Prairie House in a Condo in Chicago

Well, here I go again, starting a blog and never finding time to write in it. I'm 4 months pregnant, so the last 3 months have sort of been a haze of not being able to stay awake past 8:30 at night and constantly eating. I'm feeling better now and my summer semester of teaching has ended, so I'm sitting here breathing a sigh of relief. A feeling of my old self is sneaking around the bend once again, thank God.
So I was at the library the other day and saw a DVD called Prairie House. It was a series PBS put out years ago and it has my wheels turning in a really good way. They took 3 families and put them in the middle of nowhere in Montana for 5 months to make them live as though they were in 1883. I've always put high importance on nature and making sure I cut out too many distractions like cable TV and electronics we don't need, and this DVD (how ironic that watching TV made me remember how much I don't want TV to be a part of my life) really brought that point home.
These were modern-day people who were caught up in the fast pace of everyday life and at first they were totally shocked at how different and horrible this new world was they were thrown into. By a few weeks, they were changing into hard working, peaceful, happy people. All of them kept saying how good it felt to see the fruits of your labor and to spend time with family instead of rushing off to this and that and working at an office 60 hours a week.
There's just so much I could say about that show, but the big recurring lesson was that nature brings people together. It makes us stop and realize the enormity of this amazing planet and just how little we and our everyday materialistic worries are. Of course, we have to be realistic and work in an office or wherever to provide for our families, but we have to also make sure we don't come home and zone out in front of the TV for relief. We need to get outside, feel the wind on our face and look at all the details around us. It sounds so hippie drippy of me, but I've always felt this way. There are too many choices and distractions in this world that sometimes it's nice to just park yourself under a tree, unplug and realize how amazing this all is.