Okay well more like a defeated and beaten down return...
It takes trips like this, to help me sustain our healthy life style.
By healthy i mean so soooo soooooooo much more than how we eat.
My wonderfully "cultured" home town in Louisiana is a hard truth to swallow. I love my folks, relatives and friends. We have a distinct way of living in the deep south, and i am going to be brutally honest here, there is a lot of eating, drinking, gambling, and sex. The eating is the worst of it all, but is more hidden than the other things. What you do as a family as a pass time at get togethers when you are bored when it is hot, when you are tired, when you are stressed when you are celebrating... all the time just about, is eat! I love to eat, i stinking love it! But people dont eat food in my home town, they eat product, lots and lots and lots of it. and it is all disguised as tradition. Fast food, is only trumped by, plate lunches, greasy meaty rice, boudin, bread stuffed with cheese and shrimp, dinner foods, and gravy covered deli po boys and chips, so many chips. It is delicious, oh soo sooo delicious, you cant say no but why would you want too. Well in the week and a half that we were down there, my husband and i both gained 10 pounds... no not together, each of us. And on the 24 hour drive home we were detoxing, and quite miserable, queasy, unsettled, achy, tired, and slow.
Now from the moment you enter the "sportsman's paradise"(aka Louisiana) you are bombarded with two main forms of entertainment... Sex, and Casinos. These are the industries running the state. Gambling and Adult Entertainment. It was pretty bad before i left 10 yrs ago, but now i feel like it has grown exponentially worse. The casinos are EVERY WHERE, it use to be only on the rivers and Indian reserves... but video gaming has become the south's favorite pass time, and the only rule for that is, you must be 18. Every where you look is another video gaming "restaurant"(because eating is always involved) its covered in trashy lights and gaudy led billboards, and are usually located next to a truck stop or gentleman's club.
Which brings me to my next point. Adult superstores, gentleman's clubs, porn shops, OH MY. I was tempted to take pictures of all the billboards announcing these palaces of pleasure to every one that can read. My phone would have no memory left after so many pictures! there were almost more of them than casino billboards (but obviously casinos have larger advertising budgets) I am so thankful my children are not quite reading yet, but i was a little nervous at first. We cross the state line, and immediately start seeing the billboards for "the lions den" I10's most memorable sex stop, mainly because of their clever advertising ploy... LOTS AN LOTS of billboards. I thought my daughter will surely see this and start sounding it out, because that is the only thing other than trees to look at, and wont that be an awkward conversation to have with a six year old. But its not just the one, they are every where, and some of the billboards are quite explicit... and my husband had to point every single one of them out, funny and slightly irritating!
And the drinking is involved with every thing i have mentioned so far, you cant have any one of those things without the other...and the kicker is that we are located in the bible belt!!!! The drinking is the thing that bothers me the least, i really don't care about what other people want to do to there bodies, that is there prerogative, but it is usually accompanied by smoking, and at times driving, so that tends to worry me.
Its fun being around the people i grew up with, but not around the lifestyle we are no longer accustomed to living.
So now i am back home and recommitted to the way we live. We are just about detoxed from all the junk we have been eating... still not feeling great, but feeling better. You really don't realize how good you feel eating right, until you get the opportunity to feel really terrible from eating junk. You cant truly have good, without also having evil.
I have already started homemaking my kids healthy snacks... made some quinoa muffins last night... and have plans to continue on the right track for eating responsibly... a salad a day, and a smoothie for snack, and a slightly over the top vegan dinner, should keep up eating right and me not bored to death about cooking. Also i found this muffin cook book, that i am waiting till pay day to get and that will keep us snacked up for many days to come!!
My house was deep cleaned before we left, and i am working to keep that up again (especially now that all my summer woes are done) i am about to go declutter my children's room, and put together a clutter free home school room.
I have seen what happens to a society when children become a side note, i am sure that i will live for my husband and children's happiness, and if Virginia ever starts replacing skating rinks with adult super stores, it will be time for us to move (to new Zealand)
i sound like a prude, but really the truth is i am just sad that it has gone this way, i remember having some fun things to do as a kids, but now there is no fun places for kids to go, it is all replace with "the money making industries" as mentioned above and it makes me sad.
Husband and i had a few eye opening moments and now we know where we stand as far as ever moving "back home"
If i could just convince my family that there is life outside Louisiana, then we can start fresh together!
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