Bucha, Bitch!

I can't remember the first time I drank kombucha.  It's one of those things I've been doing for years before it was a thing.

I love kombucha.  It's made from tea, and I drink gallons of tea.  I don't think I ever even started drinking it for the purported health reasons either.  It's the bubbly flavor I enjoy.

My favorite flavor I can only find at Trader Joe's (pictured above).  I have never seen it anywhere else, not that I can typically buy it anywhere else because it's always sold out at Target, and all the good flavors that happen to be on sale are gone from the shelves at Whole Foods as well, and don't fucking get me started on the abomination that is Kirkland Signature Kombucha.

Oddly enough I've never tried my hand at making it.  Shadow's mom does and before we moved in together, one of his room mates made massive glass jars of it too.  I miss that guy, he was Native South American, gorgeous long jet black hair, beautiful reddish brown skin.  It looked like he had walked straight off the pages of Nat Geo.  He also made yerba mate, which is yet another tea beverage that I drank before the hype.

Yerba mate is not nearly as good as kombucha though.  When I lived in the Ironbound they used to drink it out of these weird wooden cups with metal straws.  At first glance I thought they were the fuzzy variety of coconut and not the giant green I'm used to seeing in Florida.  Living in that hood was a trip.

Only one of my children shares my love for the bubbly beverage and that is my Ana girl.  Dino never cared for the stuff and I don't know why.  While I would drink a bottle during a special din din at Whole Foods, Dino would always ask for lemonade or when he was very little chocolate milk.  Man, I miss those adventures.  Now it's a fiasco for us to take a two mile bus ride down to TJ's.  There is so much to forget, and so much to remember, lines, masks, empty shelves.  It's not fun.  TJ's is our sanctuary and the experience has been sullied.

Perhaps it is drinks where Ana is more adventurous and food where Dino is.  My son will eat anything and everything no questions asked, but Ana, she likes to pretend that she doesn't like something and then eat it anyway, like with nuts in baked goods, or my very scrumptious lentil soup.  Jokes on her because I've been sneaking red lentils into food for months now to add more nutrition.

Honestly, I don't even know if kombucha actually does anything for me or not.  I'm so messed up from all those years of medications it's not even funny.  I have noticed that it helps for the sore throats I'm prone to due to psoriasis.  Technically they're strep throat, but they're not painful for me, bucha turns it into a slight tickle and eventually nothing.  It especially helps for if I get a phlegmy cough which I tend to get about twice a year, when the weather drastically changes, so autumn and spring.  

The sad thing is, I have no one to go get me bottles of the stuff when I'm under the weather.  I only buy a bottle a week now, and I take sips throughout the day, I can't seem to drink an entire bottle in one sitting anymore.

Now, on to the title of this post.  Around the time Ana was learning to talk, she (as all toddlers do) would be "helpful" and she would go get me my bucha.  Well, Shadow and I thought it was funny to start saying Bucha Bitch at some point, again don't know why, but that's what happens when two adults are in massive amounts of pain, things become funny for no other reason than a small child repeating them.  So now bucha bitch is a thing, Ana knows she's not allowed to say it now, and Dino is at that age where curse words slip and I pretend not to hear, even though I'm 35 and still have yet to utter a curse word in the presence of my father.

Thus is life, and thus is bucha.

Bitch.