God-Sib

I'm not huge on reading about birth these days but an article caught my eye and all of the old familiar lingo was comfortable and easy to read and I slipped into it like a comfy sweater. Then I came across this delicious morsel and I smiled. It was a cat who got the cream smile because I lived this and it's one of my favorite memories. I'm not as close to everyone who was there for me anymore but life happens and they have moved on which I don't resent or fight. I choose to celebrate what was and accept what is. In that moment of that season my "God Sibs" surrounded me and it was beautiful. I captured the paragraph and sent it to the one who I'm still close to and I felt her smile as she read it.

"In English, at least, we know that gossip, used as a noun, was first applied to the women who attended their neighbors’ childbirths. Although the word took on negative connotations, it originally comes from god-sib, that is, god-sibling: the woman who you’d name as your closest friend, and the godmother of your child. In early America, once a woman’s postpartum recovery period was over, she’d host a party for the god-sibs who had helped her during labor. They spoke of gathering around the “groaning table,” in reference to a table creaking under the weight of the food piled atop it and to the groaning of a woman in labor."

My God-Sibs cheered my baby right out taking pictures and laughing like heaven. Then, days later the ones who couldn't make it to the birth in time gathered around me and celebrated and drank champagne and ate coffee cake and passed my little munch around squeezing and crooning and swaying like a bunch of clucking hens at our brunch. Just saying "We did that old school!" made me incredibly happy. 

I'm probably the most nostalgic human alive. 

Source: http://www.christianitytoday.com/women/2016/july/lets-be-honest-labor-is-kind-of-trauma.html

Bee, Wasp, Yellow Jacket sting remedy

Hi All, I just want to post this really quick because the yellow jackets are off the hook lately. My mom figured out how to stop the whole effect of a bee sting. This is for normal people, not people allergic to stings. 

About two weeks ago my sister and my friend got stung multiple times and their misery was on and on for days. They both kept sending me disgusting pictures of their disfigured hand and leg. I was like you guys! This is gross but I guess if it helps you somehow I will look at these awful pictures. I tried comfrey and some old dry plantain growing at the park on my friend but she said it was just soothing, didn't actually help. My sister said the same and went to my moms house. They sat around discussing what she "should have done". Mom said she wondered if hydrogen peroxide would work since she had successfully treated brown recluse bites with it. 

Well, as fate would have it, the next day Mom got a good double sting on the inside of her arm. So she tried it! 

I was so thrilled to hear this that I started texting all of my friends. And then dun dun dun dun!!! Hazel got stung. I rushed my shrieking sobbing child inside and plunged her hand into a brimming cup of peroxide. She stopped crying and asked for a Popsicle. I was amazed. We sat there for a long time soaking her hand just in case. Finally I lifted her hand out and the only mark was a tiny white dot. 

I was ecstatic! Then I doubted myself. I had just seen on the news that 90% of stings in Colorado are yellow jackets but still... Was that really a yellow jacket? Fortunately Hazel's protective father had killed the little bugger so I went out in the yard and hunted the carcas down. I compared it to Internet images of yellow jackets and concluded it was indisputably a yellow jacket. 

And now you know. We need little bottles of hydrogen peroxide in our purses, our cars and definitely in our camping supply containers. I just read on some other blog it stops poison ivy.