Making toothpaste

  I love being able to walk down entire aisles in the supermarket and not need anything. I’ve been able to do it with the soft drink aisle forever, I ditched the baby aisle midway through ‘needing’ it, bakery and butchery sections are completely irrelevant and I haven’t looked at disposable female sanitary products in years.

  It was high time I snubbed my nose at the entire toiletries aisle-it’s time to go, toothpaste. This has been the project that has definitely created the most interest among people I know. I’m always getting asked how it’s going, people have been sending me all sorts of links and information-it’s been interesting to see!

  First try, aloe vera gel. As we have an aloe vera plant, very local. All you do is crack the ‘leaf’, put the clear gel on your brush and brush. It tastes quite good, foams slightly and seems to work well. Sounds like a perfect option, except if you get the yellow part of the gel it’s very bitter, and it’s not very child-friendly-they can’t really help themselves. Plus the plant is downstairs and we’re upstairs, so we chalked this up as a very good substitute that we’ll use when we can plant it at the back door.

  Next, plain bicarb. Ugh. It worked OK, but tasted horrible. I never wanted to do it again, let alone twice a day.

  Finally, a toothpaste recipe. It’s been the stayer because it’s cheap and quick to make, it stores on the bench, and can be independently used by the two year old (yes, we finish the brushing, but he starts it).

  So, how to make it? Take 2 tbsp bicarb, 3 tbsp of glycerine and 1 tsp peppermint essence. Mix well…….and that’s it. It does separate slowly so needs the occasional extra stir. I make a double lot and it lasts about 2 weeks, with fourteen brushings a day. The taste is somewhat salty but you adjust quickly. The kids complained a bit at the start, but seeing as my attitude is along the lines of ‘too bad, that’s all you’ve got so suck it up’ it passed pretty quickly.

  Interestingly, the general agreement is that our teeth feel consistently cleaner. They certainly look whiter across the whole seven of us. Morning breath is a thing of the past, as is waking up with a terrible taste in my mouth. And I can eat an orange straight away without it tasting icky! Could the commercial toothpastes *gasp* be causing the very things they say they prevent? My cynical self says probably. After all, they don’t want it to work too well. Then people wouldn’t be continually tempted to spend more by upscaling to whitening/tartar control/bells’n’whistles toothpastes-not to mention whitening packs and professional treatments. Dentistry is a big business y’know. This is the same industry that used to put holes the size of a spaghetti strand in their tubes, until one brand enlarged them and usage, and therefore sales, soared. They are first and foremost businesses, aimed at selling as much as possible. We would do well to remember that.

References

The Organic Sister

Hazeltree Farm

Be Prepared Challenge (and some ranting)

  I’ve been meaning to post this for aaaages-but i’m here now.

  While the floods were happening up here, I spent a lot of time shaking my head in disbelief. Our town was cut off by floodwater for a week, and to me a week without supermarkets is nothing. We did nine days out bush at the property last year with no problems. The strangest thing is, it happens semi-regularly here, this is not a one-off, never-before-seen occurrence. It happens every couple of years. Surely people can feed themselves for a week from their cupboards, and the many supermarkets in town? Considering we have a dairy here as an added bonus? And the town is an old one, with many backyards having productive trees?

  Obviously not. People were freaking out everywhere, panic-buying at the supermarkets. There were food donations and food drops organised for smaller areas cut off from the main part of town. The local health food shop reported people coming in asking for breadmaking tips, and just how do you cook lentils? I spent a lot of time scratching my head, wondering what was going on. Surely people don’t go shopping every day as part of normal life? Surely they can dig up lots of food from the back of their cupboards, that may not be their favourite but will sustain them? AND WHAT WERE THEY DOING IN THE TWO WEEKS OR SO BEFOREHAND, WHEN WE KNEW WE WOULD GET FLOODED IN?!

Obviously, what many people do-rely on everyone else to fix things for them. Don’t worry about what’s coming, some person or agency will magically appear to solve all of your problems. Sadly, it usually happens-I would personally love to see more responses along the lines of ‘Sorry, take some responsibility for yourself-we have more important things to do’. Within reason of course, making someone eat out-of-date chickpeas from their bare cupboard is completely different to letting them die.

 

  Well, if you’re not one of those people (or are and realise it’s silly) Dixiebelle and Gavin are doing something far better than my ranting about it, and have provided a series on how to prepare yourselves for unexpected outcomes. I’m following some of it haphazardly (I don’t do well with structure), because while being a doomsday-ish person i’m well-prepared in food and medicines i’m not so prepared in some of the rest of the areas (although surely my recent involvement in starting up a Transition Initiative counts for this one?)

*Of course I am not referring to anyone who truly suffered during the floods. Duh.

While we’re short of fresh food…….

……….the supermarkets are still throwing perfectly good food away. These lettuces are fresher than what’s available at the local markets. So even while we’re cut off north and south with floods, with no fresh fruit and vegies making their way in, the supermarkets haven’t bothered to curb their waste. We’ve planted  the spring onions, with the chooks and worms feasting on the rest. There’s also 2kgs of sausages in the freezer, waiting to be doled out to the animals.

Oh how the smug has fallen

After I had Frosty I was one of those horrible people who don't do any exercise and eat whatever they like yet steadily lose weight. It was fantastic. Not exactly as easy as it sounds as it was a result of ravenous round-the-clock breastfeeding, but it was a great side effect. I thoroughly enjoyed eating masses of chocolate in front of my husband, and being able to say I need high energy food, suck it up husband, i'm not making you eat it. Then it got to the point where I hit 55kgs and started to look gaunt, which wasn't so fantastic, and so decided it was time to cut feeds right back to three a day-this was around his first birthday after all, it's hardly as if he was relying on it.

I then started to put on a little weight. Only a little, so I filled out and looked healthy again. Then a little more...............and today I got on the scales and I now weigh 60.1kgs. Crap. I know, it's hardly obese but five kilos has just crept up on me in a matter of months. This is bad. This is the result of me being a big lazybones in regards to exercise-I just don't. Unless you count getting up to make another cup of tea. I eat quite well overall, there's not much I could change there. And i'm still breastfeeding thrice daily, I don't want to think about what would happen if I stopped completely.

So this afternoon I ran around the house yard a few times, and I am so embarrassingly, shamefully unfit. And I got to do it to the husband's version of a pep talk 'Run faster tubby! Go on fatty, do another lap!' he yelled while he sat and watched me. Damn. I knew he'd get me back.

Now I shall do it regularly, as penance for my smug ways. It's about time I got healthy again.

Ha! Dream on lady!

One of R’s therapies is provided by a visiting person at the school instead of home because we live out of town. At his last appointment a few weeks ago the principal came to say hello, assuming that Master R would become a student in her special ed class in two years. The rest of the kids were out playing with dad in the playground, and of course she wondered when they would be coming to school. Homeschooling, said I. Oh, said she, and it was pretty plain that she sees homeschooling as a funny little indulgence, and one that i’d get over pretty quickly when I saw how fantastic the school was. As if walls full of cookie-cutter art could somehow convince me. I declined her invitation for a tour and she went back to work. That’s about the last I thought of it.

I received an interesting thing in my postbox last week-three sets of enrolment forms and an information pack from my local primary school, assumedly for the three school age girls. Interesting because I didn’t actually request it. Interesting because I made it rather clear that I wasn’t interested in sending them to school. And so all up it was rather bloody offensive. The husband was spitting chips, it took a while for the steam to stop coming out of his ears.

So I did the only sensible thing-took all the forms in and informed them politely but firmly that I had not filled them out and was returning them because I didn’t require them now, or anytime in the future. The secretary knew who I was from the names on the envelope, so there’s obviously been some gossip about the poor misguided homeschoolers.

Hopefully that is the last I hear from them, but I suspect not. However, if they think they’re going to have an easy time of getting my kids into their school they’re going to get a nasty shock-they’re not having them. Unfortunately for them I am one of the most stubborn, contrary people they’re likely to come across!

Science

I read an article in Warm Earth tonight, written by Joel Salatin. Others with an interest in sustainable agriculture will know the name. He runs Polyface Farm in the US, a sustainable, humane polyculture that is one of the growing number of places that is showing people that chemical agriculture is not actually all that great.
Anyway, it's about sound science, and our worship of science and scientifically gained results, and our acceptance of those result over good old common sense. I love this part-

What are the new darlings of sound science? Irradiation, genetic
engineering, more concentration, less domestic production, and a Wal-Mart on
every corner stocked to the hilt with amalgamated, extruded, reconstituted,
chlorinated, adulterated, manipulated, constipated psuedo-food.

Describes the stuff at the supermarket perfectly.

And don't even get me started on media misrepresentation of sound scientific research, gah.

Why am I not surprised?

That the government is spending obscene amounts of money on broadband? Hardly a pressing task IMO. But it keeps the punters happy, and that's what matters when you have a limited term.

Even worse is that it's come at the same time as the Wilkins Ice Shelf news. Which is really scary as it has climatologists saying we're hooning down the global warming path at a much faster speed than first predicted.

But i'm sure that when we're all four metres underwater we'll appreciate being able to access YouTube that bit faster.

Why TV is good for kids

So, who's had a heart attack at me writing that title? It's actually a book, I thought i'd get it to see if it would change my mind, and started it with an open mind, really I did. Let's just say that I haven't been convinced I should race out to Harvey Norman.

The holes in the arguments are the type you could fall into and never return. For example, they seem to feel that Madonna only manages to not have a TV because she has masses of money and therefore an army of employees to help with her children. Yep, they're trotting out the tired old martyred cry of 'But the only time I get to myself is when they're watching TV!' I mean, all those poor people who raised children more than 50 years ago, it must have been terrible! The kids running around feral, constantly nagging you to entertain them, never a moment to sit down and have a cuppa........hey, wait a minute, revelation here-maybe kids could entertain themselves back then, and still could if they didn't learn to fall back on television the instant they're bored?

Or by stating that TV is a passive activity, but so is reading and a number of other things. Obviously they've never seen (or ignored) any of the number of studies that show that your body runs at the lowest pace while watching TV. While reading you actually burn more kilojoules than by watching TV. I think sleeping is the only activity that comes in under TV, but not by much.

Or by saying that BMI is totally unreliable because it can't be applied to all people in the population, using George Gregan and his 'overweight' BMI as example. When anyone who has a clue about BMI ranking knows it can't be and isn't applied to super-fit body-builder types or some ethnic groups. But if they admitted that they wouldn't be able to write off BMI as an indicator and therefore also write off the increase of overweight and obese children would they?

And my favourite, deliberately interpreting the well-documented correlational link between TV watching and attention disorders as a direct cause-effect link. As in, watch x amount of hours of TV per week and you WILL get ADD. Well, it's easier to refute something that is obviously wrong, isn't it? Morons.

And that's only one chapter. I don't think i'll bother with the rest (except the education chapter, that should be fun), as books that choose their POV then selectively search out information that supports it while leaving glaring omissions frustrate my husband-yes, I argue out loud with books ;P Pity, I agree with a lot of it, like TV is not too bad if used properly (I use the guns analogy, it's not the thing it's how you use it), but the rest is just too crap.

Why I hate drunks

We encountered a moron on our walk tonight. As we walked past one house we could hear a domestic in full force, and a teenaged girl came running out of the house and down the road with an older guy appearing on the steps to scream and swear at her. As is usual in those situations, we ignored it all and carried on. Until he appeared behind me a few houses down, asking if we knew which way she'd gone. He stunk of booze and had a drink in his hand and couldn't speak nor stand properly (at 6pm on a Tuesday, not a bad effort), so I told him I didn't know. So did D-we both did know, but I didn't want to inflict him on her any more. We were very polite about it, and explained that we weren't paying attention to other people when he continued to badger us. So then we were the baddies-I really had to bite my tongue when he started telling me he hoped people looked out for my kids more when they were older. Um, hello, you're the one who lost your kid! Hopefully i'll be looking out for them more myself rather than relying on strangers out for a walk!

We walked off, so he turned around and spied her off on another street, then we copped more abuse-all the really inventive things along the lines of fuckwit and such, and all to do with how stupid we were for not knowing where she was.

Drunks are so entertaining. It reinforces my perception of alcohol as a generally bad thing-i'm always amazed at the attitude that regular drinking is quite acceptable. I know many people who see it as totally normal to drink a 6 pack every night and a slab over a weekend-it's just what blokes do. Not to mention women who down numerous bottles of wine a week. I've been pressured to drink both while pregnant and breastfeeding, and poor D gets nagged mercilessly if he refuses a drink while we're out. Now, neither of us are non-drinkers but neither do we do it on a regular basis. Both of us growing up with idiot alcoholic stepfathers is most likely responsible-when you see adults become blathering idiots who use their clothes drawers as toilets on a regular basis it tends to take the coolness away from it.

So i'll continue to be dumbfounded at the fact that whitegoods stores can run promotions giving away massive amounts of alcohol when you buy a fridge, that you can drink at some school fetes and that the supermarkets in Canberra sold alcohol. Because to me, it all helps to normalise and encourage the behaviour of the idiot above.

AWOL and hospital dumbfoundedness

AWOL-internet-free again for me, going back to a more anti-rat lifestyle again. So i'll be blogging offline and avalanching here with posts when I get the chance. I'm looking forward to it, I spend very little time online compared to what I used to do, but it's still too much for me. I don't have much spare time after all.

And the hospital...........well, suffice to say, they're morons. I went for the second part of my booking-in visit and it's just silly. I got into my 9am ob appointment at 9.45. Took in my blood test results which she looked at but didn't read, or if she did read them didn't think my low iron levels were worth talking to me about. She also didn't read the u/s report I took in, seeing as i'm sure she would have given me a referral for another u/s as recommended (it was only for clearer pics, not issues, so I wouldn't have gone anyway, but should have been picked up on.) She didn't ask me a single question about how I was feeling or how the pregnancy was, just became fixated on the fact that I haven't had a full blood screen done. After going and asking the consultant about it after I told her I didn't need it she came back and gave me my orders, told me that it's hospital policy, you MUST have it done, here's the referral, you HAVE to go and get it done now, it's VERY IMPORTANT. Go STRAIGHT to pathology. So we left, scrunched it up and chucked it in the nearest bin. Hey, I KNOW I don't have syphilis!

I did get an apology from D though. He's never come to many appointments before and was absolutely flabbergasted at how they treat us. Now at least he understands why I loathe the whole process. So that's it for appointments for me, i'll ring and cancel the next one and the next time they see me will be in labour!

Bounty Bags

Well, I had my first antenatal visit at the hospital today. I'm not going to go into details-suffice to say I am a child abuser according to hospital standards.

But I got a Bounty Bag. I thought they'd all been discontinued but obviously not. I thought of refusing it by telling her that I don't like disposable or petrochemical based products for babies, but thought i'd probably pissed her off enough by that stage. They have at least taken out the bottles and dummies.

The things I never knew I needed! Like a $790 baby bag. Or a $609 cradle and $1250 cot. Not to mention the $70 feeding set (fork and spoon). Something that rocks your baby to sleep for only $250 (go the arms-length parenting). No wonder there were also books advertised on 'how to afford baby'. Here's my advice for free-don't buy so much CRAP.

Now, some people would say 'But if people can afford it, why shouldn't they buy it? It's their right!' Well, why not buy something decent for a tenth of the price and donate the rest to a charity? Sponsor a child? Or save to buy yourself some solar panels, a fantastic investment in your child's future?

Apparently smearing your child's butt in a petrochemical derived product at every single nappy change is the best way to avoid nappy rash (from those disposables that are apparently clinically proven to reduce nappy rash?) And the hospital grade detergent I got will ensure #5 will never have his poor fragile immune system exposed to any nasties.

I will begrudgingly admit that they did have a one-page spread about cloth nappies-no info, just pictures. And quite a few slings advertised. There was also a token 'eco-mama' section-with organic needless stuff so you can satisfy your need to buy but assuage your conscience at the same time.

The terrible mood I was in when I got home was definitely NOT the best for me to go through this perfect example of rampant consumerism and wastefulness.

My pity party

I'm really not enjoying this pregnancy. I think that more than anything else makes me determined that this will be my last baby.

First up I copped nine weeks of horrible sickness and exhaustion, to the point where I was barely capable of supervising the kids, let alone doing things like cooking and housework. This was right at the time we were preparing to move as well, so poor D copped all the renos as well as a lot of the housework.

The next part was OK, I started feeling human again at about 14 weeks. My hips started to ache at about 12 weeks and the lurking varicose veins from the last pregnancies all started to swell again. But nothing too bad. People started asking me when I was due, assuming soon, but i'm used to that. I have no decent stomach muscles to hold my belly in firmly.

See what I mean? 26 weeks.

 

It took until about 23 weeks until my hips and pelvis really started playing up. Now at 27 weeks they hurt constantly, I can't sit/stand/walk or do anything for too long. I can't roll myself over in bed without waking up and doing it in a precise sequence. My pelvis hasn't started coming out of alignment yet, but i'm sure that excruciating little treat is only a few weeks away. That will then mean I can't roll myself over or get out of bed at all-welcome to interrupted sleep for D too as he becomes more like my carer than my husband. My stomach muscles have split apart again and I once again have the very freaky looking herniated belly button. No more stretch marks even though I look full term-then again, there's not much skin left for them to cover after the twins. And my feet are starting to puff up and look like pillows again. I feel so attractive.

The decision on where to give birth has also caused some stress-D wants me to go to the hospital although he's happy to support a homebirth, and I don't know what the hell I want. So apart from a visit to a doctor to get an ultrasound referral I haven't had any pregnancy care. Over the last week i've started to think it's really about time I started to see someone.

I feel sorry for the poor boy i'm carrying-all I do is complain about carting him around. I am looking forward to actually having him and holding him though-I can't wait for that bit. What I can't wait for the most is getting fit and healthy again though. I'm still only about 67 kilos so won't have much to worry about on the weight loss side, but i'm more interested in getting strong and able again. I feel like a useless, breathless lump ATM and i'm totally over it. I think after I have him it will be time to boot camp myself-as i'm the laziest person out it will be hard, but if it's not going to be wrecked by having more kids I think i'll have the motivation.

Rampant branding, bah!

Needed gumboots for the kids. Yes, it rains more than plenty here. But do you think I could easily find a pair without some idiotic character on them?

You can buy gumboots with Dora, Bratz, Fairies, Ninja Turtles, Wiggles and oodles of other brands on them. You wouldn’t think unbranded would be so damned hard to find. Kmart? In a whole rack there was one pair in an unbranded design, in the wrong size. Oh, and two pairs of camo ones, but we try to avoid camo, it’s a small doses only thing. Target? Snort, same again. Best & Less? They don’t believe in gumboots. Impractical shoes certainly, but not gumboots. I finally remembered where a Payless was and lo and behold! Tucked away with the Bob the Builder ones, Aussie Gumboots with no idiotic branding! One pink pair and one yellow pair later we exited the shop having paid less than we would have for one Dora the Explorer pair at Kmart.
Why on earth is it getting so hard to find anything for kids that isn’t licensed? We had the same problem with backpacks and ended up finding some at Anaconda. You really have to search to find anything targeted at children that isn’t merchandised. Most people don’t care but my children are not walking advertisements, nor are they mindless clones. Nor are they precocious little tarts, a la Bratz style, but that’s a whole ‘nother rant. Is there actually that much demand for it? Do parents really think it’s fantastic to have everything their child owns plastered with Dora the Explorer? Or do people just buy what’s available? Because of branding power are these products undercutting and eventually killing the unbranded items and getting them removed from stores?

And, on a tangent, do some parents let their kids do the bossing? I’ve heard a few parents say things along the lines of “He won’t brush his teeth without a Shrek toothbrush”, or “She throws a tantrum unless she has a Wiggles nappy”. Amazing, here I was thinking they did these things because that’s what’s expected of them. Whatever did our grandparents do with their plain white nappies and boring toothbrushes? There must have been soooo many tantrums :P

Enough ranting from me for now, I need to start planning my full days shopping adventure to find my kids some boring t-shirts.