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Showing posts from December, 2010

Christmas Boots

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My daddy bought me my first pair of functional cowboy boots for Christmas. I can't wait to put them to use! Here's O trying them on... Thanks to Kim at the Red Farmhouse for the recommendation. :) I thought this was cute. The kids put their new rain boots next to mine. :)

Power outage preparedness :)

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The past couple of years have been stressful for me during the winter with all the blizzards and ice storms and power outages. So this year I wanted to be prepared to stay in our house if we needed to for awhile without power. Generators are out of the question and our fireplace is out of commission. We will have a big functional wood fireplace at our new house that I am really looking forward to using during the winter. So for this winter, I bought the following: Coleman Wind-up lantern  - I just love this. I wanted something that wouldn't require batteries and this was perfect. We actually use it as a night light in the kid's room now. It is $18 on Amazon and it is LED, so the light bulb will last like 10 years, seriously. 2. Wind-up flashlight and radio - the reception on this is amazing. It's an automatic tuner as well, so there's no turning the knob really slow trying to find a station. I originally bought this for $14 on Amazon, but it looks like the pr

Wordless Wednesday

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Found this after vacuuming yesterday...

2011...

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This week I've been contemplating what goals we want to set for our family and for myself this next year. Here are a few I've come up with. If our house gets built this next year, we will have so much more to add I'm sure! lol Have daily time with God  Rid the house of plastic toys and replace with safe, non-toxic wooden ones that will inspire creativity.  Replace all of our particle board/pressed wood furniture with real wood furniture. Thanks to Knock-off-wood for this amazingly frugal option. Scrap wood at Home Depot/Lowe's rocks! $1 a board! Learn how to do all of the things that I delegate to Seth, such as canning, butter making and baking.  Fill our house with mostly functional items, as clutter free as possible.  Make exercise a priority, even if it's only 10 minutes a day.  Figure out a way to help people to start living a more natural and healthy life without overwhelming them. Spend more quality one on one time with each

Merry Christmas!

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I got all I wanted for Christmas this year, everyone is healthy. I have so many friends who are dealing with random viruses this year during the holidays and I am so thankful God spared us. We have all the gifts wrapped and under our "mini" tree. Hopefully next year we'll be officially done with toddlerhood and will be able to use the big tree. I was adding up how much we spent on all the gifts for the kids and was shocked to see that we spent under $50 total for all 3 of them! Shopping clearance sales in July and making Christmas gifts this year really paid off! Ready for Christmas morning! Christmas morning, we will wake up, put on our favorite Third Day Christmas album, and thank God for the gift of His son. We will sing "Happy Birthday" to Jesus and blow out candles on cookies we made for Jesus, not Santa. After that, the kids will open gifts. May you all be blessed with a Christ-centered Christmas this year. “Behold, the virgin shall conceiv

Being a stay-at-home mom, why I LOVE my job.

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Growing up, my mom stayed home with me and my brother. It was such a gift she gave us and I am so thankful for it. I knew as a young child that what I wanted to be when I grew up was a mom and I knew that I would stay home with my babies. When Seth and I were dating, he knew that it was not an option for me to work when we had kids. It is a priority that we make work so that I can be with them. Even though we have financial concerns every single day of every month, I would not trade these moments with my children for anything in this world. I could not be any more content with my life than I am right now. I love that all the extra time and energy I have is able to be spent on reading, researching and experimenting with ways to make life healthier and happier for my family. I love being woken up in the morning, not by an alarm, but by kids crawling in bed with me. Laying there with them until Owen starts hollering are the best moments of my day. I love knowing where my childr

Chickenpox!

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Okay, so this summer we were exposed to what I think were chickenpox. The kids came down with a high fever and Maggie had spots, but the boys didn't ever get spots. I was pretty happy about acquiring natural immunity with such a mild case if that was in fact what they had. It seems we will get a chance to test that immunity out since we had a playdate yesterday with friends who woke up with chickenpox this morning! lol Her husband is recovering from a case of shingles and apparently you can catch chickenpox from shingles since it is the same virus. Once again, I find myself a little nervous because no one wants to see their kids sick, but also happy that we might get the chance to acquire lifelong natural immunity to this virus, if they don't have it already.  An extra bonus is that when exposed to chickenpox as an adult (if you have already had the virus) it gives a natural immune booster that helps prevent you from catching shingles. The following is an excerpt from the NVIC

Blueberry-Apple Jam made with honey, by my Honey. ;) Cheesy, I know.

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This recipe is Maggie approved.  This recipe is courtesy of Aspiring Earth Daddy, aka Seth. :) Let me tell you what a lucky crunchy wife I am. Many husbands scoff at their wives attempts to make life healthier for the family and Seth goes above and beyond always advising his friends, coworkers and even people he meets at the park on how to live more naturally. He is such a sport when it comes to trying new things I have cooked or fermented, lol. We (he) started making jam with  honey about a year ago when we found a recipe online that had successfully used it. He has used this recipe with all different kinds of fruit and they always turn out great. The amount of sugar regular jam recipes call for is insane. You think a coke has a lot of sugar...you ain't seen nothing until you see jam/jelly being made. We don't use our expensive raw honey because you don't want to heat that because it kills most of the good stuff in it. For jam purposes, we buy the big thing of honey

Manic Monday

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Walked in on Maggie washing her hands today and she had thrown up all over the sink. When asked why she puked, she responded with "That soap is yucky." Ya think Mags? For those interested, she ate a wonderfully smelling, non-toxic soap that we use often, Dr. Woods Pure Peppermint Castile Soap from Vitacost for $6.82 for 32 ounces.

Homemade mayo!!

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Just made this using Kelly the Kitchen Kop 's recipe with a few substitutions. It is sooo good. I just made deviled eggs with it and they are amazing! The consistency was so thick too, I didn't expect that. Here's what I used in my recipe: (see her recipe for blending instructions) 3 pastured egg yolks 1 Tbsp raw apple cider vinegar (her recipe calls for lemon juice which I think I'll try next time) 1 Tbsp maple syrup (next time I think I'll just use a tsp of organic sugar) 1/2 tsp unrefined sea salt  1 cup grapeseed oil (I had read in other recipes that this is a more subtle flavor of oil than olive or coconut) No idea how long it will last b/c I omitted the whey portion, but I plan on making just a little to use within the week anyway. This made a good amount and it took about 5 minutes to make. 

Apples!

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This past week we ordered 60+ lbs of organic apples from Azure Standard (they were a REALLY good deal.) We are now trying to figure out what to do with them. Here's what we've come up with so far: Dehydrate! Who knew you could make apple cider vinegar with leftover cores and peel? Not me!  9 pints of organic homemade cinnamon applesauce...it took  A LOT of apples to make this much. Only 27 pounds of apples left to go...tomorrow we're making blueberry-apple jam for Christmas presents. :) Best invention ever... Seth found me an apple peeler at Bed, Bath and Beyond. It peels, cores, and slices an apple in about 10 seconds.

Instead of canned food...

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I highly advise against buying any kind of canned food because of the dangerous levels of  Bisphenol A ( BPA) in all canned foods. BPA is a toxic plastics chemical known to cause many health problems including cancer . It has been outlawed in Canada and many European countries. See this   report   from the Environmental Working Group for more info.  Click here for a May 2010 news release detailing the safety concerns of endocrine disrupting chemicals, such as BPA.  “The strength and breadth of existing research on the negative effects of EDCs, including bisphenol A, warrants immediate action to reduce EDC exposure, particularly among the developing fetus and women of reproductive age,” said author Carlos Sonnenschein, MD, professor in the department of anatomy and cellular biology at Tufts University School of Medicine (TUSM). Other sources of BPA you could be exposing yourself and your family to: Dental Sealants Receipts (if they're slippery feeling like they are wal

Stocking Stuffers

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This Christmas, I'm trying to make sure that most of our gifts to the children have a purpose and won't just end up in a storage bin in a month, stocking stuffers included. Here's what's on my short list to stuff their stockings with on Christmas morning. Jump rope Glue sticks (my kids love these) lol Kitchen tools from Dollar Tree Mini flashlights Watercolor paints Playdoh  Markers 1 big bar each of Green and Black's organic dark chocolate. (I would like one of these in my stocking...hint hint, Seth.) :)  We (Seth) are making the kid's Christmas present this year, thanks to Ana White at Knock-off Wood . With her plans and a handy husband, I have a never ending list of things for him to build. We went and bought the materials for this at Home Depot last weekend. Including paint, we spent $15. We bought the wood in the scrap section for $3. I'm excited to get started on this on Saturday. How cute is this little mailbox?  Click here for the

Instead of... (breakfast edition)

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Next time you make breakfast, instead of using pancake syrup made with EVERYTHING artificial and loads of empty calories... INGREDIENTS: CORN SYRUP, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, WATER, CELLULOSE GUM, CARAMEL COLOR, SALT, SODIUM BENZOATE AND SORBIC ACID (PRESERVATIVES), ARTIFICIAL AND NATURAL FLAVORS, SODIUM HEXAMETAPHOSPHATE . Try something that is actually good for you on your pancakes and waffles, pure maple syrup. I cannot fully express in words how much better it tastes too. This is widely available now at Target and Wal-mart.  Ingredients:   Maple syrup (from trees). Maple syrup, is an excellent source of manganese and a good source of zinc. Instead of highly processed margarine on your pancakes.... Ingredients: liquid soybean oil, partially hydrogenated soybean and hydrogenated cottonseed oils, water, whey, salt, vegetable mono and diglycerides, soy lecithin, citric acid, artificial flavor, vitamin a, and beta carotene. Try real but

Sickly Sunday...

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Oh my goodness, last night was a long night. Maggie had intermittently been complaining about her tummy hurting all day Saturday, but I never know with that girl whether or not she's telling the truth. Around bedtime she came down with a 102 fever and severe chills. From my experience with fevers and treating them, unless it gets to 104 it's best to let them burn out and run their course so that they can kill whatever bacteria or virus has invaded the body. So we snuggled on the couch with a hot water bottle until she fell asleep. She woke up throwing up around 9:30pm and continued until about 12:30am. At that point, I was about to throw up myself from being so exhausted and watching her throw up multiple times. lol Now, two things happened at that point and who's to say which one helped the most or if they both played a part. First, I was able to get her to drink some water kefir , which is a natural antibiotic and a great source of probiotics. Second, I commanded the viru

TGIF!

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Nothing to say, just wanted to share a pic of my beautiful boy in his flannel shirt. :)

Cheap, local, natural chicken! (If you're an Okie anyway)

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From their website , the DARP chickens are: "FEDERALLY USDA INSPECTED NO: ANTIBIOTICS, STEROIDS, HORMONES OR ANIMAL BY-PRODUCTS" The CEO, Raymond Jones, was quoted to say that, “We only put 15,000 birds in a house,” he said. “And we open the doors at 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. to let them out. Some other chicken plants will house up to 45,000 in one house, and that is just inhumane.” Although these may not be "ideal" conditions for the birds, since some of them do not leave the barn from what I've heard, this is a MUCH better alternative than eating commercial chicken raised on antibiotics and treated inhumanely. Like I told a friend yesterday, at this point in our life due to our food budget, our number one priority is that the chickens are hormone and antibiotic free and these are. They are cheap too. I also read in the article that they are cleaned with vinegar and water, my favorite cleaner. :) So much better than dipping them in bleach...eww. Please wash