How to Slay a Dragon

Confession time:  In some ways, I have morphed into more of a full on hippie than the halfway hippie I have claimed to be.  But, desperate times, you know?!

I have been making a slow transition to a healthier lifestyle for a while now.  I have had many, many flops, and relatively few successes.  The biggest problem has been deciding what to implement and in what order, essentially, priorities.  I have prayed for quite a while about this, and really didn’t have any big revelation, so I just continued marching on.

Until that one day.

My littlest love had been hacking all night, and I kept him home from school.  Around 3:00, I decided that he needed to go to the doctor.  I am so glad I did.  Turns out, although he had everyone fooled (even our awesome doctor!), he had dangerously low oxygen levels and required serious treatment and hospitalization.

I freaked.

He was diagnosed with “wheezing episodes” (to avoid a diagnosis that will follow him forever).  He has an inhaler, nebulizer, and a ton of other stuff.  For the past several weeks we have been dealing with this unofficial diagnosis, trying to figure out how to help him naturally, because I truly believe his body should be able to fight this.  It turns out that asthma, allergies and eczema are often found together, as they are in my littlest love.

I have found that low magnesium, manganese and essential fatty acids are common in people with these three issues, so we are addressing that.

I cut out all dairy from his diet, and his digestion is SO MUCH BETTER.

We kicked our cat outside.

We all got Zyto scanned for essential oils.

And, in true hippie fashion, I have water keifer grains fermenting on my counter.

In an interesting twist, his illness has given me the priorities list I needed to start implementing all of these ideas.  We’ll see how they go, but at least we have a general direction.

I will do my best to keep you posted as to what is working well for us, and what isn’t.  This in no way will be medical advice, but rather just explaining what works for us.  While he is doing much better these days, we did have a couple of major episodes yesterday so we are by no means “there” yet.

So, now you have it.  Another interesting twist in our “halfway hippie” journey to a healthier, more natural lifestyle.

 

Redirecting

I started this blog with the grandiose plans of having an awesome little homestead.  However, these great ideas were soon scaled back and even abandoned due to “real life happenings”.  The reality is, we are new here in the South.  We seem to travel often, and travel with a garden and farm animals is difficult (and only difficult instead of impossible because of wonderful neighbors).  We also have school aged kiddos.  Kids come with a whole unique set of needs and desires, and after so many moves we made getting involved in their school and sports activities a family priority over setting up the homestead.   Add in the illnesses and work trips, well, suffice it to say, I just stopped blogging for fear that updating the blog would feel like a near constant reminder; in writing, nonetheless, of my failures.

I don’t want to give you the idea that the year was full of failures.  It was not, by a long shot.  In fact, we’ve had a great year!  We are more settled here than I ever would have hoped!  The boys had a great school years, were very successful in baseball and tee ball, Mark is enjoying his job, we have found a church we like and even made some really great friends.  We enjoyed a two week trip to the Homeland in July, and the kids had a great time trekking all over the beautiful Pacific Northwest.  The boys started school again in August and we have nothing but positive things to say about their teachers and the school year thus far.

All of these things are really great, but I am definitely re-thinking what I want our goals to be regarding the “homestead” and the blog.  Self-sustainability is an incredible goal, but I don’t think it’s possible for us with the priorities we’ve had, and I don’t think we will be changing them any time soon.   I hope to expound on my gardening issues this year and share some of our struggles in that department, as well as with our rabbitry, in a future post.  I also plan to share some new things we are trying that are a little bit easier to incorporate and sustain to increase our health and sustainability.  Eventually, I would like to redefine our goals, but that may take a while.

Until then, here’s me, on a trip of a lifetime to South America and Jamaica.