Homemade Harvest

The past month has been such a frenzy of homemade awesomeness. Harvesting yummy veggies from our garden

Including cassava so we can make our own cassava chips (as well as so many amazing delicacies)

Amazing, delectable, organic, home made cherry liqueur, which tastes like an explosion of fluffy bliss bubbles in your brain

Hannukah Sufganiot

Homemade Bailey’s Irish Cream made from local, raw, organic cream, and served with my organic, raw macadamia and honey ice cream

Gingerbread yoni cookies made by my neighbour

And last, but not least, a local farm stall gave us a massive box of “seconds” tomatoes for only $2! What to do with such a tomatoey abundance?

Tomato Chutney!

In between the moments of madness, there’s been SO MUCH AWESOME!

I love eating locally, I love eating food that we grew ourselves, I love making from scratch all the things that even our grandmothers have forgotten how to make :)

Truly Blessed

I came down sick over the weekend; I got a nasty sore throat, totally lost my voice and felt like crap.

Thankfully, Purple was here to take care of me. He spent the day making sure I was warm enough, taking care of Littletree and making me loads of cups of ginger-lemon tea and soups.

Best soup ever – greens, broccoli, sweet potato all fresh from our own garden and home made organic chicken stock, with loads of garlic. He also made an amazingly delicious fermented spelt bread (actually, he made that for Ariad, who is gluten intolerant, but she couldn’t come over in the end so I had to eat it!). Mmmm spelt bread dipped in home made soup!

Actually, it was so tasty and nourishing I didn’t stop between mouthfuls to take a photo of the finished soup. But it did make me feel a lot better.

I am truly blessed to have someone so awesome in my life. Someone to share parenting with, and a house, and to look out for each other. Someone who really gets me and supports me exactly as I am (and puts up with all my crazy).

5 Star Travel

Littletree and I landed in Phuket, tired after a long day. Thankfully, we were greeted by a driver standing with one of those little signs with my name on it.

Relaxing in the air conditioned car, we pulled up at our destination where a bellhop in a shiny uniform greeted us in front of an imposing edifice, a large brass baggage cart in hand.

We were guided to my client’s suite by an elegantly-dressed concierge who swept through the expansive marble-floored lobby, past the gift shop selling expensive trinkets and overpriced luggage, numerous little boutiques and beauty counters advertising specials on facial treatments or dental whitening, and to the elevators.

The suite was quite large with all the mod-cons and a massive garden balcony. I headed straight for a hot shower in the marble bathroom and then ordered dinner from room service before laying down on the sofa for a rest in front of the big-screen TV while Littletree played on the wifi.

Only this wasn’t a 5-star hotel but a fancy private hospital. Kind of fun for one evening taking care of my client, she is very sick, but we’re back at her house now, and she’s feeling better.

A Call for Healing

My friends Earth Mama and Autumn’s little boy, Jallahyn, who was born into my hands, and is dear to all our hearts, is gravely ill.

He has developed septic arthritis in his left hip joint, which is spreading down his thigh bone. Today he is scheduled for his third surgery at the Mater hospital in Brisbane to try to clear this out.

Please send healing energy, prayers and blessings to all the family.

Home Birth – Risk Safety and Responsibility

It seems the media is all aflutter with the recent birthing of Dannii Minogue’s baby boy – you can read a standard example of the mainstream media coverage HERE

Honestly, it’s not such a big deal – a baby was born: congratulations to the family! It was a celebrity family: well, yeah, that’s interesting to fans, and would usually get a line in the gossip pages or something, so why all the fuss?

Dannii had a *gasp* home birth. Which is hugely confronting, because we all thought Dannii was a pretty intelligent woman who is likely to be well-informed and make sound choices about such matters. So it challenges our sensibilities – surely only crazed hippie fringe freaks have home births!

And it gets worse – Dannii, under the skilled eye of a trained midwife, transported to birth in hospital when the birthing process became complicated. Well, we can all heave a sigh of relief. See: she needed the hospital.

Except that this proves the safety of home birth with a skilled midwife – it is possible to transfer to hospital if needed, of course, the majority of cases don’t need it, and birth safely and happily at home.

When a woman plans her birth in a hospital, and complications develop leading to a transfer to a larger tertiary-care facility, or a caesarean section, no one is blazing trumpets and newspaper articles saying hospital birth is unsafe (well, I am :P )

The reality is that for the vast majority of women, home birth is a safe option, and a hospital transfer is a viable resource when back-up is needed.

Dr Ted Weaver, the president of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists is reported to have said

“Up to half of all first-time mothers attempting a home birth had to be transferred to hospital due to complications”

Great. He’s a doctor with a fancy title, so we can all ignore the fact that he’s just making up statistics as he goes along, and, in the words of Gloria Lemay: hallucinating his own reality.

Really? Up to half of all first-time mothers attempting home birth transfer? Based on what study? I’m willing to bet it’s based on the “study” of his own personal experience.

Dr Weaver went on to say,

“It is better if first-time mothers don't attempt a home birth or, if they do, they should be counselled about their risks and needs for transfer."

Oh the hypocrisy! When are women ever counselled as to the risks of hospital birth?

I have a real study published in the British Medical Journal showing that outcomes were the same in planned home and hospital births, but interventions were much lower at home and the mothers reported more satisfaction with their births. BMJ 1996 313 1313-8

In European countries where midwifery care is the standard, mortality rates are much lower under the care of midwives than under the care of obstetricians at all levels of predicted risk. Even when unplanned transfers to hospital are taken into account, home birth is still safer than hospital birth. Tew, M (1990) Safer Childbirth, Midwifery, 7(2):55-63

The true issue of home birth is control and responsibility. If you birth in hospital, the risks of complications, interventions, morbidity and mortality are higher than at home with a skilled midwife, but you have no responsibility. If something goes wrong, the doctor says “I’m very sorry, we did all we could”, and that’s the end of it. Taking that much smaller risk that something might go wrong means that the responsibility is taken on by the birthing mother.

If something goes wrong at home, everyone says “you should have been in hospital”. If something goes wrong in the hospital (even though this is more likely), it’s “just one of those things that happen”.

Ultimately, Dannii made a reasonable, responsible choice regarding her own birthing experience. It makes me so angry that the medical establishment is using the media to spin hype and misinformation, which is actually increasing risk for women and babies.

I won!

I won a raffle this week! Even better – it was a free raffle, at the organic butchery. When they called me up to tell me I’d gotten the second prize, my reaction was: “but I never win anything”

Well, I suppose that’s not entirely true – I did win a jellybean guess at the school fair when I was about 9 years old. But I think I was the only kid who didn’t just ‘guess’ – I counted the beans visible on the base of the jar, counted the number of beans going up the height of the jar, and multiplied. The irony was that I didn’t like jelly beans!

Anyway, I went in to the butchers – The Southern Cross Organic Butchery in Murwillumbah – to collect my prize. I love the guys there (even before I won the free raffle I thought they were great) – they’re always friendly and happy to cut up beef knucklebones for me to make stock, and since I’ve now healed a bunch of cavities in my teeth from eating stock and following the Weston Price dietary guidelines, I love it even more :)

The butcher handed me a $50 note – I was expecting to get a $50 credit for meat, but he just gave me the money. Of course, I bought meat with it! LOL Yep, it’s not very vegetarian, but I like my teeth better than I liked vegetarianism ;)

So I got a kilo of chuck steak (among other things) and made Beef Bourguignon – it was DELICIOUS!

RECIPE FOR BEEF BOURGUIGNON:

1. 1kg cubed beef, marinated all day in 2 cups red wine with a bay leaf, some fresh thyme, parsley and whatever other herbs are fresh in the garden. Drain the beef, put aside the marinade and pat beef dry with paper towel.
2. Brown the meat in a big frypan (in batches) and add to a big casserole dish (note that the dish should be big enough – mine wasn’t and the casserole bubbled over and burned on the bottom of the oven, filling the house with smoke).
3. Pour the remaining marinade in with the beef, add 1 cup home made beef stock and a big spoon of flour, mix it up, cover and pop in the oven at 180C for about an hour and a half, stirring every 1/2 hour.
4. Heat 30g butter and a schluck of olive oil in a heavy pan, cook about half a dozen small onions, peeled and halved for about 10 mins, set aside. Then fry in the pan 200g mushrooms, set aside with onions. Then fry about 250g bacon, in strips until crispy.
5. Add the onions, mushrooms and bacon to the casserole dish with a cup of water, stir into the meat and back into the oven for another half hour.
6. Serve over rice or couscous. ENJOY!!!

Bullrout Sting

Yesterday Littletree was stung by a Bullrout. Ouch! And before everyone asks: http://www.mpatkin.org/surgery_clinical/bullraut.htm

It was horrible. I’ve never seen anyone in so much pain. Ever. The poor little thing. Honestly, I can’t even begin to explain how much pain she was in; it was excruciating just to look at.

The local home school kids were playing down by the creek in the village, Purple was there, and a few other parents, and I had just gone home for a nap, as I had a headache, when the phone rang – it was Purple calling to say Littletree had stepped on something, maybe a piece of glass, and could I come down with the car and bring the first aid kit.

So I grabbed the kit and dashed into the car. I arrived to find a huge crowd of kids surrounding Littletree, who was on Purple’s lap, screaming like I’ve never heard before. She was screaming that the pain was getting worse, going right up her leg, and I could see her foot was swelling.

Apparently no one knew exactly what had gotten her – might have been a snake, or maybe a “bullrush”. I scooped her up in my arms and got her into the car, with Purple close behind, and we rushed to the hospital.

We got to the ER and were brought right in (it’s a small hospital; only 5 beds in the ER). And lucky for us, all the doctors and nurses on duty at that time just happened to be foreigners, so none of them could diagnose that it was, indeed, a Bullrout sting (note the tell-tale 2mm long slit, which is duplicated about a centimetre away. note the excruciating pain).

Littletree was absolutely beside herself with pain, and they all thought “snake bite” and so started doing a snakebite tox screen. Which meant taking bloods from her every 2 hours, and an overnight stay. Naturally, all the bloods came back negative for snakebite.

At some point, an orderly ambled by with a mop and said (with a thick local accent), “ow, that’s a Bullrout sting! Put ‘er in ‘ot water; she’ll be roight!”

The doctor gave her a shot of morphine, which was, for me, terrible to see, and she calmed right down. duh. Then they listened to the orderly and put her foot in hot water, which (of course) helped a lot. But they still had to finish the snakebite protocol, because once it’s started, they’re in the system.

So Littletree was admitted for the night, and we went up to the paediatric ward to wait out the snakebite bloods. I sent Purple home to get us some overnight things – in my hurry I’d gone out without my handbag or even shoes. And I got to enjoy a comfortable, pleasant night on a little fold-out bed next to Littletree.

Waking after about 4 hours of broken sleep, and feeling entirely refreshed and rested, I sat with Littletree, keeping her occupied till they came to discharge her.

Littletree was amazed to discover a Gideon’s Bible in the bedside drawer, which she read happily over her breakfast, which was “awesome, just like on the aeroplane!”

At least the nurses in Paeds were really nice, and in the morning the ER doctor who had been on duty came up to check in on us. Finally, we were set free to go about our merry way, though poor Littletree’s foot is still swollen and painful to walk on; she’s just fine :)

Cavity-Free and Full of Ice Cream!

I went to the dentist today. Yeah, you all probably cringed a little just reading that, but don’t worry; I ate a whole bowl of ice cream before I went!

Forgive me Dentist, for I have sinned. It’s been over a year and a half since the last time I went to the dentist, when I was told I have eight teeth that are decaying and need filling. At the time, I decided not to get the work done, but to start following the Weston A Price traditional diet recommendations.

I bought the book Nourishing Traditions, and started making bone broths and chicken stock and eating organ meats and raw, organic, grass-fed dairy; I started taking good quality Cod Liver Oil and High-Vitamin Butter Oil. It was quite a diet-shift! But I didn’t give up sugar or acid foods. I still eat loads of cake, as always, and my awesome ice cream, which I believe is actually good for teeth, as well as sinfully delicious.

So today, I went to the local dentist for a cleaning, and he looked at my last-seen-ridden-with-eight-cavities teeth, and declared:

“Your teeth are in perfect condition and I think if you keep taking care of them they’ll last you the rest of your life.”

My jaw nearly hit the floor! I pressed him, “Are you *sure* there’s no decay? 2 years ago I was told I need some fillings”

To which he replied, “Oh, you have one tiny brown spot on one tooth, but that’s nothing to worry about; it should be fine.”

WOOHOO!!! I went skipping out of the dentist happily! Who would have thought ice cream would be better for cavities than getting fillings?

Homebirth; Australia Spits on Human Rights

I’ve spent most of the last week since we got home from camp dealing with a nasty cold – Littletree was feeling pretty sick and feverish on the day we came home from camp, and spent most of the next 3 days in bed with a yucky, wet cough. But we took good care of her, and she got better, only for me to catch the cold. I came down with a sore throat, and lost my voice completely, so I wasn’t really up to blogging.

Not to mention, I find the topic on my mind somewhat depressing. Most every other birth-blogger in Australia already said something about this, so I can probably leave it alone, but it is on my mind, even though I have a tendency to procrastinate on thinking about it.

Essentially, the federal government is proposing new laws that will essentially make independent homebirth midwives illegal, and put women’s birthing choices securely in the hands of the medical institution.

Bruse Teakle at The Maternity Coalition put out this press-release, which pretty much sums it up:

Doctors to gain veto powers over midwives and birth choices

Doctors to gain veto powers over midwives and birth choices

On 5 November the Government announced that the “Medicare for midwives” Bills would be amended to require midwives to have “collaborative arrangements” with “medical practitioners” before being eligible for professional indemnity insurance or Medicare rebates.

Doctors must approve each midwife’s entry to private practice:

- Midwives will be required by Commonwealth law to have “collaborative arrangements” with “one or more medical practitioners” before being eligible for Commonwealth-subsidised professional indemnity insurance (PII).

- PII will be a prerequisite for a midwife to enter private practice, under new national registration laws, being enacted state by state.

- Doctors will be able to unilaterally withdrawal from collaborative agreements with a midwife, rendering her uninsured, and legally unable to practice in a private professional capacity.

- This legally mandates medical control over midwives’ ability to register and work in private practice.

- This will be set in Commonwealth law, which can only be changed by Commonwealth Parliament.

- These provisions are contained in the Health Legislation Amendment (Midwives and Nurse Practitioners) Bill 2009.

- Medical practitioners will control the registration status of midwives, despite their being a discrete, separately regulated profession.

- Medical professional organisations could set guidelines for collaborative arrangements, potentially forming defacto regulatory standards for midwifery endorsement and practice.

This gives doctors right of veto over women’s choices in birth care.

(this is an abbreviated quote, the full synopsis can be read HERE)

It basically means that no one can be a midwife; midwives have to have an agreement with a practicing doctor and all clients and births will have to be approved by the doctor and there’s pretty much no reason or incentive for doctors to ever approve anyone for a home birth, even if we thought we needed doctors’ approval. It means that women will not have the right to choose a homebirth without the approval, sanction and control of a doctor – which is hardly a choice at all.

This basically contravenes one of our most basic human rights. I’ve pointed out before that one of the Rights of Women as set out by the UN is that women have the right to have control over, and decide freely and responsibly on all matters relating to their sexual and reproductive health.

Which means that it is a human right for women to be able to make their own choices about how, where and with whom they birth. The Australian government is blatantly spitting in the face of the rights of women!

Oh, that’s right. Australia doesn’t have a bill of rights in its constitution. Which explains how the Australian Medical Association can get away with lobbying parliament to secretly make and pass laws that deny Australian women their human right to have control over their own bodies and their own birthing. Not to mention holding refugee children in detention centres for months on end, or the shocking treatment of Australia’s native peoples. And don’t lets forget that the whole of Australia’s federation was essentially based on wanting to push the White Australia policy, which is the crux of our nation’s love for abusing human rights.

Heck, Australia isn’t even a true democracy; it’s one of only a handful of nations where voting is compulsory. How is it democratic if you can’t even choose not to vote? Easy – you don’t have to actually cast a vote, you just have to show up on polling day and register that you voted. A clever way of controlling and keeping tabs on the population, indeed.

So complaining about the the crime of refusing rights and controlling birthing women is petty when you think about it.

Do I sound angry? Funny about that.

Rainbow Gathering part II

In following on from my last post about our trip up to far north Queensland for the Australian Rainbow Gathering (which you can read HERE), here's some more highlights from the journey:

Regular drum circles in the evening

Me drying my hair after a swim:

I brought a pretty extensive first aid kit with me, both herbal/homeopathic and allopathic, so I found myself treating lots of minor injuries and illnesses, including this chamomile tea eye-patch:

We had some spontaneous lessons - Littletree decided that we would save her pocket money while we were at the rainbow (there's no where to spend money there anyway) and she wanted to work out how much money she was saving, which led to discussions about multiplication tables. She was fascinated with the idea and quickly learned the 1, 2 and 10 times tables, as well as a bunch of the 3 and 7s. When it started getting tricky, we moved on to using groups of pebbles to work them out.

Purple played his silver flute a lot and impressed us all with how good he's getting

Here's one of the things I crocheted - a rainbow striped hat that took me about 4 or 5 hours. I also added some sections to Littletree's blanket and made myself mohair leg warmers.

In rainbow people can really show their true colours :)

We had a resident hygiene hand-spray cowgirl

Hair-wrap workshops

and the best breakfast ever - here modelled by the most gorgeous woman

And of course no rainbow would be complete without an all-night mission to make more pizza than 100 hippies can eat!

The oven was awesome - made out of an old barrel and structured with stones and mortar made from termite hills, it survived four rainy seasons and is still going strong!

The beauty of rainbow magic was that one brother had a vision to make pizzas, and then 2 other guys showed up to help that turned out to be an Italian chef and an American pizza chef!

And what rainbow mission would be complete without some funky music and a bunch of people dancing!?

Okay, there's more, but this post is getting way too long. I'll save the trip home for another post tomorrow. You can check out the full album of photos on my flickr page HERE

Healing from the Barefoot Doctor

You might remember about a month ago I had a bit of a flu... well, after four weeks, I was still coughing, and nothing I tried offered any relief. Eventually I even broke a rib from coughing so much!

I had been to see a doctor to be tested for whooping cough, that came back negative, as did all the other batch of tests the doctor had done on me just to see if they could find anything wrong with me - even tuberculosis!

It was getting ridiculous; I just couldn't stop coughing and my life was basically on hold - I missed one birth and had barely been out of the house. The broken rib was just adding to my misery, since it made coughing excruciatingly painful.

My new neighbour, being a Chinese herbalist, acupuncturist and homeopath offered me a treatment. How could I refuse? Especially when the treatment room looked like this:

It was a beautiful, warm sunny day, and I got my first ever acupuncture treatment, as well as cupping on my back and some other Chinese herbs while lying in a tropical garden.

The result was that I haven't coughed at all since the treatment and my rib feels much less tender! :)

I even have cool marks from the cupping:

Or maybe that's just where my wings are growing in ;)

Fill in

While the chicken soup really helped, I've still been coughing all week, feeling a bit sorry for myself and all that, so I haven't posted at all, sorry.

and I still don't have anything to post, so I'll entertain you all with a cute picture of Littletree with the lace parasol she found in a hard rubbish collection on the street (we washed it)

Purple playing flute in the park at our local homeschool group

The ever-gorgeous Química making me dinner

Purple and Littletree dancing (note the awesome incidental colour coordination)

And funniest of all; me solving a Rubik's Cube in under 2 minutes. Yeah, I know, 2 minutes is hardly a record of any sort (I think in this one it's really like 1:50 or something), and I'm really out of practice.

I learned to solve the cube in Africa, Purple told me a few tricks, and then I traveled from Cape Town to Cairo by hitch-hike, bus and once a boat, with my cube, and any time I was waiting for a ride, I would practice solving the cube. By the end of that journey I got really good at it!

Now we're all preparing for my birthday party - I'm celebrating my 30th tomorrow evening! (though my birthday is on the 17th)

Chicken Soup for the Swine Flu

I'm sick. More than a week ago I got a bit of a cough. I started sneezing like crazy, lots of yucky phlegm, headache, tiredness, aches, and generally feeling crap. After googling my symptoms, it became clear that I must have swine flu.

Being that there's a global pandemic - after all, something like 46 people have already died in the whole world, which is a lot, especially compared with the thousands who die each year from the regular seasonal flu. Especially considering the terrible avian flu pandemic that caused havoc around the world just a couple of years ago. Not to mention the 1976 swine flu pandemic that only one person died from, yet, many died from the US government's vaccine.

The government's recommendations were all basically related to buying stuff (go out and stockpile canned foods, buy flu treatments, buy face masks, and keep buying pork).

So I did what any sensible person would do - I started taking echinacea tincture, drinking ginger lemon tea, I made elderflower tea, onion and honey cough syrup, and loads of vitamin C. I went out and bought some fresh veggies and an organic, free-range, local chicken. (incidentally, the veggies I bought made a beautiful rainbow in the shopping trolley)

Thus armed, I made chicken soup. Starting with a whole chicken

Chopped it up a bit

Took my yummy veggies

Chopped them up too

and put it all into my pressure cooker with a splash of vinegar and a few litres of filtered water.

Let sit for an hour, then bring to a boil. Scoop of any foam that rises to the top, and then close the cooker, and simmer for 20 hours. Add in a bunch of chopped parsley at the end.

The final result was a wonderful, rich chicken stock. I made myself bowls of yummy chicken soup, we cooked brown rice in chicken stock, I made a yummy quiche with all the chicken and veggie bits I strained out. And froze all the rest, so now we have a freezer full of stock :)

Playing With Water

Littletree was feeling 100% healthy by last night, so today we came into town to go to the library for storytime.

I would like to make clear that while Littletree was delirious from fever, that is pretty normal for her with fevers. She was like that for only about 3 hours, and I was checking for other symptoms that would have indicated a trip to the doctor; there were none. The only symptom she had was fever.

I spoke with our doctor, who was of the opinion that there was no real cause to bring her in, and letting the fever run its course was probably the best action.

Anyway, after library we went for our usual play-date at Princess' house. It's a hot day, so Princess' mother got out the hose for a few minutes to cool the girls off.

It was great to see Littletree running happily through the spray; she's come such a long way with regards to water.

Just a year ago she was terrified of getting in water, and even a few drops splashed on her was enough to terrify her. It's been wonderful to watch her process, as she faces her fear and gets more and more used to being in water.

She still hasn't gotten to the point of full immersion, or putting her face into water, but we're getting there.

Dramas in the Majikfaerie Household

I was sitting with Littletree tonight, watching a movie, when we heard a rustle up on the pantry shelf. I thought it was probably a rat, but I haven't seen one for a couple of days, and this didn't sound quite like a rat, so I went to investigate...

it was...

Two brown snakes!

Naturally, the first thing I did was get my camera and snap a few shots.

I'm not much of a snake expert, but they looked like brown snakes, which are terribly poisonous, the second most poisonous land snake in the world. There are brown snakes on our property, so though it seemed weird to see two of them together, and at night, I had to assume that's what they were.

Not knowing what to do, I called my neighbour, who gave me the number for the local Snakeman.

The Snakeman came out straight away, despite it being 11pm. By the time he got here, my little brown buddies had slithered away, but he did look at the photos, and declared them not brown snakes, but brown tree snakes. Still poisonous, but not nearly as dangerous.

The Snakeman turned out to be an interesting guy, and we chatted for a while about shamanism and snakes and the Hare Krshnas. I told him about my drama last night with Littletree being sick.

Littletree came down with a fever the night before, when we were staying over at a friend's house. She wasn't too well all yesterday, being feverish and headachey, but last night around 7pm her fever spiked and she spent a few hours alternating between sleeping fitfully for about 15 minutes, and waking up and being delirious for a while.

It was pretty scary, at some point she was waking up and calling for me, she stared through me as if I wasn't there, and didn't seem to recognise that I was holding her. She started to see things I couldn't see.

Difficult though it was to see my little girl sick like that, I held firm in the knowledge that there is no danger in a fever whatsoever, as long as it's not a case of heatstroke or meningitis (both of which I can rule out), and did my best to support her, keep her hydrated, and let the fever run it's course and do it's work in healing my child.

At some point, I decided to burn some sage to smudge the house. I had a strong feeling that there were some negative energies around, so I worked on clearing them.

Right when I finished, Littletree settled into a restful deep sleep, and even responded lucidly when I carried her upstairs to bed, so I guess something worked. :) This morning Littletree woke up and vomited, still with a low fever, but by the end of the day she seems perfectly fine.

So it's been just one drama after another around here!

Ambulance Adventures

Today was quite an adventure. Since it's the weekend, we planned a trip up to Port Douglas and Mossman Gorge... Only in the morning Littletree had an accident.

She was playing with some friends, a bit rough and tumble, and fell headfirst down a full flight of stairs - about 2.5M onto her head. Lush (the gorgeous woman formerly known as Rapunzel),  picked Littletree up and her eyes were rolling back in her head, but she came to and started crying like a normal kid.

I held her, she was sweating and screaming for a while, and she seemed okay, but then she fell asleep. It was hard to wake her up, and then she was moaning that her tummy ached. She vomited and then passed out again, all floppy and unresponsive.

We got worried, but I didn't want to rush off to the hospital, so Lush called a healthcare hotline. Given that Littletree was vomiting, going in and out of consciousness, and had bruising around her eyes, they called an ambulance on our behalf.

Having an ambulance come was pretty scary, well, I got frightened. Though they were only coming to check on Littletree and see if she was alright.

Of course, when the paramedics came in, they checked Littletree and said we need to take her into the hospital. I tried not to cry, carrying my little girl into an ambulance.

She woke up a bit on the ride, just in time to vomit again all over me. The triage went quickly and we were brought in to a bed to await the doctor. By the time the doctor came, Littletree was recovering, seemed mostly okay. The doctor said she had a bad concussion, but should be fine.

They kept us for observation for a couple of hours; Littletree was given a popsicle made of re-hydration salts which perked her up a bit, and she spent a while playing with the electronic bed controls.

Eventually we were released with instructions to keep an eye on Littletree and make sure she doesn't get any more signs of head injury.

Since I hadn't even had breakfast yet, Lush went to get us a luscious picnic lunch from a fantastic organic cafe, and we sat under a shady tree by the sea to eat it. After lunch we decided to go to a nice gelateria and have ice cream. YUM!

Phew; what a long day! I'm glad Littletree is fine... but the worst part: in all the stress of going to the hospital, I didn't take my camera, so I didn't take any pictures. So here's a really gorgeous one of Littletree from last week.

 

my pearly whites

A few folk have asked what I did in the end with my dental dilemma, I did a lot of reading and soul-searching, and finally decided not to have the work done, mostly out of sheer laziness.

I kind of had this idea that I should be able to heal my teeth through nutrition, I know my best friend has done a lot of work on re-mineralising his teeth. Though he's also done a lot of work on getting fancy silver fillings ;)

Anyways, it seemed reasonable to assume that the dentist was really looking to make some extra money and I don't need to have the work done just yet.

So, thus begins my journey into the wild depths of nutritional healing on my teeth. I'm learning a lot about Weston A. Price and taking care to brush more and eat more dark green leaves.
Well, the green leaves part is easy ;)
I shall definitely update as I get further down this path...

In other news;
My wonderful computer, who is still pretty new and therefore under warranty, is playing up a little, so I might be sending her in for a service :(
The fun part was that I had to backup my hard disk, and re-install everything. :(:(:(

Of course I blame Vista for all my problems, and naturally, Vista makes it easy to do so.
During the install wizard, I got this screen:
A more secure environment
Spend less time fixing problems and enjoy a faster, more reliable online experience with Windows Vista

What!?? I would never have seen that screen if not for trying to fix problems. and then just minutes later, my computer popped up a little box to tell me it found some problems and I should click on it to see what they are and how to solve them. That got me to this screen:Problem caused by Windows
This problem was caused by Windows, which was created by Microsoft Corporation. Currently there is no solution for the problem that you reported.

Yep. Next time I'm getting a Mac
LOL