September Sickness - and Healing

   September is here ... my most favorite month of the year. It is the gateway to fall...to apple goodness, to flickering fires, to slippers and crisp night air, crafts and crafts and more crafts. It's also my birthday month, which isn't something I greatly care about...it's just on my "to do" list of each year. You know....Alyssa must turn 29 years old this year...get er' done.
 The top picture is of my little baby doll last September...bundled up in his favorite blanket.

  And here is this year, all of little boyishness still draped with his favorite blankie, an Ikea awesomeness. Such a little man to fall asleep with his hands under his head, his little feet crossed at the ankle, sweetly dreaming away his fever.
 Oh fevers....my last five days has been taken over with them. Tristan surprised us this last week with coming down with a rather severe case of croup. His coughing was really rough and I had to stay up at least two nights almost ALL night long with him, holding him over a humidifier, taking him out in the night air...rubbing eucalyptus oil on his chest and garlic oil on his feet. It was kind of scary because there were a few times I was kind of unsure of if we needed to take a trip to the ER. But, I looked up what they would do to him at the hospital and wasn't totally comfortable with all of the treatments and didn't feel like having a long conversation with doctors over Tristan's vaccination records - and I knew almost everything they COULD do for him Zac and I could do at home. So, we just took his vitals rather often, listened to his chest with a stethoscope and I used every bit of my herbal mama knowledge. I gave him wild cherry bark tincture for the mucous...for a bit he had rattling in his chest. After only two doses he threw up almost all of the sliminess (sorry for the tmi) and then I just let his fever run. I gave him ginger baths if he seemed really really uncomfortable (ginger regulates your body's temperature) and then I chopped and chopped up garlic and put it in oil for about 4 hours and rubbed it on his feet. Garlic is a natural antibiotic and the feet is one of the best places to apply it...it gets into the blood stream quicker where the skin is soft and thin. I also combined eucalyptus essential oil and coconut oil and used that on his chest and spine. Our house smelled like a pizzeria in the Outback. If he was having a really bad coughing fit I would turn on the hot water in the shower and put peppermint essential oil in the bathtub and we would sit in their together. It was around the clock care for sure but I was in just a little bit of heaven...except for my baby being sick and me being secretly terrified from time to time.  I came away with two thoughts.
First....staying calm and confident is a challenge...and I was able to do both.
Second ... i LOVE herbs. Most people don't have the patience to use them...they take a bit longer then pharmaceuticals but I think in MOST cases the herbs actually heal and the drugs just cover up symptoms.
Third (I always have more thoughts) I would love to learn more - I feel like I NEED to learn more. I will.

  The other kids and Zac have all just had a one day fever with congestion. They haven't been very comfortable and Zac has already finished off a box of kleenex and then got started on our toilet paper rolls today.
  I started a raw food regimen about a week before the sickness took over the Corley clan and...knock on wood...I think it may have saved me from catching this bug. We will see what happens in the next few days...but eating a watermelon a day, loads of grapes and greens and chugging down lemon/mint water has made me feel rather giddy and kind of on a "high." I have so much energy and I haven't even really had coffee lately - it's pretty awesome how good food can heal the body. Besides eating mounds of fruit, we've just been resting.

  Resting and resting and resting so much I've begun to go stir crazy. Today we were watching a Walton Movie marathon on the Hallmark channel and i just jumped up and started doing squats just because I couldn't stand watching Olivia sweep her porch and the Walton clan hiking up the mountain every ten minutes and me on the couch with kids draped over my body. It's been good healing time though and the kids have been troopers...but I'm ready for the sickness to be gone, the school books out...and the normal routine ticking away again.

 As a parting thought, if any of you have any awesome history craft type ideas I can do with my kiddos, will you leave me a comment? Brady is obsessed right now with the presidents, especially President Obama and JFK .... I would like to come up with a project he could work on that doesn't entail a lot of writing. We were able to visit the Martin Luther King Jr. library the other day (I got a library card for the first time in ages) and Brady was really wanting a book on Martin Luther King Jr. Well, we searched and searched and then a librarian helped search and the man finally looked at me and said "well, this is embarrassing but we don't actually have a kids book on Martin Luther King." Embarrassing indeed. I told Brady that libraries were a lot of fun but we better go our normal route and wikipedia Dr.King - sometimes being a techno mom is helpful.
 Until next time friends...