You are NOT powerless in RSV season! During the respiratory season, pregnant women and moms are especially alert to the risk of RSV for their babies, but there are many option beyond “being worried or getting the RSV vaccine.”

Here are 3 powerful preventions and some RSV vaccine info to help you be more empowered in your choices, and keep your babies safe and healthy.

A healthier new year makes everything better! These simple five ideas are powerful starting points, and are offer improvements to everyone regardless of where you are on your healthy journey.

Nothing really tops simple prevention and prompt action as our first line of defense when we feel like we might be getting sick. It’s tempting to ignore the hints, but responding promptly is not only simple, cheap, and effective, but it saves massive amounts of time and suffering over the long term! When you have a hint that illness might be brewing, here are 7 actions you can take which have been successful in my family about 80-90% of the time.

Gift-giving lists are not my usual thing, but you’ll love the unique gems on this one. These are incredible treasures I’ve found over the years for my boys as they’ve grown up. I’ve always tried to prioritize imagination, playfulness, fun, and quality materials for longevity and aesthetics. Many of these companies are smaller scaler, family-owned, or are proud of being ‘Made in the USA;’ plan accordingly because they may need human time to arrive (as opposed to Prime time).

At our house, the squash seeds are even more popular than the pretty orange vegetables; the kids wolf them down while waiting for dinner. Roasted squash seeds are super easy to make, so when squash and pumpkins begin to debut in your Autumn market, let the fun begin! The fresher and the smaller the seeds, the tastier they are to eat…..

As a midwife, I’ve spent considerable amount of time with young parents to-be in their springtime season. In this hopeful chapter, they often expect to birth their baby and mostly get back to their busy lives with a baby in tow. “But babies,” I tell them, “are not on iPhone time.” I teach them that we need to slow down for our babies, and take the time to be with these fresh little humans. Pretty consistently, the mothers who take the time to spend the first few weeks a little more quietly with their babies on their chests, especially with some “skin-to-skin” time, seem to ‘luck out’ more often with calm, bright-eyed babies who pretty comfortably settle into life along side their families....

Elderberries have been used for millennia as both a food and a medicine, and its a wonderful immune booster of the best kind.  It’s particularly useful to enhance winter immunity in cases of fever and respiratory constriction, and has been found to kill the influenza virus and shorten bouts of illness. Here's a simple recipe to make yourself, which is safe for the whole family!

The problem with being a ‘holistic mom’ is that we want to send our grown-up kids out into the world with everything they could possibly need! The best college first aid kit addresses the most common small stuff in a general way and contains familiar, easy-to-use items.

Natural remedies such as therapeutic essential oils, homeopathy, and herbs can offer a gentle correction or rebalancing for the body/mind system before things reach a crisis. Homeopathy is a safe, gentle, and natural therapeutic method that uses highly diluted natural substances to relieve symptoms. The active ingredients in homeopathic medicines are highly dilute properties from plants, animals and minerals that relieve the same symptoms they would cause at full strength (i.e., a micro-dose of coffee bean helps nervousness). Instead of masking symptoms, the medicine sends the body a signal to help it rebalance and heal.

Having the kids off school during the summer is a mixed bag. The long-anticipated freedom from being over-scheduled quickly gives way to the stressful fatigue of managing high-intensity kids looking for outlets. It’s exhausting to constantly be ‘herding cats’, or trying to muscle our kids into ‘helping’ or ‘things to occupy them’. As parents, we can still reap the helpful benefits of rhythm during the summer free-for-all by getting creative. Here are 10 parenting tips to beat summer boredom!