February APLS Carnival: Winter Motivation

Winter is my least favorite season of the year. Especially here in the mountains of Colorado, where winter seems to last for nine months out of the twelve. Summer is downright hot for about 3 months, then fall is cold, winter is bitter-cold and spring is mostly cold. We roll our eyes on Groundhog Day and say "Ha - we wish there were only 6 more weeks of winter!" It's this time of year that we start getting spring fever and dreaming ahead to summer.

Our garden area is still covered in snow, but we plan what we'll grow and start our seeds...

...then put them in our sunny upstairs window and watch the sprouts pop up. Seeing little green sprouts push their way through the soil is always a nice reminder that spring is indeed on its way.

We've started planning our summer camps. The Denver Zoo and the Museum of Nature & Science both have some amazing summer day camps but, with three kids and limited funds, we'll be doing a DIY version instead.


Both of our boys *love* dinosaurs and we're lucky enough to live near Dinosaur Ridge which is home to 150 million year old dinosaur bones (that you can touch!!!), 100 million year old dinosaur tracks, trails, tours and so much more. I can safely say that I'm as excited as the kids to see this. We'll pair that up with library books, crafts, a trip to the dino exhibit at the museum and a few other activities for our very own DIY Dino Camp.

We'll also have some time at the zoo "studying" (I use the term loosely) animals, gardening lessons (followed by cooking, seed saving, and composting lessons) swimming time at the local pool and anything else that suits our fancy. There are a plethora of ideas on this homeschooling website to get your creative juices flowing. It's been fun brainstorming and dreaming ahead to the lazy days of summer.

Because we do spend so much time outdoors -- away from the hot kitchen -- in the summer, I tend to cook and bake more in the winter. In the summer, it's fresh fruit and veggies, PB&J sandwiches and anything else that packs well in a picnic basket. In the winter, I have time to pour through cookbooks, try new recipes, and practice making things I'd normally buy. No wonder we all gain weight in the winter!

I've made some headway on my goals of eating more sustainably and making more from scratch. I find myself shopping the perimeter of the grocery store much more now and skipping the inside aisles of boxed, processed food. I've stopped buying peanut butter and am making it myself instead. I've stopped buying boxed, frozen waffles as a quick breakfast and started making and freezing pancakes in big batches. I like being able to control the ingredients (gluten and dairy free for Fletcher) and being able to add in any fruit we have that might be going bad. It's so much easier to experiment with things like this in the winter when I have *zero* desire to go outside!

My showers may be longer and hotter than they are in the summer months and I may drive more often than walking, but there are just as many sustainable things to do inside during these dark days of winter that will pull us through to the inevitable days of spring.

This post is my submittal to the February APLS Carnival "Winter Motivation" that will be hosted at Going Green Mama on February 24th.