“Mommy, when you were a little kid, did you bite your toenails, and were they hard, too?”
Yuuuckkk!
Category Archives: General
My first burn!
My friend, Rob, got a new fire hoop and I got to help break it in! So here it is… my first hooping video and my first burn! My heart was beating 300 times a minute. Kaia was there to watch and she said, “Momma, I don’t think I’m going to do that when I grow up… it looks dangerous!” hehe, smart kid 🙂
Watch me!!
I can’t wait to do it again!!
The Few, The Proud, The taste-testers of Crisp Cat!
I spent some time this afternoon at the warehouse of Tree Huggin’ Treats – Crispy Cat Candy Bars, being a taste tester for their newest shipment. They are a local company that sells their delicious organic, preservative free, vegan candy bars nationwide! So, I got to sit down with 10 of the same candy bar and decide if I liked them or not, and why. I was amazed at the difference in flavors. I really could tell which ones had bad oils or nuts and which ones were really fresh and full-bodied. They take the results of their taste test and decide which ones are good enough to sell. Then, I got to go home with a big handful of Crispy Cats of all flavors! Really, I felt like Homer when he was the taste tester for Duff Beer! (It’s so nice to see a nice family making a go of a business and not going corporate, too!)
I have to say, my favorite is definitely the Mint Coconut Crispy Cat! You should definitely get your local store to carry them!!
Beautiful mama
This weekend I threw a Blessingway (kind of like a spiritual baby shower) for my good friend and business partner! She is 34 weeks pregnant with her first child. Her close friends came over and we had a circle to give her our blessings and love for her journey into motherhood. It was really beautiful. Then a friend of mine who is a henna tattoo artist came over to tattoo mama’s belly. Isn’t this beautiful??!!
Then the ladies there had their hands done too. The henna paste comes off after ~a day and there is a stain from the henna that is left. The tattoos can last anywhere from 2-4 weeks, so now when we look at our hands we will stop for a second to send mama good birthing energy. Cool, eh?
Thank you!
Thank you so much for this, Katie! (Sorry it has taken me so long to say that!!)
house skin
When I asked Toby what they did yesterday while I was at work he said “It was a pretty slow day”. Yeah, right!! Continue reading
building and building
Check out what my man made me today!! Once in a blue moon he gets in a serious organization mood… so I encouraged this by asking him to make me something to better organize my tinctures (this is my home stash… the stuff at the office takes up a large closet :-))Â All alphabetized neatly from A to Z… oooh I love order!
Here’s the progress at the house… walls are going up. Interior walls down stairs, interior and exterior upstairs. Here we are framing out some of the upstairs walls.
Above and below is Toby and Eden framing out a window above the stairwell.
And here I am, so beautifully gracing another window above the stairwell… I think I should have taken off the tool belt and put on the stiletto heels to really get the full effect!
Here’s Toby in the window that will be above the bureau. (Stilettos would have made all the difference here, too :-))
shroom medicine
A good friend of mine called me this morning. She said she and her two boys were out mushroom hunting and found some Ganoderma tsugae (or Hemlock Varnish Shelf). It’s closely related to the Reishi mushrooms and is used in a similar way medicinally. So, she asked if I would like it. I said of course, thinking I would make a little medicine for the winter. WELL, a little medicine would be the understatement of the year! They brought in 8 mushrooms ranging in size from 3 inches across to 2 feet!! Absolutely beautiful, stunning examples of Ganoderma tsugae!! So, right now, they are on the stove. I chopped them up (while they are fresh and I could still chop them, ’cause they get hard as a rock if you let them dry) and put them in a pot of water. They will simmer until the water is reduced to a thick, dark brown concentrated liquid. Then, I will measure out the liquid and add enough alcohol to make the final product 35% alcohol. Then I will put the mushrooms back in the liquid and let it sit for 4 weeks to macerate. After that, I’ll strain the mushrooms out and voila! This process helps to extract all the medicine available in the mushrooms.
Above are the smaller ones!!
The two largest mushrooms (below) I saved to dry and hang on the wall… one at my house, one at the clinic. If I need them later, I can process them, but I really like the idea of hanging them on my wall (a little energetic/home immune support :-)) Yes, that is my foot in the pictures for size comparison! (I don’t have small feet, by the way!)
Today’s Haul
Toby and I headed out today to pick up the shower and some wood for exterior (upstairs) siding. On the way, we stopped by the Habitat store to see if there was anything new and got a great haul! We picked up another antique door (this one for our bedroom) for $25, a cast iron kitchen sink in great condition for $75 (retails new for $400), and a jenn-air gas convection oven for $125!!! The oven is between 6 and 9 years old, but is in great condition. We found similar models on the internet for ~$2000!!! Wahooo!!
Right now, I’m enjoying a little popcorn snack that I’ll share with you, since you asked…
Pop up some popcorn in a little olive oil (we use the stove instead of a microwave). Then add a splash of tamari (enough to get some flavor but not so much as to really wet the popcorn). Sprinkle on some nutritional yeast (I like lots… add it to your taste), and a dash of spirulina. A really yummy treat with lots of minerals and B-vitamins! (Well, Toby thinks it’s gross, but I love it!!)
Bottles
Oh, I forgot… Here are all the bottles that we will be incorporating into the cordwood walls. We’ve put all of them into a big bathtub with soapy water to try to get the labels and dirt off. We mostly have clear, green, yellowish, and blue. I have two red ones that I got at an antique store. If you have any cool colored or funky shaped bottles in your house that you would like to include in the walls of our house, I would be honored to have them! I’ll put a little note inside with your name, so you will be preserved in my house forever 🙂
Cordwood!! Wild foods and Chickens.
Toby laid down our first cordwood pieces today! Very Exciting!! Here he is, putting in the first piece!!
This is our friend Eden who has started helping us build. She is working with the mortar here. It is a mix hydrated lime, water, and sand, and should be a nice white once it is dry. That will help to brighten things up inside (as opposed to a dark gray mortar). this wall will be a part of the mechanical/mud/laundry room.
Here is the same wall from the outside.
I also ground down all the plants that I harvested a couple of weeks ago. I don’t know if it is worth the effort. The Lamb’s Quarters only made 6.5 ounces of flour, the Aster 5.5, and the Yellow Dock ~4.5 ounces. The Thistle I had to trash because I couldn’t grind it up fine enough and I was worried about getting little sharp thistle pieces in our food. So, for all the effort in gathering, drying, and grinding them, I think it may be a better idea to gather a little each year and use the wild green flours to supplement and increase the nutrients in the ones we buy.
Have I mentioned that Suki (the dog) and Sweetie (the Houdini chicken) have come to an agreement? I don’t know how or why it happened, but Sweetie, who continues to escape her coop, roams all around the yard and Suki doesn’t bother her. She hops back into the coop to lay her eggs and then gets out again! So, we decided to try to just open up the coop, during the day while we are here, and let all the chickens roam around. Suki seems to be fine with it. She will occasionally give chase to one of the chickens, but there have been no casualties and the chickens love it! In fact, when we don’t open the coop up early enough, all the chickens are trying (and often succeeding) to get out! They have even been going back to their boxes in their coop house to lay their eggs! Crazy chickens!
Day 8
Day 8 of the fast… a little over half way through! Physically, I’m having no issues. It’s not hard to do. But man, I am craving food! Especially carbs! I have to stop myself from grabbing a snack from Kaia’s bowl every time she is snacking on something! (Those bland animal crackers just look so good!!)
Toby has been experimenting with some new recipes… healthy things, and I’m really excited to try them! It’s actually nice to have cooking going on while I’m fasting. It makes the home feel warm and cozy. I want to try the food, but I have to remind myself to be patient and that I will get to try it sooner or later.
6 more days…
Today’s harvest
As part of this fast, I want to start not just eating healthier, but more sustainably. Both Toby and I have talked about wanting to harvest as much as possible from our land. So, I got this fantastic book “From Crabgrass Muffins to Pine Needle Tea” by Linda Runyon. She lived in the Adirondack Mountains for 13 years without electricity or running water. She learned how to feed her family by harvesting, cooking, and preserving the wild foods that grew on her land. The book talks about lots of great plants, how to find them, along with recipes and nutritional values of the plants. (She’s coming out with a revision in a few weeks, so hold your horses if you want one.)
So, I’ve been inspired to harvest some of the foods on our land right now. Below are Lambs Quarters and Aster hanging up to dry.
The top bag is Yellow Dock seed, and the bottom is Bull Thistle leaves. All of this stuff is going to be dried and ground into flour.
Here are some steamed Bull Thistle Flowers. These I tossed in the freezer until I’m eating again.
It’s interesting how I’m fasting to try to make food less of an issue in my life, yet all I think about when I’m fasting is food! Today (day 4) has been good. Yesterday I was sneezing my head off and very snotty. Today, my lymph is a little swollen and my head feels heavy. There’s lots of processing going on. 10 days to go…
Hoop Path Workshop
I spent this past weekend in Carrboro for a hooping workshop and I have wanted to post about it, but I don’t know how to put it into words. When most people think of hooping, they might imagine just spinning this circle around your waist. But hooping has become so much more, especially after this weekend. Baxter, the hooper who taught the class, got into hooping after he had a shoulder injury. It was his method of physical therapy. But, through that, he had developed his own hoop mythology. So for three days, we learned about the story of the Maidan (pron My-dan), who hooped to get closer to the spirit wind. He is an amazing story teller, and I really felt myself becoming a part of the story. We learned about the belief, strength, and grace it takes to hoop (and do anything in our lives for that matter).
There were 3 three hour workshops, a fire ceremony and hooping on Sat. night, and a Hooper’s Ball on Sunday.
As you can see, on Sunday, we really got to cut loose and strut our stuff! (that’s me on the right with the big white feather on my head):-) I’ll get some video footage up soon…
fasting
I am on the second day of a fast right now. I decided that I wanted to create better food habits for myself so I’m going to fast (doing the master cleanse) for 14 days and then start my food habits over. I have a huge sweet tooth, and whenever there is food, I always eat more than I need to be full. I get this thing in my head that if I don’t eat it and enjoy it right now, I might seriously miss out on something. So, I stuff myself a lot. I also want to start having more greens, veggies, and whole foods in our diets. Toby decided to do it with me, which is nice.
I did this once when Kaia was 2, just to have a nice cleanse after having been pregnant and breastfeeding. But, Kaia didn’t like it. She couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t eat with her. Now, she is just curious and wants to talk about foods and what makes a food a healthy food.
So far, things are good. My energy has been fine, I’m not too hungry. Although, I am craving the taste of food and the feeling of chewing.
Hooked
Well, Smallville and BSG are on Summer break, so Toby and I have found another show to get hooked on. The show is just getting started so join me, won’t you? 🙂
Summer’s here!
Happy (almost) first day of Summer everyone!! I always love the longest day of the year, but it also comes to me with some sadness. ‘Cause that means every day after it is getting shorter 🙁
Things are going well here at the homestead. The chickens are happy, Suki is enjoying time in the shade with her favorite bone. Unfortunately, our great friend and house-helper, Mattie, is moving back to Canada at the end of the month! He’s been an amazing help and support with the house so far and we will really miss him. Another friend may begin working for us in a few weeks. Plus, a few years ago, Toby helped install a veggie oil conversion kit in a school bus in Chapel Hill. Well, the woman who owns the school bus now lives near us and she wants to give a few days of work on our house to repay the favor!
Toby and I have started talking about whether or not we want to have another child. Part of me really wants to. I look at Kaia and I think “how could I not want another one. It’s so absolutely amazing to be a parent… to watch her grow and learn… the complete love I feel” and part of me is like “why would I ever want to put myself through that again?! The nausea of pregnancy, the immense weight gain, the pain and depression after the birth, the endless nights without sleep… ugh!!” So, you see, I am torn. Now that I finally have my energy and my sanity back (though unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll ever get my body back), it seems like having another child would be easy… ’cause I’m in a good place. But all that changes after not having slept in 2 years. Toby and I would both really like to adopt, but no one will approve us right now… you know – tiny cabin, out house, now shower, no money and all that. So, maybe in the future. Kaia is up for another child, without a doubt. She gives birth to some kind of pretend baby every day in preparation for the real thing 🙂
Baby or not, I’ve started trying to get a little more exercise. I’ve been getting up early to go out and hoop a little before Kaia wakes up. It’s been really nice hooping in the cool morning air. It puts me in a great mood for the rest of the day. I’ve also signed up for a workshop in July that I am really excited about. I hope it will get me into some sort of hooping routine! I continue to (slowly) get better, but I want more!! Here is a hooper doing some of the moves that we will be learning at the workshop.
Viriditas is going great! We are finally picking up! This week was booked. We have people from South Carolina, Eastern NC, and even a tourist from CT. coming in for the Maya Abdominal Massage. And Herb consultations have picked up too. Hopefully this is the start of something. Then maybe we can start paying off some business loans. Our Summer Newsletter is out if you want to see it.
Happy Solstice!
Decking the roof
We had some great progress on the house these past few days. A bunch of friends came out to lend a hand on Sat. and then Toby’s dad stayed over to help again on Sunday! We have such awesome friends and family!!
Here we are beginning the decking of the first story roof. Each piece of wood was planed on one side to give it a smooth, clean look. Then the edges were routered to give them a finished look. Then hammered into place. The floor was constantly covered with sawdust. We will have enough sawdust for the composting toilets to last for at least a year!!
More decking…
Toby and his dad trying to lift the center post up to the second floor.
Just about finished! There’s the center post for the second story laying over to the left… See it?
Here is the view of the ceiling from the inside. I was laying down in what will be Kaia’s room. Pretty, eh?
Kaia enjoyed all the saw dust we made!
We just got pounded!
In the past 4 weeks, we’ve only had 1 really good rain. The plants are very parched!! Well, today, we got pounded. Problem is, there are no leaves left on the plants!!
Yes, this is hail! The ground was covered!
This is the road in front of our new house. Looks like a lake! All that stuff in the middle is floating balls of hail!
Here are some nice sized chunks!
How ’bout this one???
luckily, there was no damage to the house or cars… just the poor plants.
spaceship house
Sorry for the long break! We’ve been a little busy (HA, like we ever have down time) 🙂
Here is the house from afar… Second floor rafters are up! Woo Hoo!!
This is a picture of the ceiling, looking up from the first floor near the center post.
This is the sub floor of the second floor. We will be putting hardwood on top (we’ve gotten enough from the local hardwood floor dumpster to do the whole floor!! I have no idea why they throw out this great, perfect wood!)
Looking down the stairwell into Kaia’s room.
make your own…
Last week Kaia asked me why we didn’t chew gum. I told her it just wasn’t something we did. I was a huge gum addict when I was younger. I use to have a drawer in the fridge that I kept my gum in. My mom hated it! Mostly because it was chewed gum that I believed would regain it’s flavor if you cooled it down and then tried chewing it again. Anyway, at some point, I just stopped chewing gum. Now, with having Kaia, I think I didn’t want to get into it because I wasn’t ready to deal with gum in the hair, in the bed, stuck to furniture…
Anyway, last week when she went to play at her grandmother’s, Kaia came home with a pack of gum and she has been chomping on it for dear life. She loves it! Any chance she gets she asks me for another piece. And get this… She found a little corner in the fridge and stores it there… new and used gum! Now she wants to know how to blow bubbles (gum in the hair, here we come)!
So, looking at the ingredients in the gum (the pack she had was loaded with artificial sweeteners) I decided we were going to learn how to make our own and come up with our own special flavors. So, I ordered this and also got the ingredients to follow this recipe. We’ll see how they all turn out! (Oh, by the way if you ever happen to get a wad of chewing gum stuck in your belly button, Q-tips work really well to get it out. Just keep twisting it around and it will get it all out… 🙂
After looking up how to make gum, I got in the ‘makin’ mood. So, we decided to make some ice cream. Since we don’t have an ice cream maker, we followed both of these recipes for Pumpkin Ice Cream (also from the Leener’s site we got the gum recipe from… cool site!) and for Fruit Ice Cream (we used a frozen fruit mix at the end). They both turned out fantastic!!! Kaia is bouncing off the walls right now while Toby tries to get her into bed! (Mental note: no more ice cream right before bed!)
Kaia, smiling like the nut she is, mixing the pumpkin ice cream.
Here we are kneading the bags of fruit ice cream. Kaia has a cloth over hers to keep her hands from getting too cold. You can see the pink ice cream in the bag I am holding.
Savoring the fruit ice cream. (No, she didn’t eat all of that! We put most of it back in the freezer.)
I think I am going to order her the “Play and Freeze” ice cream maker for her birthday.
When the cat’s away, the mouse will clean!
Why is it that when Toby goes out of town I get things done? Maybe it’s that I don’t expect to have help with anything, so I do what ever needs to be done. Which, in this case was:
- Get the car completely detailed as it hasn’t been washed in ~4 years
- Wash the dishes
- Deep clean the kitchen
- Clean Kaia’s room
- Put away Kaia’s winter clothes and tidy her clothing drawers
- Tidy/organize the whole house!
- Organize the front porch
- Take everything out of the house downstairs, sweep and mop the floors
- Bring all the food compost scraps covering the kitchen counter to the compost bin
- Bring the dead snake (thanks Suki) and the bird carcass (again, thanks suki) to the compost bin
- Take off all the recycling and trash
- Strain the kefir
- Spend the afternoon with Kaia at a school picnic
- There’s more, but I can’t remember it all!
And that was just today!!!
Tomorrow, we have a birthday party, hiking, maybe we will start planting her flower garden…
If I just had a little help (to lift the big beams), I could have the new house done by the time he comes home! 🙂
Hope this gives you all a good giggle!
And we want this why????!!!
It’s hard enough trying to fight the current stereotypes of todays world when trying to help my clients feel positive about their femininity and their monthly cycles… now we have this. Tell me why I would want to stop myself from ever bleeding again, forcing my body to constantly think I am pregnant, and pretending that I don’t cycle with the moon? And with research results like this, it sounds just peachy!
“Women who use Lybrel would not have a scheduled menstrual period, but will most likely have unplanned, breakthrough, unscheduled bleeding or spotting,” Shames said. The bleeding can last four to five days and may persist for a year…”
Woo Hoo!
Howdy!
Ok, so I wrote an article yesterday about harvesting herbs/weeds from your back yard that can help you with seasonal allergies and sent it in to BackHome Magazine to see if they might be interested in it. Today, I got an email back from the editor saying that they are interested and would like to publish it in their Sept/Oct issue!!! Woo Hoo!! I’m goin’ national, baby!! No, really, the biggest boost to the ego isn’t that I want to be famous, it’s that feeling “yeah, you know what… you do have something good to say that others might benefit from”. I’d better go renew my subscription!! 🙂
In other ‘big’ news, check out this mondo egg! The one on the left is our standard xtra large variety egg!! One of our Americaunas (poor thing) laid the one on the right. Toby had it for breakfast this morning and said it was a double yolker! Ouch!
Here are the latest house pictures I’ve got. The first two are of the rafters that have been going up. The third is from our party this weekend when we had a center post raising! It weighed ~600 pounds, so we needed a bunch of hands! It’s so amazing to see this progress and to know that this will be our home and that so much friendship and love has gone into it!
dinner
This is what Kaia and I harvested for dinner last night.
I also had some fresh nettles and green onions. So we fried up the nettles, morrels and onions in some butter and mead for dinner, and washed it down with a plantain/spearmint tea. It was delicious!
I love walking around the land and picking food from here or there! It’s such a great feeling to wild harvest foods and then such a healthy feeling to eat them!!
Dandelion Mead and broken fridge
Once the Dandelions started flowering all around, I planned on making a dandelion mead. But, when I went out the other day to gather dandelion flowers, I also found a field full of violets, a wild patch of lemon balm, a huge amount of nettles, and a few other yumminesses. Above is a picture of the bottom of the 5 gallon that I brew my mead in (minus the nettles). Isn’t it pretty? I can’t wait to sample it!
I taught two herb classes this past week for the local school and felt completely drained. I love teaching community classes about herbalism to people who have no clue about it. Afterwards, I feel energized. But these 3 hour classes to aspiring herbalist just drain me. They make me think too much when I am teaching 🙂 No, seriously, I feel like I am being pulled along by this wave of people who are all doing great herbal things, but may want to be ‘bigger’ herbalists than I do. Writing books, teaching at conferences… I wouldn’t mind being known and making good money, but it’s not a goal of mine. In fact, it stresses me out. I really just want to live simply, have time for playing with my family, and to be an effective healer. If I never taught another class or wrote another article, but had enough clients to keep me happily busy, I would be good with that. But, right now, I have to teach classes and write, etc. to get my name known to build clientele. I think lot of it is that I feel like I am teaching over my head. I mean, I know my herbs and all, but I don’t know all the constituents in Pipssissewa, and I don’t know all the drug/herb interactions for people on cardiac medications. And even when I am teaching anatomy and physiology, I am definitely not an expert and sometimes don’t even feel like I should be up there teaching. I don’t know what I am trying to say here… I guess, I am just remembering the whole reason that we are on this land and building our own house, and it’s not so that I can always be elsewhere trying to make a name for myself as an herbalist. My vision to be a part time herbalist and full time mom/wife/friend/land lover has somehow gotten to fulltime+ herbalist and on occassion mom/wife and even less time for friends and time on the land. Hmmmm… something needs to change.
……..
HOLY SHIT!! The Fridge just blew off the porch!!! The weather man predicted wind gust of up to 65mph for the next 2 days… and the brand new $600 fridge just blew off the porch and landed on a concrete statue! We had 20 eggs in the fridge and now there are only 2 left! The rest are plastered all over the inside of the fridge. Broken bottles everywhere… The whole thing is dented up and the light isn’t working. So we don’t know if the light is burnt out or if the whole fridge is broken. CRAP, CRAP, CRAP!!!
The out house is blown over now too! Major CRAP!! I’m not looking forward to cleaning that one up! Things are flying all over the place and I keep having visions of the whole house tipping over! I hope the chicken coop stays put!! And I really hope the tin stays on our roof! It is really insane here right now, and a tad bit scary!!
this weeks progress
Here is what was accomplished this past Tuesday on the house! It feels like what I imagine standing in the middle of stonehenge to be like when you are in the house 🙂
And here is a beautiful dogwood flower! It is supposed to be 17 degrees this sat. night, so I hope they all make it through! My strawberries are covered with flowers, so I’ve covered all of my garden beds with floating row cover.
Dreams
I have had some very vivid dreams in my life, but I have only recently started paying attention to them…
Two nights ago, I woke up to the doorbell. I sat up and looked over at Toby, who was sitting up too. I thought, “why would someone be coming out to see us at this hour??” Then I thought I heard someone opening the door and coming in. I looked back over at Toby and he had laid his head back down and was sleeping. So, I laid down and listened for a while but I didn’t hear anything more. I figured I was just hearing things. It wasn’t until the morning, when I was eating breakfast that I remembered that we don’t have a doorbell! Toby remembered none of this.
Then last night my dream was really wild!
I was somewhere outside with lots of people, and it was a damp cool night. Everyone was hanging out by the house, it was kind of like a party. I walked off into the woods/jungle, knowing I wasn’t supposed to be going to far. Very quickly I was by myself on a very peaceful, muddy, green trail. To my right side was a rocky wall with green plants and vines all over it. I walked past a beautiful blooming rose bush and thought about picking one. Then I thought maybe on the way back… Next, I saw a small red onion laying in a rocky area. It was about the size of a plum. I decided to take this instead of the rose. Then only a few feet further, there was an enormous shrine placed into the rock wall on my right. It went up about 20 feet and was covered with rose petals, red onions and other things that I can’t remember now. In the middle at the top was a statue of Mother Mary (I am not religious, so this is kind of weird for me) with a trickle of water running down this rock shrine. I saw one hole where an onion was missing and took mine and placed it on the shrine. Immediately water started flowing from the top of the wall, around all the rose petals and onions. I place my hands out and the water rushed over them. I splashed my face with the water, put it in my hair, and then drank some. It was very sweet and the smell of roses filled my body. I felt the water was a gift, telling me that now I was allowed/able to heal fully. Then, the water stopped as quickly as it started and I turned to walk on. Soon, I came to a ‘room’ on the path where the was a woman laying on her side facing away from me. I slowly approached wondering if this was a test I had to pass. I asked her if she was ok and she rolled over and told me her shoulder hurt. I place both my hands on her right shoulder and saw a ball of bright yellow light float from her body. Then I asked her if I could touch her stomach. She rolled to her back and I began massaging. I could feel that inside her uterus was up out of the pelvis and she was in immense pain. I remember her rolling around, and then I remember being surrounded by many other people while I was touching her. After that, it’s a blank…
I can’t wait to see what happens tonight!
Here it is…
Well, after the long wait, we now have a floor…
Here are the pictures Continue reading