I have an essay called “The First Time Around” in an anthology that is coming out soon, From the Heart: A Collection of Stories and Poems from the Front Lines of Parenting. It compares my first year mothering to my first year teaching high school and explores the desire for a do-over, to fix all…
healing
Homemade Chicken Stock
One of the easiest things to do to stay – or get – healthy in the winter is to make your own chicken stock, or bone broth. Some people like to claim that healthy eating costs a lot of money, but broth is something you can make from the bones of a chicken you already…
Mama gets the sniffles
Here is a health-focused piece cross-posted from my main blog, Crunchy-Chewy Mama. I had been putting more health-focused pieces here and more snippets from life on the alternative mainstream divide over there, but I now that I am writing for The Washington Times Communities at “Reading Ingredients: Tales of a Health-Conscious Mom,” I’m re-evaluating my…
Craniosacral therapy for my son
I don’t claim to understand exactly what craniosacral therapy (CST) does, but I believe in it. I’ve read some books by Dr. John Upledger, and I’ve talked a whole lot with my practitioners about my body and my son’s body. And I’ve seen its results firsthand. I’ve been getting CST for six years, since I…
Healing a Face Wound (and more?)
Almost a month ago, I went to the grand re-opening of Holeco Wellness Medi Spa, the first holistic/wellness medispa recognized by Green America as a Green company and listed in their Green Pages. The owner is a wonderful woman who recently spoke at a Holistic Moms meeting. They are in a building that just underwent…
The kind of health coverage I want
“This is why health care costs are so high,” hissed my endocrinologist when she looked at the results of the labwork my holistic physician had ordered. To her, the additional blood tests were a waste of time and money. But the information – a full, more complete picture of my thyroid levels and antibody levels–…
Traditional, GFCF, and Low-Carb Eating 101
I just attended a local hospital’s women’s health expo and spoke to a diabetes nutrition educator who was horrified that I would pursue a low carb diet. “Why would you do that?” she asked. I dropped a lot of names, none of which she was familiar with. I just wrote her an email and decided…
Balancing action with rest
I had a fabulous week last week of attending three (partial) days of the NVIC conference and then all day of “Perinatal: A Symposium on Birth and Reproductive Rights.” But now, instead of volunteering at the Holistic Moms Network table at the Green Festival, I’m home with a slight fever. I don’t feel that bad,…
Vaccine conference: Dr. Lawrence Palevsky
Seeing Dr. Lawrence Palevsky made me appreciate my pediatrician even more than I already do. The basic message of both is that we want symptoms to be expressed because they are a way for us to understand what is going on in our bodies. It’s crazy to expect kids to be well all the time….
Fighting the flu naturally
I haven’t been pro-vaccine for a long time, since I got the flu vaccine in my 20s and felt terrible. Now that we’re facing a potentially bad flu year, there is a lot of talk about vaccines for flu and specifically for H1N1/Swine Flu. I’m hoping that the alternative folks are right that the best…
Dropping some silver on supplements
I just spent $132 at the Vitamin Shoppe. Wow. My husband has an eardrum that has been ruptured for over 48 hours and still hurts a lot. I bought some tea, colloidal silver supplement and nasal spray, grapefruit seed extract ear drops and nasal spray, some probiotic (on sale), calendula tincture (seemed like a good…
“Feed me” said the Fever
I’ve always intended to learn more about both homeopathy and herbalism, but I don’t get serious about either until an illness prompts me to drag out some books and to poke around online. When my son woke the other night before 9:30, we could tell something was off. He’d had a small cough and looked…
Coconut Oil – new study shows it might help with pneumonia
The Washington Post recently published an article entitled “Coconut Oil May Help Fight Childhood Pneumonia.” The study was only done on folks taking antiobiotics (no group that wasn’t on meds), but it did show that the folks who also consumed coconut oil daily had a quicker recovery and had lower levels of the “crackling” sound…
Acupunture and Cupping for Tight Muscles
My neck and shoulders used to hurt all the time. Long before I was diagnosed with Graves’ disease (autoimmune hyperthyroidism) or celiac disease, my health problems manifested in a more physical way. I’ve had some issues on and off since my son was born, especially when I was wearing him in a sling all day,…
Who wears short shorts?
It’s time to show my knees again. A year ago, last July 4th, a trip to a friend’s pool pushed my skin irritation over the edge. The dermatologist had called it likely psoriasis, and my knees were red, itchy and flaky. It was getting bad on its own, and I was already embarrassed to wear…
What bruise?
“What did you give him?” This was my friend’s question after she saw my two-year-old son a few days after her son rolled a rock down a slide onto my boy’s head. There was hardly a mark on my son where we both expected a goose-egg or at least some royal shades of blue. First…