Lenten Sacrifices

For Lent, I am sacrificing one thing and doing another.

I've already given up sugar, grains, and fruit, so what else is there?  Well... cheese.  I love cheese and eat it almost every day.  Lately I've been trying out lots of raw goat and sheep milk cheeses (which are easy to digest and pretty healthy, assuming they're grass-fed, which I hope but am not certain they are).  Aged manchego, murcio curado, Idiazabal.  Oh my gosh.  I am addicted to cheese like nothing else.  I love the taste of avocados, but they don't make me high.  Cheese does, I swear it does, it does something crazy in my brain when I bite down into a hunk of rich, aged, cultured milk solids.  I am constantly looking forward to my next salty, slightly nutty fix.  My favorite part?  The rind.

What I'm trying to get at is it doesn't sound like a big deal, but for me, giving up cheese is giving up the only intensely pleasurable thing in my diet.  Sure, I like the food I eat, but I love cheese.  I had a wedge of Manchego today (party Sunday!), which I had been looking forward to since Ash Wednesday.  And I'm already anticipating which cheese is going in my belly next Sunday.  (Ben says the Sunday exception thing is cheating.)

I'm also trying to pick up something this Lent I did awhile ago, which is to record at least 3 things that I am grateful for each day, preferably something I had a hand in as opposed to something that happened to me, but I'll take either.  The idea is to be on the lookout all day for things to be happy about.

Without further adieu, here is my gratitude journal for the week of 2/13/13....

2/13/13

1. Michael takes his fermented cod liver oil, even though I had to find a new bribe today (Swampy didn't cut it; They Might Be Giants did).  So many other moms who are on very similar diets to mine (Weston A. Price/Paleo) can't get their kids to take FCLO, period.
2. I actually left early enough to arrive on time for Michael's therapy.  I always seem to underestimate how long it takes to get there.
3. The garage door closed all three times today I used it -- a first in the months since I've backed into it!  Ben is optimistic he may have found the fix yesterday!
4. The deacon gave a homily at mass where he unambiguously stated that abortion is a great evil and that it's wrong to support politicians who support abortion.

2/14/13

1. Valentine's Day falls between Ash Wednesday and Friday, meaning:  surf and turf!  Michael and I had a delicious grass-fed filet mignon (Michael possibly had more than half of it!), and Ben and I had broiled lobster tails for dinner.  Yum!
2. We spent two hours at the park for a playdate this morning.
3. I didn't get sick from the raw salmon ceviche or raw goat's milk kefir from two days ago.

2/15/13

1. I'm so proud of Michael!  He went up to get his storytime stamp all by himself today.  It was the very first time he went up alone; he always beckons for me to go with him because all the little kids group together for the hand stamps and it makes him nervous.  But he went up and even though she kept missing him, he followed her around with his arm extended until he got stamped.
2. We spent an hour and a half at a new park and got to see Jen and River.
3. I may have found someone to split a share of goats with me!  (To milk.)

2/16/13

1. I managed to get a workout in with less knee pain than I have had my last several sessions.
2. Michael is very eager to learn how to use utensils, and it is cute.
3. Ben cleaned the bathtub for me today and watched Michael while I worked out.

2/17/13

1. Michael didn't wake up with me when I got up this morning so I had some free time to put away dishes and have tea in peace.
2. The church remembered to turn the speakers on outside.  (Michael usually starts to throw a mini-fit midway through mass and I have to take him outside to nurse.)  And it didn't take half an hour to leave the parking lot like it did on Ash Wednesday!
3. Ben and I ate another meal together.  We don't eat together much, and when we do it's rare that it's the same thing, but we finally did it tonight!  Food is a big thing for me and I like sharing it with him.  I made grass-fed beef osso bucco and sauteed cabbage.
4. Ben helped me clean up after dinner without me asking him.
5. According to the Natural Gardener, the live oak leaves in our backyard aren't edible but they're fine for fermenting (they supply tannins to keep pickles crunchy) which means I don't have to toss the batch of pickles I'm fermenting that I tossed the oak leaves in.  I meant to check before I added the oak leaves but never got around to it.  (Ben has an expression, "it's better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission."  I guess it sort of applies here.)  I'm also grateful the Natural Gardener gives horticultural tips over the phone.
6. Someone is training me to be a host for the Austin Family Cooperative Buyers, where we get a bunch of people together to get discounts on group/bulk orders at a bunch of companies.  I buy a lot of stuff with the AFCB, like our cod liver oil and grass-fed meat.  I'm getting trained at the moment on a gelatin co-op.  It's volunteer run and I like the idea of helping out after benefiting so much.