Why I Love Saturdays

Weekends with nothing on the calendar used to mean waking up without an alarm, reading all of the interesting sections of the newspaper–everything minus Sports and Business– and staying in my PJ’s until I couldn’t stand another second of being cooped up inside, then getting dressed and going for a walk. Ever since pregnancy and baby happened, however, weekends have begun pretty much the same as every other day–wake up at 5:30 and wait (meaning visit the bathroom, nurse baby G, entertain him, pretend to sleep if he’s happy batting at his crunchy ladybug mobile, etc) until Michael’s alarm goes off at 6:30. Thankfully, I don’t mind the early Saturday wake-up. Michael and I have a plan to go to Mass at 8:30 a.m. and then head over to our local farmer’s market for our weekly purchase of fruit, eggs, meat, and milk. (We get our veggies each week as part of a Community Supported Agriculture deal with Potomac Vegetable Farms, so we don’t buy veggies at the market.) We’ve been going to the same farmer’s market every week since June–I even worked there briefly–and every week I love walking through the stalls and looking at all the colorful fresh flowers and veggies. Even though they’re pretty much the same stalls, every week the produce changes just a bit to reflect the change in the growing season. We’ve made friends with a couple of the vendors–the Wheatland Vegetable Farms owner, Susan Planck, and I have had conversations about midwifery and babywearing spurred on first by my pregnancy and then later by my sling. Michael has inquired from the fellow who sells goat yogurt about raising the critters and if he can find goat milk anywhere around here to purchase. Other interesting and fun characters include a young couple from PA who are about our age, starting up a small organic farm on land that’s been in their family for generations, the Hispanic family from the Northern Neck with the sweet little girl I made friends with while I worked there, and the friendly West Virginian Berkeley Springs Creamery grass-fed milk people. During the summer we stopped from time to time at Michael’s garden on the way home, and I would wander around looking at all of the plots in the community garden, checking out what people had done with their little squares of earth. By far my favorite was the guy who built a trellis-type structure that by the end of August was covered in climbing vines that grew mottled, bumpy gourds that looked like gigantic light green pickles handing straight down from the trellis roof! In any case, I don’t mind waking up early to spend Saturday mornings in the company of my husband and son and doing things that make me almost forget that we’re living here in commuter-crazy, status-driven NoVA.