Last week was FUN and hectic as well. Stomach aches…visiting in-laws that I see every three years…meeting cousins in a park for their spring break and hearing my sister tell me the plot line for the romance novel she is writing that will make Jane Austen jealous…spring flowers popping up….hoping my kids didn’t notice that we didn’t dye Easter eggs this year…watching The Life of Pi with my husband on a rare movie date…doing an Easter egg hunt with the cousins…finding parking in downtown SLC…being woken up at 3 AM by a sick child…making homemade Easter chocolates that were sooooo good! All in a week’s work of my mother of seven life!

It didn’t start out too fun, as I was really nauseous (and no, I am not pregnant!) for the Friday and Saturday the week before. It lessened on Sunday but then came back on Monday. It was this strange sickness that made me lose my appetite for food and my passion for life. I didn’t even want to move as I felt so weak and queasy. I sincerely wondered if I would ever want to cook food for my family EVER AGAIN and eat with vengeance like I usually do.

I was thinking I might be fixing dinner and playing hostess for my brother in law and sister in law from North Carolina who would be coming to visit us in the middle of their spring skiing trip with their little boy. I wondered what in the world I could prepare for them. The only thing that sounded good was hamburgers. We went for years without eating ground beef, but since I have been turned on to Nourishing Traditions I have been slowly accepting the wholesomeness of ground beef. The more I thought about having a juicy hamburger with tasty condiments, the happier I got!

Well, it turned out they only stayed until 4 PM so we didn’t have dinner together but my 11 year old son decided to fix the hamburgers on Friday for a “barbecue.” He plugged the electric griddle into the outlet on the patio and mentored his little 8 year old brother, who needed to pass off a cooking requirement for Cub Scouts, on how to cook hamburger patties. They were so eager to have a barbecue! They set everything up outside for a picnic. It was sooo nice to have a night off fixing dinner, totally unplanned! This 11 year old boy can be such a go-getter. He happily sighed after eating his burger, “I am so happy!” OK, if I had known making hamburgers can make boys so happy, I would have started putting them on the menu a long time ago.

By Tuesday night, I had recovered from my illness with some essential oils. My daughter got sick Saturday night after being gone all day to her job at the Lion House. I met her at the Conference Center for the Young Women meeting, rather late because of my hair appointment that was at 3. The best place I could find to park was up at the Capitol so we had fun hiking to the hill.

In the middle of the night, early Sunday she woke me up saying she felt so sick. I woke up from my comatose state and said in my raspy, dehydrated voice, “Get the essential oil off my dresser and put 2 to 3 drops on your tongue!” Then I promptly fell back to sleep. Next thing I knew, I could hear noises in the bathroom that indicated the drops had worked. They will help your body do whatever it needs to do to get better, whether it’s vomiting, such as her case was, or settling the stomach down. The next day she was feeling MUCH better and got to wear a new dress, the black and white one pictured above, that she got as a new hand-me-down from her aunt for Easter Sunday. I had made some homemade Easter chocolate with some new molds. I couldn’t get them out easily of the molds so I totally mangled them as I pried them out. She added her artistic touch and put them back into Easter bunny shapes. I am so going to miss her when she goes away to college!