Holding Out Hope for the Home Brew

"I make food and I gotta' go work on Wezz-day. Buh-bye. Maybe you wight. On you email I have to go to email and shake when you wear Pull-ups. Where you Pull-ups is? In da store? I gotta' go get 'em. I worry you got to get 'em. I have to get 'em at da store. I HAVE to buy all da' stores, Mama. I'm not going anything. I'm just hangin' out wight here. Why you have to zip me, tell me zip it? I'm miz-able now, so I have to go. We gotta' go da store and buy noodles. Why get a job? You do this all the time."

I love talking to two year olds who are punch drunk from lack of sleep, especially my own. I don't love talking to them when they are up way past their bed time for no good reason (sniffles, bad dream, "Help! I wost my speh-shull cell phone," you know, the usual).

I should explain that Pigtails, who continues to babble espresso ripping fast at this very moment, was referring to my blogging addiction when she said I "do this all the time." At bedtime last night she busted out of bed, darted into the living room and declared between drags on her thumb, "It's free-o'clock now, mama. An' you still doing blog?!"

In unrelated news, Cheeks is on the mend. All the king's men could and did put him back together again. He's officially no longer sporting silver staple skull bling. He swapped that junk out for eye gunk care of conjunctivitis. His budding ER doc big brother, Mouth, continues to clean his two-inch long laceration with peroxide and Neosporin nightly.



Everyone in the family bears telltale red-rimmed eyes with pie crust crumbles sprinkled in our lashes. We practically need chisels to rub the sleep from our zombie bloodshot eyes in the morning. Our self-imposed quarantine (avoidance of friends, preschool and neighbor kids) is getting old. Have you ever gone stir crazy alongside hyperactive two- and three-year-olds? Those controversial cocktail playdates are starting to sound good. I provide the hard stuff, you bring the protective goggles and a can of Lysol.

Needless to say, my homemade pink eye remedy/eyewash isn't working as quickly as I'd like, although it seems to be greatly reducing itchiness and redness, as well as making me feel like a bad-ass herbal concoction queen, a trooper survival mode mama.

In case you're into home brewed health remedies, I give you the Herbal Eyewash for the treatment of conjunctivitis recipe, compliments of The Family Herbal by Rosemary Gladstar:

1 tablespoon of powdered comfrey root (I couldn't find it in the powdered form, so I used the dried flakes instead ... the same type of comfrey root flakes I used in each of my post-home birth sitz baths. It's a powerful, proven tissue healer.)

1 teaspoon of organically grown goldenseal root (Take the time to shop around for the best price - It cost a steep $299.99 per pound at Wild Oats or about $18 per ounce! I don't know whether or not the goldenseal I bought was organic. Does it really matter? Won't it still work the same? One would think ...)

I boiled one cup of water, combined that with the above ingredients in two layers of non-fancy cloth drawstring tea bags and let it cool to room temperature.

Next, I dipped a cottonball into the fragrant eyewash and dripped a few drops into the crispy eyes of my petrified-of-their-witch's-brew-master-mama kids. I'm supposed to repeat the eye blotting remedy often for four or five days.

Anyone have a good remedy for hair-lodged gum? One of my Big League Chew addicted children (Cheeks, as if you didn't already guess it was him) decided the overstuffed trash can wasn't the best final destination for his spit soaked rubber tree sap.

(Brings back bad memories from childhood, when my aunt sheared a chunk of my long golden locks off without telling my mother after giving me a gagging hunk of Bubble Yum.)

No amount of eye goop could keep me from relishing a rainy Tuesday night in Southern California (Cheeks, Pigtails and I stomped in sidewalk puddles all morning long ... Who needs umbrellas?)