Closer to Nature · Health

Safe, Natural Remedies For Common Ailments

When we get sick, our first instinct is to go to the doctor for advice. We trust that they have the skills and medications to correct whatever is wrong with us. 

Unfortunately, though, that’s not always the case. Many people wind up going to a local defective drugs and devices attorney because their physician prescribes them medication that actually harms their bodies. 

So what’s the solution? For many, it’s choosing safe, natural remedies instead. It turns out that there are already proven compounds out there in nature that can address the symptoms and causes of most diseases. What’s more, because they’re mostly just regular foods and herbs, they’re almost always safe (so long as you consume them in small quantities). 

Let’s take a look at some natural remedies for common health issues. 

Lavender For Anxiety

Natural remedies

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If you have anxiety, physicians will usually prescribe you drugs that change your brain’s chemistry. These can work in the short-term, but they’re a quick fix and don’t actually deal with the underlying issue. What’s more, some of them are unsafe or even addictive, making it possible to develop dependencies. 

Fortunately, lavender is not like this. This purple flower is natural and emits a scent which helps to calm the mind considerably. People who take lavender regularly report feeling happier and healthier as a result. Just pop some drops of essential oil in your diffuser or bring freshly cut lavender into your home. 

Ginger For Nausea

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Do you ever feel a little nauseous? If so, you might want to try ginger. 

Ginger is a bit of a superstar in the wellness field. Research suggests that it can do everything from protect our DNA to reduce migraines. It also contains compounds that help to soothe the receptors in the gut that cause nausea. 

If ginger doesn’t work, you can also try peppermint. Again, this herb helps to settle the stomach and improve the muscle tone of the bowel walls. 

Apple Cider Vinegar For Acid Reflux

Acid reflux occurs when stomach acid leaks out of the top of the stomach and begins to damage the surrounding esophagus. Long-term, it can lead to some nasty conditions, including Barrett’s disease and cancer.

Acid reflux is mostly the result of poor diet. If you eat too much sugar, meat and fat, and not enough fiber, your stomach acids will bubble over, causing you pain. 

To deal with this, you can use apple cider vinegar. It stimulates the digestive juices, preparing them for the food that you are about to eat. By itself, it doesn’t taste good, but it is extremely effective. 

Prunes For Constipation

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Prunes contain a special type of fiber called metamucil. When eaten as part of a whole prune, this fiber bulks up in the gut, providing it with a greater surface area on which to push. This, in turns, makes it easier to move stools out of the colon, helping you go to the bathroom. 

Just sprinkle six to ten dried prunes on your breakfast in the morning and then wait for the magic to happen. 

Closer to Nature · Environment · Family · Kids

Play More and Win a Sudocrem My Little Adventure Pack!

One of the reasons that we moved to our little house in the countryside, back in 2015, was so that we could spend more time outdoors as a family. Living in a very suburban area meant that we were constantly surrounded by noise and pollution, our garden was overlooked by about 100 other houses and to get anywhere even vaguely quiet or secluded, we’d need to drive a fair way.

Where we live now, there are less than 15 houses in our entire village and we have a lovely big garden for the girls to enjoy, as well as public footpaths leading through the countryside, right on our doorsteps. It means that screen time has been massively already reduced this summer, with the girls choosing to play outside in the paddling pool, riding their bikes, or walking with me and Husband when we take Maureen out (which hasn’t been until about 9pm in this heat!)

We’ve teamed up with Sudocrem to get involved with their latest campaign to get kids outside. As part of the campaign, they are encouraging parents around the UK to nominate a nursery and give them the chance to help improve the nurseries outdoor play area – just click the link to go through the the page for nominations. 

They said: “Children are spending more time indoors than outside and they are missing out on exploring the natural world around them. In fact, research found that 1 in 9 British children have not visited a beach, park or forest in twelve months, and on average, a British child only spends 4 hours a week playing in the great outdoors. [1]This is why Sudocrem set up the award-winning Play More campaign, an initiative designed to encourage parents and children to get back in touch with nature and explore the greatest playground on earth- the outdoors. As part of the campaign, Sudocrem carried out a survey which asked 200 children between the ages of 4 to 8 years old to identify some of the creepy crawlies in Britain. The survey revealed that 9 out of 10 children (89%) were unable to recognise a butterfly even though there is an abundance of native British insects, with around 27,000 insect species calling the UK home. Moreover, 51% didn’t know what a Bumblebee looks like. And, surprisingly, 1 in 3 (29%) didn’t realise that bees make honey[2].

Children are not only unable to identify some of the most distinctive insects, but they are also missing out on the adventure which comes with playing outside in a natural environment.  Over half of those surveyed (59%) admitted that they had never climbed a tree, 89% didn’t know what a Buttercup was and 77% couldn’t identify a Sunflower. Are children losing their sense of wonder and adventure?

According to children’s TV presenter and naturalist, Chris Packham, who’s an ambassador for Play More, parents should be encouraging their children to get outside and explore the natural environment around them. “I was very fortunate when I was a child because I was encouraged to interact with the outdoors- looking under rocks and searching under logs and hedges to find creepy crawlies. If you just open your eyes, you’ll see that there is an incredible natural world out there waiting to be discovered”.”

They’ve given us one of their gorgeous Sudocrem My Little Adventure Packs to give away to one lucky reader.  The kit is worth £40.00 and includes:

– Play More t-shirt
– Play More sun hat
– Bug Pot
– Frisbee
– Butterfly Net
– Magnifying glass
– Trowel or fork

To be in with a chance of winning, leave me a comment below telling me your favourite place to get outdoors with the kids. You’ve got until midnight on 31st July 2018 to enter.

T&Cs: winner will be chosen at random. Winner will have 48 hours to provide me with their postal address once contact has been made. If winner doesn’t respond within this time a new winner will be chosen. No cash alternative offered, prizes supplied and sent by PR company for Sudocrem. Mum’s the Word accepts no liability for supply of prizes.
[1] According to a government report, ‘MENE: A pilot for an indicator of visits to the natural environment by children- results from years 1 to 2 (March 2013-February 2015)’.
[2] National report conducted by Sudocrem, April 2018.
Closer to Nature

Closer to Nature – Lens Flare

This week has been a bit of a washout, despite big plans and lots of Closer to Nature related opportunities. Sausage is on half-term at the moment, like most of the kids in the UK, and we had plans of mini-golf, beach combing, nature walks and lots more besides, but the weather has meant that we’ve had to be a bit more creative about what we’ve done instead, so it’s been a week of fashion shows, cake baking, painting and film afternoons.

We have had one or two days of sunshine in the last month and I’ve developed a bit of an obsession with lens-flare, so for this week’s Closer to Nature, I thought I’d show you some sunshine snaps to warm you up and remind you that we so have nice weather sometimes! I’m not sure of the exact physics of lens flare, but I know that if I stand under something, like a tree, and snap directly at the sun, I get pretty good results and these were just taken with the camera on my Nexus 4.

I also love this close-up I took of our neighbour’s wysteria plant. I was being dragged along by an impatient Chuck on our way out for a walk, so it’s not the most amazing shot, but I love it anyway!

And finally, Sausage and I went on a walk aroundthe grounds of a local church on Sunday, just to get some fresh air, and I took one of my ‘weird photos that only I like or understand’ of some yellow moss that was growing on a curbstone. I think I liked it because of the pattern and the vividness of the yellow.

Do you have any photos of anything nature-related on your blog this week? Link up below and grab the badge code from the sidebar.

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Closer to Nature

Closer to Nature – Meet the Robins

Something very exciting has been happening this week…we’ve just found out we’ve got babies! Baby robins, that is! Let me set the scene…

A few weeks ago, I was on the phone (probably to my Mum) and I was gazing out of our patio doors when I noticed a robin, standing INSIDE my garden shed.

“No”, I thought, “I must be hallucinating…” (like that was a FAR more reasonable explanation)

I put the thought out of my head until last week, Husband proclaimed “A robin just flew into our shed!”

“Aha!”, I thought, glad not to have been in the early stages of a psychotic break.

So, we’ve been watching two robins flying in and out of the shed for a couple of weeks, watching them frantically searching for food, knowing that there must be babies in there and on Monday, Husband managed to sneakily get this snap through the window:

Isn’t he a beauty? We’ve learned that robins don’t get their red breast until they reach maturity, although you can see the beginnings of orangey patched on this little dudes’ chest. He’s not alone either, we’re pretty sure there are two babies in there as we’ve seen them hopping around together. Mr. and Mrs. Robin work tirelessly to feed their young, we’ve sat and watched them for whole afternoons, zooming in and out, hopping through the hole above the shed door with worms and berries in their beaks.

On Monday, Husband and I decided that we’d help our lodgers along in their daily toil to feed their young and we bought a variety of bird food, which we’ve secreted in various locations around the garden. Suet pellets, mealworms, soaked raisins and robin museli have gone down a treat! We didn’t want to put a bird table up, as we’ve heard that they attract cats as we had to come up with some other, impromptu ways of dispensing the food. Husband came up with the great idea of getting a carton from a dozen eggs and cutting it into sections, which we then taped on windowsills and outside the shed, and we even hid one in our trough of strawberries!

We’ve thoroughly enjoyed observing the robins and getting a little bit closer to nature (did you see what I did there?!) and we’ll be sad when our babies fly the nest, something that we think isn’t far off, given the size of them. We’d love to see your nature photos too, so please get involved by linking up any recent nature-related posts and you can even stick one of our badges on there too, if you like. (code in sidebar)

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Closer to Nature · Education · Family

Learning is Fun: Animal Sizes

Since Sausage was old enough to hold her own head up, Husband has sat her on his lap at his desk and showed her pictures of animals on the computer. She’s always been fascinated by nature and as she grew we moved her learning on from visual-only stimulation to actually learning facts about animals and the natural world. The internet is an amazing resource and we love nothing more than when Sausage asks us about something and we’re able to sit and learn together using websites we love, such as Wikipedia and the National Geographic site.

One thing that can be quite hard to explain is the actual sizes of different animals. Most kids don’t have a concept of how big things are, so Husband and I started actually measuring things out with Sausage. It’s a fantastic learning opportunity as not only are you quantifying the knowledge you’re passing on about animals, you’re getting them involved with using numbers, tools such as tape measures and best of all, it fires the imagination like nobodies business!

Now that the weather is nicer, we’ve taken the game outdoors and have started marking things out in chalk, so whenever Sausage wants to know how tall or long something is, we mark it out on the patio. However, our patio is only so big, so we’re planning to take our tape measures to the park to measure out some of the larger creatures, like species of dinosaurs and whales!

What you’ll need.

All you need to do this at home is a patio, a tape measure, some chalk and the internet. Encourage your kids to think of different animals to look up, get them involved in measuring them out and drawing the lines. We’ve had hours of fun doing this and it’s free, educational and really fun if you get your imagination involved.

Starting left to right, the smallest line is Sausage’s height, for context. The next line is the wingspan of a golden eagle (Sausage was blown away that a bird could have wings wider than her height, which led to a conversation about other birds that are even bigger). The third line, in blue, is the average length of a bottle-nose dolphin and the longest line is the average length of a large species of crocodile!

This is a great activity for kids and you don’t even necessarily need good weather to play it (though it’s so nice to get some fresh air finally). We often measure the heights of things and I had fun standing on the arm of the sofa with Husband stopping me from falling off, to show Sausage how tall a particular species of pre-historic ape was! You can even get a stepladder involved to show the really tall things, just mind your head on the ceiling!

Another method of quantifying things for them is to weigh all of the members of the family and write them on a piece of paper (I recommend doing it in kilos as most animals weights are in kilos and it’ll save you having to do all of the conversions!). Using the “think of an animal…” starting point, get them to think of a creature, look up their weight and get the kids to work out how many times bigger than them the animal is, or how many times bigger than Mummy or Daddy, or Mummy plus Daddy, etc. It’ll get them exercising their maths skills and get the imaginations going even wilder!

Sunday