Back & Excited to be Moving Forward

I didn’t totally vanish! Any useful blog posts on the Herbal Homeschool may have dried up these last 5 months but my little family has been flourishing and growing happily! Now that things are somewhat settled I am going to get back to writing 1 post per week on something herb-related, but I want this first post to just be an update to catch everyone up on what we have been up to . . .

Biggest news first; We had our 3rd baby 8 weeks ago! Little Eli David was born at 38 weeks (total surprise) at home with our incredible midwives after only 4 hours of active labor. Our girls slept through everything & were actually speechless when we surprised them with a little brother the next morning! (Even though Elsie told us that she thought she would just stay up with us & wait for the baby to come the night before around 9pm. Yeah, no)  Herbs were a big part of our birth story too; I had been using Red raspberry tincture to help prepare my body in the week leading up to his birth ( and it must have worked!) Also, the midwives used some Chinese herbs to stop my body from hemorrhaging between when he was born & when the placenta was fully delivered. It was a last resort before Pitocin would have been absolutely necessary and it worked within seconds. Third, though this isn’t completely “herbal” I took Arnica homeopathically after the delivery to speed my recovery & it was absolutely amazing compared to my two previous births.

So yeah in these last 8 weeks we have been adjusting to being outnumbered by kids (though with babywearing we still aren’t!) while coping with very little sleep, some health problems in the family that have demanded a lot of attention, crazy work schedules for Jeremy, and daily life. We are super blessed though & have loved every minute we have gotten to spend as a new family of 5!

Fun news; We’re starting preschool! As my blog name is The Herbal Homeschool, I am super excited to tell you all that we are officially HOMESCHOOLERS! Jeremy & I are both homeschool graduates, so we have always looked forward to homeschooling our own children. This summer before Eli was born, Elsie, who is 3, and I started working ourselves into a preschool homeschool routine about 3 days per week. So far we’ve nailed letters & sounds, are working hard on handwriting & cutting with scissors (BIG deal!) reading Bible stories all together, memorizing verses, cooking/baking together (she LOVES making her own sauerkraut), and of course, learning about the outdoors. I’ve never seen another 3 year old who can identify so many plants and is so passionate about weeding! Jeremy is also enjoying adding mushroom hunting & learning about deer into her preschool “curriculum” lol!

 Our garden has done amazing this year! I was able to keep up with it through June before needing to focus more heavily on preparing for the baby, and we had so much fun! The girls and I picked dozens and dozens of pounds of strawberries from the beds around our house & we enjoyed picking grapes, goji berries, goumi berries, blueberries, and seaberries from our larger berry garden on the hill with Jeremy. The veggie garden did well too, though  I could have kept up with some things like the green beans & cucumbers better; we got hundreds of pounds of winter and summer squash including some crazy decorative gremlin squash that the three year old calls “monster squash” Everything grew about 5 times bigger than it should have because I couldn’t get out to pick it right after Eli was born, so we are enjoying 15 pound butternut squash and zucchini that looks like a baseball bat. We were hoping for enough squash to supplement our diet this winter & provide Eli with his first “real food” in a few months & we definitely got it!

Side Note; I started a new business online! I LOVE anything to do with Photoshop & enjoy editing photos for my own family, but even with new babies there are only so  many photos to edit. And by “so many” I mean hundreds. But still. Once I felt like I had a bit more energy back & could wake up before all the kids, I decided to start a photo editing business called Refined Photo Editing.  I offer color correction, photo enhancement, background removal, object removal, photo restoration, head-swapping, merging pictures to make photo montages, etc. You can now check out my latest endeavor on Etsy and facebook .  I am also offering a line of customizable digital Christmas cards featuring family pictures & unique scripture that hasn’t been ‘overdone’ on Christmas cards.

A few goals moving forward . . .

• With autumn upon us & the weather FINALLY getting cooler, one thing I really want to learn about is what to do with my herbs over the winter; I want to learn which herbs to keep outside, which ones I should bring in, how to regrow some little plants from clipping so I have some to use for next year, etc.
• Every winter it seems like my hands get horribly dry then crack & bleed. This year I want to develop an awesome hand cream that is effective, soaks in & isn’t greasy, smells great, and is still safe for babies who are constantly sucking on my fingers.
• As winter is also cold & flu season, I also want to prepare an herbal/ essential oil antibacterial mixture that I can soak some fabric napkins or paper towels in so we can wipe our hands frequently while we are out & stay healthy. This year I feel like this is extra important because we will be visiting my grandma in her nursing home very often and being exposed to a lot of different germs there (not to mention we really don’t want her to get sick.) I’ll also make this mixture into a spray for things like my phone, keyboard, light switches, etc. that don’t get washed as often as they should.
• Prepping some tincture for the future is also on my list. As I was reorganizing my pantry the other day, I realized that my supply of tinctures like Echinacea was sadly depleted. Since they take a few weeks to prepare, I need to be proactive in restocking my pantry so we are ready at the first sign of any sickness.  I also need to learn how to make more kid friendly tincture alternatives without the alcohol base so I can be confident using it to treat my kids as well.
• I want to keep learning about how to use herbs while pregnant/nursing. NO, I’m not pregnant again now, but having the information BEFORE I am will be a help. I had just started learning about it when I found out I was pregnant with Eli then I didn’t feel well enough to keep up with much of anything except for the bare minimum for the first 25 weeks or so.
• I also want to keep learning about a new herb each week. To help me retain what I have learned & to teach my kids about herbs in a fun way, I will be designing herb flash cards. I want to incorporate herbs into our daily life & make treating health issues naturally second-nature for my kids, so we will be using the flash cards to play fun games like go fish, matching games, etc. I’m expecting to have these available for sale by spring!

Moving into this next season, I hope to be back to learning more about herbs & sharing what I learn here on the Herbal Homeschool. I want to encourage everyone, myself included, to make it a priority to continue to learn & grow even when life gets crazy and busy . There’s never a “perfect” time to start something, but if you look around there are plenty of ways to incorporate learning about natural ways to improve your health into everyday life, whether it’s googling new things while nursing in the middle of the night, taking nature walks with kids, or incorporating herbs into your homeschool curriculum.