All natural healing salve – soothes diaper rash and more!

Diaper rash sucks, plain and simple. To watch your sweet little girl endure a red, inflamed, bumpy rear end is just no fun. Sucks, sucks, sucks I tell you. I let her run around most of yesterday without a diaper on to allow her skin to air out. This led to many pee soaked towels… Nothing I can’t handle. The big poo we had to remove from the kitchen floor was my favorite part though. Hey, if she had gone in her diaper we would have had to scrape the smashed poop from all over her butt cheeks, so maybe we were given a gift this time. No one ever said being a mother was glamorous, no one.

You don’t need to have wee ones to find benefits for this balm. It can be used as a calming salve for skin conditions such as psoriasis or eczema, to treat minor scrapes or rashes, soften cuticles or simply to moisturize chapped skin. If you do have little ones I would say this treatment is hands down the best way to soothe diaper rash. In the 21 months that I’ve been a mama to my Marvel she has gotten maybe 4 or 5 diaper rashes. She’s one of the lucky ones, that’s for sure. When a rash has flared up in the past I have used arrowroot powder, shea butter or even an organic store bought butt paste. This method has proven more effective than all of them. I whipped this up quicker than you can say the ingredients out loud, slathered her irritated bum with it and within a few hours it was a few bumps away from being completely cleared up. I wish I would have gotten a before and after picture for you but it totally escaped me in all that bodily function cleaning mayhem.

All you do to make this is mix 1-2 tbsp of coconut oil with a 5-10 drops of tea tree and/or lavender essential oils. That’s it. For reals! Totally effective, all natural rash soother. Like I said earlier, this mixture would be wonderful for healing minor cuts, scrapes, burns, bug bites, chapped skin, the list goes on.

Coconut oil is incredible. It contains lauric acid, which kills harmful pathogens like bacteria, viruses and fungi. Breast milk is the only other natural source that contains such a high concentration of lauric acid. So unless your boobs are secreting this miracle liquid, get yourself some coconut oil. It’s a hippies Neosporin – but you can eat it and it smells like a tropical vacation. It rocks my proverbial socks off. If you don’t keep coconut oil in your house at all times I would strongly suggest you do. It’s awesomeness knows no bounds! I get mine from Costco. The brand they carry, Nutiva is organic and responsibly farmed. It’s the cheapest organic coconut oil I’ve found at $28.00 for 78 oz. Killer deal!

XO
Sam

Zucchini Onion Bites

The battle to get my 20 month old to eat her vegetables has been waging for a few months now. There was a time not so long ago when she would eat nearly anything I put in front of her. Oh the good old days. Now that she is starting to understand her own power and her ability to choose, she is exercising it at every opportunity. The fact that she is flexing these newly formed muscles makes me happy, mostly anyway. This means that she is right on track to becoming a strong, independent girl. Fantastic! However, when it comes to making sure she is getting the proper nutrition for her little growing body, this strong will is thwarting my good intentions. It can be extremely frustrating when I work hard to prepare a meal that I know will do her body good and she doesn’t even try the green stuff. In recent desperation, I’ve been exploring new tactics to get her to eat more veggies. Turns out she is old enough to understand the concept of ‘eat your dinner and you’ll get dessert’. Before I had a child of my own, I swore up and down that I’d never bribe my kids. That went out the window as soon as I realized how powerful a tool it was. 😉 My husband got me an ice cream maker for Christmas. I foresee much more dessert bribery in my future. In the meantime, I’m always implementing the tried and true method of hiding vegetables in other food that I know she loves. Works every time.

These bites are AH-MAZING. I made the batch yesterday and we’ve already eaten nearly half of them. I’ve packed 24 bites (the equivalent of a dozen muffins) with an entire onion, 2 carrots and 1 large zucchini.

The flour I used to bind it all together is toasted quinoa flour. All you do to make it is grind 2 cups of uncooked quinoa in your coffee grinder. Spread the flour out on a baking sheet and bake in your oven on 220 degrees for 2 hours. Roasting the flour like this will take out the intense grassy flavor that plain quinoa flour can have. Store in a tightly sealed jar for months!

I’ve also added a healthy dose of turmeric, one of my favorite spices to use in my cooking. Turmeric boasts a long list of health benefits such as containing powerful antioxidants and being a potent anti-inflammatory. Inflammation in the body of any kind can be the start of a myriad of health problems. The foods we are putting in our body are either feeding disease or fighting it; turmeric is certainly in the latter category. An important bit of information about turmeric – it is fat soluble, which means that it dissolves in fat. Without fat, the active component in turmeric, curcumin, has a difficult time making it past the stomach, into the small intestine, and into the blood where it can offer the greatest benefits. So whenever I cook with turmeric, I always add a healthy fat like ghee to the recipe as well. I also always add black pepper when I’m using turmeric. Here is why,

One problem with curcumin is its low levels of bioavailability. Most of the curcumin that is ingested gets metabolized before it can get absorbed. Piperine is said to help make curcumin more bioavailable. This could be because it could inhibit certain intestinal digestive enzymes. This increases the amount of any drug or supplement that can be absorbed by the body. They also do not get degraded quickly. Hence, there are studies to test if co-administering curcumin with piperine could improve the bioavailability of the former. These studies have been conducted on humans and laboratory animals. One study found that when even 2g of curcumin was ingested, its serum levels were very low. However, when 20mg piperine was added to curcumin the bioavailability increased by 2000%. The bioavailability, serum levels and levels of absorption of curcumin all improved dramatically. Thus, if one tales turmeric, most of it is unutilized unless supplemented by addons such as black pepper.

So dear readers, if you want to up your body’s ability to reap all of the yummy benefits of this super spice, use a healthy fat and black pepper when cooking with it. I’ve done just that in my zucchini onion bites.

Zucchini Onion Bites

Ingredients

• 1 medium yellow onion finely chopped
• 2 medium carrots grated
• 1 large zucchini grated
• 3 cloves of garlic minced
• 3 eggs beaten
• 1/2 cup toasted quinoa flour
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp turmeric
• 1/4 cup ghee
• 1/4 tsp black pepper

Process

• Set oven to 350 degrees
• Add ghee to a skillet on medium heat and cook until melted.
• Once melted, add onions and cook for a few minutes, until translucent.
• Next add garlic and let cook for another minute or so.
• Add carrot and zucchini and mix until everything is nicely combined. Cook for another two minutes or so.
• Take off heat and place in a large bowl to cool.
• Meanwhile beat eggs lightly in a medium bowl.
• Add grated Parmesan and spices to eggs as mix lightly until just combined
• Once veggie mixture is cooled, add egg mixture to it and mix until combined.
• In a small bowl mix flour and baking powder, then add to large bowl with eggs and veggies and mix together until evenly combined.
• Pour batter into greased mini muffin tin or if you don’t have a mini muffin tin, scoop out 2 tbsp worth of batter and place bites onto large greased baking sheet to cook.
• Bake in oven for 18 minutes.

My daughter, husband and I are all delighted with the yummy outcome. Look how cute she is chowing down! If she only knew how much of the yucky vegetable stuff she was eating… Muahahahahaha! 🙂

Ease teething pain naturally

Hell hath no fury like an 18 month old cutting 4 molars at once. These last few months, I’ve traded in sleep for coffee. Good thing I like coffee. Lack of sleep = lack of coherence. If you find this post disjointed, now you know why. Sleep is really good for brains. I’ll bet in the case of a zombie apocalypse my pickled cerebrum would be in no immediate danger.

Procreating. What a trip. Being a mother has elicited emotions in me that I simply didn’t know existed. Did you know it was possible to feel seething anger and total loving sympathy for someone at the very same instant? For while my sweet baby is in agonizing pain that I very much sympathize with, I am congruently dealing with an unreasonable, sleepless, manic breastfeeding monster, sporting newly sprouted teeth to bite me with. And she does bite.

But really how can you stay annoyed with this little face… You can’t. You just can’t.

This snarly little face is so precious to me. I wasn’t prepared for how much I would adore my child. I mean, I figured I’d love my baby but until I actually made her and watched her grow up and morph into this awesome little person who says I love you and counts to three… well words are empty and completely insufficient in expressing it. My heart explodes every day and every day I put the pieces back together only to have it break open again. Loving someone like this is exhausting… especially when you hate them sometimes. But you could never hate her, I mean… LOOK at her.

Anyway, back on course brain! Her teeth… and her poor swollen little gums… and my pickled brain. I’ll do nearly anything to help soothe her pain and get my family some sleep. Because I am the tree hugging hippie that I am, I prefer to find a natural alternative to benzocaine. In my sleepless desperation, I’ve been trying all the remedies out there. Here are the three that have helped:

Barley water: Barley has natural antiseptic and anti-inflammatory properties and is super easy to make. Soak 1 cup of barley overnight and then cook barley with 2 1/3 cups of water for about 15 minutes. Drain excess cooking water and save. Once it has cooled you can either just rub some on inflamed gums or much more fun, use it to make teething popsicles! Here is a rad little recipe if you’re interested.

Chamomile oil: Also naturally antiseptic and anti-inflammatory as well as very soothing. We’ve rubbed some of this oil on her gums in the middle of the night and after hours of being up she is finally able to conk out.

German chamomile hydrosol:  A hydrosol is essentially flower water, or the stream distillate of the plant matter. Hydrosols are like essential oils but are far less concentrated, therefore they can be used undiluted on skin. I’ve used this hydrosol on her diaper rash and on her gums and have noticed a instant calming effect, both in her disposition and topically.

Our earth provides. It’s incredible how healing plants can be. I’m hoping these methods can bring your baby some relief and you even a few hours of sleep. Speaking of, my brain is officially shutting down. Over and out.