"In Her Shoes" a conversation with Annie of Bird and Little Bird

Today I welcome Annie of Bird and Little Bird.  She is also the creator of Alphabet Glue, an online magazine for kids and parents who love reading and writing. I found Annie's blog through Maya Made. I won a copy of Alphabet Glue from a giveaway Maya was doing. I fell in love with Annie's blog almost immediately and knew that I wanted to include her in this series. Please grab your beverage of choice and get comfy because this is a great interview you don't want to miss!

1) With in the first few minutes of exploring your blog space I can see that you are a lover of words. Can you list for us your five most favorite words?

Well, let's see... I like the word "oh" a lot, and I start many a sentence that way.  Not the most exciting word, but a useful one for lots of purposes. "Persnickety" is a new favorite. I mean, it obviously isn't a new word, but I've just begun using it a lot lately, and it's a great word.  I definitely recommend it to others.  Speaking of which, I like "definitely"  a lot as well.  I also really enjoy "wholly," "imagination" and "super."  "Super" is an excellent word. 

2) With your family having various food allergies and dietary needs how have you found the challenge of making adjustments for them? Have you all been able to find meal time rhythm?

Well, we do family dinner together every night, pretty much no matter what.  Which is kind of a feat considering that my husband is a medical student and has a seriously challenging schedule sometimes.  My daughter has celiac disease and my husband has a severe nut allergy, so we have had some restrictions on what we eat for a little while now.  But it seems that our five month old now has some food allergies as well, which adds to the list of things that I, at least, am not able to eat.  I won't lie; it has been a challenge.  Our solution for the time being is to eat a whole foods based diet with limited grains and to do all of our cooking and eating at home.  Folks who read my blog are probably painfully aware of the fact that we are still working out the details of our allergy-friendly eating plan and that there have been some real moments of frustration.

3) What are your family's favorite go to snacks?

We eat a ton of avocados, often with rice crackers. Those little round ones with seaweed and wheat-free tamari on them.  My daughter also really likes toasted seaweed and will munch away on a nori sheet when we have them.  Lately we've also been doing a lot of roasted potatoes as a snack.  I'll cut them into little chunks (maybe about 1 inch or so), toss them with a bunch of olive oil and some really good salt (I really like the pink Himalayan salt) and then roast them at 425 until they are super toasty and brown and crunchy.  Did you catch my use of the word "super" there?  See, it does a lot for a sentence.

4) From your posts about book making to your fun Monday book feature, it's obvious that you have a love for books. Where did your love of books begin? What was your first favorite book? And did you or do you still have a favorite place to read? 

I think by the time I was in second grade, I was reading around a chapter book a day.  I can't remember why it is that I had so much time to do that, but maybe I was a fast reader or something. And, I actually wasn't all that well behaved in school, so I think I got to read at recess a lot because I always had to sit on the floor outside the principal's office instead of going outside. So there's that.    It is possible that I might have read the entire original Nancy Drew series the year that I was eight.  I went to this little tiny Catholic school and we were allowed to go to the library (which was about the size of my bathroom) as often as we wanted.  So I did. 

When I was ten, I first read The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster.  It was the first time I remember reading a book and just wishing that it would never end.  I loved it so much.  I wrote a blog post about a year and a half ago about meeting Norton Juster at a local bookstore and how I just became a total puddle of nerd in his presence.  He was very gracious about the whole thing and only made fun of me a little bit.  

I think I read in my bed a lot as a kid.  I know this because I distinctly remember pulling the covers over my head and sobbing like crazy when I read Bridge to Terabithia.  I think I might have to vote "no" on books that sad.  Goodness. These days we mostly read on the couch.  We used to read in my daughter's bunk bed a lot, but it has a surprisingly low weight limit and as I mentioned before, I'm five months post partum.  I guess that's the advantage of my limited diet these days; I'll be back in bunk bed reading shape in no time.  

5) If you could travel back in time to the library in Alexandria, what kinds of books would you look at?

You know, I have actually been to modern day Alexandria, although I didn't visit any libraries while I was there.  If I were in the ancient library in Alexandria, I suspect that I probably would read much of the same stuff that I actually read today.  I rarely read fiction (unless I'm reading with my daughter) and most of the non-fiction that I read is natural history.  Natural sciences were big in the Alexandria of old, I think, so I'd probably do quite well.  

6) You cook, garden, sew, craft, travel, are the creator of Alphabet Glue, new editor at Rhythm of the Home, and full time mama and wife. Sounds like you have a lot on your plate. What is your daily rhythm like? Do you think that each of these activities helps you find your rhythm? 

I totally have a lot on my plate!  I think for me, however, that being busy is what keeps me relatively together.  If I have very little to do, I tend to do very little, and that isn't something that feels great for me.  Also, my husband's medical school life means that he spends a lot of time studying, and so it really is nice when I have things to be busy with when he's in a phase of having to be at the library or hospital a lot. It helps keep me sane.  

My oldest is in school during the day at a small alternative school.  It is a bit of a drive to drop her off in the morning, but once the baby and I are back home, I have a number of hours to do things around the house, go for a walk or run errands.  Usually, we'll do errand running first because I have this weird thing where I almost don't believe in doing errands after noon.  Then we'll work on things around the house.  I think because he was born during the coldest part of winter, and we stayed in a lot at first, my son became a natural homebody.  He's really happiest when we hang around home most of the day or maybe just go out for a walk and then come right back. So when we are home, I might get things organized for dinner, work on my blog a bit or on things for Rhythm of the Home and then if I'm lucky, the baby will take a decent nap and I can answer emails, fold laundry or spend a bit of time knitting.  Somehow I never, ever get totally caught up on laundry.  My laundry basket is like Mary Poppins' handbag.  When we pick Mariam up from school, we often play outside on a favorite local farm or go for a walk in the woods before we head home to tackle things like music practice and dinner time.  I've been working a lot lately on getting most of the dinner prep done early in the day so that we can have that outside time in the afternoons.  

I think that I'm really fortunate in that I am reasonably efficient.  If I've had enough sleep the night before, I can usually get quite a bit done during the day.  But when it gets dark out, I seriously crash! I tend to be really active all day long but then I'm pretty much useless in the evenings.  By which I mean completely useless. 

7) Vermont and northern California seem to me like the ideal places for local sustainable life styles. Can you describe to us how living in each place has changed your perspective on eating, consuming and living? 

Well, I think that when you live in California, you really benefit from the climate and the fact that there is so much diversity in what can be grown locally.  We lived in northern California, where there are a lot of great small farm CSAs and that was nice.  But, I don't think that I had any real idea of how much you could connect to local food systems until we moved to Vermont.  Vermont is really small, both in geography and population, and the result is that you can really and truly get to know your local farmers.  Because they are just up the street.  Farms are completely intertwined with residential areas here and it is easy to get almost everything that you eat from farmers who are basically in your neighborhood.  I love that.  There was an article by Mark Bittman not too long ago where he talked about how Vermont had basically become the example for what local food systems should look like, and I found that to be really exciting and inspiring.  

Thank you so much for talking with me today! You can hear more from Annie on her blog or go to her new home at Rhythm of the Home. You can follow her on twitter as well, here.