Modern Wife

Tag: easter

  • My Daughter’s Homemade Lipbalm

    My Daughter’s Homemade Lipbalm

    I tend to skip the lipbalm. Instead of putting on lipbalm when my lips are dry I just drink more water and eat more hydrating fruits. Most lipbalm is made of petroleum, which is a burden on the immune system and obviously wouldn’t be helping me in the long run.

    Until I tried my daughter’s super awesome lipbalm.

    My daughter made this fantastic lipbalm out of healthy kitchen ingredients:

    2 teaspoons organic virgin coconut oil
    1 teaspoon raw honey
    a few drops vanilla or peppermint extract (optional)

    Ingredients for homemade lipbalm - coconut oil, raw honey and peppermint extract

    Mix them all up and store in a little plastic container. She made one by recycling a used HDPE juice bottle. Another time she upcycled plastic Easter eggs. My kid is amazing!

    If the weather is warm, keep your lipbalm refrigerated when you’re not using it to prevent the coconut oil from liquifying.

    I love my daughter’s lipbalm. I use it all the time. My lips stay soft and moist from the healing powers of coconut oil and raw honey.

  • Organic Easter Eggs

    Organic Easter Eggs

    For weeks now I’ve been walking past grocery aisles seeing brightly colored plastic Easter eggs that pop open to contain candy. We’ve been saving our set year after year, and called it the eco-friendly way because they’re reusable. But a basketful of candy is hardly the celebration of spring I would like to encourage as a healthy family tradition.

    At one point we also brought home an Easter Egg dye kit from the local convenience store. It came with little tablets of dye and a bunch of stickers for decorating hardboiled eggs. Although the package states it’s non-toxic, the list of ingredients contains synthetic chemical dyes that have been found to cause allergies and behavioral problems in children.

    So this weekend we are starting a new old tradition of making Easter eggs out of vegetables that are naturally staining.

    Like beets!

    Easter Eggs dyed with beets

    And red cabbage!

    Easter Eggs dyed with red cabbage

    And turmeric!

    Easter Eggs dyed with turmeric

    The recipe is easy.

    You need:
    1 tablespoon of distilled white vineger for each cup of water
    white organic eggs

    So if you need 3 cups of water in a saucepan to cover your eggs, then you will need to add 3 tablespoons of vinegar.

    Then chop up and add your staining vegetable of choice. Put them in the vinegar/water combination with the eggs. Bring to a boil, turn off the stove, then cover and let sit for 15 minutes. Transfer the whole soup into a quart mason jar or any quart-sized recycled plastic container you don’t mind getting stained. Some people strain the vegetables out but I decided to keep my vegetables in the soak, in hopes there would be some patterns stamped against the eggs. Let it sit overnight.

    Get the eggs out and let it dry on paper towels or old newspapers. This is how my eggs looked just out of their color soup. Turmeric made yellow, red cabbage made blue, and beets made red.

    Easter Eggs dyed with beets, red cabbage and turmeric

    After they dried, more patterns emerged.

    Easter Eggs dyed with beets, red cabbage and turmeric

    Transfer the dried Easter eggs back into the egg cartons they came in originally. Refrigerate until Easter morning.

    Here are other ways to do this:
    Recipe from Full Circle
    Go Eco when Dyeing Eggs

    Have a great week and an egg-cellent Easter!