching title for our joint projects, be they food, home or otherwise.  If you are new to the blog, welcome! You can check out our old posts for lots of stuff about food, particularly ancestral health related content. If you are a seasoned Anarchy Road reader, we hope you will continue to follow us on this journey.

 

 

 

Enough

A while ago, Mark Sisson wrote this blog post  and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. If you’ve got a minute you should check it out. In the article, he says ‘I don’t want the perfect to become the enemy of the good‘, and this phrase resonated for me.

It is so easy to get caught up in ideas and plans and to become obsessed with doing things perfectly. I’m guilty of this all the time. I do the best that I can to nourish my body with natural, chemical free foods, quality sleep and regular exercise but if something slips through that isn’t optimal, now I just roll with it. Once upon a time I would have beaten myself up and promised to be more strict in the future. But, for the sake of my sanity, I take a breath and look at what I am doing and how far I have come and let it be enough.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Do the best you can with what you have, and let good be enough.