When you think of herbs, you think of a sprig of thyme or a big basil plant, or maybe a crushed mint leaf in your tea or a sachet of dried lavender. You think of plants which accompany food, perhaps, but you don't often think of food itself. The definition of an herb, however, is pretty wide. Houdret says that "a herb is now generally understood to mean a plant, some part of which, roots, stem, leaves, flowers or fruits, is used for food, medicine, flavouring or scent" (1).

Common foods, of course, we use as a source of nutrition. But many also have qualities which can help treat minor medical problems, improve appearance, and/or simply build up overall health. Read the rest of this entry »

Chamomile is one of the best herbs to use for babies, hence the entire post dedicated to telling you all about it. It's gentle, it's effective in a variety of ways, and it's easy to find or to grow yourself. It has a naturally mild, sweet taste. Read the rest of this entry »

"...and their fruit shall be for food and their leaves for healing."

{Ezekiel 47:12}

I'm interested in keeping my children naturally healthy. (Which reminds me, oh yeah, I have children. Have I given them breakfast yet...?)

Here's the thing. I don't have anything against doctors, really, I don't. But I do have a few significant issues with 1) the health care system in general (who doesn't?), 2) the exorbitant costs, and 3) the drug companies. I have a big problem with my children being part of the "guinea pig" process. Read the rest of this entry »

I've been a new Mom three times in the last 4 years, so I feel like I should know something about this. Actually, I thought that when my third baby was born it would be almost a non-event. "Oh, look, another one! He's cute... well, throw him in crib..." Okay. I exaggerate. It was definitely an event, hours worth, with a 10 pound 10 ounce blue baby at the end of it. Blue, yes, because he had the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck twice. He has since recovered nicely and no longer looks like a Smurf. We are thankful, though we would love him anyway... Read the rest of this entry »

1. It won't last forever.
2. You will sleep again.
3. It's not just okay, it's absolutely necessary to ask for help.
4. Take a nap every chance you get.
5. Enlist the slowcooker, the pizza place, your husband, your in-laws, your Chinese delivery place for help with dinner. No shame.
6. Peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches count as a home-cooked meal.
7. Your baby won't look like a Gerber commercial all the time. It's okay.
8. Take a bath or a shower every single day, put on a little makeup, and put on some fresh clothes. You'll feel a thousand times better.
9. A newborn requires something like 8 to 10 hours of care per day. You're working a full-time job in addition to being a wife, a home-maker, etc. Give yourself a break.
10. Keep easy, protein-rich snacks on hand: string cheese, yogurt, protein bars, trail mix. Eat them.
11. Drink water till you feel like you're floating. It will help you feel more energized, it will refresh you, it will clean out your body, it will make your skin brighter.
12. Go to bed as early as you want to whenever you can.
13. Tell people what you need help with specifically: they're not good at guessing (especially husbands).
14. If the house is a mess and it's driving you crazy, pick one thing to tackle each day. Monday, sweep the floor. Tuesday, put away laundry. Wednesday, pick up clutter. Don't try to clean the whole house and bring complete order in one day.
15. Hire a housecleaner, if you can, to come one afternoon or morning and get things scrubbed and shiny. It will give you a boost for getting back into a routine.
16. Trust your gut. It's great to read parenting books and get advice, but keep things in perspective. Go with your gut. You're the Mommy.
17. Say NO loudly and firmly when sick people ask to get near or hold your baby. It is NOT worth it to end up with a sick newborn.
18. Babies cry. This is a natural thing, and it does not mean there is a crisis, you are a bad Mommy, or anything like that. Remember that crying is their only way of communicating at this point. Sometimes all they're saying is, "Hey, um, I'm bored. Can you do that funny peek-a-boo thing again?"
19. Emotions, sleeplessness, and hormones are a crazy combination. It's normal to feel overwhelmed. It's normal to cry. It's normal to be frustrated. Talk to your spouse, your Mom, your best friend. If you feel depressed for more than a few days, talk to your doctor.
20. You will make mistakes; this is a law of parenting. But you will still be the best possible parent for your baby, so hang in there, do your best, take care of yourself, and relax your standards. Perfection isn't the goal; love is. The more you relax, the more you will enjoy your baby.

Image courtesy of therapycatguardian on Flickr.

There he stood, my little 1 1/2 year old, with his blond curls on his head and his diaper in his hand. As in, not on his little bottom. And yes, there was poop. And it was Not Good.

I was writing about happiness. I had stopped writing about happiness just to go get that little booger up from his nap. I was needing a break from the sort of thing I kept finding in my research on happiness. Things like this:

Happiness is..."the ultimate state of conscious feeling where all the five senses integrate into a purest form of dreamless love. Happiness flows out of 'FORGIVE'ness and not 'FORGET'ness," says Asesh Datta here.

This is why happiness is so elusive; we've just defined the heart and soul out of it.

How in the name of all that is yellow and buttery are you supposed to make all five senses integrate into a purest form of dreamless love?

First of all, what is dreamless love? Is love normally full of dreams? Is it better without the dreams? How do you get it to be dreamless? How can you tell? Can you be happy with love that stubbornly retains one or two dreams involving giant French fries, a purple tuxedo, and a burro named Roxy?

And how do you integrate all five senses into this sort of state? Let's just refresh on all five senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. Please explain to me how you can smell dreamless love. Please. I want to know.

Anybody?

By now you're thinking Okay, ha ha ha with the sarcasm, where is the happiness?

Well, it's elusive, like a deer, so quit being so pushy.

I take that back. Happiness isn't elusive. Happiness is hard work. We pretend it's elusive so we don't have to fess up to being lazy. That way we can continue to be unhappy without feeling like it's our own fault, which allows us to continue complaining about the utter injustice of the universe and how we're gonna tell that Happiness Guru a thing or two when we get up there. Or over there. Or through there. Whatever.

Happiness isn't elusive, like a deer. Happiness is big and ugly, like a rhino. Happiness likes stare-downs. Happiness needs plenty of space and care and feeding. Happiness makes great big piles of poop.

Uh, my analogy might have broken down on that last one.

And now I have a story to tell. I finished the line above (the one about the rhino poop, you remember?), and went to wake up my napping children. Well. They weren't exactly napping anymore. They had been awake for an undisclosed amount of time as I recorded my brilliant and vanishing insights into your happiness. That is the price they pay for having a famous authoress a writer as a mother.

I opened the door to my daughter's room. I opened the door to my son's room. I smelled rhinos. Well, I smelled something I now unfailingly associate with rhinos.

Those are the little ironies of life. You get up from writing about happiness and walk in to wake your wonderful, cuddly, cute baby only to find yourself scraping poo off the floor, which was put there by said baby, whom you are currently not referring to as "wonderful" or "cute" and very definitely not "cuddly." Half a roll of paper towels and a bottle of disinfectant later, your happiness is being put to the test. And this is the essay question that stumps you at the end:

Can you be happy while you are cleaning up poo?

I will now defer to my collection of quotations from people much smarter than me:

Abraham Lincoln, who certainly knew a thing or two about cleaning up gigantic messes, said that "Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."

Benjamin Franklin said that "It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man," so according to the illustrious Mr. Franklin, me cleaning poo off the floor is a happier person than me sitting around idly in that cushy blue chair, reading a novel and nibbling pistachios. I don't know. I've always admired B.F. but he seems to be falling a little short of insightful on this one.

Here's what I think: happiness doesn't come when you have more fun; fun comes when you have more happiness.

We wait for certain conditions and expect them to provide happiness and we're always disappointed. Reality can never live up to fantasy. Disney World is fun when you're there, but it's never quite as good as it was in those hours of imagining how great it would be to go to Disney World.

You don't imagine standing in line for an hour, melting into a pool of sweat in the shiny asphalt, and wearing a scratchy polyester jumpsuit as a fill-in for Captain Kirk in the make-your-own Star Trek movie event. So you go, you have fun, but it's not as good as the expectation. Too often we let that gap between what we get and what we expect just destroy our happiness.

I didn't expect poo on the bed when I walked into my son's room, but that's what I got. And there was my moment of destiny in the pursuit of happiness: do I curse and mutter? Do I let it ruin my day? Do I yell at my child?

I'm basically a selfish person, and I'd rather be happy than be unhappy. So I stopped and looked and then I laughed. Because, really, what else can you do?

I laughed because it's a great story. I laughed as I took the sheets of the bed, bathed the child, and mopped the floor. (Okay, I might have stopped laughing at some point because you can't just laugh indefinitely; bear with me, I'm trying to make a point.) Here's the point: Happy is up to you. Happy doesn't make the mess go away, but it does make cleaning up any kind of mess better.

Oh, and yeah, I also laughed because it's not as great a story as my friend's, whose daughter not only took off her diaper and pooped but then proceeded to wipe it all over the walls. Comparison isn't always a bad thing.

Images courtesy of mpeterke and lanuiop.

Parenting is supposed to bring out that deep, unselfish part of you that doesn't mind getting up in the middle of the night and being alternately pooped and vomited upon. Maybe it worked for me and I'm more unselfish now that I used to be, but then again...

Maybe not.

I admire those Moms who breastfeed because it's a good thing to do. I'm not one of them. I breastfeed for purely selfish reasons:

1. I need to be needed.

There's nothing like being the only one able to provide food to make you feel needed. Sure, I can pump and someone else could give baby the bottle, but guess what? I'm still the source, baby. Talk about using your children to fill emotional voids? I am the queen.

2. I really like watching their little faces when they nurse.

It's probably somewhat the same with bottle feeding, but then you have to share. My son Zeke, the current nurser, is especially expressive. The early morning feedings are best. He's like a druggie getting his fix - head thrown back, eyes kind of rolling around and glazed over, and then that euphoric look when he gets full and just kind of collapses on my arm. Love it.

3. I'm lazy. Mixing bottles = work + mess.

Having to get out of bed in the middle of the night to feed the baby? Not for me. I like the roll over, pick up baby, stick boob in mouth method.

4. I am so not giving up the excuse to sit down and put my feet up at regular intervals throughout the day.

Other nursing moms get all excited about how quick their babies eat. Not me. Oh no. Mine are forced to 30-minute feeding sessions at a minimum, and I'm happy if I can make it 45. "I can't, I'm nursing," is a wonderful thing to be able to say.

5. I like having big boobs.

Oh, come on, you small-breasted women understand this. I was somewhere around a triple AAA when I got married; and I think there's a reason that corresponds to the size of a teeny tiny battery. That's about how big they were. My poor husband.

We got pregnant, my boobs expanded, and suddenly so did my wardrobe options! Peasant blouses? Yes! V-necks? Yes! Plain t-shirts in dark colors that used to make me look like a wimpy boy? Yes! No possibility of being mistaken for a male again.

I'm terrified of losing this lovely curvaceousness, so onward, forward with the breastfeeding train. I don't know what I'll do when it's time to wean this one, because we're not planning on more, at least not for a long time. Guess I better check out the implant options or it's back to major push-up bras for me...

image courtesy of jessicafm.

So I figured, hey, Zeke is a month old, maybe I should bathe him now. Yep, that' s just how great a Mom I am. I don't charge my kids extra for baths. I even use soap that smells good Read the rest of this entry »

{from 09 April 2009} This is what I tell Mara & Robbie when they get those frequent little booboos: "You're okay. Stop crying. Back to playing!" The essence is this: Don't waste your time whining, even if it's a real hurt.

Maybe I sound like a mean Mom, but I'm trying to help my children. I don't want their pleasure in life to be constantly ruined by the little upsets. Hurts always happen. Real ones. Stopping and letting every single owie become a big interruption in the day's work and play is the beginning of emotional bondage. I fight it all too often in my own head. This morning, for example: day 2 of life with 3 under 3.

I did too much yesterday (due to the 'me trying to control everything' tendency) and I was hurting worse this morning than I did yesterday. As Joe got ready to leave, I nursed Zeke and whined over my booboos.

Why can't my Mom still be alive and here to help me? Why is all my family so far away? Why is everyone so busy? Why can't Joe take more time off work?

Whine, whine, whine, whine, whine.

Meanwhile, a perfect and healthy baby rested on me, two precious children slept in the next room, and my tired husband prepared for his busy, 10-hour workday without complaint. He had been up multiple times the night before, too. A baby crying in the same room tends to wake up all the occupants... But he was up, bleary eyes and all, putting on his uniform, grabbing a lunch, and going to work because that's what he needs to do.

I learn a lot from him.

Image courtesy of "CAVE CANEM."