The amazing experience of the birth of our little girl Amayah

Much has happened or at least many things have kept us busy since I had my last opportunity to write a post. As usual I have so many things I'd like to share and so little time to actually do it.

 Baby Amayah

A wonderful blessing made her appearance several weeks ago. Our beautiful daughter Amayah was born to us in our new home, creating memories that I shall never forget. She is doing amazingly well and I'm immensely cherishing the time to simply look down at her beautiful face and see her intense little eyes look back at me. Having a third child has been far easier  than I would have expected (greatly due to the homebirth and having a very healthy child). Our family has had a very smooth transition, with only our 2 year old struggling a bit in the beginning as she had to get used to sharing mom with a baby. Otherwise Amayah is covered in kisses daily by both her older brother and sister and of course mom and dad can't help but also do the same.

I can't write enough about the amazing experience of having a homebirth and so glad we went this route. While it certainly is not for everyone, having our little girl in the comfort of our home was perfect for us and an experience I hope to repeat if we are blessed with more children in the future.

The day of Amayah's birth unraveled fairly perfectly. The night before, I was pretty convinced I would be meeting our child very soon. Around 2 AM I was having fairly intense contractions, but they weren't regular, however trying to sleep or even rest during them wasn't working for me. Deciding that sitting still and waiting for things to happen wasn't going to work for the moment, I got up and started cleaning. Can we say nesting was in full affect? My kitchen was thoroughly cleaned and the other rooms picked up before I decided that I actually must lay down and try to get some sleep, especially since the contractions were still not staying consistent.

What I've been up to: unpacking, preparing for baby #3 & homebirth, gardening and many more projects

The blog has been quiet lately. I'd love to say that will change, but I'm one busy momma at the moment and living life versus writing about it is taking far higher priority!

One of my favorite plants as a child and it's growing right out our back door!

We have moved to a wonderful 19+ acre property and are enjoying the beautiful land and the inviting home that we feel God has blessed us with. We first found this property back in January and now that spring is here we are for the first time getting to see what is growing around us and what is exactly all here. One of these days I need to get a book to identify all the many wild plants growing that may be edible. We also get to check out the many wild animals. We now know that there are many deer, pheasant, wild turkey and a huge array of birds (with plenty of hawks and eagles mixed in), all hanging out right behind our home. Our neighbor, who we recently met, mentioned we can basically sit on our back porch and hunt! :-) I'd believe it too. We hear the many pheasant daily and have seen them on several occasion while working in our new garden. Now to just learn how to hunt!

Gardening and Chickens, starting a new adventure

It's been a long day of packing and baking a cute, little birthday cake for my soon to be two year old. My back has let me know that it's best to be done with the standing and the bending over trying to fill boxes, so I thought I take a moment to write a little post about some of the things we are planning for.

I have been packing, because in a very short amount of time we are leaving behind our little apartment and heading to a new home with land that we've purchased. I can't begin to say just how excited I am to be moving to a home where we can have a beautiful garden and some chickens. Down the line we may have more things, but being in my third trimester of pregnancy and only having so much time, the garden and the chickens are all we are going to attempt for this year. Now next... well that's a whole different story. I've already have plans in my head, but for now it's time to focus on the current coming seasons.

Photo credit: http://www.superizon.com/vegetables-garden-ideas-with-stylish-designs/

Walking With the Lord: Honoring the Sabbath

Sunday is my favorite day of the week, even with the stresses that seem to come with it. Trying to get kids up and out of the house and to church on time always is a bit overwhelming and both my husband and my patience is often challenged during this time. Even after church, kiddos can be cranky and tired, but what I love about Sunday is first, I truly do normally enjoy going to church. I think it's wonderful to be surrounded by fellow believers. More than that though, is that Sunday is the God ordained day of rest. It's the only day where I don't feel guilty if I don't get things done. It's the only day that, if the kids actually allow it, I can sit and read a book during the day and relax.

Yesterday was one of those more relaxing Sundays. The weather in Minnesota right now is more similar to weather we see in June instead of March. It was sunny, with a breeze and in the upper 70's. That pretty much falls into the perfect weather category in my world. After lunch was done we put kids down for naps. Thankfully our youngest actually fell asleep and even our oldest stayed in his room for a while quietly laying down. I took that time to sit down out on our balcony and read in the glorious sun. This pregnant, overly tired and worn out momma needed that. Needed it in the extreme.

We have a lot going on right now and it's been that ways for a while. It's been a period of time for us where we have so many directions to head in that we don't know where to go first. Not ideal by any means, nor something we like to see happen in our lives, but it is what it is right now and there isn't much we can do to pull back the reigns. Throw into the batch of things to do, illness that has been lingering in the family for over a week and even the toughest is going to get worn out. As much as we have to do, with certain deadlines creeping up very quickly, I spoke with my husband Saturday night and said we were going to set everything aside on Sunday and relax. In general we try and keep Sunday as a day of rest in our home. It's a time for family and for the Lord. However, the last couple of weeks we haven't been so good at following God's command for a day of rest and I've seen it reflect itself into our week(s).  It's easy to think that "we must get this done", yet forgetting to follow the guidance of the Lord. In doing so I have felt that the Lord has often pulled back some of His blessing on the week going forward. Mondays have started out far more stressful and by mid-week after not having any break I find myself short tempered and flat out exhausted.

Coconut flour yellow cake - great for birthday cakes! Gluten and grain free.

My husband's birthday was several weeks ago and one dessert item he's had a hankering for is good old fashion yellow birthday cake. The only problem is our son can't have wheat, so that nixes the majority of recipes out there. I know that I could have used a gluten-free flour to make a close substitute, but to be honest I'm not a huge fan of the GF flours on the market. They are often filled with ingredients that I'd prefer to avoid in our diet. So, instead I made a very delicious version using coconut flour.

I've messed with this recipe over the last year on and off again, playing around with different ingredients. This time because I wanted to provide something more similar to a traditional birthday cake I went with more traditional ingredients, like organic white sugar instead of honey and butter instead of coconut oil. I have shared a coconut flour chocolate cake recipe we use all the time. You can get away with a different variety of ingredients with chocolate cake, because the chocolate masks some of the flavors, but with a white cake a flavor like honey or coconut oil will be much more pronounced.

I'm now offering Norwex Products. If you are looking for a way to clean your home without chemicals, check these products out.

 

Last week I decided to take a new step and become a Norwex sales consultant. Why? Well, like many woman who are at home, I have been looking for ways to help earn a little extra income for my family. Beyond that though, we are getting ready to move and it has been very important to me to find ways to reduce our chemical use in our new home. It's ultimately been my goal to be completely chemical free, not only with food, but in our environment too. I knew that I wanted our new home to not only be clean, but safe for my children, our pets and my husband and myself. One of the best ways I could see to do that is by cutting out the chemicals I use when I clean.

While I do often use baking soda, vinegar and hydrogen peroxide to clean and these are natural products, I have been interested in Norwex for a while after hearing some friend discuss their products a year or two ago. They went on and on about how much they loved Norwex's microfiber cloths. This had me intrigued, but until recently I hadn't actually had an opportunity to try any of the Norwex products myself. One of the items they are most known for, and what my friends said they loved so much, is the Antibacterial Microfiber Cloths. Norwex has incorporated some fascinating technology to create a line of cloths that can wipe away 99.9% of bacteria by just using water. Intriguing, right?

I've put my new microfiber cloths to work and I will very honestly tell you that I have been very impressed. I have other microfiber cloths from different companies, but they don't even begin to compare to how well Norwex's cloths clean. Honestly, I think I had a look of shock on my face when I went to wipe down my chairs at my kitchen table with my new cloth. They are made of unsealed wood, but over time and lots of use have gotten a patina on them from dirty hands and kids that dump things all over them. I have scrubbed these chairs numerous times with a scrub brush, soap and water. While that gets them cleaner, they still have the patina on them. Then I started wiping them down with my new Norwex microfiber cloth that only had water on it. With very little effort the cloth began wiping away layers of the grime on the chairs that had made the patina. Very cool.

Besides cleaning my chairs, I started wiping down the walls by the kitchen table. What can I say, I was in cleaning mode. Again, the cloth with only a bit of water on it, did an excellent job of getting grease marks off the walls from little hand prints.

Next, I grabbed my new window cloth to see if it worked as well as I had been told. I first did the inside of our glass balcony door that my kids had covered in hand prints. With literally no effort at all the cloth wiped the glass completely clean and far, far better than what glass cleaners do. To really put the window cloth to work I cleaned the outside of the door also. This was when I really became impressed, because I was able to very quickly clean the outside of the door and the cloth left no streaks. I think cleaning exterior doors and windows can be such a pain, because no matter how much I try they always seem to streak from the grime that builds up on them. I'll think they are clean and then go inside only to see another place that the grime streaked instead of actually came up. This didn't happen with the Norwex window cloth at all. After the door I went and cleaned the mirror closet doors in our two bedrooms. Still with the same cloth and without rinsing it. The mirrors came perfectly clean and again they were dirty from little hand prints (side note: I actually clean a lot, but I think it must take my kids less than 30 min. to have finger prints on just about every surface in my house. Give them a whole day and you'd never know I spent have the morning cleaning. Ah the fun of being a mom sometimes!) The last place I used the window cloth was on the mirror in the bathroom that always gets splattered from washing hands, faces and teeth. In about a quarter of the time my mirror was spotless and all I used was the window cloth and some water. That is my type of cleaning! Easy, no chemicals and with great results!

A Look at Home Births

Giving birth at home is once again gaining in popularity. Until the first part of the 20th century this is how women brought their newborns into the world, but as hospitals gained in popularity, especially in the 40's, home births went out the door for the more clinical style hospital birth.

I feel very blessed that we have an opportunity to have a home birth for our third child. I wish I could have done it with all three. Although, in all fairness, my daughter's birth was overall a good experience and one I would hope for again if I went the route of going to a hospital.

While home births are gaining in popularity, I think there is still a lot of confusion about them. I know I didn't fully understand how it worked when I first started looking into them several years ago. One benefit we have today is that now that home births are more popular there is more information easily available about them and finding an experienced midwife has also gotten easier.

Certainly there are many that would question why in the world you'd choose to have a child in your home. It doesn't take much searching to find passionate advocates for both hospital births and home births and both sides have a variety of statistics that they use to support their beliefs (see here and here for against home births and here and here for pro home births). For several generations now we have been trained to believe that hospitals are the only place to have a baby safely. There is a system that has been set up that we are to follow, starting with the beginning of pregnancy and one that continues forward through the life of a child. While I am not here to tell you that no one should have a hospital birth, that certainly isn't true in my opinion, I do think that home births should be considered as an option. Every woman should consider all of her options and educated herself to make the best decision for her baby and her. We were designed to have babies and have been doing so since humans first came into existence. Some people embrace the idea that our bodies can give birth without a lot of assistance and others feel lead to have as much help surrounding the birth as possible. Are either wrong? No. For me, the issue comes more about the freedom to decide what is best for my baby's and my body. Either route someone chooses to go, there are going to be not so perfect outcomes and even deaths. What would truly be fantastic is if the two styles of giving birth could more greatly overlap giving women a far greater advantage to delivering a healthy baby without the use of drugs or other unnecessary procedures.

When I first started looking into home births it was overwhelming to figure out how the whole process worked. If you follow the standard protocol, things are fairly simple and there doesn't need to be a lot of decision making. You find a doctor that is in your insurance plan and then follow what they tell you to do. Home births fall into a category of their own and depending on what state you live in, the laws that govern midwives and the freedom to have a birth at home varies.