Dear People of California...

Dear People of California,

My name is Laura, and I live in Iowa. Have you ever been to Iowa? If not, let me paint a picture: the sky is blue and there are miles and miles and miles (and miles) of fields of corn and soy. It is pretty, really. To get the greens in the spring and golds at harvest you would need every crayola in the box.

Mopping the Floor to Cure a Headache?

photo credit

There are days when the boys are louder than others, whether it is amicable role play or a brotherly squabble. The cats hiss at each other and the dog barks at them, then at the UPS guy, then at the mail lady... Oh, my aching head! If only I could just turn down the volume a bit in the whole house.

I have a secret weapon that I bring out from time to time. Two, actually: essential oils of peppermint and cedarwood.  These two oils, in a 2-to-1 ratio peppermint to cedar, when added to unscented* mop water, take everything down a notch. I choose to use the mop water as the medium because it will give a gentle scent to much of our home, but not in an overwhelming way. It does its job and within a few hours will be gone. Today I used six drops of peppermint and three drops of cedarwood, making it pretty strong while keeping the ratio at 2-to-1.

Peppermint has an immediate cooling effect, and its vapours relieve my tension headaches. (If it is a migraine, the effect will be temporary but welcome all the same.) When I was a kid my mom used to rub white Tiger balm on my temples for a headache and this works in a similar, but more subtle, way.

Cedarwood gives a clean, earthy under-note. It is purported to have a calming effect. The household seems to quiet down after everyone gets a whiff of the magic mopping potion. Perhaps it is my imagination; maybe it is because my head stops hurting and I feel better. I don't know, but it works for me.

Headache gone. Floors clean. Next?


* It is hard to find a good, all-purpose cleaner that is not heavily scented. Life Tree's Home Soap does the trick for me. It barely has a fragrance of its own so I can add whatever I like or just let clean smell like nothing.



I shared this post with Frugal Days, Sustainable Ways,  Wildcrafting Wednesday and Fight Back Friday, the Weekend Whatever and Small Footprint Fridays.

www.stealthymom.com

Mommy's Little Helper

G-man helped bake buns the other night. Together we rolled out rounds and hoagies and, at his insistence, a heart-shaped loaf for breakfast toast. Alphabet magnets on the fridge door kept him busy while he waited for the first batch to bake. He disappeared from the kitchen with a freshly buttered bun. Sometimes a quiet four-year-old is cause to worry, so when he did not return to the kitchen I joined him in the living room.

This is how I found him:

Sweet dreams, little fella.



www.stealthymom.com

Butter Biscuit Bake-Off

Butter Biscuits

Several months ago, I emailed Clabber Girl Corporation to thank them for offering a non-GMO baking powder. Rumford is non GMO and aluminum-free. The company sent me a generous sample of the Reduced Sodium version to try. (The sample arrived just before the heat wave, so it was a while before I could go anywhere near the oven. )

Would reduced sodium baking powder get the same results? To find out, I baked up two batches of Butter Biscuits using both versions of the baking powder.

To make the trial as fair as possible, I mixed both at the same time and baked them at the same time. First, the low sodium were arranged on the left side of the baking sheet and the regular on the right, then I reversed them for the next sheet. (That way the only variable was the baking powder. They were rolled the same thickness at the same time, baked at the same time at the same temperature and any inconsistencies within the oven were controlled.)

Here is my Butter Biscuit recipe, adapted from the Tea Biscuits recipe in the Five Roses: A Guide to Good Cooking book:

What can you learn from a patch of dirt?

Everyone should have the opportunity to plant a garden, even if it is only a small rooftop garden or a balcony pot. This year, a guy up the street was driving around making a little side money with his tiller, and the boys were so excited to watch him dig up part of our front yard. Their Daddy and I emptied out the composter and we all grabbed various tools- including a little plastic rake for the Cadet- and worked a year's worth of kitchen scraps and leaves into the big patch of muck. We officially became gardeners on a small scale.


There is something about getting dirty and experiencing the process of growing food that cannot be learned (or felt) in any classroom, from reading books or watching TV. (Teachers out there might cry foul because they had their kids plant seeds for a "lab" experience. I did that, too, when I taught outside the home, and in university got to do some pretty neat stuff in a greenhouse. Nope, not the same, unless you can stick with it from dirt to food and back to dirt again. ) It had been decades since I had been involved in growing food myself, so it was as fresh for me as it was for the boys.

What are we learning?

Basic Biology and Geology: What do roots do? What do leaves do? How did the seed or tuber become a plant? What do plants need to grow? What are the basic components of soil? Where does rain come from? Of course, each of these questions could take up a PHD thesis, but have simple answers for a preschooler, too.

Patience: Some seeds take weeks to poke their solar panels (cotyledons) up through the soil surface. Others take just days, but the weeds quickly outgrow them. There are the plants that become huge but do not produce anything edible until after they flower and go to seed. Then there are the perennials and trees that can take years to produce a crop. Nature has no fast-forward button.

Habitats: Spending time in the garden, we have seen beetles, spiders, worms, bees, birds, squirrels and even a snake. While the front yard was already a habitat, we pay closer attention to what else lives in and visits the yard when we are out there. We listen to crickets, cicadas, and tree frogs in the evening and watch for bats to swoop out to eat mosquitos.

Humans are Part of the Ecosystem: Now that the kids are trying to grow food, they take notice when people throw trash out their car windows or when debris from former owners years ago works up through the soil. When we take walks they like to carry a bag to pick up after litterbugs. They understand how bees and other winged things help pollinate the garden and don't want to hurt them with chemicals. The boys love to forage for edibles and pick wildflowers in the lawn and can see that the "pretty, all-grass" yards in town are not nearly as interesting. They can also see how those conventional lawns have fewer butterflies and bees. At our house, there is a four-year-old and a two-year-old who are getting it.

So far, we've got beets and will have an explosion of zucchini any day. The sweet pepper seeds did not come up, and it might be getting too hot for the potatoes. If this heat wave continues and our herbs don't make it, that will be okay. What we are learning from the yard is more valuable than the produce itself.




I shared this post with Friday Food Flicks,  the Weekend Whatever,  Wildcrafting Wednesday and Empty Your Archives (science experiments for kids).

www.stealthymom.com

File Thirteen

"Bait Snacks"

Some great ideas, if never tried, will stay as great ideas. I've had a few that propelled me to greatness in my own mind, but humbled me in practice. It is arrogant to assume that just because there is not already a recipe published for my grand scheme that no one has tried it before. It is likely that the same ideas crossed someone else's mind at some point then discreetly found their way to the bin, never to be discussed again.

Tornados and Muffins

On Saturday, a powerful set of storms ripped through the Midwest. Two towns in our area- Thurman and Creston, Iowa- were hit pretty hard by tornados. About a hundred people from Thurman became homeless, as 90% of their tiny town was damaged.

Of course we wanted to help somehow. Showing up with wee ones to a disaster area would not be a great idea. Why not bake up a bunch of muffins? Anyone stuck in a shelter would be grateful for something to eat that did not come wrapped in cellophane, right? While I mixed and poured, Stealthy Dad made a run to the grocery store and kept the kids entertained. We made chocolate chip, raisin spice and lemon poppyseed muffins, regular and gluten free. Ten dozen in all.