Another guest post is live over at Little Ladies Who Lunch.

Why do I always set out to post a recipe and some photos and end up writing a long self-reflective post about the meaning of food? Food is powerful, food is a big part of a family dynamic, a huge part of the budget, and maybe even a defining part of childhood. Scary. Food is scary! Food can kill you! Food brings people together, takes time and energy to create, forms the center of good days and bad days. Even on days when you are sick and you scrap everything else in the realm of parenting, you still have to feed everyone.

Yikes, I leave for a couple of weeks and come back to a comments section full of jumbled up spam. Sorry about that. And if my spam catcher is eating real comments again, please let me know. I have it set to KILL for now.

This week I’m doing a some guest posting over at the very lovely http://littleladieswholunch.com/post/15457448012/crunchy-guest-post Little Ladies Who Lunch blog.

How I got mixed up in a healthy home made food operation would be a horrifying mystery to the me from the 1990s, but here we are.

Meanwhile, we are working like dogs to get all of our new products put together for this year. We want to do more jewelry items, more cool baby stuff, more more more. We have so many ideas that may or may not actually be good products. A couple of weeks ago I was in OMG Let’s Just Have Everything Made in MFing China meltdown crisis mode. It was awful, born out of total frustration from trying to get what we want produced here.

It’s not a matter of going overseas to make a little more money on a product — it’s a matter of not being able to find USA manufacturers at all. It’s a matter of asking customers to pay $25 for a small plush rattle that’s on the shelf next to dozens of $8 rattles. A lot of times it means a choice between going overseas or just scrapping this or that product altogether. Which is fine except that it’s so cuuuuute and I want to produce all of the adorable nerdy things. But “I wannnaaaa” is not really worth compromising over, is it? No, not yet. There has to be a solution and this is what I spend my late nights doing instead of writing and updating my blog; I am working on all of the designs and searching for creative ways to use local resources to produce everything for a cost that American consumers will pay.

It’s exhausting being this neurotic, let me tell you. But! I think we’re figuring it out. Little by little by little… slowly slowly slowly the little train climbed the mountain…