Natural health methods have been incredibly helpful for my family over the years. I credit the majority of my natural health exposure to our time living in Seattle where holistic is a widely embraced a way of life (at least in the circles we ran in). Supplements proved vital to everything from allergy relief to skin care although I careful to get medical advice about any potential interactions with medications, etc. After finding out I was pregnant I restarted my standard prenatal multivitamin, additional calcium, as well as quercetin to try to stave off the allergies. However time showed my sinus battle was being utterly lost I finally started researching other options and came across acupuncture.

My first trip to the acupuncture specialist proved to be one of wills. I was woozy my whole drive there, and sitting upright proved to only increase my nausea so I spent my wait leaned over in a comfortable chair. The doctor was very nice and asked me a wide range of questions about my medical history before beginning treatment. He also made sure to find out whether or not I have any fears about needles (which thankfully I don’t). I laid on my back for the first treatment and barely felt the small pricks of the needles as they were inserted on various points on my feet and arms. Shockingly within a few minutes the world suddenly felt like it had stopped spinning and my nausea subsided. I fell asleep with the small needles still working away and awoke to feel more clear headed than I’d felt in weeks. I went home and slept for almost 12 hours straight, deep luxurious sleep which left my body feeling fantastic. The next day I still felt bad but much less nauseous so I returned for another treatment.

In my subsequent treatments needles for sinus and allergy control were added (which did include a few in my face, but I promise they didn’t hurt). Each time I felt less and less nauseous and was surprised that the river of drainage I’d been battling seem to slow to a slight trickle. Unfortunately I awoke Sunday a sinus pain and drainage mess and couldn’t hold anything down, but thankfully the constant burden of nausea seemed to be lifted. Monday I went in for a 3rd treatment and the differences didn’t seem too apparent right away. The ground was definitely more stable thanks to the sea sickening nausea lifting away but the sinus drainage misery wasn’t going anywhere. I went to bed that evening not expecting much else to change but was awoken today to the most wonderous event:

My. Head. Was. Completely. And. Totally. Clear

Feeling this clear and alive is not an experience I’ve had in ANY of my pregnancies and I am truly grateful to actually be able to share this today. I don’t know how long this will last or quite frankly even care- right now I’m so ecstatically thrilled to be pregnant AND feel like a normal person that I am savoring each and every moment. It’s like the huge crushing weight of nausea, pain, and allergies have been removed and I still can’t get over how great it feels!

I can’t say I especially expected acupuncture to completely work and was just hoping for a tiny bit of relief, but my mind has definitely been changed. Thankfully our insurance includes full coverage of most natural therapies (including acupuncture) so I’ll be returning for many more visits in the future. I haven’t had an issue eating any meals at all today (and kept down all of my liquids too!) so who knows perhaps the 3rd time really is the charm.

The Ebony Family is having a baby. We always knew that we wanted to have at least one more child but my one issue has always been the whole being pregnant part. I’ve only recently chronicled some of the details of my pregnancies but one part that I was hoping to not deal with again is hypermesis gravitorum. Turns out there’s basically no avoiding it so I’ve been taking it as easy as possible to try to hold food down for as long as possible.

I don’t typically experience nausea but the last two weeks saw me under the constant driving force of always feeling like I’m going to toss my cookies. It finally seems to be getting a little bit better thanks to some visits to an acupuncture specialist (I’ll have to blog about that in its own post) but I’m still fighting the massive sinus drainage which tends to haunt me the entire 9 months. Food has a come and go relationship at the moment, but I’ve finally been able to keep small portions of protein down now which is always a benefit.

We haven’t really spoken about the pregnancy to the boys yet (our families are in the know and are very excited) but we’re looking forward to their insight as time goes on. I did not do much journaling of either of my previous pregnancies because I didn’t want to write down just how miserable pregnancy can be, however this time I want to remember (since chances are there’s no way I will ever ever put myself through this one again so future self consider yourself warned). The newest Ebony child should be making their appearance sometime in May 2009. People ask the usual questions about what we’d like and hope for but at this point whether its a boy or girl is the least of my worries, if I could just get well enough to enjoy my daily life and get a healthy baby in the end everything will be more than fabulous.

Got this one from Amy

Reading has been a passion of mine since I first learned to read. We made weekly trips to the library to check out books and I made it my mission to read through as many genres as possible. My mom had a huge collection of books and classic literature so I took it upon myself to go through them whenever we couldn’t get to the library.

My Jane Austen and Bronte sisters reading sessions lead to some rather interesting vocabulary discoveries. Apparently some of the terms in the books meaning had changed over the years, so my adaptation of words ofen lead to some comical results. Calling someone impotent apparently meant a bit more than the lack of strength my 13 year old mind took it to mean. I’ve never seen someone turn so many shades of red, than the friend I insulted by noting his impotence in a crowded restaurant. I quickly noted that perhaps I should recheck word meanings before incorporating them for daily use.

The Big Read (an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to restore reading to the centter of American culture) reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.

Look at the list and:
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you own.
3) Underline the books you HAVE SEEN A MOVIE OR TV PRODUCTION OF.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth ( I think I read this but can’t remember for sure…)
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Bank
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

After years of resisting I finally gave in to the pressure. I actually created a Facebook account. Some dear friends gently encouraged me to give Facebook a go - but for some reason the whole idea of a permanent social network source simply gives me the heebie jeebies.

Now, you would think as someone who blogs regularly about all kinds of details or her life that a little online networking would be no big deal. However I guess I’m still concerned with safety issues and considering I’ve never fully come out of the blog closet. It still makes me nervous to think of having my personal information plastered anywhere that I don’t personally own, no matter how password protected it may be.

I signed up with Facebook using a fake name but still feel uncomfortable even going to look around. I guess it just all seems so voyeuristic to check in on people I knew from high school (notice I said PEOPLE not neccessarily friends) because while I’m curious to see how people’s lives are doing, I’m not really interested in reconnecting with anyone (perhaps a weird trait of mine but my high school days were pretty dark so reliving anything from that time is not a high priority).

Do you facebook? What have been the positive aspects that keep you going there? My profile name is Soulographer Radiance if you’d like to say hello. We’ll see if I ever feel comfortable enough to become a full blown Facebook fanatic. For now I’ll just stay shy until I figure out a way to not feel so exposed.

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Be sure to check out the review blog for the latest and greatest from Britax

After 2 years of lock lust and stalking blogs- I am proud to announce I am finally the proud owner of Sisterlocks! The process took 27 hours over two days- combining tons of lovely conversation with my exceptional consultant, lots of snacks, and plenty of old school videos for reminiscing and giggling.

This is single handedly the best hair decision I’ve made since going natural and I can’t wait to see how my hair matures and grows. To put it simply- I absolutely positively love my locks!