2017 Holiday Season Recap
A visit to Woodward Christmas Tree Farm, and exploring the Kamloops Wine Trail.
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Fishing at Jacko Lake
Looking back at these photos, it's hard to believe that this was not even a month ago. Today my garden is a snowy winter wonderland. This is a beautiful place to live, regardless of the season, but I especially like our autumns. Because of the rain-shadow effect, we receive the least amount of precipitation in our province, so our fall months are overwhelmingly crisp, clear, and sunny. Gold and blue are the dominant colours of the landscape.
This was a terrible year for fishing. I'm not sure how everyone else did, but we caught absolutely nothing this time. There were a few factors working against us, the main one being that we don't have a boat, or fly fishing equipment. Another is that it's trickier now that we need to schedule a babysitter to make it happen. We used to take Little Forager along in a carrier, but now he's too wiggly and isn't content if he can't be out exploring. When he's older we can take him and teach him how it all works, but for now it's just much easier if we go by ourselves. Still another thing - more specific to this summer alone - was the oppressive smoke from what was British Columbia's worst ever season of wildfires.
I knew the beautiful weather was coming to an end, and so I enlisted a friend to watch Little Forager so Mr. Forager and I could head out to Jacko Lake for a few hours one afternoon. I'm so glad I did because I'm fairly certain that this was the last warm sunny weekend of the year! Like I said, now everything is frozen, and likely to remain that way for a while! It's possible we might have another warm spell, but I'm not holding my breath at this point.
Still no fish for us, but it was so nice to spend a few hours alone with my husband. Fishing is so relaxing. This spot at Jacko was a perfect place to relax in the sun even if it was a little disappointing not to be bringing home any trout for dinner.
Jacko Lake is in the centre of a big controversy at the moment, because the land is held by a local mining corporation, but is also thought to be a culturally significant site for the Tk'emlups and Skeetchestn Indian Bands. In the Secwepemc language the area around the lake is called Pipsell, and is thought to be where the legend called The Trout Children took place (see the link at the bottom of this page if you want to read the legend).
I love this place, and personally it is hard for me to imagine it disappearing from public access because of the proposed nearby open pit mine. I'm not very well versed on the politics of the situation, but I would certainly grieve the loss.
Road Tripping and Cloth Diapering
This is not my usual topic for this blog, but today I wanted to talk a little bit about cloth diapers. Yup. If you think about it, this is not as off topic as it might seem. I care about the earth and care to continue my foraging, and gardening for many more years so I feel being as close to zero-waste as I can is important. Vital, even. Let's just say that all the disposable diapers you wore as a baby are still sitting in a landfill somewhere. Just hanging out. Basically completely intact. No matter how old you are. That grosses me out way more than washing a soiled diaper ever could especially with how hassle free cloth diapering companies make their products.
If you've seen my Instagram, you are probably aware that we love using cloth instead of conventional diapers. This is a huge way we can reduce the garbage that comes along with raising Little Forager, and it is also a major help financially since we are not always buying diapers. I don't want to spend all my time here talking about why cloth diapering is the way to go - there are many other resources you can find on that topic via a quick google - rather I wanted to talk about whether or not it is practical to use cloth diapers when travelling
As enthusiastic as we are, we are not cloth diapering purists by any means. There are often times we decide that a disposable diaper is needed. If we know we are going to be visiting somewhere that doing laundry is going to be really inconvenient for us or our hosts we leave the cloth at home and buy as eco-friendly an option as possible. This time we knew we knew the laundry wouldn't be a problem, so we decided to pack up the cloth and try them out on a really long road trip and blog about how it went.
This is basically all of my stash. For the most part we use a combination of Mother Ease and Nuggles diapers. The Mother Ease diapers (one size fitted diapers with their "air flow" covers) we bought used at a very reasonable price. These are not the fanciest diapers - there are other styles offered that are, however - and they don't have the trimmest fit, but they are so durable. We are the second to use them and after two years of our use you can barely tell they are getting on a bit. Most of our Nuggles products are accessories (Tuck-Wrap-Go covers, wet bags, wallet), although we do have one of their Simplee diapers and it is amazing. We are seriously considering adding more of them to our collection. We also have a couple reusable swim diapers, use basic washcloths for wipes, Delish Naturals Therapeutic Yum Bum Butter, and Bummis flushable liners (indispensable now that we have a toddler eating solids), and that basically sums up everything we use for diapering.
The biggest challenge I figured we would have is changing Little Forager during the driving. Thankfully the travel sized wet bag (pictured above) makes this just as convenient as it would have been using conventional diapers - if changing a wriggling toddler in a public place is ever truly convenient. The only thing that I had to remember is that since we just use regular baby washcloths for wipes, I had to get them wet first at a sink before I started the whole process. I could have planned ahead and carried pre-moistened washcloths in a container, or there are even plenty of DIY wipe solution recipes people have made available on the internet. These wet bags are awesome, because there is a front pocket where you can keep clean diapers, and the back pocket is made of waterproofed fabric (the same kind of thing as the diaper covers) where you can throw the dirty stuff and leave it there until you get a chance to do a load of laundry. The best part is how well they contain the smell! I'll be honest that it's not completely 100% smell-proof if you get up close, and if you have dirty stuff and clean stuff in at the same time for a while you're going to want to air out the clean stuff a bit before using it. Despite those minor concerns we drove all the way from Kamloops, British Columbia to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan and you couldn't tell there were dirty diapers in there.
There were a few times we went to the park, or stopped at a water park, and that was all super easy as well thanks to the Nuggles Reusable Swim Diaper and their Simplee diaper which are both really easy to use on the go. Thanks again to the travel sized wet bag no one knew we were packing dirty diapers along with us!
Well, thanks for bearing with me through all my gushing about cloth diapers. It really was easy to use them even on a long road trip, and I really think it's important to do as much as we can to reduce our garbage.
For those of you who are interested, Nuggles has given me a link to share with my readers to shop their site at a discount! Click here and happy shopping!
Nuggles Diapers and Mother Ease have provided me some of their products free of charge, but all thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are my own.
Where Have We Been?
You might have noticed that the blog has been rather silent for the past month. The long and the short of it is that we've been really busy! Here is something in the way of an update, with more posts to follow!
This past month or so we have had way too much traveling to do! Some of it was a planned holiday, some was work related, and some was to celebrate the wedding of some dear friends. Though it was all really great, we were just completely wiped out for about a full week afterward!
The beginning of all this travel was a much needed holiday to Whistler. This was the first family getaway we had taken in the past two years! Not that we haven't had holiday time before this, but when your family stretches across most of one of the biggest countries on earth visiting them all eats up a lot of vacation days! This March we took a week to ourselves and had some much needed family bonding time.
This winter has been particularly bitter all across BC, and so we decided to just embrace it and make our "spring" break one last winter celebration! We got to use our snowshoes again (I love snowshoeing), and visit Whistler Olympic Park. We lucked out the last weekend since they were having the national championships for Nordic Combined and Ski Jumping.
Sometimes you have to nurse your kid in the weirdest places! This was at the biathlon range at the Whistler Olympic Park. I really enjoyed snowshoeing here. It was really affordable, and so fun to see all the sights from the 2010 Olympic Games!
The drive home was the most beautiful day. This shot in Pemberton really doesn't do it justice. It's a long drive through what could be a treacherous mountain road, but thankfully the sun was shining and the roads were bare!
Our next trip down was work related for Mr. Forager, but we still found time to visit the Tulips in the Valley festival! Little Forager loves flowers - that's one of the words he can already say - and we caught it at a really beautiful moment where the storm clouds were gathering over the mountains.
One of the really fun things Little Forager and I got up to while Mr. Forager was in class was visiting the BC Farm Museum in Fort Langley. This place was amazing, and admission was only $6! We still haven't seen everything they have on display and we'll definitely be back again.
It was lucky that our visit coincided with my mom's parents coming to Vancouver as well. They usually stop by our place on their way, but this way we wound up with some extra time with them, and that was really nice. Below you can see my mom and her mom "breadwinning" in the kitchen. My mom bakes a brilliant loaf of sourdough! Every time we visit we get sent home with one of the incredible loaves!
Little Forager loves visiting Vancouver. Cars, boats, and puppies are some of his favourite things, so he's pretty happy to be out and about with us there.
I realized our last visit - again to the Vancouver area, this time for a wedding - was so busy I barely took any photos! Mr. Forager and I were both very involved in the wedding and we simply enjoyed being in the moment of it all and left the photos to the professionals. I did manage to take a shot of the incredibly dreamy lavender mocha my mom treated me to at Cafe Medina, though!
Now that we are back home and more rested, I have quite a few more posts planned for your enjoyment! Thankfully there are no more road trips planned until the summer!
