Musings

It's been a quiet season for me blogwise, pregnancy always makes me more introspective and I tend to focus a lot more on health related topics and less on self sufficiency themes, though I suppose they are closely related. This pregnancy started out as my easiest in a decade, but I have had a few minor issues pop up in the last few weeks. My blood pressure went pretty high for a while but it has come back down now. These are the things that I did/do for it: garlic supplements, lecithin, hawthorn berry tea (though this works better for chronic hypertension than PIH), Ionic Magnesium, passionflower tincture, a mixture of 1T lemon juice with 2t cream of tartar and water-vile stuff but purported to work. I am still drinking my red raspberry, alfalfa, nettle and peppermint tea, taking chlorophyll and yellow dock decoction (another vile concoction). When my BP first went high I really increased my protein and fluid intake and I started taking my BP twice a day. For a while it seemed like my days were ordered around taking readings and imbibing my next round of herbs, but despite the how tiresome I found this routine, it worked! I don't know why I should be amazed when God's ways work out, but sometimes I still am. I believe that He hasn't left us bereft of the means to heal ourselves if only we would listen! I think we've been trained to want the easy way out, to pop a pill and expect problems to disappear. And I confess that sometimes in my research I find myself unable to believe the harmful effects of commonly prescribed drugs, unwillingly to believe that this garbage is foisted on people and they are so unaware of the true cost. For instance, did you know that commonly prescribed cholesterol and blood pressure drugs actually destroy heart muscle making you far more susceptible to a future heart attack? Did you know that pain relieving drugs destroy your joints? Did you know that a popular glucose lowering drug destroys your pancreas? Doctors know that all it really does it buys you a few years until you're forced to go on insulin. And people think herbs are radical. :-) However, on the flip side, I'm dismayed by the people who think that herbs are the magic bullet for their own health issues. Without a good diet and healthy lifestyle, herbs aren't going to be able to compensate for a lack of discipline on your part, God never intended that.

We are still unsure of where this baby will be born. My CNM is no longer practicing, though she *might* return before I deliver we can't really count on that. I've begun care with the lay midwife that I've known for years, she caught Rebekah when she was born. Our house is not set up to birth here in the Winter as we generally have to move our bed into the living room or dining room as our bedroom isn't insulated. We're taking steps to fix that though so that if it seems like God's timing for this little girl to be born at home we'll be ready. And if it isn't His will, we're OK with that too. My prayer for this pregnancy has never been for a specific outcome, but just for peace, no matter what happens. So please pray for a calm mind for me and His will to be worked out.

About this baby.....

Thanks to everybody for your congratulations and well wishes! I've been asked a few questions by several people so I thought that I would just answer them here.

• Do you have a name picked out? Yes, I think so but we've changed our minds several times already so I think until she's born and the name is official we will keep it a secret.




• Are you going to dress her in the historic gowns that Asa wore? No, I don't think so. With Asa I wanted to see how it was to dress a baby in the chemises, dresses and petticoats of an 1860s baby and I'm glad that I did. With this baby I will probably dress her in sleepers, onesies, longies, shirts etc that a modern baby would wear. Most of the girl baby clothes I had were used on Tabitha, Rebekah, Elisabethe and Abigail and I got rid of the ratty, stained clothes when we had Asa. So I'm back to square one, or almost anyway, on girls clothes.




• Are you cloth diapering? Yes! I've been buying used and on sale newborn sized diapers for months now. The one size diapers that I use on Asa just don't fit well on a teeny baby. The newborn diapers have an excellent resale value should I decide to go that route, but I think I'm more likely to hang onto them and loan them out to friends with new babies.

Riddle-with the answer

I've had 1 and 1, and 3 and 3
But I've never had 2 and 2 or 4 and 4
And now I won't have 5 and 5 either.
What do I have?

----------------------------------------------------

Congratulations Tiff, you got it!

You see, I had Aleks and then Katie, so that was my 1 and 1 (1 boy 1 girl)
Then I had Levi and Micah, so that blew any chance of 2 and 2.
Then came Tabitha and Rebekah, so I had 3 and 3.
Then came Elisabethe and Abigail, so again no chance of 4 and 4.
Then we had Asa and if this baby had been a boy like EVERYBODY thought it was we would have had 5 and 5.
However, she's a girl. A great big, chubby, uncooperative girl! She wouldn't get her arm off of her face for the untrasound no matter what any of us tried. Maybe she's shy. Anyway the technician checked for all of the Down's Syndrome markers and found none, no Spina Bifida either. Just a perfect little girl. :D

First Midwife Visit

I had my first midwife appointment today. I'm 26+3 weeks along and everything was as fine as I knew it was. I really appreciate my midwife, her outlook is so down to earth and refreshing. She's a believer in a woman's intuition as I am and she places a lot of stock in how a woman feels. She checked weight and blood pressure, both were fine. She only wants the needed bloodwork, she doesn't make you get the whole panel with each pregnancy like most OBs do, after all what's the chance that my blood type has changed?!? She doesn't push ultrasound and she used a fetoscope to listen to the baby's heartrate at my request. The rate was mid 120s and the baby wasn't asleep either. :-) She gave me the names of several homebirth midwives that she trusts so I can have a homebirth if I want to with her as back-up. I live in a state that's not very homebirth friendly so her stance really is an anomaly. I'm feeling very peaceful and serene this evening. :-)

Community Cider Press

Today was our first apple pressing of the year. I had hoped that we would only have to go once, but things didn't work out that way. The press only runs on Thursdays which is the day of the livestock auction, hence the farmers are already in town. We took at least 4 different varieties of apples, cider is never as good when it's made from only 1 variety. Later apples make sweeter cider than early apples; so much so that we can taste the difference without having the jugs marked. The press runs until the week before Thanksgiving so we have plenty of time for more gathering and pressing.


In all our years of picking up windfalls at the orchard I've never seen a worse crop of apples. We gather them and then bring them home, then each apple is individually washed in soapy water and rinsed. This is not an organic orchard and windfalls can pick up soil borne pathogens. Better safe than sorry. There was so much worm damage and core rot, we probably threw out almost half of what we brought home, but if you want a decent end product you have to start with decent apples.
The apples are dumped into the holding area and then pushed into the chute which carries them up to the grinder.


The belt and pulley system that powers this machine.

The pumice is let down from that hanging bag and caught by big wooden trays lined with canvas. They are stacked layer upon layer until all of the apples are contained therein.

Once the stack of trays is full they are "driven" (see the wheels?) to the middle section.


The trays are lifted up until they hit the top and the squeezing begins.

The cider runs into a holding tank and then you fill your jugs from the spigots.

The spent pumice is dumped into this room after pressing, local farmers shovel it up and fatten hogs with it. The room had been recently cleaned out, but the pile still reached above my waist.

We got 21 gallons from 10 4 or 5 gallon buckets. That's a pretty typical yield.

The bill? $14.70, the lion's share of which was the cost of the jugs.

The 21 gallons comprise about 1/3 of the total we had last year so we'll be pressing again. We could, theoretically, buy cider but I admit that I'm spoiled. As with maple syrup I know exactly what went into the end product. I know the apples were free from dirt and bruises, I know they were fresh and I know no pasteurization was required to cover up the lack of quality. Obviously no commercial producer could or would take this much care (not in this day and age anyway) but there is no other way for us

Primitive Grain Bin

My birthday present came early this year. Mr. G and I were antiquing this week and were fortunate enough to find an 1860s walnut table to put in the livingroom. I've wanted a table in there forever for the children to do their schoolwork upon and now I have one! Still no chairs to go with it though...... But! while we were there I saw this gorgeous 1840s grain bin with original faux woodgraining, it is in wonderful condition and I *love* primitive painted furniture. It still has the original casters and everything, unfortunately it reeks like moth balls though. Any ideas on how to get that smell out?

I casually mentioned to Mr. G that if he wanted it he'd better get on the stick and go buy it before someone else did. He went the very next day and bought it for me! I will most likely use it as a blanket chest, but for right now it's still in the very overcrowded livingroom where I can smile at it every time I walk through. I can't imagine being happier with anything else he could have purchased. :-)

September happenings

I woke up this morning and it was cold! It got down to 38 last night, unseasonably chilly for mid-September. Yesterday we broke down and brought the old woodstove back in the house. We take it out in the Spring and bring it back in when we need to, this year however we hadn't planned to bring it back in at all. Our coal cookstove is almost ready to use, but we've had a delay in trying to find some replacement pieces; it dates to the early 1920s so parts aren't readily available. Anyway, a fire was definitely needed so the woodstove has again taken up residence in the living room. I had hoped that the boys would make a fire this morning but Aleks went straight out to milk instead, so I jumped out of bed and pulled warm clothes on myself and Asa and then went out to make the fire. I burned some paper and cardboard first to heat up the chimney, a warm chimney draws better than a cold one. We have an abundance of corncobs right now so I used those and some smaller twigs and then found what bigger pieces I could to get a nice fire going. We have very little firewood around as we had planned to be using coal. Levi helped with all that and then brought Asa's highchair in and placed it by the fire where he ate breakfast in relative warmth. We generally move the dining room table in by the fire for the coldest months for just this reason, it makes for a cramped but cosy living room.

We have some tomatoes to finish up and a batch or two of salsa, but the pressure has eased for the most part on the food preservation front. We're still shelling beans but we'll be doing that for quite some time. I want to put some beef in to corn later today, in about 2 weeks we'll be having corned beef hash or corned beef and cabbage! I found the most wonderful book about preserving meats without refrigeration "Cold Smoking and Salt Curing". I can finally learn to preserve hams etc. in a way that is consistent with my vision! I'm so excited!!! This book, unlike many how-to titles, instills confidence in my ability to be able to do this safely. For instance, when we first raised turkeys we bought 5 poults. I'd never raised anything like that before, but I just figured that I could do it successfully and I did. Then we bought the "raising turkeys" book and read how hard it is, all the diseases turkeys are subject to and all the equipment you need etc. We lost confidence and it took a while to get it back again. I hate self "help" books like that. My philosophy is that illiterate people have done XYZ for thousands of years, surely I can handle it. Maybe that's naive? I don't know, but it seems to garner its share of success. We seem to do a lot of things in ways that aren't considered "proper" today, especially with animals. You're never supposed to raise chickens and turkeys together, but we have for years with no problems. Broody chickens are set on turkey eggs which they hatch out and raise without difficulty. It sure beats trying to duplicate nature with an incubator!

We'll also be picking up black walnuts and shelling them soon and the apples are almost ready to be gathered in, I so look forward to the Autumn smells and tastes. We're going to brine and cold smoke our Thanksgiving turkey, a process that can take a month and a half so we'll be butchering it around the beginning of October. I'm excited about that too, life seems very satisfying right now. :-)