The Perfect Fall Day

Is it just me, or does it seem like fall just started a little over a month ago, and now it feels like winter is knocking on our mid-western door?

Living in the mid-west, I am used to seasons changing very rapidly, but after the really long summer that we had this year, I was looking forward to all that fall offers, but it feels like it came and went, and then came again, and then went yet again. I didn’t even get a chance to enjoy it this year.

A few weeks ago, I had started to write about the beautiful changes occurring in this autumn season. Normal changes that I love such as, the leaves changing to their glorious colors, the smells of fall foods cooking and burning leaves, the slightly cooler, more comfortable temps, and other fall things, but I guess I waited too long to finish my article, as now the trees are bare, the temps are more winter than fall like, and I am finding that I am settling into making more winter foods than I usually would be for this time of the year.

I also just realized that I have been stocking up on freezer and pantry foods to get through the winter, for the “just in case” storms.

Even though it seems like I am getting ready for the inevitable winter, (no, I am not a big fan of winter), I still feel that I need to write about fall, so, since I can’t look outside to write about it, I am going to rely on my memory of a beautiful fall day of the past.

Here goes….

Take a walk with me outside on this spectacular fall day!  Mmmmm, can you smell the crisp leaves on the ground, rustling and crunching under our feet? Oh my, look up through the trees and see the brilliant colors of the leaves that almost hurt my eyes when you look at them!  Isn’t that amazing?!

The cooler temps feel great don’t they, and are perfect for wearing our most comfortable jeans and hoodies!

Now, let’s go inside and have some homemade chili and corn bread. I will light a couple of fall scented candles, and you grab a bottle of wine and the glasses. After dinner, let’s build a fire in the fire pit by the pond and just enjoy the stars, the crackling fire, and the cool fall evening!

There is nothing like the perfect fall day!

Thank you for sharing this perfect fall memory with me!

Letting Nature Take Its Course

I want to start this article off by stating that I am not a doctor and don’t proclaim to be one at all. I respect those in the medical field, and as usual, this is just my observation of this subject. This subject being about letting nature take its course, and in this instance, letting it take its course with child birth.

I think it’s getting more reasonable now, but for the last few years or so, it seems like just about everyone I know that was having a baby, had their doctors encourage them to either be induced or have a C- section just about the time the woman hit the 37 weeks gestation mark.

Sometimes there was a medical reason such as a breech baby, or other medical complications, but there were also way too many times, when the suggestion was made purely for convenience sake. Those are the instances that I am writing about, do not agree with, and have to say, please, just let nature take its course!

Ask just about any woman at 36 or 37 week into their pregnancy if she is ready to have the baby, and almost all of them will say absolutely YES, GET IT OUT OF ME!! I mean, who wouldn’t want to be done carrying around that extra weight as soon as possible.

Okay, I know that there are women out there that actually like being pregnant, (my mother, who bore 11 children, for one.) but most women are tired of being pregnant and are ready to have their baby by around the end of their 8^th month so, of course they are going to agree if a doctor tells them that it’s perfectly fine to proceed with getting the baby out earlier than their original due date.

They schedule the date to come to the hospital to be induced, give them the epidural so that they don’t feel the pain of the Pitocin (the dreaded Pit drip!), and the woman can basically sit back, hold a normal conversation with those around her and wait for the baby to arrive with very little pain. Sounds pretty easy, but the truth is that it’s not always that easy. Sometimes, after hours at the hospital, the little baby doesn’t come out at scheduled, (imagine that!), and then after all that time, they send the woman home and set up another day to try it again! Seriously!!

Hopefully the baby makes its own appearance when it is done and ready, but if they don’t, then back to the hospital the woman goes to be induced again! After all of that, you hope that the baby is born naturally, but even after all of that, they sometimes still have to perform an emergency C-section.

This all seems completely crazy to me, and I feel that I can speak of the above scenario as I watched it happen with my first granddaughter 6 years ago. Yes, they induced my daughter 2 times before my granddaughter was finally born, and then when she was born, she wasn’t breathing, and had a host of other complications which kept her in the infant intensive care unit for the first 3 days of her life.

Let me tell you that it is pretty difficult to bond with a baby that is hooked up to monitors and wired for sound. Luckily, she is perfectly healthy today, but I still believe that she had the complications due to being forced out of the womb before it was naturally time for her to come out.

As I mentioned in the beginning of this article, I know that this is not as common anymore, and the doctors do not force inducing of a healthy pregnancy before a woman hits 39 weeks, but they can still encourage it at that time. Again, I have to question, why? Why when everything is fine, is there a need to induce? The baby will come out when it is ready, and if there are no complications, we need to leave them in the womb until nature says that their lease up and it’s time to enter the world.

Back when I was having babies, (come on now, you had to know that I was going to go here) your doctor gave you a due date. If your due date was the 15^th, they would tell you that you could expect to have the baby anywhere from the 1^st to the 30^th. That was common and you just expected it and lived with it, and unless there were complications, you didn’t get the option to have the baby on the 15^th. God knows you wanted to be the one to have your baby anywhere from the 1^st to the 15^th, and prayed that you didn’t go all the way to the 30^th, but sometimes you did.

God forbid you had to be induced back then, as you only got the Pitocin, which was pretty much awful as they didn’t give you an epidural to numb you so you felt every bit of that incredible pain. You definitely didn’t talk while you were in labor either, well, yes you did, but generally those were four letter words that you screamed out, while cursing your husband for getting you in this mess to begin with… But, I digress.

Most of the times in the past, (and I hopefully going forward), babies came into the world when THEY were ready, not when the doctors or the women were ready. Nature is funny like that, it knows when it’s time, and I am pretty sure that there has never been an incidence of a child growing up in the womb, so let’s get back to letting nature take its course, and letting the little ones enter the world when they are done cooking.

The Moon

I never get tired of looking at the moon.

 

Truth be told, it seems as though every time I look at it, I feel like it is the first time that I ever saw it, and will take every opportunity to share my enthusiasm with anyone else that will look at it with me, or at the very least, listen to me go on about how magnificent I think it is.

 

I think my love for the moon started when I was a little girl, and one of my nighttime songs sung to me so sweetly by my mother was “my sweetheart man in the moon”

I remember searching the full moon for the face of that man in the moon, swearing that I could see him, and he was smiling down at me as well.

 

Every stage of it, in all of its different phases, from the slightest sliver, to the fullest harvest moon, always succeeds in taking my breath away.

It has a way of making me feel close and connected to whomever in my life that may be far away from me.

The thought that while I am looking up at the magnificent moon, there could be that someone special looking up at the same moon, and no matter how far apart on this earth that we are, we are close, connected, and that somehow comforts me.

 

I have no idea why I feel so connected to the moon, or what makes is so special to me.  It is most likely a combination of all of the above reasons, or, maybe even something deeper…

 

It doesn’t really matter to me though why I feel this way.

 

I am just grateful to have the moon to look at in all of its phases, its glory and awe, every day, and every night.