Family Photos

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Family Photo

I feel a need to have a professional take photos of the girls each year. It’s a funny thing because I’m almost never happy with the end result. They are too staged, my girls don’t cooperate, and I never feel like they really capture who they are at the moment. Nevertheless, I feel the urge to record each stage with professional quality and I think way too much about it, spend far too much on it, and I’m lucky if I can find one or two of the expensive photos that I like enough to put on the wall. This year I was looking into photographers and our neighbor, who runs one of the lodges in the reserve, offered to take some free shots for [...] Read more »

Power Outage: A Perfect Moment

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Kooks Power Outage

On the last Monday of each month Lori at Write Mind Open Heart posts about a perfect moment she has had. She says, “it is about noticing a perfect moment rather than creating one.” I really love the idea of being mindful of perfect moments and dwelling on them when they happen, so this month I am participating. To read other perfect moments or to link up your own, visit Lori’s post. The electricity (and sometimes lack there of) at the conservation project here has been a real adjustment for me. Other projects we have worked with have used solar power and have been off the grid so as long as you managed your power, you were never without it. When we have worked in [...] Read more »

Mayan Abdominal Massage: Arvigo Therapy

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Towards the end of the break I took from medical infertility treatments and while using acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine to treat my unexplained infertility, my husband returned from an appointment with his acupuncturist excited about Mayan Abdominal Massage. I had never heard of it before and I was intrigued. My husband’s acupuncturist had taken a training course with one of the first certified practitioners of Dr. Rosita Arvigo Techniques of Mayan abdominal massage who happened to live in Manhattan and so I was referred to her. Mayan abdominal massage, also known as the Arvigo Techniques, is an ancient, non-invasive treatment for a variety of ailments including infertility. I love any excuse for a massage and so I was all for it. This was truly [...] Read more »

The Best Treatment I’ve Found for Candida

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Treatment for Candida - Mud Hut Mama

I had a couple of questions about candida after my post about starting a cleanse so thought I would share what I have discovered over the years here. My disclaimer is that I am definitely not a doctor, this is just what I’ve tried based on a lot of reading and advice from holistic practitioners. It is what has worked for me. Candida Albicans is a fungus that is always found in the genital and intestinal tracts. When good bacteria, like those found in yogurt with live cultures, is removed, often after a course or repeated courses of antibiotics, the candida can grow to a disproportionate level and cause a variety of different aliments. For me it is usually headaches and often migraines, fuzzy head, [...] Read more »

Learning How to Make a Wedding Cake

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Malawian Wedding

I don’t know why I tend to offer my services for things that I know nothing about but this wasn’t the first time and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Sometimes it works out well and sometimes not so well, but it always pushes me to learn something new. Saliyapa, our housekeeper, is getting married. She had her traditional wedding the end of June but the church wedding will be in October. We’ve been talking a lot about it lately, especially about all the things that she needs to purchase for this celebration. Since Saliyapa comes from a rural community in one of the twenty poorest countries in the world, I have been really surprised at the price tag attached to a local church [...] Read more »

Summer Camp at Home!

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Cross Culture

School’s out for the summer! Ok our winter is just ending so I guess it’s actually spring but school is out because we found a way to make our own mini version of summer camp. My two kids along with three girls about their same age are enrolled and we have an energetic camp counselor who is keeping them engaged with activities, games, and lots of music. Saliyapa, our housekeeper, has a younger sister Kwamvera who is still in school but is on break until early September and looking to make some cash. I asked her to come help out on Monday thinking she could ease Sali’s load and that the littles would enjoy a new personality in the house. It was better than that [...] Read more »

Preschool Homeschool Weekly Lesson Plans, Age 3

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Homeschool Preschool Lesson Plans - Mud Hut Mama

In an attempt to organize this space a bit, I am listing the links to each week of our free homeschool preschool lesson plans for age three here. I’ll be updating this post as we complete more weeks. One thing that I would change if we were starting over would be to use the rhyme a week instruction from Webbing Into Literacy with their suggested activities from the start. All the activities we have done are based on this plan for a free DIY curriculum. Week 1: Letter crafts (d, o & g), salt tray writing, letter recognition, sequencing, sorting by color, matching and nature bracelets Week 2: Letter s craft, writing practice, letter recognition, cutting shapes, counting with playdough, sorting by size, number recognition, nature [...] Read more »

Pictures of the Lions and Information About Their Arrival

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Chimwala, African Lions

The lions are here! They arrived last week and I’m finally posting the photos I’ve been promising. All of the lions have been given Chichewa names. This is one of the males – Chimwala which means big rock. I think it’s a fitting name. He is hard as nails and I sure wouldn’t want to mess with him. The lions were flown to Malawi from South Africa. The two males (Chimwala and Sapitwa) were in one plane and the two females (Shire and Nakamba) in another. Sapitwa was named after the peak of Malawi’s Mt. Malanje which is known for being difficult to reach and is shrouded in mysticism and superstition. The two females were named after rivers that flow through the reserve. Unfortunately one [...] Read more »

Preschool Lesson Plans: Week 12, Age 3

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Science, Age 3, Week 12

It’s been a long week! The lions arrived, my husband has been working long hours, and Kooks is cutting her two year molars. There have been tears this week (mostly mine but also some from the littles). However, the learning has carried on and I’ve been thankful for the structure it has provided to some no end in sight days. Literacy and Language Arts: Our nursery rhyme from Webbing Into Literacy was “Baby and I” this week. I know I sound like a stuck record but I’m so glad I found this site and that we have started doing the activities. It gives a bit of routine to our week and Boo is really beginning to understand rhyming. It is working for us. Here we [...] Read more »

Selfishness: A Perspective from African Culture

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Justine, over at A Half Baked Life, recently wrote a thoughtful post about “Giving, and Giving Back.” She talks about how we sometimes weigh up what we receive with what we give and relates that back to blogging and our responsibility to one another in the online community. Her post got me thinking about an experience I had as a Peace Corps Volunteer in a small community in Zambia back in 1998 where I learned to look at give and take in a whole new light. The majority of the people that I lived with didn’t have a lot in the material sense, but they shared what they did have. This was definitely a community where there was always space for one more at mealtime. In [...] Read more »