WILD WILDERNESS RETREAT!

As I am writing, my husband has 24 hrs left to his "WILD WILDERNESS RETREAT!", and they could not go by faster. Meshach is growling like a lion, watching Word World. Zeke is in the bathroom, "pooping" (a.k.a. playing with the water and making a huge mess). Noah is ripping open the baby wipes package and trying to eat them. Jov is sleeping (thank ya JESUS).

So why am I at the computer, writing, you ask. Because if I don't write now then I never will.

Here goes. Brandon is a psycho path. He watches Survivorman and Man vs. Wild and gets this crazy idea to go out camping with his friends having only the clothes on their backs, 1lb of trail mix, and 1 gallon of water. He wants the challenge of having to live right off of what the earth has to offer around him. Like I said, psycho path. This is my gift to him for his 25th birthday. It truly is a gift that I give to let him have the weekend off of damage control and drop him off on Miracle Mountain to frolic in the wilderness. He didn't even want me to send him off with beer. Maybe he felt like he didn't need beer this weekend to drown out the sound of four screaming children (and sometimes one screaming wife).

However, I do understand where he gets his desire to go out and rough it. I think everyone desires something that's out of the ordinary to give them a kick. It's like being in 80 degree weather for weeks, and suddenly getting the urge to take an ice cold shower. It's invigorating. So if he wants to go out and get in touch with his primitive masculine self, well then to each his own. As long as he doesn't come home all weak and pitiful, needing me to pamper him, I'm good.

As for me and getting through this weekend without him, obviously I'm gonna need lots of pampering as soon as he gets home. Last night I took my four boys and met two other moms and their children for a dinner play date. The intimidating mass of our eight children (seven of them being boys), scared all the other kids away from the play area we met up in at the mall. Well at least that reduced the number of children Noah could terrorize (Noah is going through a biting/smacking/pinching stage). We then decided to make our lives even more difficult, and take the kids all out to a sit down restaurant. I think I had two brain aneurysms during that dinner. Although two single ladies graciously volunteered their time to help us, there is nothing quite like the stern rebuke from a Papa. On the way home I stopped at Starbucks and treated myself to a delicious Pumpkin Latte. I figured I burned plenty of calories while I was flapping my jaw yelling at the kids all evening. When we got home I threw the screaming, emotional, over exhausted kids into their beds. Then I threw my screaming, emotional, over exhausted butt onto the couch and watched The Real Housewives of New Jersey. After Jov had his last feeding of the night I headed for my beloved. The Bed. Beautiful clouds of white fluffiness beckoning me to come and rest my weary eyes. This peaceful transition from chaos to nirvana was interrupted by an incredibly rude possum lurking outside my window. Because of him (of course it was a male possum, no female possum would have had the audacity of getting in between a mommy and her bed) I had a spotty night of sleep, waking up periodically thinking the possum had snuck into my house and was under my bed sheets waiting to gnaw on my toes.

Brandon cannot come home soon enough.

To My Husband, You Were Right

At what cost should I remain unwaveringly devoted to the principles of natural living? If the principles also happen to be closely connected to my faith (ie. abortion, euthanasia, war, on the conviction that these are all unnatural events and interrupt God's rhythm), then I stay steadfast. But if not, how much of a granola munching fundamentalist should I be? Bottom line: If it makes me go bankrupt, or keeps me from looking gorgeous, I'm second guessing it.

This all comes down to the fact that my culture enables insecure people to change themselves into whatever they want to be, at any price. It is an annoying thorn in my side knowing that if I would lower my standards by just a little bit I could perhaps skip over this whole post-partum haggard look and be transformed into one of those perfect looking moms who can fit into a size 4 right after giving birth. It's funny because for all my dedication to being Miss Organic, half the time it is a huge struggle for me. I don't even look the part of being a modern hippie, my husband and his big fatty beard does. I shave my armpits, thank you very much.

I live this lifestyle primarily for my children, and to give them the best start on life as possible. I also live this way because it how God intended us to live, more by the earth's rules and not our own. So that's why I can't shed my 20 lbs of baby weight as fast as I would like. Because as soon as I started cutting my calories down, my 8 wk old nursing baby, Jov, started fussing constantly. And no matter how much I would nurse him, it always seemed like he would have to hop back on 10 minutes later. Once I added the calories back on, no more Mr. Fussy. Breastfeeding is a non-negotiable for me, and I'm not giving Jov formula just so I can get rid of my love-handle-spillage.

So I started looking for some short cuts to fabulousness. In an attempt to make myself appear thinner I ignored the advice of my facebook friends and the usually wise counsel of my husband, and went tanning. Since I live in rural West Virginia (one of the most poverty stricken areas of the country) my options were limited. I ended up lying in a tanning bed that I'm pretty sure was from the 80's , with a dusty Wal-Mart fan blowing in from outside the bed, feeling much like a piece of fried chicken under some KFC lights. I got twenty minutes for only five bucks, and ten minutes in I knew why. I ended up hopping out after 18 minutes.

Two weeks later and I'm still peeling off the effects of my date with the human oven (sorry if that sounds offensive, but humans are literally baking themselves in tanning beds). I ended up getting a second degree burn! At one point the skin on my backside started to swell, and just walking around feeling my clothes move against my skin was excruciating.

With this much damage done, I decided to look up some facts about tanning bed and their effects. I found a study put out by WHO's International Agency for research on Cancer saying that UV tanning beds have been moved to it highest cancer risk category in "carcinogenic to humans". Which means it's in the same group as cigarettes and asbestos! The report also said,"The relationship between UV exposure and an increased risk of developing skin cancer is only likely to arise where over-exposure and burning in particular has taken place." Holy crap, that's me. An IARC report released in 2006 also found the usage of tanning beds before age 30 to be associated with a 75% increase in melanoma risk. Yikes, I'm starting to wish I've never tanned before. And lastly, the most sobering part of this report :

"The World Health Organization also estimates that as many as 60,000 people a year worldwide die from too much sun, mostly from malignant skin cancer.
Of these deaths, 48,000 are from melanoma, and 12,000 are from other skin cancers. About 90 percent of these cancers are caused by ultraviolet light from the sun."

So, I am very sorry Brandon, Meshach, Zeke, Noah, and Jov for ever stepping foot into a tanning salon. I wont do again!

Drown 'Em in Mayo!

Right around the time lady summer started to really turn the heat up I noticed my 4yr old, Meshach, start to itch his head a lot. I figured since his little blond shags were starting to look like an afro, he was probably in need of a hair cut. My husband, Brandon, and I thought it was time for him to transition out of toddler hood into being a "big boy" with a new do, a Mohawk. But, as Brandon was buzzing his sides he started noticing dark colored sesame seeds at the roots. At first we thought it might just be dirt or little specs of mulch leftover from the "mulch war" he and his 3 yr old brother Zeke had earlier that day. And then one of the specs moved. After a lot of shrieks and "Oh my gosh this is so disgusting! My kids are becoming the dirty kids!", we moved into action. Clearly since this was a bug on our sons head we researched what it was and how to terminate it.

While Brandon was googling remedies, I had my mom on the phone to reassure me that it was not bad parenting and lack of personal hygiene that caused this infestation. On the contrary, lice actually prefer clean heads (so there, my kids aren't dirty!). And since lice apparently do not carry any life threatening diseases with them, we knew that a home remedy was appropriate for this situation. At this point I was still very, very pregnant with a fourth baby boy, Jov, and the conventional, highly concentrated with chemicals, medicines are very dangerous to pregnant women. And I think it's safe to say that if it's harmful to my precious fetus, then it must pose some danger to a small child and should be used as a last resort. So what's left to kill the little itchy buggers? Mayo. The consistency of mayo (or other very thick oil based products) is great for suffocating the lice, but the trick is that you have to keep it on for about 3 hours. So how do you keep mayo on a 4 yr olds head for 3 hours? First you have to put plastic wrap around their hair because they'll be so tempted to itch and lie every which way over everything and get mayo everywhere and 2 days later you'll have a funky odor coming form your couch. So we got Meshach packaged accordingly, sat him in front of the T.V. and played "Ameria's Got Talent" on a reel until it was time for him to shower off. While Meshach was marinating, I got all the linens from all of our beds, washed and dried them, and then also ran his pillows through the dryer on high for about 20 minutes (evidently, lice are intolerant to hot, dry heat). After he was showered, I went through his hair and picked out all of the dark looking sesame seeds (nits), and he was good to go. Although the mayo was more time and energy consuming than an over the counter medicine would have been, my mind was free of any concerns that we were hurting Meshach in any way by our debugging methods. When the fiasco was over, Meshach got to walk away with the benefit of a head full of soft and shiny hair, bug free.

In the past 8wks since the initial onslaught, we have had two more outbreaks (Zeke got it as well), and have spread our curse to three other homes.

Lesson Learned: If your family has lice, alert every single person that comes in contact with the infected family member and make sure you do not let the infected one sleep in anyone else's space (sorry Aunt Makahla, but thanks for letting Zeke nap in your bed!).

Why is everyone all of the sudden "green"?

In hopes of documenting my families life as people who like to live as close to the earth as possible, I have created my blog " By Natural Means". This is my spin on the other cliche terms "by all means", or "by any means", in which anything goes. For me, only natural goes because you can almost always find something harmful or counter productive in products and processes of life that are not natural. Our first step in the journey of living "green" happened while we were debating what methods of birth control we would use when we first got married. After a lot of research we found that the pill contains hormones that have a violent affect on women's bodies, and can lead to some nasty consequences. And so choosing NFP (natural family planning) was the beginning of our lives as individuals in pursuit of a more holistic lifestyle. Five years and four kids later, we still choose more natural means of living, and I hope to share my story of what it's like.