Home remedies, the Dr in your kitchen.

This weekend youngest son went to bed fine on Saturday and then in the early hours of Sunday morning, can into our bed and coughed like a trooper for the next four hours.
So come getting up time something had to be done.
I found a dusty bottle of Tixylix that was still in date and gave him a dose.

Did it help his cough?
Nope.

Did he get worse?
Yup.

Now he was feverish with spots of hi colour on his cheeks in an otherwise pale face.

The trouble is, when you have kids that don't eat much junk, highly coloured and flavored medicine can do more harm than good. Check out the additives on the back...sugar free? Well they sweeten it with something and no sweetener is good or even benign for you.

A quick trawl online brought up a few home remedies and as I had nothing to loose I thought "Why not?"

First of all I made up a quick honey and lemon mix. Now Honey is not Vegan.

Me and Kim quickly discussed this and came to the conclusion that we would buy a jar of the most local, home produced honey we could find that day (from Turriff so not bad!). My feeling is that is we can find a regular supply of home produced honey then I am happy to use it medicinally.

So I mixed the juice of 1 (organic) lemon with a good spoon on honey and then doled out this vit C rich, cough soothing mixture at a rate of 2 spoons every hour or so.

Then I made up an Expectorant.
Chop up 1 onion and 3 cloves of garlic and place in a deep bowl. Cover with sugar and leave for a couple of hours.
What you get is a fantastic syrup that  actually tastes alright!

Within a few minuets you could really hear him getting behind the cough rather than just making that awful "hu hu hu" dry sound.

Verdict?

Well  the cough dissipated rapidly and by bedtime was very light. I kept him home from school today but that was more because he slept a fair bit yesterday and didn't eat much. In fact I haven't heard him cough all morning and he's back to being argumentative and loud!

Desperate to ward off any nasties before our trip down south on Thursday me and Kim drank down cups of lemon and ginger tea with added fresh lemon and honey for a vitamin kick, and for dinner that night I made a power soup of Nettles, lungwort, plantain, dandelion, onions, garlic, celery and potato.

Despite having youngest coughing in my face all Saturday night in bed *touch wood* I feel fine.

Do you guys have any home remedies you want to share?

Small spaces? Think Tardis!

There is a definite trend in recent years for a constant feeling of moving up. Not just a "Keeping up with the Jones" mentality, but a vague feeling of some how deserving something better.
Many families now feel a large 4 bed house is their "right" and damned be anyone who might suggest they can't afford it.
In this climate  having your children SHARE a room is the same as suggesting they all share a bed and have to knock ice off the outside of their covers in the morning and if they need a wee in the night there's a handy piss pot under the bed.

Its just not done you know.

Anyway, we are a 5 person family currently living in a 1 1/2 bed croft cottage (the 1/2 will become clear in due course. Hold your breath though. By the end of the summer we may have reached the dizzy heights of TWO and 1/2 bedrooms through some drastic re-jigging.

But now I'm getting ahead of myself.

I want to show you round my home.
Bit by bit.

I'm proud of how we fit our lives into such a compact space. Whenever I feel like cabin fever sets in (like when we get 4 months of snow for example!) I try and remind myself that 100 years ago a husband his wife and their 7 or 8 children might have lived in this house, and back then it would have only had 3 rooms and a lean to pantry.

So to start, let me show you round my living room and the 1/2 bed.

  

Space saving comes in all guises. By using this re-claimed mirror (found in the back of the shed when we moved in and stripped and varnished by me!) we have doubled the space and avoided clutter.

The steps up to our bed double as book shelves on this side.......

...and on the other, maximizing usage in what could have been awkward wasted space.

Custom make furniture. When your space is limited nearly all ready made furniture will be a compromise. We made this sofa to fit in the available space under the bed, and its a cosy spot to read or watch a movie.  

Custom made means less waste. These shelves are perfect for our DVD collection, and its worth noting that they are mostly made out of the slats from an old bunk bed! 

Find a second use and make your furniture work hard. This chest has followed us everywhere and done service in the tack room and as a toy box. Now its used as a blanket box cum coffee table.

 

Biko admires the view from the bed! Our raise bed is surprisingly private and unobtrusive in our "living room" area.

Kim built all the wood work in this post and I made coffee and supervised! 

Everything evolves.

When I started this blog (91 posts ago!!!) the main topic was our foray into car-less living, all be it almost car-less living.
Well we have certainly learnt a lot in the last ten months!
The main thing being that no, we can't live without a car, not in a permanent capacity.

A lot of things have changed since August 2009.

For one thing Kim now has work. Having gone self-employed he finds himself having to ditch the bike more and more in favour of the car as his work takes him further afield. For example we have to take a clients horse to be x-rayed on Friday. The vets don't have a mobile x-ray and so he will have to box the mare ten miles down the road and back.
Another blow was that one of his clients is now very ill and he has taken over a lot more work that he was originally going to do and they insisted he have the use of one of their cars so he can be up to their yard quickly in all weathers and also take over jobs such as collecting feed from the feed merchants.

Winter 2009 also conspired against our eager plans. The worst winter in thirty years hit Aberdeenshire and for the best part of four months it was impossible to cycle anywhere, with sporadically gritted and ploughed roads and grocery deliveries often not arriving or refusing to come down our lane, we were forced to drive into town to collect our shopping.

Then, after getting ourselves geared up to do nearly all our shopping within cycling distance, the local veggie cabin closed, meaning it was no long financially viable to do more than a fraction of our shopping locally.

All in all, despite our best efforts we now acknowledge that our rural location makes it incredibly hard (because nothing is IMPOSSIBLE!) to be 100% car-less.
With bad weather, no reliable and regular public transport, young children and animals (who always seem to need the vet when you are least able to get them there!) the whole thing was getting more than a little stressful!

Are we giving up?

Hell no!

Just being realistic.

I can still cycle to the little town and Kim still cycles to work when he is able, we still try and get the kids on the bikes to visit local areas. 

After a recent trip to the city of Edinburgh (FANTASTIC by the way!) I suddenly realised just how infrastructure poor we are here.
In a large town or city the majority of things you need are THERE, within walking distance or at a push easily reached by bus or train.  
I've been using the Tuesday bus into town for a while, but the two hours you get before having to catch the bus back home are woefully inadequate, you can do your shopping OR you can do jobs in town, but not both, so you spend the best part of £6 travelling and the whole morning away from home and will probably have to go back into town in a car as well at some stage in the week.

I don't feel we have failed so much as I feel let down by a country that takes relish in closing small local shops and businesses, cutting public transport and making life so hard for those not in te city to live car-less that you end up with country people migrating to the towns and richer town people taking over the country and villages.

So we have a newer outlook.
A do-what-we-can outlook that tries not too feel too bad when a car is a necessary evil.
Go through the options first and use the car last, but don't beat yourself up for having to use it outlook.

I think we can live with it.

HOWEVER......

This puts us in somewhat of a quandary.
How can we continue to call this blog "The (Almost) Car-Less Family" when we are now more the "Definitely Car Owning Family"?

So I feel a re-jig coming on.

A new name to go with the evolution of the blog.
I'm thinking about it at the moment and when I have half a dozen options we'll put it on a poll!!!

Feel free to throw any suggestions in there!