Go on, you know you want to. Just pick up a musical instrument and play it. If you don’t have an instrument, just sing. Or beatbox.
Don’t worry if it’s not good enough for anyone else to hear. Just sing. Sing a song.
Tag: daughter
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Take a walk
Spring is just around the corner. The snow and ice is melting. The sun is shining brighter. This past weekend we took a 2-mile walk to the village and back. It was great to get some exercise, fresh air, sun and sightseeing at Camden Village. Come along with us.
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Duck Tape Gift Ribbon Tutorial
My 9 year old daughter is a duck tape artist! Here she is demonstrating how to make homemade gift ribbons using duck tape. Top off your Christmas presents with one of these babies. Mama loves them!
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Zapping an Earache Away
We’ve had a really fun weekend with friends, carving pumpkins and roasting marshmallows on a fire outdoors. Then suddenly last night my daughter woke up crying and clutching her ear.
My first response is to set her up with a Hulda Clark Zapper. She zapped, holding it close to her ear and under her jaw. I also gave her some echinacea and brought her a warm washcloth to comfort the ear that hurts. Pretty soon my husband was up too and set her up with a hot water bottle to replace the washcloth. Within half an hour she was asleep again.
I tried to imagine the same situation if I didn’t have a Hulda Clark Zapper.
I grew up in the tropics. I never had an earache as a child. I once had a mosquito enter my ear, but that’s a whole different story. My husband grew up here in Maine, and told me he constantly had earaches. He remembers staying up all night, 6 to 7 hours of crying in pain, with only a hot water bottle for comfort.
A while back in conversation with a dad at a playground, he told me how glad he was he had health insurance because of how often he had to take his children to the emergency room for fevers and ear infections. Getting a crying child bundled up and in the car to go to the emergency room, where she has to wait to get treated with antibiotics is pretty extreme for something as common as an ear infection. Antibiotics also do not provide immediate relief. According to most medical websites I consulted, doctors prescribe ear drops and recommend an over-the-counter pain reliever for kids.
Personally I would hate to do this to my kid. First off I think hospitals are a good source of secondary infection. You come in with one problem and leave with more. Next, I don’t like drugs. Even the ones doctors prescribe have a level of toxicity. That’s why doctors have to control them with a prescription. Then of course, there is the threat of antibiotic-resistant pathogens we cannot anymore ignore. And finally, going to the ER is so stressful at a time when a child most needs to rest.
The Hulda Clark Zapper has allowed me to take care of my family in the comfort of our home, quickly, painlessly and effectively. I am so grateful to have it in my life.
(Disclosure: I am owner/manager of NaturalHealthSupply.com and we sell zappers. My husband and I have been zapping since 1997, and in 1999 we began selling zappers because we believe in its benefits. I feel really lucky to have found the zapper as a solution to many of my family’s health problems. I’ve spoken openly about zapping long before we started selling them. My testimonial above is my own personal experience with the zapper, and is not intended as a medical claim.)
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Hug a Tree
It has been so hot here in the Central Valley of California. The little tree in front of our house cracked right in two. It’s the tree the Chipmunks in our latest Time Brats movie perched up on. (Boy, am I glad it didn’t crack while the kids were up on it!)
Speaking of trees, here’s my daughter hugging a tree for Team Yupapotamus Ranch Capture California Adventure #36: Hug a Tree.
Go on, hug a tree and say, it’s all right, tree. I love you!
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Happy Mothers Day!
I got lavender plants for Mothers Day this year.
They are absolutely beautiful and smells heavenly.
Have a beautiful day!
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Carrots for Red Highlights in Hair
My husband’s grandmother was an Irish redhead. My husband’s mother had auburn hair. Our daughter’s hair bleached blond under the sun, and darkened as she grew older. She has natural copper highlights in her hair when the sun hits it. She wanted more of that red to come out. Tonight she showed me a YouTube video of how to use ingredients from our kitchen pantry to enhance the red highlights in her hair. Here’s the video:
We didn’t have cranberries but we had everything else. So here’s what we whipped up:
Ingredients:
3 medium organic carrots, grated
3 tablespoons organic plain yogurt
2 tablespoons raw honeyOther things needed:
plastic shower cap
plastic bag to wear over clothing
paper bag or old newspapers to stand on and catch drippings
Get ready by pulling a plastic bag over clothing and spread paper bag or old newspapers on the floor to catch the drippings. Mix the ingredients together in a bowl. Spread all over hair until it is all soaked and caked.
Put a plastic shower cap over head. Let it sit for at least half an hour. Rinse it out in the kitchen sink so the carrot shavings don’t clog your bathroom drain. Jump in the shower and wash/shampoo hair as usual.
It really works! I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Carrots do stain. I’m wondering now if it would be just as effective to juice the carrots and use that instead of grated carrots. It would save us the trouble of picking out little carrot shavings out of hair, which we had to do a lot!
We’ll try cranberries when they become available in the fall. I bet beets would do the job too.
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Garden Update
My Shade Garden is coming along nicely. Most of it, at least. I planted early spring plants such as peas, sugar snap peas, broccoli, lettuce, radishes and beets on February 16 and 17.
Remember those Sugar Snap Peas I got from Botanical Interests that I planted a while back? Here they are now!
Aren’t they happy?
The radishes are perking up adorably as well. Here’s one. I love its red stems and heart-shaped leaves.
I can’t wait to see these underground beauties.
The lettuce, broccoli, spinach and beets have also sprouted, but I’ll wait a little bit until they’re bigger before I take pictures.
Someone has been messing around in my garden. I don’t know if it’s a bird or a little mammal, but I really need to figure out a way to keep my plants from getting eaten. I have both a cat and a dog, and the neighbors’ cats come over to play too. You’d think we’d keep the rodents and birds in check, but I still see a lot of gopher holes throughout the lawn.
I was thinking of maybe building some kind of Arduino-powered robot-scarecrow to create a motion-detecting alarm to scare off little creatures. Still tossing around some ideas. Maybe something as simple as solar-powered or wind-powered kinetic sculptures would be sufficient.
As for the Little Marvel Shelling Peas I had leftover from last year, I wrote about refrigerating them before putting them in the ground. I think I read about it somewhere in an old copy of The Old Farmers Almanac. Well, my peas took a very long time to emerge. The Sugar Snaps were way further along before I saw even just a peep of the peas. I finally saw some of them this weekend.
What else have I got to report? Remember the rose bushes I pruned and fed banana peels? They are growing so big and beautiful. Here’s Security, the Rose Bush with the killer thorns by my daughter’s window.
The Olive tree is sprouting shoots at its base.
I think I may take cuttings this summer and see if we can grow more of this Olive tree that is so rich in symbolism.
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The Adventures of Cosmo
Look at my sweet little dog whispering secrets to my daughter. Cosmo is the best dog ever. Very mellow around kids, lets my daughter dress him up, follows basic commands like sit, stay, drop it, does a lot of fun tricks like roll over, high-five, jump through hoop, the works!
But.
Cosmo is a rat terrier. He runs very fast and is a killing machine. The other day my husband saw him with the neighbor’s chicken in his mouth. Cosmo got reprimanded big-time in our house. He chases squirrels up trees and keeps our house and farm rodent-free.
Most of the time we don’t see him in action. One time in Maine we saw him emerge from underneath our little red cabin with a mouse’s tail dangling off his lips.
This past weekend I was turning the compost pile while the kids were running around in the field, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Cosmo digging furiously. When I looked at him directly I saw him push his pointy nose into the hole and pull out little pink things, which he dropped on the ground and started eating one by one.
Baby mice!
I called the kids so they could watch their beloved mild-mannered carnivore fulfill the circle of life. Amid screams of Ewwww, I heard one of them dare my daughter to touch the baby mouse. So I picked up one of them, the mouse, not the kid, still alive, and put it right in my daughter’s hand. Suddenly all the kids wanted to pet the baby.
It was so small. Its eyes weren’t even open yet. It kept opening and closing its mouth, looking for its Mama, but no sound came from it. My daughter wanted to feed it milk and keep it as a pet. I said it was pointless to raise it just so our dog or cat could eat it once it was grown.
We decided to put it back in the hole it was found in, to give it a chance. Maybe it would die of cold or a stray cat would snatch it up. But maybe its Mama would come back and find it and take it far away so it could be someone else’s nuisance. Or… or… maybe it will come back as some kind of super villain swearing vengeance on my dog for killing its siblings. That would be really interesting.
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My Daughter’s Snack Recipe
I don’t remember when my daughter started helping me in the kitchen. Was it at age 3 or was it even younger? I remember her taking initiative making us snacks not even a mother could love.
Now that she’s 8 she’s become quite a cook. She can cook her own breakfast eggs. She’s been my assistant for the past two Thanksgivings, peeling and slicing potatoes like a big girl. She’s also got those really strong arms from gymnastics. The girl can whisk like a pro!
Today she made another one of her no-bake snacks, but this time she wrote her recipe out.
I asked her what the letters stood for. Here’s what she told me:
C.C. – cupcake liner
G.M. – granola Mom’s
M.S. – marshmallows
Sh.W. – sugar white (in our house that’s organic evaporated cane sugar)
H.W. – honey raw
R.O. – raisins organicAnd what does M.W.H.B. with a circle and backslash stand for?
No Mother With Hanging Butt. 😐