Recipe:
1 Box Fillo dough
Feta cheese
A huge bin of fresh Spinach
1 tsp Salt
1 cup of melted butter
1 purple onion
1 peeled and grated carrot
1 diced red pepper
1 cup cottage cheese
6 eggs
Zest and juice of 1 lime
Salt and pepper to taste
Put ingredients together
Video Tutorial: https://videopress.com/embed/U3Q2sa4f?hd=0&autoPlay=0&permalink=0&loop=0
Recently I was talking to a friend of mine.
She is a young wife and planning to be a mother in the near future. As we talked she kept asking me questions about healthy pregnancy. She had recently experienced an early miscarriage with her first and was very interested in learning more about how to hold on to a healthy baby.
I shared with her some facts about nutrition and asked her if it was really necessary for her to work full time. I explained to her my belief that pregnancy was a full time job. Much time was needed to prepare healthy meals, eat, and rest. She said she needed to work because her health insurance for the baby came through her work. But she also said that she did not need to work as much as she had during her first pregnancy.
Having this conversation with her got me thinking about our current society situation in regards to family life.
I have had many long conversations with my daughters about their futures. Michelle has always been clear that when she grew up she wanted to be a mother. In fact, in 9th grade a teacher asked the class to write essays on what they wanted to do for a career, and Michelle expressed her life long desire to be a parent. The teacher later told her that in all her years of teaching she had never had a student write about parenthood as a career.
I was talking to Michelle lately about her college education. I expressed my hope for her to be able to achieve a degree in something, but cautioned her about the weight that will be on her shoulders if she graduates from college with thousands of dollars in student loans to pay off. I explained to her that if she truly had a desire for a lifetime of homaking, her time might be better spent in learning a marketable skill and then working at it for a time until she gets married.
I did this in high school. Our vocational school that was affiliated with the high school had an excellent medical assisting program. I had always wanted to be a nurse, (which strikes me as being rather funny now) and looked at my medical assisting as just being the first step towards that goal. I attended classes for three hours a day my junior year, and then worked a summer for a proctologist. My four months in that office convinced me that medicine was the last profession I wanted to be in. Yet it felt comforting that I had obtained skills that would allow me to earn more than the minimum wage, should life require that I have to provide for myself.
Having that skill left me feeling more comfortable in my choice of majors. I knew the high unemployment of the theatre profession, yet I knew I could always work as a waitress or in a medical office if need be between shows after I graduated in musical theatre.
I met Paul when I was nineteen, so all of my plans just melted away as we started family life and began welcoming our babies into our life.
I think about my young friend, my own daughters, and wonder what life will hold for them as future wives and mothers.
I am just finishing up the Anne of Green Gables Books. Rilla of Ingleside is my favorite in the series and I started reading it last night. I love that book, it is one of the best war novels I have ever read, because you live world war one through the eyes of the women at home.
In thinking about careerism and what is best for babies, those books have such a clear headed approach to marriage, preparation for family life, and what it takes for mothers and babies to thrive. I suppose that is one of the main reasons I love reading them so much.
Two of the main characters in the book, Anne and Diana, have different approaches to preparations for motherhood. Anne becomes a teacher, then attend college and gets a BA degree, and then works for three additional years as a principal before she marries and settles down to motherhood and the births of her seven children.
In the book, she and Gilbert understand that with him in medical school, they will need to wait for marriage and family life for three long years. Why this assumption on the part of author LM Montgomery that they will wait for marriage and family life? I suppose because it was drilled into her generation as young people that family life takes a certain infrastructure in terms of career, home, and community.
Diana on the other hand finished up her 8th grade year of school and then with her mothers influence spent the next three years preparing for family life. She married a farmer and then began to welcome her children while her best friend Anne was still in school.
Question is, which path is better for the woman who has a desire for family life? I don’t know and really believe exceptional families can be created with the mother preparing in a variety of ways for her time as a home maker. Wether my own daughters choose to be a Diana or an Anne, prepare at home for family life, or attend college to get a degree, is really up to them. I plan to help them in any way I can for that important time of welcoming children into their lives.
What I wish would happen though is for all of those women who desire to be mothers to understand that preparation for family life should be taken most seriously, and when young women welcome children into their lives without any thought of providing for that baby, poverty and disaster are waiting just around the corner.
And if mothers wish to create the type of family life that will allow them to welcome a large group of children, a certain level of preparation and realism is really the key.
I finished up our conversation with my young friend by giving her this advice. I told her that if early in her marriage she and her husband would learn to live on one income, his, she would start right from the beginning in learning how to economize in a variety of ways, and this economizing would help her be able to stay home with her babes.
I told her that if she would simply breastfeed, wash her own cloth diapers, learn to live with one car, and be happy living in a small house, she would be able to have many children, and provide them with the fabulous blessing of a mother committed to them for the duration, without the need to provide the necessities of life for herself and her children.
She was very open to the ideas I was sharing, and is so excited to give birth and create a lovely home for her young husband and any children they may be blessed with. It gave me a feeling of great joy to visit with her for a couple minutes the other night.
I believe the current mess we are in with our young women partying through their 20’s, doing drugs, drinking, everyone on the pill, abortions for unwanted children, and all the ballast that accompanies such living is the absolute worst preparation for motherhood possible.
If you are a young woman reading this post, I want to challenge you to clean up your life. Repent of your sins, and live your day to day life in a way that will enable you to enjoy the blessings of moral family living. Live worthy for the type of man who is also preparing himself for a committed relationship. The best place to meet that sort of a man is at church. So join a church, any church, and let the partying and the bar hopping go. It does absolutely nothing for your preparation for family life.
I cannot wait for my young friend to welcome her first baby. As we were talking, she began to cry when I expressed my positive belief that she was fully capable of creating a healthy baby, and welcoming it into her home. She said that accompanying her miscarriage came a barrage of fear based comments from, well, everyone. Doctors, nurses, friends, relatives had all shared horrifying stories about loss of babies, and distrust that she could do a good job of it.
She did say that the fertility doc she worked with was a very upbeat and positive man, and she thrilled with his attitude. But everyone knows that nurses run the hospitals, and do much damage with fear based language. They are an especially powerful force in the delivery rooms, and I have observed that the more interventionist and allopathic approaches come from those women who have been brutalized during their own births. They sort of have an emotional need to make sure every woman who comes to them for help has the same sort of birth they had.
My young friend told me that she is eating the brewer diet faithfully, and that she planned to continue eating it until conception and then during her pregnancy. I told her that was the best news she could have shared.
Here is the diet for those of you interested in learning how to make a healthy baby. As she said…. “It is just so much food!” But teaching your body how to eat that amount of food will prevent prematurity and low birth weight.
Every day of the week you and your baby should have:
One quart (4 glasses) or more of milk. Any kind will do: whole milk, low fat, skim, buttermilk, or cheese, yogurt, ice cream, etc….
Two eggs, (hard boiled, in french toast, or added to other foods).
One or two servings of fish or seafood, liver, chicken, lean beef, lamb, pork, beans or any kind of cheese.
One or two good servings of fresh green leafy vegetables: mustard, collard, turnip greens, spinach, lettuce, or cabbage.
Two or three slices of whole wheat bread, cornmeal, cornbread, or tortillas.
A piece of citrus fruit or glass of juice of lemon, lime, orange, tomato, or grapefruit.
Three pats of butter.
Other fruits and vegetables.
Also include in your diet:
A serving of whole grain cereal such as oatmeal or granola.
A yellow or orange-colored fruit or vegetable five times a week.
Liver once a week. (if you like it)
Whole baked potato three times a week.
Plenty of fluids, water, juice etc.
Salt food to taste for a safe increase in blood volume.
You may substitute proteins if you wish, being sure your proteins are complete, and that you get approximately 100 grams per day, If you substitute, also be sure all the elements necessary for a well balanced diet are available every day.
#SpinachPie #Spanikopita
PS
My children regularly request Spinach Pie for birthday meals and family gatherings.
Jenny Hatch
Spanikopita, a recipe by Mom Blogger Jenny Hatch