Moving Back to Duluth. Need Input.
By JPERSCH on Dec 18, 2011 in Help Wanted
I have finally convinced my wife to come back to Duluth after years of trying to persuade her. Her biggest concerns are education for our children, cultural diversity, organic selection for food and a good doctor of osteopathic medicine that has a family practice. I turn to PDD because my personal circle of influence in town stays with the norm of not researching these subjects and she needs a good place to start. We do not need to live in Duluth proper, but would like to be close enough that Grandma can reach us in a short amount of time to babysit.
Oh, and on a side note, I wanted to post this link that I just found while cleaning my bookmarks out. It is the best thing I have found on PDD to date!
http://music.metafilter.com/228/You-Spin-Me-Round
Were you the one trying to convince your mom to buy the brick house on the corner of West 6th Street and Central? If so, it’s still for sale.
Whole Foods Coop has your organic food needs covered. Check that one off the list.
Whole foods is where we go when there on vacation, great store. Is there a good farmers market in the summer? How about a farmer that sells grass fed beef in halves?
Barrett, I have been trying to get my wife to look at that house, but the pictures list aren’t a great selling point. I keep e-mailing the listing company to try and get more images, but they fail to respond. Kind of pissing me off too. I think it is a great location with the school right there, the fields being put in and my mom living in Faith Haven.
We get good grass fed beef every year (just got our) from the Liebart’s family farm just outside Superior. They are for all purposes organic (just not “certified”) They also won the 2009 Wisc. state sustainability award for sustainable agricultural practice. Good stuff ($3.00 per lb), check THAT off your list too!
While I have no experience with any of them, a quick google search yields a number of DOs in the area.
Yes, there are ample farmers’ markets here. Between Duluth and Superior, you can find one about 4 days a week. There are also a number of CSAs serving the area, practically delivering food to you.
I’ll second Liebaerts as a great source of meat. They’re great people with wonderful practices and a real drive to do it right.
Why are you doing this to her?
Where do you live now?
We live in Merrimack, NH. It is a great place to live, but there is nothing like having a family support near.
I’m finding that many of the newer MDs (probably those who’ve finished their residencies in the past five to ten years) are also acting more like DOs these days. I’ve always had DOs since I could choose for myself, but when I switched physicians a couple years ago, I went with an MD that came highly recommended from several people. She definitely has a philosophy and practices like a DO, which I was pleasantly surprised by.
As far as cultural diversity goes, you probably won’t find much outside the city limits. As far as inside the city limits, it’s not like a large city of course, but things have come a long way since you left.
I have spent significant time in every school in this city at every grade level, and I don’t think there’s any such thing as a bad school here. There are unpleasant classrooms (which either means a lazy teacher or too many behaviorally challenged kids in too large a class for the help provided), but those kinds of things can change year to year and situation to situation. It is really very rare, unless you live in Lakewood, to have a classroom without any kind of cultural/racial diversity. (Though you do sometimes encounter classrooms with only one non-white student.)
I do still see unconscious racism in teachers all too frequently, but it’s getting better all the time.
Congrats on the move. Duluth is a great place to live. As for cultural diversity, not much relative to many other cities of its size. We expose ourselves and our children to diversity by staying involved with the UMD and its cultural activities. The universities in town are among only a few ‘sources’ of diversity in the city.
Duluth is very diverse. There are Swedes and Norskies and the miserable Finns and a few Germans and …
Give Casey Knutson Carbert at Edmunds Realty a call … she does a rockstar job on the house-hunting end of things.
My kids see Heather Winesett at St. Lukes Peds. I think she’s trained as a traditional M.D., but she treats the whole person and my kids like her + nurses there.
Education is what you make of it. But that’s true anywhere.
You are welcome over at the parenting email group that sprouted out of the natural childbirth prenatal yoga class in town. It’s called Circles of Duluth and is hosted at Google groups. (It’s an open list … anyone is welcome unless you want to spam the list).
Check out Green Pastures for dairy.
There’s farm out that way which also sells lots based on their production of vegetables, but every time we call there are none available. I second Whole Foods as a great all-natural grocery.
+1 for Green Pastures Dairy. They are genuinely nice people and have great cheese and beef. I miss them at the Farmers’ Market every week…
The local USDA inspector buys his meat from Old World. Just sayin.
We get our milk delivered from Dahl’s Dairy in Babbitt and get meat and eggs bi-weekly from My Little Farm in Moose Lake. We live healthier lives in bike-friendly Duluth than we did on Long Island. Racial diversity is more limited here. The lake isn’t the ocean, but it’s its own wonderfulness. Come, life is good here.
The limits of racial diversity here is a downside, that is. There are downsides, even to life in Duluth. And I don’t want to minimize them. But life in Duluth is generally good, if not perfect.
Ha. That’s funny, I just noticed, the link you posted was one that I put up on Metafilter. So encapsulating about 30% of all my internet time, Metafiler and pdd. Tell you what, if you make it back to these fair shores I’ll hand deliver a copy of the cd that the linked song is on. As to the broader questions: yeah there are a few CSAs in the area, including The Food Farm (http://www.foodfarm.us/Site/about_us.html) amongst others, they have weekly egg shares as well as winter/summer/canning/picky eater shares. Whole foods is pretty good. Mt Royal Fine foods has integrated organic selections, so organic selections are right next to standard products which I find nice. Diversity is limited unless you are actively seeking it out, in which case there are enclaves, but like everything else in Duluth you have to work to achieve what yo want ( I just talked to someone who recently went to a gathering where they where the only while folks present). It is not a city to appease the lazy. If you are active and assertive you can have a very fulfilling, life affirming life here. If you expect things to be easy…. well I hear Nashville is a booming town.
And then there’s the lake. You can’t go wrong with a lake like ours.