Natural Living Monday

Posted on June 17, 2013 by Mama Rosemary
NLM_mamarosemary
Thank you for joining us on Natural Living Monday!  I am excited to see the great things you have been doing to live a more natural, whole, holistic life.

Your Hosts:

Amanda from Natural Living Mamma

Katie from Nourishing Simplicity

Angela from Mama Rosemary

Andrea from Homemade for Elle

Beth from Modern Alternative Health

Last weeks top four popular posts were:

eat more garlic

Eat These Bulbs and Live Forever… Well Not Really But Close by Hug a Tree With Me
carragenin
Why You Should Avoid All Products With This Ingredient by Eat.Play.Love… More
naturally whiten teeth
Just Naturally Whitening My Teeth by The Crunchy Delinquint
herbal liquid sweetener
Herbal Liquid Sweetener by A Nutritional Makeover 

Congratulations on being featured! These amazing posts (and a few others) will be tweeted, shared on my Facebook page and pinned on my Pinterest boards!

Are you ready to link up?

Here are the rules:

Your blog article must fit these categories: sustainable living, homesteading, DIY, herbs, home-made body and skin care, real food (no processed ingredients, Weston A. Price Foundation guidelines are a good place to start to define “real food”), and all things “natural“.

Link back to this week’s blog hop post so that everyone can see the other amazing posts.

By linking to the blog hop you give the hosts permission to use your pictures with a URL back to your original post on our social media to promote the most popular posts.

Show some love! Go check out and see what others have posted.   Share the hop and the posts you love!

Not required but I would love it if you would grab the button and share!

What are your best natural living posts this week?

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Click here to enter your link and view this Linky Tools list…

Categories: Natural Living Monday Blog Hop | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

♥ Summer Herb Camp: Week One Fairy Fun ♥

Posted on June 15, 2013 by Mama Rosemary

Welcome to Mama Rosemary’s Herb Camp

Join us every week for a fun round up of projects and ideas to do with your kids during the summer.  Each week will have a theme with lots of projects to do using herbs, exploring science and natural, holistic living plus some great crafts for good ol’ fashion fun!  Many projects can be adapted for multiple age ranges depending on your child’s interests and developmental stage.

♥ Let’s visit with the wee fairy folk ♥

Our first week of summer camp is all about fairies!

Below you will find books, projects and even online sites you can visit as you delve into the world of fairies.  Do as many of these activities as you want!  

Books & More

Start your journey into the world of Fae with a couple of lovely books about fairies.  

The Complete Book Of The Flower Fairies

by Cicely Mary Barker

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Have you seen the adorable, beautiful paintings by Cicely Mary Barker?  If you haven’t you are in for a treat!  These are some of our very favorite fairies and if you look around you will find a plethora of books, activities books, figurines and more based on these fairies.  The Complete Book Of The Flower Fairies is a compilation of all the smaller Flower Fairy books by Barker.  Full of beautiful paintings and poems all created by Barker, this book really stimulates and inspires the imagination.  My girls and I adore the delightful little poems and amazing paintings which were done from children modeling as fairies.  

Flower Fairy Alphabet CD

flower fairy ABC

Another of our favorite’s based on Ms. Barker’s fairies is this wonderful CD.  On this CD Barker’s sweet poems are lovingly set to music.  It really sounds like little fairies singing!  We have spent many happy hours listen to this CD, singing along and then finding the corresponding flowers out in the world.

Fairy Houses

by Tracy Cane

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Go on a magical journey with Kristen in this is lovely book all about creating a fairy house in a beautiful wood using only natural materials (which are preferred by fairies).  If your kids are anything like mine when you finish reading this with them they will be heading outside with great anticipation and excitement over building their own fairy house.   

Projects

Here are some fairy projects full of creativity and fairy magic!  

Just click on the pictures to get full instructions.

♥ Make A Fairy Garden ♥ 

… with edible plants 

chamomile fairy3

… or even dinosaurs!

dino2

♥ Make Your Very Own Fairy Friend To Join You In The Garden ♥ 

fairyrain - Edited3

♥ Craft A Fairy Crown From Roses or Mint ♥ 

rosecrown

mintcrown3

♥ Create A Fairy Snow Globe ♥

snowglobe

 

More Fairy Fun Ideas

Host a Fairy Tea Party with Herbal Treats ~

  • Iced infusions made with the yummiest of herbs like lemon balm, mint or chamomile
  • Bake cookies with mint or lemon balm
  • Sugared Flowers
  • Freeze ice cubes with pretty edible flowers inside to keep your infusion cold
  • Serve dandelion biscuits with rose petal butter

Build A Fairy House ~

Go to one of you favorite places in nature and build a house for the fairies out of natural materials you find around you.  Be sure to check back on your house regularly to see how the fairies are enjoying it!  

Make Fairy Accessories For Your Little Fairy ~

Like wands and crowns and even wings!  There are a lot of amazing ideas for creating your own beautiful fairy accessories online.  Just a quick search away!

Visit

The Magic Onions Fairy Garden Contest ~  check out all the wonderful fairy gardens and get inspired.  Seriously there are some super cute, creative gardens here.  Don’t forget to enter the contest if you make your own fairy garden!

Flower Fairies ~ the official site for Cicely Mary Barker’s fairies and enjoy the online fun and free activity sheets.

I am so glad you stopped by!  

Please join us again next week for lots of aromatic fun with herbs and essential oils all mixed up together in a classic favorite, play dough! 

 

Shared On:  Eco-Kid’s Tuesday

Categories: Gardening, Herbal Crafts And Projects, Herbs For Kids and Mamas, Nature Exploration, Science Investigation, Seasonal Herbal Crafts, Summer, Summer Herb Camp | Tags: , , , , , | 4 Comments

Guidelines for Using Herbs Safely

Posted on June 12, 2013 by Mama Rosemary

Recently I have shared a lot of fun little projects for kids~ kids and worms, kids and volcanoes, kids and lady bugs.  Today I want to talk about something a bit more serious, using herbs and herbal medicines safely.

apothecary

This is an important albeit somewhat slippery topic.  Every person is different and just as with any substance, we each have the potential to react differently to herbs.  Yet there are ways to approach and use herbs safely so we can harvest the amazing health enhancing benefits of plants.

In fact, people often make the mistake of thinking herbs are completely safe because they are a natural products.  While others consider herbs unsafe due to lack of testing and regulation.  The truth is that just as with anything there are benefits and risks with using herbs.  So how can you reap the benefits of using herbs while lowering, if not eliminating risks?  The more you know when using herbs the safer you will be!

To read more about this important topic please visit Natural Living Mamma were I shared a guest post on this topic.

Image Credit: Morgue File
Categories: Herbal Medicines, Herbs For Kids and Mamas, Ingredients And Herbs, Natural Family Care, Practices For Intentional Living | Tags: , , | 2 Comments

Natural Living Monday

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Mama Rosemary


NLM_mamarosemary
Thank you for joining us on Natural Living Monday!  I am excited to see the great things you have been doing to live a more natural, whole, holistic life.

Your Hosts:

Amanda from Natural Living Mamma

Katie from Nourishing Simplicity

Angela from Mama Rosemary

Andrea from Homemade for Elle

Beth from Modern Alternative Health

Last weeks top three popular posts were:

 

You don’t have to go to the store by A Life Unprocessed

Coconut oil, breastfeeding, and the bible by Health, Home & Heritage

Congratulations on being featured! These amazing posts (and a few others) will be tweeted, shared on my Facebook page and pinned on my Pinterest boards!

Are you ready to link up?

Here are the rules:

Your blog article must fit these categories: sustainable living, homesteading, DIY, herbs, home-made body and skin care, real food (no processed ingredients, Weston A. Price Foundation guidelines are a good place to start to define “real food”), and all things “natural“.
 
Link back to this week’s blog hop post so that everyone can see the other amazing posts.
 
By linking to the blog hop you give the hosts permission to use your pictures with a URL back to your original post on our social media to promote the most popular posts.
 
Show some love! Go check out and see what others have posted.
 
Share the hop and the posts you love!  Not required but I would love it if you would grab the button and share!

What are your best natural living posts this week? 

Powered by Linky Tools

Click here to enter your link and view this Linky Tools list…

 

Categories: Natural Living Monday Blog Hop | Tags: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Playing With Lady Bugs

Posted on June 6, 2013 by Mama Rosemary

lady bugs in search of aphids

What kid doesn’t love bugs?  Butterflies, caterpillars, rollie pollies and lady bugs are some of the most treasured critters in the garden.  I even know a child who has a deep love and respect for spiders.  Of course not every child loves bugs yet many do and lady bugs are among the most enchanting of bugs and are very approachable for most kids.

lady in hand

Recently I brought in a big bag of lady bugs to play with at the preschool.  (I purchased them at our local flower nursery.)  Before we let the lady’s go in our garden, we started out our lady bug exploration with a book all about the lady bug life cycle, Grub To Lady Bug by Melvin and Gilda Berger.

There are great pictures of lady bugs in different parts of their life cycle in this book including the larval stage when they look nothing like that lady bugs we are used to seeing.  The kids really were engaged reading about these familiar little insects.   While reading we talked about how many legs a lady bug has and about how lady bugs help our gardens be healthy by eating bugs that harm plants like aphids; aphids who suck all the nice juice out of plants and make them feel bad.  At this point one of our littlest girls who is just 3 years old, exclaimed “like the Grouchy Lady Bug!”

~ A Simple Art Project ~

Has you may know from my post about salt dough finger prints, I love to capture the precious cuteness of little fingers, hands and feet.  So as part of our lady bug exploration we made lady bug pictures with the children’s little red finger prints for the lady bug’s body.  The kids drew in the details of lady bugs often including six legs and even flowers for the lady bugs to protect.

Here are some wonderful examples of our art work:

~ Lady Bug Release ~

Finally the big moment came when we released the lady bugs into our garden.

The kids squealed and giggled as lady bugs crawled out of the bag in droves.

releasing lady bugs

They crawled everywhere, up my arm, all over the ground and on our spinach plants.

Super duper buggy fun!

lady's on spinach

We spent the rest of the morning gently holding lady bugs and watching them find a new home among the plants.

A Cherry Tree In Trouble ~

About a week after the release at school, my daughter and I discovered our cherry tree at home covered in black cherry aphids and we knew just what to do!

Off we went to our local nursery to get some more lady bugs.

coming out of the bag

Here are the lady bugs coming out of the bag onto our poor cherry tree!

 We let them go all over the tree and we could see the lady’s immediately getting to work chowing down on those aphids.

lady bugs finding aphids

It has been less that a week and the tree already looks so much better.

Like it’s energy is coming back, the leaves are greener and it seems to be standing stronger.

My daughter had a great day playing with the lady bugs and running back over to the tree every now and then to check on their progress.

Have you ever used lady bugs to control pests in your garden?  I would love to hear how it went for you.

For More Buggy Fun Check Out ~

Shared On:  Eco-Kid’s Tuesday

Categories: Gardening, Insects, Lesson Plans For Preschool And Home, Science Exploration, Science Investigation | Tags: , , , , | 2 Comments

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