I first heard of Locks of Love when I was 18 and joined the volunteer service. I had long hair down to my lower back but was moving to sweltering south Texas so I decided to cut it all off. I made a donation of a nice sized ponytail to be turned into a wig for a child in need. Today I decided to make another donation.If you're not familiar with Locks of Love, their website … [Read more...]
Coping With Sleep Issues as a Co-Sleeping Family
Welcome to the February 2013 Natural Living Blog Carnival: Addressing Sleep Challenges. This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Natural Living Blog Carnival hosted by Happy Mothering and The Pistachio Project through the Green Moms Network. This month our members have written posts about how they address sleep challenges in their homes. When I was pregnant, I knew … [Read more...]
Our New Year Goals
It is that time of year when we wrap up one year and think of our aspirations and dreams for a whole new year ahead. I love the opportunity to sit down, reflect back on the year past and dream for the future. Here are a few of the goals we have for the next year:1. Live more self-sufficiently by reducing our debt and in turn reduce the time we need to work away from home at a … [Read more...]
How to Get New Things Without Spending a Dime: Barter and Trade
These days since I'm more of a stay at home/work from home mama, money is a lot tighter than last year when I was working full time. I've been enjoying the challenge of finding ways to save money, live more frugally and be creative about how I get new things for our family.One of my favorite ways to acquire things is to barter and trade. Back in my college days I used to barter … [Read more...]
Our Birth Trauma & A Healing Journey
My hope in writing the following post is to share our story about facing a traumatic birth and coping with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Postpartum Depression so that it may help someone else out there who is having a similar struggle. There is no need to suffer in silence. There are many resources out there in communities and online to help families through these … [Read more...]
Solar Panels & Offsetting our Carbon Footprint
Having solar panels on your home is such a wonderful way to reduce your carbon footprint and live more sustainability. These days there are many federal and state tax credits available and even grant funds to help offset the expense to have solar panels installed on your home.My husband is the co-owner of a solar business. To say he is a solar nerd is an understatement. At the … [Read more...]
The Grief of a Thousand Miles
Each time I wrote a blog post over the last two weeks and clicked the “publish” button, I knew an email of that blog post would get sent across the country to my aunt’s inbox. I knew it would never get read. It would sit there, unopened, unread, among all the other emails she was receiving in her inbox. The reason you wonder? She lay unresponsive in a hospital bed in … [Read more...]
Life Lessons from Gumby and Pokey: Learning to be Flexible
For the last month, we had been planning on a several day family camping adventure over the Memorial Day weekend in one of our favorite camping spots. As the weekend neared, we realized that our favorite camping spot was not going to be accessible due to the access road being gated because of high levels of snow on the mountain pass. We began talking about alternative camping … [Read more...]