Shanspirations

Out of all the recipes in my Nourishing Traditions Cookbook, none is more beloved to my husband than the salsa recipe. He thinks it is just the best homemade salsa ever. My favorite thing about this lacto-cultured salsa (meaning it is cultured by the lactobacilli in yogurt) is that it retains an incredibly fresh taste. [...]

In my last post, I wrote about how happy I was to have found a candlelight alternative. Here’s a little more about this concept. Note that the article says that “yellow, orange and red light has no effect on the pineal gland,” meaning they do not halt the pineal gland’s melatonin production. (And [...]

9/26/08 Edit to add:  This post was about sleep glasses that block blue light.  I later tried these, but ended up settling on buying bulbs without blue light that are amber colored.  For my family, this proved to be easier than using the glasses.  In the end, we have transitioned to this way of “doing [...]

Yesterday Anna turned two years old. Several weeks ago, I bought a blank children’s hardcover book for Anna so that I could make her a homemade storybook about her birthday.
I know she won’t be picky and the story needn’t be perfect, just something that she can enjoy for years to come. I am going [...]

My brother-in-law received the following newspaper-style account by email from his wife, Nycole, who had written and sent it to him while he was at work. Their partly potty-trained toddler, my niece, Madelina, is the subject. We were later sent a copy of the email (by Blaine, who thought it was funny) and I laughed [...]

For Women Only:
I’ve had an irregular menstrual cycle from the start and I hated how I never knew when my period was going to come. One cycle would be a nice 28 days, the next would be 36 days. Aunt Flo always took me by surprise. Until a couple years ago I had no [...]

Today was the dreaded day.
I was nervous.
It was time to unveil my kombucha culturing away in the hall closet…and see what had become of it.
You have to understand, the stuff looks like this (I picked this guy’s kombucha picture out of the many photos available on the internet because I was amused by his comments: [...]

As we raise our little girl, all sorts of questions about future decisions we’ll have to make come to mind. One of them has been whether or not we’ll let Anna do sleepovers when she’s older. I enjoyed them when I was growing up, so I didn’t want to deprive her of something fun. Yet [...]