Raspberry delight

So, I was planning on talking about this great little weed-looking plant which is actually nature's thumb to modern science's Neosporin, cuz this one works equally well inside as well as outside the body.

Booh-ya! Take that little squishy tube that I always goop too much out of.

What is the name of this wonder plant, you ask. Plaintain.

A bit confusing, I know, because you are probably thinking...that banana thing that you can get in tropical areas? No, same name, different plant. This one is home to more temperatate areas (another way of saying we have all 4 seasons, instead of just summer and HOT!)


But today I have very exciting news happening in my family...my growing family.

My sister is having a baby!
Not at this exact second, but soon.


This has changed what I want to talk about.

Raspberries

No, not sticking out your tounge at your second grade teacher when she said you had to stay in for recess and finish your homework.

I'm talking about the sweet, tiny seed filled berry goodness that ripens around midsummer, depending on where you are living. The berries themselves are wonderful, tasty, and have great tonic properties.

Personally, the smell of ripe raspberries is one of my most absolute favorite smells in the whole world. I have yet to find a perfume that comes anywhere close. And short of smearing ripe berries on my neck and wrists, I guess I'll have to settle for some other form of body scent and be content with the whiff that I may get of those beautiful red berries.

The berries are high in vitamins and minerals. They also work as a good, mild, tonic herb. What is a tonic herb you ask? Well, from the best of my knowledge, it is like spring cleaning for the insides.

Or as Wikipedia so eloquently puts it. "A Herbal tonic is used to help restore, tone and invigorate systems in the body or to promote general health and well-being.^[1]"

This used to be a very common thing. In the spring people took tonics. Some older, country people still do. And now the spring and the fall are both considered ideal times to go on a cleanse. Which is just a newer way of saying tonic! I love when things come full circle.

But what I love most about Raspberries are not the berries, amazing as they are... it's the leaves!

Dried Raspberry leaves are a woman's best friend.

Move aside chocolate,
Move aside Diamonds,
Ewen McGregor, you can stay there, though.

I think that at some point, fairly early on in adulthood a woman will have the realization that while she may inhabit this body, she does not necessarily control it.

Don't believe me?

Raise your hand if you have ever started your peroid on the first day of a vacation while you are traveling?
Raise your hand if you've ever become overwhelmingly annoyed with your boss/coworker/husband/fill in other (typically male) name here? And couldn't figure out the source of your short fuse until you started a few days later.
Raise your hand if you've ever started randomly crying and didn't know why?
Raise your hand if you've ever had days (or weeks) of wondering if you are pregnant.
Raise your hand if you've ever had a baby. Or hot flashes.

Need I go on?

Ladies (Gentlemen, it would be good for you to listen to this too) Our bodies are not our own. Our cycles are dictated by what was once thought to be mysteries as mystical as the moon, but we've come now to discover is more heavlily involved with the roller coaster levels of many different types of hormones. Estrogen, Progesterone, and others, even a tiny bit of Testosterone.

So what does this have to do with Raspberries?
Well Raspberries have these hormones too, in complimenting doses to our body.

Uhh, English please?

Take Raspberry leaf tea two or three days before you start your peroid, your cramps will decrease in intensity.

This one I have tried personally. And while I normally have cramps that could bring an African Elephant to it's knees. All of a sudden after just taking the tea a few days before, my cramps became little more than a mild ache. Something I could live with and didn't make me want to personally rip every single person in half who had the gall to cross my path. Obviously I'm not promising this will happen the exact same way with everyone. But it does help... a lot!

With regular use, it will also decrease excessive bleeding. (See 'ya Tampon Giangantic!)

My hardest deal is the timing, taking the tea and getting it those few elusive days before the flood gates open. But here's the great part. If you take it too early, nothing bad will happen.

Let me repeat that, Nothing bad will happen!

No nausea, no thoughts of suicide, no restless leg syndrome, no erection lasting more than four hours, Nada!

Reason number two thousand I LOVE herbs. "They so rarely have negative side effects."

Raspberry leaves tone the muscles in the uterus, making it's work easier.

Including having babies. In the last trimester of pregnancy, a woman can take Raspberry tea, and it will help tone the uterus and pelvis to make the labor and delivery easier.

That's what many of my sister's have done. And what I try to ecourage to all my pregnant friends, who I feel comfortable enough with to talk about their hot boxes.

Not to mention, toning sounds like it could have some other positive side effects. Like maybe in the making of babies. But that one is just my personal speculation.

And what about those of us who are beyond our childbearing years? Those of us who have earned the ancient titles of wise woman, or wild woman (maybe becasue of the crazy hot flashes). Well, Raspberry leaf tea has estrogen in it.

Estrogen. You know, the  hormone that has such erratic levels in your body right now, that your body is spinning around like a Tasmanian Devil causing all this havoc. So nice doses of estrogen in a form your body knows how to accept and handle (tea, rather than injection) is a perfect way of taking that Tasmanian Devil and putting it on a leash.

Other positive things that Raspberries and their leaves do:
-Raspberry leaf tea is good for clearing up mild diarrhea, and is gentle enough for kids to use.
-As a gargle is good for mouth ulcers and sore throats (cough cough)
-As a wash it is good for bathing varicose veins, shallow wounds (it helps draw it together).
-It's a soothing eyewash.

Ain't it great! For more information on how to get raspberry leaves, make gargles and washes, just let me know

Now onto the flip side. I said I love herbs becasue they have few negative side effects, I did not say they had no side effects.

With Raspberry leaves, do not take in the first trimester of your pregnancy. Apparently all that toning can sometimes tone a brand new life right out of there.

Also, if you are planning on gathering and drying them yourself, first make sure they not from a plant that recieves pesticide treatment.

Second make sure that you only use them fresh, or completely dried. One or the other!
Why? The residual moisture could possibly, maybe, be home to a fungus that inhibits blood clotting. Which in a worse case senerio can turn into internal hemmoraging or non stop external bleeding.
Fresh leaves and completely dried leaves do not have this problem. You know they are dry when they sound like tissue paper,and crumble easily looking like the little crumbledy bits in your spice jars.

Don't let this scare you. Just be educated about it.
I have used Raspberry leaves both fresh and dried more times than I can count on all my nieces and nephews fingers and toes. And I have quite a lot of them.

With one more coming!
Soon!



Ode to a Babe, Reluctant to join

Come, little one, we'd like to see your face.
You are safe there, and warm, yes.
To leave requires struggle,
and a world of unknown
a whole universe of unknown.

That can be scary, we know.
But you have a net here to catch you.
To love you.
To feed you.
To soothe your tears, your hurts, and your fears.
To listen to your dreams, and your heartaches.
To teach you, as you will teach us.

There will be times you are cold, wet,
squinting at an unfathomable bringhtness
       -as some latexed hand slaps your butt.

But that is a small price to pay to be able to watch a sunset, listen to your grandmother's stories, travel to exotic lands, laugh with family, and eat really good food made by friends who love you.

In short, to have experiences that touch you right down to your soul. And the ability to put your fingerprint on this unfolding song that we as humanity sings, with all its ridges and swirls.

Come to us little one, there is so much to see!

Cure for the common cold...feet.

It snowed today. 

Beautiful, big gobs of snow that I was pretty sure as it settled in my hand would just magically turn into the perfect snowball to throw at my boss... I mean a tree.

But with this beautiful snow comes the harsh, but real truth that we are in the very dead center of winter. Ugh!

I don't know about other people, but I have a coldness threshold. A certain point that I can be in a cold-ish atmosphere before it seeps into my bones and permeates me with a coldness that I just can't shake, hours, days, even weeks later. 

What is funny is this coldness threshold will change. There will be some times that I feel like I can stand barefoot in a Canadian blizzard (which we all know are friendlier and have that funny accent) and be fine. 

Alright, maybe not that extreme. But there are times when I feel like I have my internal "I'll keep you warm" switch so securely on high that I could do something crazy, like unzip my industrial winter jacket on a snowy walk!

But there are other times that I could crawl inside the radiator and still not be able to rid myself of that chill that sticks itself to me like a leech, pulling out any comforting, confident sensation of warmth before it can build up and tip me over to the warm side.

The problem is I don't control which switch is on. Warm or Cold. 

Today, it was a cold day. I almost sat on the heater, the only thing preventing me was the thought of scorching my tan pants and smelling like burnt bottom the rest of the day. 

Nothing I did tipped the scale from being cold to warm. 

And night time is the worse. 

There were some nights I would lay in bed for hours, unable to fall asleep because certain parts of my body (feet!) were cold as a penguin's tail feathers. 

I would marvel at how the human body was able to successfully pump blood from my warm heart to my warm lungs and this pleasantly warm, oxygenated blood would course happily all throughout my body... Except My Feet! 

There had to be some kind of alternative route switch. 

Because if any warm blood flowed to my feet they would have had to warm up, right? 

Then I could finally get to sleep. 

But my feet stayed cold. And the only logical explanation was that my body made the executive decision that my feet were obviously severely frozen and beyond saving, so for the good of the rest of the body, it refused it service of blood, or warmth, or even inviting it to it's daughter's upcoming birthday party.

And so there my feet lay, so far from the rest of me. So cold, and that coldness holding me in tortured awakeness, as the time for my morning alarm ticks ever closer. Bit by bit. Madness.

I've tried different things to cure this. Hot shower before bed. Which usually just results in me having wet hair when I lay down, and crazy bed head the next morning. 

Hot pad at the foot of my bed. This was the perfect solution for a long time. Something nice and warm for my little toe-ies to nestle up to.

And the warmth from my feet sent warm waves of happiness up my legs to the rest of myself. Which then, and only then, decided to acknowledge my feet again as members. 

Now the downsides to this include the fact that once I am warm enough, and fall asleep, the hot pad does not necessarily do so. So it's hot, clammy fingers will turn me into a lobster in my own bed. 

Sometimes there was no outlet that was convenient, and no matter how warm the end got, the cord still felt like an icy eel laying next to you in bed that you have to keep away from in your quest for warmth.

 Or I'd kick it away in the middle of the night, wake up the morning and forget to turn it off. That one is the worst, because as soon as I remember, typically when I get to work, I then have my father's voice in my head the rest of the day pointing a finger at me and yelling "Fire Hazard!"

Which brings me to my newest solution. Heated rice pillows. 

My friend first introduced me to them, and they are great. It's a small, pillow filled with rice that you microwave. The rice will hold onto that heat for up to an hour or more. The prefect amount of time to warm you nice and cozy without becoming a fire hazard. 

It's great as a muscle relaxant too. There was one time I was on a road trip, and got cramps. Now heading south from Fargo, North Dakota just does not offer you a lot of opportunities to buy those cool little heat activated packs.

 Actually it doesn't offer you any gas station of any kind for a solid 2 hours. 

Needless to say when we did finally did find a gas station, I was in pain. Lots. 

Going into MacGuyver mode I was determined to do something for relief. I was well past the point of any pain pill. But heat could help. I took a long sock, and went inside, looking to buy a bag of rice and use the microwave.

'Cuz every trucker stop has a microwave...but they don't all have rice. 

At this point I was to the point of rabid pain. Instead of biting someone, I bought the closest thing I could to rice, sunflower seeds. I dumped them in the sock. Nuked them until they started to burn, then headed out to the car. 

Relief washed over me. In less than 10 minutes I was speaking like a normal person again, and within a half hour I was actually not unpleasant to be around. 

But the tiny car reeked of burnt sunflower seeds. 

Rice doesn't have that negative side effect. 

Inside your flannel rice pillow you have your own portable, non fire hazard, warmth machine. I throw it under my covers at the foot of my bed. Then when I climb in, my toes joyfully greet their warm friend. I smile and fall into a blissful sleep filled with candy bars,  sunny days, and handsome men giving back massages. 

If you suffer from this chronic disease called cold. Especially common in the winter, I would highly recommend you medicate yourself with a warm rice pillow. 

Cloth, rice, and a working microwave can help seep that little bit of extra heat to tip the scale from cold to warm. 

Use it on the couch, use it in bed, use it as heat to relax muscles, use it as a neck and shoulder relaxant. It has tons of great uses. 

It's easy to make, as long as your not afraid of a little sewing. 

And for those of us who are, yet want one. I can make one for you. I have cloth, you'd just have to pay for the cost of a bag of rice ($4) and what it takes to ship it to you. 

I can even put a bit of lavender in it if you want. Lavender does wonders for calming a worried mind. Promoting relaxation and sleep. 

Some say it's also an aphrodisiac. But I'll let you be the judge of that. ;)

Want one? e-mail. pavlovia@gmail.com

Bit of Florida in February

I have good news.

I am sick.

I also intend to post every Tuesday from now until I explode...you have to help keep me honest on that one. Give me grief if I forget. But give me a break if I can't, like if I'm sick.

Which brings me back to my good news!

I have a cold.

This is a great thing in the fact that for being a person who tests the herbs on herself. It's kind of pointless to try new things when you are not sick.

Experiment Number One. Does this clover honey cough syrup work?
Patient: pre-cough syrup, feeling healthy and normal
Take cough syrup.
Patient, now feels healthy and normal.
Outcome, duh!


But here is my big chance!

Finally a reason to use my herbs I so lovingly collected and preserved this past summer.

There was a cold and stomach thing going around lately. So I've been boning up on my, take-these-so-it's-not-too-bad. herbs. These are great for when people around you are dropping like flies.

Elderberry in maple syrup. Compliments of an herbalist friend. It's great for kickstarting your immune system. I like to think of it as giving your body boxing gloves to fight.
Plus it tastes like Saturday mornings with pancakes and real maple syrup. Who doesn't love that?

Yarrow tea- a great solidifier to keep germs from finding the weak chinks in your armor.

Most importantly, fresh fruits and veggies. I'm learning more and more that the best way I can support my body (which does oh-so-much for me, like holding me upright, getting me to work, or better yet... to the freezer for a nip of ice cream) is with vitamins!

For us poor souls in the Northern Hemisphere, now is a hard time of year for fresh fruits and veggies.

Something about the lack of sunlight and gray days makes pulling a frozen pizza or a hot pocket seem way more appealing than a salad with balsamic vinegar dressing, fresh baby carrots, and plump cherry tomatoes, and bright kernels of yellow corn.

Probably because all our 'fresh' produce is chemically grown, ripened, and has the same watery cardboard taste. It's yuck but better than nothing.

But it's the fresh fruits and veggies that have the best source of vitamins. The way your body best understands how to consume it...as a whole food.


Vitamins in pill form are good. They are better than nothing.

 But taking a pill of all your vitamins and not at least trying to eat fresh foods is like watching a trailer for a movie, then spending the rest of the time it takes to watch the movie staring at a wall instead.

Nothing wrong with it... but doesn't make quite as much sense as watching the movie.

So I was doing the best I can with the cherry tomatoes, baby carrots in a bag, and lettuce, and the overarching watery cardboard taste.

Not to mention it's fickle affection toward rotting before you have a chance to pull it out of our crisper.

I tried.

All my vitamins and herbs helped for a while.


But the inevitable sickness happened...I was thrilled.

I learned recently that there are different types of colds.
There are the soggy "My nose is running so much I'm floating away".
There is the "I'm coughing so much that I sound like a Greyhound at the dog pound".
There is the chronic boomerang kind that goes away and comes back.
There is the short "one night stand" kind.
And a whole bunch of others.

Mine was a "I'm going to hide right behind your nose and throat and creep up to your years and be dry, and tender, and just hurt."

I must admit, part of the reason I love herbs and taking control of my health is because I am such a big baby when I get sick.

That first feeling of discomfort, and I instantly turn into that screaming, whining, tantrum-throwing small devil that you are tempted to disown.

So I started playing with what I know on how to get rid of sickness, and my first ally was...Garlic.

I love garlic, because it is herbalist's firepower for severely weakening just about any bug. Not to mention giving you a clear exit strategy in case you are caught at the worst party known to man.

So I started taking garlic, knowing that as I'm killing off bacteria, both good and bad in my body. I have to be able to replenish them with preferably the good. But the bad already got a foothold in my body. So I have to give it less space to play.

Think of the bully kid in your school. Now imagine just him and you in the gym. No teacher watching and an arsenal of balls in his court. He can cause some serious damage.

Not mentally add 3,000 other kids. It's shoulder to shoulder kids. And only one bully. There's not much room for him to move, much less pummel you with balls after giving you a wedgie all the while laughing at you.

I needed to get the other kids there, on my side. That's where yogurt, my one true love (don't tell all the other's) comes in. Yogurt is a natural source of all those good kids, squeezing the bully in. And as we all know, if bullies are not allowed to be bullies, after a certain amount of time, they shrivel up and die.

OK, this may not be true for real bullies. But germs have a rough time, especially when they have a highly trained immune system (thanks to your vitamins) just waiting to pounce on it like NCIS.


My problem with my garlic/yogurt regimen was that I wasn't regular with it.

Story of my life.

I'd take it in the mornings, then forget for the rest of the day. Lay down at night, intending to get up and take it, then open my eyes and it's morning again.

I was not giving my body the consistent support it needed to do it's job, healing.

I was hearing my body yell in a loud New York accent "Ya gonna help me or what?"

And while the garlic was wonderful at traveling though my digestive system, my circulatory system, and all the cells that my garlic infused blood passes by including my respiratory system. (hence the garlic breath). Working it's wonderful anti germ magic everywhere it went.

 It really wasn't able to get that high up spot right behind my nose going out to my ears.

The stronghold of my cold


That's when I changed tactics. Dry air was hard to breathe. But the above freezing, melting-snow humid air outside was much kinder on my attempt to maintain that oh so important thing called breathing.

If it just wasn't so darn cold.


So I made a steam tent.

Remember those memories of seeing people in commercials, or real life with their heads over the bathroom sink, fulled with warm water, and a towel over their head. Standing awkwardly, uncomfortably, for obnoxious amounts of time on sickness weakened legs, breathing and waiting for the miraculous change of 'feeling better' to occur.

Well that's what I did. But with my own comfortable twist.

I took the pan we roast the Thanksgiving turkey in. And put in a teapot full of boiling hot water in it. I placed it just beside the edge of my bed, which sits low to the ground.

Then, laying on my bed, with just my head over the edge, over the pan I covered my head in a throw blanket.

It was great. Well, way better than the alternative.

First off, it was much more comfortable that standing arched awkwardly over a sink.

It was warm and cozy.

The thick steam was balm to my throat.

And I put thyme leaves in the water, which is a mild antiseptic. Kinda like the nice guy going around and picking up after a party. Get's the job done without causing a ruckus.

And best of all, I had enough light that I could read! And if I was a DS player, I could have had that too.

Cozy, warm, humid, and overall very pleasant!


Not to mention when I got done, I felt like I had made leaps and bounds toward being healthy.

My throat wasn't so tender and dry. My ears hurt less, although my immune system was already starting to catch up with that one, and was starting the healing process before the steam tent.

All in all, I had a more hopeful feeling about beating this bug that had decided to take over my body these last few days.

I did another steam bath the end of that day, and am now trying to think of excuses to do it again.


Because frankly, in the middle of month three of sub-freezing weather, any excuse to feel warm humid air, and dream of Floridian coasts with the salt sting of the ocean surf rolling in, dance music and seagulls cry far in the distance, and a tanned, handsome towel boy (or girl) offering you a fruit smoothie, is a good thing.

Here's to your health!