Gramma's Kitchen: Better than Wendy's!

On the day before Thanksgiving, we had the pleasure of a lovely little breakfast at Gramma's Kitchen outside of Mansfield, Pennsylvania. This is the only photo I successfully snapped before my camera battery died, which is a shame, because I'd have loved to snap one of the cute grannies on duty or the vegetable omelet with fresh and perfectly cooked broccoli inside! The hash browns were yummy, crunchy strings of potato. Our server could not have been nicer and didn't blink an eye when I asked her to hold the mushrooms and cheese or when I said I wouldn't need the toast.

I usually order fried eggs so that I know I'm getting real eggs, but we could see where the breakfasts were being cooked and had no doubt that our eggs would come from cartons. I don't imagine they were organic, and if the meat wasn't local (I didn't try any), I doubt the eggs were. But it was nice to support a local joint, and they had a natural foods stores advertising on their paper placemats, which my son enjoyed drawing on with the crayons his mama had in the car.

The place is largely a bakery, those of us avoiding gluten will miss out on enjoying the sources of the wonderful smells inside. My husband said his muffin was very pumpkin-y!

This is the third Thanksgiving we've driven from the DC Metro area to visit family in upstate New York. The second year my son was seven months old. He'd had a short tummy bug, and we thought about not going at all. Once we decided to, it was a hurry to get out the door, and we didn't pack all the safe gluten-free, dairy-free food we usually do. We missed our best opportunities to stop at a grocery store and found ourselves pretty hunger on Rt. 15 in northern Pennsylvania. We stopped at a Wendy's and ate only about a third of our sodium-saturated meal before getting back in the car to nurse my son and drive as fast as we could out of the mountains and toward the closest Wegmans. (We'd missed the exit for one in Williamsport and unintentionally did the same thing this time).

We got the recommendation for Gramma's Kitchen from a gas station attendant and then looked it up on my husband's Blackberry. It was a little over a mile from the second (I think) Mansfield, PA exit off of Rt. 15 (going North). It's hard to know where you're going to want to get some food, but it seems worth the time to wait for a small town and some food that might be seriously made by people.

Gramma's Kitchen is located at 1080 S Main St., Mansfield, PA Tel: (570) 662-2350

Mama Bloggers Show Motrin What Pain Is

If you're not on Twitter, you might possibly still not know about this phenomenon (I didn't until yesterday).

Motrin released a snarky anti-babywearing ad in the hopes of garnering more pill-popping consumer support. What the company got was a big dose of mad mamas. Women started Twittering about the condescending ad in droves.

Here is a story about the flap in Ad Age Magazine that references Silicon Valley Moms Blog, the parent (?) mother group of the DC Metro Moms Blog I write for under Claire Jess.

There's another story (and the video) at Marketing Pilgrim. Check it out!

My take?
1) Disheartening that a company would come up with this ad.
2) Inspiring that so many mamas would rally to shoot it down.

Crossposted at Crunchy-Chewy Mama

Coconut Oil - new study shows it might help with pneumonia

The Washington Post recently published an article entitled "Coconut Oil May Help Fight Childhood Pneumonia."

The study was only done on folks taking antiobiotics (no group that wasn't on meds), but it did show that the folks who also consumed coconut oil daily had a quicker recovery and had lower levels of the "crackling" sound in the lungs. The kids on coconut oil also showed better levels of oxygen in their blood. One theory is that the antimicrobial properties of the lauric acid are what makes the difference.

We cook with Tropical Traditions oil because we can buy it buy the gallon for a good price, but my favorite for taste -- and yes, eating right off the spoon -- is the much pricier Jungle Products brand.

Check out "The Latest Studies on Coconut Oil" at the Weston A. Price Foundation.

Acupunture and Cupping for Tight Muscles

My neck and shoulders used to hurt all the time. Long before I was diagnosed with Graves' disease (autoimmune hyperthyroidism) or celiac disease, my health problems manifested in a more physical way. I've had some issues on and off since my son was born, especially when I was wearing him in a sling all day, but nothing was like my recent right-should spasm. I think we can blame this one in large part on one weekend of car trouble followed by another of plane travel (including wearing my 30-lb. toddler in the Ergo) and unfamiliar (and harder beds). Of course the lack of a regular home yoga practice followed by a few classes in a row in short succession might have something to do with it, too!

So I called the acupuncture center I used to go to. I love that they provide a back massage before doing the needles on the back side and then have you flip over so they can do some more massage (especially with the sinuses, but whatever part of the body needs it, too) before placing needles on the front. This is a two-hour ordeal but costs less than most 60-minute massages in my area.

I figured this time that they would want to use the suction cups because my shoulder was a rock. Cupping is supposed to help release tension and free up energy. It essentially feels like a bunch of extra people squeezing your muscles at once. The cups go to work while the therapist is massaging another area.

When I was seeing these folks back four years ago as part of my effort to heal my thyroid and regain my fertility, I was also getting treatments in an oxygen sauna. The sauna woman said I should not be bruising so much, and she claimed that one woman came in after getting cosmetic surgery for the express purpose of minimizing her bruising, and it did. As I got more regular acupuncture treatments and also got more oxygen sauna treatments, the bruising did indeed become much less severe and shorter-lived.

I saw these folks a few times a month when my son was a year old. My thyroid was threatening to go low, and I was exhausted from all the night nursing (and nursing around the clock!). When I made this most recent appointment, it had been many months since I'd been to the acupuncture clinic and maybe months since I'd had any bodywork of any kind (at least several weeks). With a lot of projects in the air and my toddler no longer napping, time has been a hot commodity! But I've felt pretty good physically, until the shoulder flared up. Or so I thought. My body has probably been storing up toxins from my late bedtimes and other unhealthy habits, so it was perhaps only a matter of time until something screamed at me to get me to pay attention.

The treatment felt good. The morning after the presidential election and its late-night results, it was easy to fall into a deep sleep once the needles were in. I asked both the assistant who did the bulk of the massage and the doctor who did some more before inserting the needles about the bruising and what it meant. They both said that someone in good health and with good energy will hardly bruise at all. People whose energy is weak or who are ill are the ones with the more purple, longer-lasting marks. The ones pictured here are much lighter than some rounds I've had, but they certainly followed me out of the office, and they're still there 36 hours later. The pain is not completely gone but is dramatically milder; I don't feel like that section of my body is ruling the rest of me as I did a few days ago.

The doctor put an herbal patch on my shoulder and told me to stretch more by pulling my arm across my body with the other arm. She could have also written a prescription for my son to resume sleeping through the night so that I don't join him on his hard futon!