Community Question: To Placebo or Not To Placebo With Your Wily Kids?
Dear Crunchy Betty,
I need for you to come up with a way to deceive my kids. Yes, indeedy. So many nights during bedtime I get the “Mommy, my hand is aching” or “Mommy, my toe feels weird. I need medicine.”
And so I need you to come up with a tonic that I can give them so they’ll be happy and go to sleep thinking they’ve taken some real medicine. I’m thinking honey, obviously, because it has to be more alluring than that grape-flavored kid’s Tylenol which, even to me, smells like children’s crack. And something else, so it looks like I made a real tonic for them.
40 Hot Homemade Gift Ideas for the Holidays: First Up, Kids
Yes. You heard me. FORTY gift ideas – and not just the best present ideas from Crunchy Betty, but from all over the internet. All spread out over this week.
Last year, as a gift to you, I offered the free printable recipe cards for household and beauty recipes. This year, I offer you an abundance that you can give away (or make for yourself … please don’t be shy). We’re talking women and children and – yes – even men here.
To start with, we’re going to focus on the kids.
I’m your curator of crunchiness this week, so sit back, relax, and start making plans to go UBER natural and full of good old fashioned love this holiday season.
Quick Homemade Vapor Rub
Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.
I think you’ll agree that quote is, perhaps, the most eye-crossingly, nose-whistlingly boring saying ever.
And … also … so annoyingly true.
Despite my kajillion ideas of things to do in Kansas City with my nephews, not a single thing has been seen through to completion yet. Until today, when my youngest nephew, Sully, decided it was time to get ill. And not Beastie Boys style.
He woke up this morning with a bit of a cough and a runny nose.
By 6:30 this evening, my mother and I were crouched over his sad little sniffly body, plotting how we’d get him to keep his feet in garlic water while dripping hydrogen peroxide in his ears while pouring Umcka down his sad mouth. All before my sister could come home and stop us before we made his feet stinky and his ears bubble.
(My mother is VERY serious about her HUG cure.)
While we never really got around to garlic dipping or hydrogen peroxide curing, I did find a moment to make Sullivan some homemade vapor rub.
Here’s how.
Problem-Solving: Helping Your Loved Ones Help You Crunch
“My family thinks I’m crazy!”
“My husband’s threatening mutiny if I replace the fabric softener!”
“I’ve been locked out of the house with unshampooed hair, waving a bottle of lavender essential oil and a jar full of baking soda like a crazy lady at pointing passers-by!”
All of a sudden, this is a common theme around here.
The family just doesn’t understand. We want to be healthier, we want to be more frugal, and we want to be more in touch with the products we use on our bodies, our children’s bodies, and our household in general.
They just think we’re nutso, following a new “fad” that’s overtaken the estrogen side of the internet. They love their brand names. The Speed Stick is comfortable, and the Lysol bathroom cleaner smells like what a clean bathroom should smell like.
Until you learn that it’s not.
I mean, it has been – for 50-some-odd years. Ever since Dow Chemicals introduced their infamous slogan: Better living through chemistry.
After that moment, as fast as the scientific world could scramble, they took apart natural ingredients, down to their tiny individual particles, and reassembled things in a new way. Then, they just started making stuff up as they went along. And then we just started putting that stuff all over our homes and bodies, because, well, it was there, and they told us it worked.
Some of it does work. Some of it is dangerous – in ways we’re still just beginning to understand. And some of it … well, some of it’s not so bad at all.
That being said, how do you convince your family to take the journey with you into this “new” (and mostly old) realm? How do you get them to believe that, maybe, the way people did things 200 years ago – at least some of it – is not only healthier, but just as effective as the stuff on the supermarket shelves?
Here’s where I suggest you start.
Ladies, Grab Your Girls, Grab Your Food, Grab Your Faces!
This is my friend Ashley and her little sister Alizea.
(Or, as I like to call her “The girl with the most mesmerizing name in the world.”)
These hot chicas stopped by on Sunday for a few hours of food, faces, and lotsa laughs.
And it really made me start thinking: a few of you have mentioned doing this with your children – and it’s SUCH a fantastic idea! There’s nothing like a little avocado on your face to help open conversations and make fantastically silly memories.
The holidays are coming up, and quality family time will be at a maximum. Grab your daughters, your nieces, your grandmothers, and a few pieces of fruit, maybe a little honey … and you’ve got yourself a rockin’ food-on-your-face time.
It really couldn’t be easier. All you need is a few pairs of hands, a camera, and some fruit. It makes it even more fun if you put the food in the air first, before you put it on your face.
See?
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Crunchy Shopping
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