Calming and Cleansing Baby Bath Herbs

The soft, sensitive skin of our babies deserves extra special care.  So many body products contain chemicals that aren’t as safe as we’d hope.  You can see how your products rank on the Environmental Working Group’s Cosmetic Database.  More than 74,000 common products are evaluated for their safety including their risk to contributing to cancer or development of allergies.  It’s a pretty impressive resource!

The site also provides tips for specific chemicals to look out for and avoid in each age group.  For example, in babies, be sure to avoid diaper creams that contain BHA, Boric Acid, or fragrances.  Better yet, make your own diaper cream by making plantain salve!

Similarly, it is quite possible to make some of your own products for baby’s bath time.  Today I’d like to share a simple recipe for calming and cleansing baby bath herbs. Continue reading →

Permaculture for Urban Homes and Small Spaces

One of the best things about blogging is discovering a new community of people with shared interests and goals.  One such kindred spirit is Mari of the blog Gather and Grow.  She is a fellow lover of permaculture and has graciously shared some great tips and inspiration for many of us who are interested in being more self-sufficient but feel limited by the space constraints of the urban environment.

Whether you live in an urban environment, or on many acres of land – I think you’ll find something useful here!

Permaculture Strategies for Urban Homes and Small Spaces

Permaculture designers love challenges. After all, permaculture is not just a set of organic gardening techniques, but a toolkit, a decision-making process, for designing sustainable human settlements. And one of its fundamental principles is: “The problem is the solution.”

What if we apply this principle to a challenge that many of us are all too familiar with: living in small urban spaces with little or no access to actual soil on which to grow food? Permaculture and gardening books present pictures of lovely, lush farm landscapes and large suburban lots overflowing with greenery, fruit trees, and vegetable gardens, perhaps even with small livestock. But what do you do if you live in an apartment, or have only a postage-stamp-sized bit of yard by your front door?

The permaculture answer: you can still do a lot. In this case, seeing the problem as the solution means turning the seeming constraints of an urban environment – the density of buildings, people, and resources – to your advantage, and doing things like intensive planting, vertical growing, and maximizing solar exposure in- and outdoors. Here I present ideas and strategies first for the apartment dweller, and then for those who do have yard space but it’s limited. Continue reading →

DIY Felted Wool Dryer Balls

Here’s a quick and easy project to help “green-up” your laundry: felted laundry balls.  They’re non-toxic, save energy, and can be composted when you’re done with them!

But why would you want to use balls of wool instead of your usual dryer sheets?  Commercial dryer sheets often contain harmful chemicals that attach to clothing allowing them to enter your body as you wear your clothes.

Healthy Living How To lists the 7 most common chemicals found in dryer sheets: Continue reading →

These Light Footsteps: Best of 2013

I figure I’ll jump on the bandwagon and do a “best of” 2013 post.  The following 10 posts were the most viewed this year (even though some were published in 2012).  It looks like my herbal how-to posts are very well received.  I have many more of these up my sleeves so I’ll be sure to do more in the future!

best of 2013 Continue reading →

Two Months in to Our New Adventure

The Light Footsteps Family has been busy enjoying the transition to a family of three.  I’m not sure how so many other women bloggers manage to keep cranking out posts once they have a new baby.  Guest bloggers, perhaps?  Anyone interested in doing some here? I’d take ’em!

Hopefully sometime in the new year I’ll be able to start posting more regularly again.  Recently, I thought I’d have a lot of new content soon as we were planning to close on a new 23-acre homestead tomorrow, but unfortunately, it has fallen through yet again.  I’m not sure if we’ll keep waiting around or start looking at new properties again.  This certainly has been a long search.

In other news, today is Baby Light Footstep’s 2-month birthday!  I wrote her a letter today that I thought might be fun to share here.  I hope you enjoy reading the highlights of our first two months, too.

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The Day After the Solstice

I’m late in wishing you a Happy Solstice and  Festive Yule — one of the most promising Earth-based holidays of the year (the light returns!), but you’ll have to excuse me for I am often distracted by my favorite gift of the season. Continue reading →

Why We Chose a Homebirth

I received some encouraging feedback after posting my birth story.  It led me to write a more detailed post about some of the reasons that we decided to birth at home.  It’s hard to summarize such a complicated and emotionally-inspired topic, but here are some preliminary thoughts…

Why We Chose a Homebirth

I wasn’t always comfortable with the idea of birth.  Like many, I was indoctrinated into a culture that presents birth as something painful, terrifying, and prone to disaster.

I closed my eyes when we were shown a video of a hospital birth in 8th grade health class.

I remember another teacher returning after maternity leave and explaining that, “No, birth was not fun, it was like pushing a watermelon through a donut hole.” I tried to imagine this, but the donut always fell apart…

I thought I probably would not have children as a young adult.  If I wanted kids, maybe I would adopt. Having babies naturally seemed like it was just too much to handle.

Until I thought about getting pregnant myself, I don’t think I had ever heard a single positive birth story.

bizbeingborn-2And then I watched “The Business of Being Born”.  The scene of a woman swaying in water, her older child and husband standing nearby, is still fresh in my mind.  Suddenly, without any sound, without any indication of anything really, she reaches down and pulls up her baby.  My mind was blown. Birth did not have to hurt. And certainly birth did not have to be traumatic!  Continue reading →

The Birth of Baby Light Footsteps

I feel a little strange making this post public because I am actually a very private person and this is a very intimate topic!  However, over the months that I was pregnant with Baby Light Footsteps, I became very passionate about birth and women’s birth experiences.  I want to share this story to add to the voices of women who are telling positive stories about birth.  Birth does not have to be driven by fear, it does not need to be scary, and it can be done without the use of drugs.

These sentiments are much different than what we are commonly exposed to in the media and what we often hear when we are told others’ birth stories.  Every birth is a blessing and I would never want to take away from someone else who experienced birth differently than me, but I am honored to share the story of my daughter’s peaceful and empowering homebirth.

Please also note that my decision to homebirth was researched extremely carefully (obsessively, really) and that my decision to (and preparation for) birth at home is not explained here.  Please email me if you’d like to discuss the decision further, or maybe there will be a future post about why I decided this was the safest choice for me and my baby!

One of the many captions scattered around the house in the month before the birth!

One of the many affirmations scattered around the house in the month before the birth!

Continue reading →

Pumpkin and Lentil Soup

We’ve had some strange days of weather recently.  This photo isn’t the best, but in it you can see a rainbow, really dark clouds to the North over the lake, and you can tell that it is 100% sunny behind me by the way the trees are shining with light.  Add to that some lightning and snow all in the same day and you can see what I mean – strange!  But kind of beautiful, really… Continue reading →

Nests and Nesting

nestsI am so thankful to have this time of nesting. It has been a period of profound spiritual development, deep insights, and lots of preparation.  Continue reading →