Living At Wit's End

Everyone in our house, except the Director is sick.   I don’t know what’s worse, everyone including mom, being sick at the same time or having one person at a time get sick.   I mean if we did the one person at a time thing, our household could potentially be sick for two months!   Then again having everyone sick at the same time is really hard too.   Especially when the little ones won’t succumb and just rest, and all of the older ones, me included just want to sleep. So what do we do when we’re all sick?   Well, I try to use natural remedies as well as conventional western medicine, but in the end sometimes it just takes time.   In the mean time I always make the following as part of our healing process. From my absolute favorite cookbook and one of my favorite authors, More Home Cooking, A writer Returns to the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin.   As Laurie states, “There is nothing like roast chicken.   It is helpful and agreeable, the perfect dish ...

Do you know where the term Christmas in July came from?   A search of the internet shows many different answers.   The one that I prefer is from one of my favorite books, by one of my favorite authors,   Mrs. Sharps Traditions by Sarah Ban Breathnach .   In the book she explains that frugal Victorian families would make their Christmas presents.   They would start the list in mid-June and be finishing them by the end of the summer.   In addition, she also gives wonderful suggestions for gifts such as dried potpourri or dried-flower bouquets gathered from your summer garden (I currently don’t have a garden of any type, that’s one of those projects I would like to do!).    If you’re taking a vacation at the seashore she suggests making seashell picture frames.   Or, if you’d like to have fun in the kitchen with your kids, she suggests making things like spiced tea bags, nine-bean soup mixes or preserves.   She also suggests that celebrat...

Were Saturdays of the past lazy?   To be honest I’m not sure if they were, I’m sure if you lived on a farm there was lots of work and before labor laws people probably worked all the time.   Maybe in the 50’s?   I don’t know, what I do know is I would like my Saturdays to be maybe not lazier but more enjoyable. My house always looks like a bomb has gone off in it.   One of my favorite quotes is “Cleaning the house while the children are growing is like shoveling snow while it's still snowing.” - Erma Bombeck.   I would like to get my house to a maintenance mode, so that on Saturday morning my family and I could do a Weekly Home Blessing Hour and then have the rest of the day to do projects that we really want to, or something that must be done, or just have a lazy or fun day. If you’re like me and are working toward that goal, a simple search of the internet will bring up lots and lots of ways to declutter, deep clean and get to that point.   Here are a...