Festive Traditions ~ A Real Food Guide to the Holidays!

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Naming Names or Nicknames

Today's thankfulness is for a God who can see the big picture, because right now, I'm struggling with what the future may hold.

As with most time consuming commitments, I fail because there are so many variables in my life right now.  And I'm thankful for most of them, most of the time.  So here I am humbly apologizing for failing so early in the game to keep up with my daily posts.
After I'd published this post, I checked my email and found this inspirational post by Aviva Romm M.D. that seemed written just for me!
Permission to Pause and Ten Easy Ways to Do It


Someone asked about the way I talk about my family and friends on my blog.  Do I call them by name or do I use descriptive terms and nicknames?  My thoughts are that real names don't need to be used to acquaint folks with my story and get the point across.
 I'm the Woodwife, as I'm sure you may have guessed.  After reading my blog, we are affectionately called the Woodwise family by a dear friend.  I call my husband Mr.Wood or Wally, and my children have been referred to , by this same dear friend, as Miss Lizzy Woodwise and Miss Indianna Woodwise.  I love those names and so I think I will adopt them at times, as well.  However, I may refer to them as Goosie, Jo, Little Bit, or some such character from their favorite literature and they often call me Marmie.

 As a homeschooling family, we've covered the classical literature subject with intense pleasure...and also with deplorable grief and despair, as he story goes!  We've read the books, we've seen the movies, we've listened to the audio dramas and been transported to places we can only imagine thanks to the descriptive authors who've painted the picture so well.  The Miss Woodwises can recite many scenes verbatim, in context, with all the proper airs and accents without batting an eye! We've even dressed the part occasionally as we've taken part in our local theater productions. Yes, I do answer to the name, Mrs. Beaver from time to time. We've been to a few colonial reenactments and spent a week in Colonial Williamsburg dressing appropriately the entire week! We were mistaken for reenactors who work there!  What great fun!
In light of all that, you can imagine how much at home we feel as we read through the attic scene in Little Women as the girls act out the stories of their time!

It's fun to think of ourselves as fictional characters who embody some of our most prominent characteristics. However, I would be quite put out if anyone called me Mrs. Bennett!


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Much herbal love,

   

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Thankfulness for Three Areas of Natural Health Maintainance

Today's November Thankfulness Thought  #5 is for the rest of my family and all the life lessons I've learned from them.  It's been quite a trip but I think I would have been a different person if I had not been placed on this path.  You know what they say, 'Bloom where you're planted' and I've tried to do that.

Whole Foods
Natural DIY Products
Natural/Herbal Medicine

Three areas of naturall health for which I'm thankful.

Lets talk about Whole Food and what that means.  Eating a Whole Food diet doesn't mean you have to buy every thing you eat from the Whole Foods market.  In fact in light of some recent articles I've read, don't assume that what you buy there is good for you until you've read the label.

Whole Foods isn't a new concept.  It's the revival of a way of life or way of eating before the industrial age.  Don't be afraid, I'm not suggesting you go back to living like folks did 100 years ago! Only eating the way they did...eating foods as close to their natural state as you can find.  And that doesn't include GMO  (frankenfoods) even if they're labeled as "natural" foods, because they're not!  Read this article to learn a bit more about what GMO foods really represent.

No prepackaged, hyper-preserved, dead food...let's eat food that alive!  Alive with raw vitamins, minerals, fiber, digestion enhancing bacteria and the natural synergy God placed in them.

Synergy!
I love that word!
But you already knew that!
Synergy has to do with the increased benefits of natural components working better together
for good than either one alone.  But it's even more then just adding one's benefits to the other...synergy is another bonus on top of those benefits that comes from the interaction of the two.

As a brief simple primer, a Whole Food diet includes
* fresh, local produce free from pesticides and herbicides,
* pasture raised meat,
* eggs from free range chickens,
* unprocessed dairy from pastured cows,
* cultured foods made from our fresh dairy and produce,
* unrefined grains (ancient grain wheat from before the days of increased gluten),
* natural, unrefined sweeteners
* unrefined natural fats
I'll talk about how we try to implement these ideals in our daily lives later this month.

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Much herbal love,

   

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Thankfulness and Things I'd like to Know

It's Saturday morning and I'm writing to say that I'm a few days late getting on the thankful posts for the month of November so let me start by sharing 3 things that have blessed me.

First, I'm so grateful for the love of my Savior that was so great that He died on the cross, not only for an impersonal 'mankind' (which He did), but for me!  Because He sees me and knows my every thought, feeling and deed, He did it for me!

Second, I'm thankful for my husband who works so hard to provide for us.  He may not always be available when things are going on, or be good at showing his feelings but he loves each one of us very much.

Third, I'm thankful for my two beautiful, God fearing daughters who have blessed me from day one and continue to do so!  I've shared so many memories with them...sometimes I look back with regret at the opportunities that have passed us by but then I look at all the things we've done together and I'm glad.

One a different note, I'd like to say that one thing that has always intrigued me is iridology.  My first encounter with it was kinda unnerving because the gal who was talking about it thought that it was actually a window to a person's soul!  Now, I'm not into that and I don't really believe it, but I do believe that iridology could certainly be a window to our health. We've lost touch with so many ancient ways of determining the state of our health and abandoned all those concerns to the health care industry.  But don't get me started on that!  The practice of modern medicine has a lot to offer but I can't help feeling like we need to maintain some personal responsibility for our health and care.

I'll tell you why I finally decided there was a practical side to iridology.
My cat, who was one of the most healthy animals I've ever owned, would occasionally get a dark spot in the iris of her eye.  Shortly after that I noticed that she had worms.  So I treated her and in about a week the dark spot was gone!  Several months later, the process happened again with the same results and I realized I'd just witnessed the method of iridology at work!
Someday, I'd like to dig a little deeper into the information our body is telling us about our own health through the miraculous way God created our eyes to mirror what's going on inside.

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Much herbal love,

   

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Menopause? Menopause! Perimenopause.

Menopause!  Caution...very personal story.
It hasn't been fun...but thank goodness for herbal/supplement methods of balancing hormone levels.

After a very traumatic 3 month period of time in which I lost my Dad to cancer in 2 weeks, my first great nephew who was stillborn and another very close friend to cancer,  my cycle stopped altogether. I started hemorrhaging a few months later.  For two straight months I had massive bleeding. Being the stubborn person that I am, I refused to seek out help until I was nearly clear and very weak.  After a 2 unit blood transfusion, I was given a couple options.  Oblation...which I'd read about and didn't feel I was a candidate for (the specialist at Magee agreed with me!), Hysterectomy...which was not even an option in my book unless there was cancer, or an injection of premarin that would put me in a mini menopause for 3 months.
It takes me a long time to make big decisions so I opted for the injection to gain more time.  This was during the time when I was learning about the xenoestrogens ~ toxins that act like estrogen in your body and pull all kinds of nasty tricks on your hormones.  Then your hormones play horrible games with the rest of your body leaving you with worn out adrenal glands, poor memory, crazy oscillating cycles, excessive clotting and bleeding, excess weight, cloudy thinking, and several other things which have slipped my mind...see 'poor memory' listed earlier.
A life saving book that I found was 'What Your Doctor Won't Tell You About Perimenopause' by Dr. John Lee.  It's listed in the revolving Amazon book list in the margin...go look for it!
It's over there...
See?
Just click on the book when it pops up if you are having any of the above symptoms and think you may be heading down the same path.  Dr. Lee described me to a TEE and has lists of recommendations for supplements and bio identical progesterone cream to help ease the transition into this new phase of my life.
It's still a rocky road when I stop doing the things I should and eat too much chocolate but I'm so thankful for the solutions that allowed me to avoid surgery.
I hope this book can help you, too.
Look for it...now!

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Much herbal love,

   

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Herbal Distance Learning for the whole family! Herb, Teas, Essential Oils, Tinctures, Incense and more! Start your own Herbal Medicine Chest Kit!

Why I write about natural health...

The Internet is bursting with a resurgence of natural alternative medicine and practices.  From all corners of the globe traditions and long practiced principles for the prevention, maintenance, and healing from disease can now be found with the click of a button.

Years ago when I was just a young wife in the pre-child (and pre-internet) years, I was fascinated by the idea that one could use folk remedies to heal a myriad of health issues.  Gathering medicine from the fields and woodlands seemed like something from a fairy tale.  The few books I had were full of interesting information only to be followed by frightening warnings.

And so I read about but never tried using homemade remedies for healing.  Instead, I turned my attention to the beautiful things I could make from the natural bounty around me.  Wreaths, garlands, swags, potpourri and more for myself, my friends and soon as a business.  I loved being in touch with all these things and found that I had so much to learn about what they had to offer.

  I'd never thought about how the things I breathed or touched could impact my health in either positive or negative ways.  I've always been blessed with a pretty hardy constitution which I took for granted.  Now, with my girls grown, I'm facing the truth about xenoestrogens and how they have harmed my health through the steady exposure to cleaning products, chemical hair color, plastics, petroleum based cosmetics, parabens in nearly every personal care product and more over the years.

So my first step was to learn how to eliminate as many of those things as I can from my home and my life.  I needed to make some changes like:
 Adding real, whole foods, eating less refined processed food, making my own soap and herbal remedies, using aromatherapy,  green cleaning my home with safe products made from things I already had on hand, finding ways to reduce reuse, recycle and upcycle old things into a new repurposed life, DIY projects to become more self-sufficient.

  Then, as I continue learning about herbs and ways to care for my health from a more natural perspective, I can grow in knowledge and conviction.  I still have a long way to go but through education, research and experience I intend to pursue my lifelong journey toward becoming an herbalist and learning to use the bounty of God's creation to stay healthy.

You may wonder about the name of this blog...you can read about it at What is a Woodwife.

If you'd like to learn more about me, you can read:
 Who I Am and Where I've Been,
and
About Me

You can read about crafting your own Herbal Medicine Chest
.


Join myself and a couple blogging friends each week for Wildcrafting Wednesday where you can share what you've made and learn about how others are using herbs and natural means to build sustainable lifestyles.

Visit the Grab My Buttons page to add some of these links to your blog or site.
Happy Reading!

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Hope you "Like" it!

Much herbal love,

   

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Herbal Distance Learning for the whole family! Herb, Teas, Essential Oils, Tinctures, Incense and more! Start your own Herbal Medicine Chest Kit!