Love, sweet love (and laundry, and tea)

Oh, my heart! Poor Newby is still so new that I don't even have a blogworthy nickname for him. So he'll have to be Newby for another while. He is very serious, save his little unconscious sleep-smiles, which suggest a future of chubby-cheeked dimpled-ness. He sleeps a lot, even - get this - at night. It might be just a phase. No baby of mine has ever willingly slept after dark. I've actually watched his eyelashes grow over the last two days. Babies are amazing.

Needless to say, I've been doing a whole lot of sitting on the couch staring at Newby for the last week, and not much else. Well, yesterday I did dig up some of the papers I need to find in order to do my two years' worth of overdue taxes (eep!), and I mended some of Bear's pyjamas. I took some naps. Ate a lot. And that's about it.

I've been trying to get some photos with all of the kids in them, but the frenetic combined energy of a six-year-old, a toddler, and an infant is not at all conducive to portraiture. Despite the madness, we've managed, through Hubby C's tireless campaigns, to keep the house quite tidy. Our washing machine has been running day and night, and while I feel a little guilty about using all that water and electricity, at least we're using homemade laundry powder, which means less packaging and fewer dodgy chemicals. I've been using Su's recipe, but most of the ones I've seen online are more or less the same, combining borax, washing soda, and laundry soap. For my first couple batches I used Sunlight laundry soap, which is available in the laundry section of most grocery stores (as are borax and washing soda). I find Sunlight a bit smelly, though. The smell goes away once the laundry has dried, but I still know it's there. I picked up some unscented laundry soap at, of all places, Dollarama, and I'll test that out when this batch is done, which shouldn't be long at the rate we're going.

(Interestingly, SouleMama's post today is about laundry and homemade laundry powder. She's got pictures.)

The hardest thing this last week, I have to say, has been forcing myself to take it easy when I feel pretty much like I've fully recovered from delivering wee Newby. Call me a crazy hippie if you will, but I attribute this in large part to the daily doses of red raspberry leaf, nettle, and alfalfa teas I've been chugging for the last few months. I can't say much for the taste - sort of generally grassy and not particularly appealing - but for minimal blood loss and maximal vigour, it's well worth it. I don't like offering unsolicited advice to pregnant women (or to anyone), but if you're in your last few months of pregnancy and you're hoping for an easy delivery and a speedy recovery (who isn't), might I recommend multiple daily doses of this, this, and this? Now, I'm not your health care provider, or a health professional of any sort, so, you know, you might want to let your midwife or doctor or whomever know if you're getting into the hippie teas. And don't start brewing the red raspberry leaf until you're into your third trimester, I've been told. I think I probably drank 400 cups of red raspberry/nettle combo while I was in labour, and I'm still drinking it a couple times a day. Does wonders, I swear.