Journal entries were made during 2009 and include excerpts about every day events, Butterfly Express oils, learning to make soap, etc. They were moved over here to the blog to be archived. Just a little bit of history!

What’s Happening in My World – 2009

bookswithlegsNov. 7: My dear husband give me an amazing gift today — a search engine for this website! It’s a wonderful thing. Now I can find information so easily — and as this website is growing, there is a lot to find. Guess what else — you can use it, too! Just kidding. You knew you could. It’s right at the top of each page. I figured that if I needed one, everyone else did, too. I will no longer be frustrated because I can’t remember where I read that fascinating fact — or which oil would be the best to soak in tonight — or … the possibilities are endless. And I’m so happy!

Oct. 27: Just finished my daughter’s reversible wizard robe for Halloween. In a few hours I’m on my way to help my older girls finish their fairy skirts. Every year it’s hard for me to believe that my three 28+ aged daughters still trick or treat. I ask them how many more years I need to keep helping them with their costumes and they ask, “How long are you planning to live?”

Oct. 15: I’ve been advertising on Facebook and Google and have had a lot more activity on the website. I often advertise them as 100% pure and affordable — and so, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about this. How can they be so good and so affordable at the same time? I’ve finally gotten an answer posted — it’s not perfect, but it’s a start. It only makes sense to let you all know how I feel about these oils. I’m so happy to have a product to sell that I really really really do believe in. I can recommend them to you with an honest heart, knowing that you really don’t need to spend an incredible amount of money to get wonderful oils. Click here to read my explanation of the low cost and high quality of Butterfly Express.

Sept. 28: I wrote two songs this year — called Never Leave Us and Miracles. The sheet music is available at  www.EarthSonnets.com. Special thanks to Anthony Phan, who wrote the piano arrangements. I really like the way they turned out. These are my first songs so … I think I’ll celebrate!

Sept. 16: I love making soap! Three varieties are ready on the Gifts & Soap page: Sunflower, Delight, and Indulge. Several more are curing as we speak, including Woof Doggie, Herbal Garden shampoo bar, Cinnamon Swirl, Chamomile and Three Kings. Some of them are hand milled. What fun!

Sept. 9: Now we have 10 new kits for you — 8 essential oils kits and 2 flu kits! These are collections of oils designed for certain types of people or situations. It’s been fun coming up with the different combinations for the oils kits and I’m excited to have them all ready to go. Take a look at Oil Kits and Flu Kits

August 30: The homemade soap is almost ready, but I’m having a hard time deciding how to launch it. I only have enough of three varieties so far  but they are very nice. I’d better get a big batch of Orange Spice soap ready, though, because my husband says that’s all he wants for Christmas. It much be a good one because the last two people I asked said it was their favorite, too. I’ve been working on the new kits we’ll soon be offering and I’ve neglected the soap project, but it’s still coming!

August 20: Today I added three new pages, so go check them out! Influenza, For Women Only, and Oils for Emotions

Butterfly Express Experience
I bet you’re dying to know which oils people have bought most so far this year (Jan through July). Hope you haven’t been missing out on any! Here are the top twenty in order:

Peppermint, Lavender, Endo Relief, Tranquility, Deliverance, Tea Tree, Lemon, Deeper, Weightless, Frankincense, Eucalyptus, Cypress, Birch, Warm Down, Paine, Aspire, Sweet Orange, Lemongrass, Millenia, Breezey

June 15: I can’t stop making soap! I’m not sure what’s so appealing about soap that keeps it on my mind so much of the time. It does look delicious when it’s mixing, just like pudding. And when it’s saponifying, it looks a lot like lemon meringue. And the essential oils I add make it smell so good. It’s fun to experiment with colors and additives like calendula petals and rosemary leaves. Hmmmm … it’s no wonder I’m having such a good time.

I started with melt-and-pour glycerin soap and that was fun, but now I’m into real lye soap made with a combination of plant based oils. We’re starting to use some of my first cold-processed soap and it is nice! Now I’m using the hot process so we won’t have to wait 4-6 weeks to use the new soap. I check on all of the bars each day, turning them and smelling them to see if they’re holding their scents. I call them my soap babies.

It’s been a real adventure trying to figure out which essential oils hold their scent the best through the soap making process.

Did you know that the regular soap you buy at the grocery store is made from petroleum products instead of plant oils and it has had the glycerin removed? Once you try “real” soap, you’ll never want to go back.

No lye, no soap, no lie!

June 10: I’ve never seen anything like the sheets of rain that poured down on us today. What a storm! I was happy that my garden wasn’t damaged. Here’s a picture of my Square Foot Garden. It’s amazing that plants can really grow in six inches depth — and no weeds! If you don’t know about square foot gardening (invented by Mel Bartholomew) the key is using the perfect growing environment, not dirt.

My plants are thriving in just 6 inches of compost, peat moss, and vermiculite. You’re supposed to get five times the yield of a typical row garden. These squares – marked off in a grid of yellow electrical wire – have things such as 1 tomato, 2 eggplants, 4 bush beans, 16 carrots, etc.

June 4: Just got finished with a two day class on Children’s Health from Katri Nordbloom. I learned so much and thoroughly enjoyed listening to Katri’s Swedish accent once again. She posed a most interesting idea: that we are on the third generation of people who have been exposed to lots and lots of bad stuff — chemicals, food additives, heavy metals, pollution, etc. It’s getting harder to raise healthy children. We’ve got to be on our toes and learn as much as we can to take care of ourselves and combat the forces that are relentlessly working against us.

May 2: We just got back from a quick trip looking for property so the website, which was on vacation, is now back in business!

April 22: My husband and I have decided to try a new sport — soap making! I think I’m addicted already. So far I’ve only tried the melt-and-pour glycerin kind, but I’ve found some fun molds and have tried several creative methods. Adding essential oils makes it even more exciting. My husband is waiting to make soap with lye before he joins in the fun, but he’s enjoying our new glycerin soap. My favorite bar is magenta colored with bath salts and the scent of Butterfly Express Le Magi added. It smells heavenly.

I also bought a whole big box full of glass and plastic bottles. Now I can duplicate my homeopathics collection and bottle up some almond and coconut oil.

April 11: We recently sold our home in Cache Valley, Utah and decided to spend some time at my mom’s. She turned 83 yesterday! We’ve been at her place in Orem for a few months and she doesn’t really want us to leave, so I think we’ll be here for a while. We might be taking a trip soon to look for property.

Butterfly Express Experience
This may seem like an insignificant happening, but for me it was a long-awaited success. It all has to do with pierced ears. I had mine pierced about 15 years ago and then decided to abandon the idea 3 or 4 years later. One of the holes closed up after a year or so, but the other has stayed stubbornly open all this time. Sometimes it would get a bit infected and usually I could feel a tiny lump of something in there. The other day it occurred to me that our bodies can often heal themselves if we can just remove the roadblocks. So, I reached into my purse for an oil and came up with Peppermint. I figured that would work just fine to knock out any infection that might be present. I put a drop on my finger and applied it to my ear. Then I pretty much forgot about it. But, sure enough, the next day I could feel a difference and in two or three days the hole had closed up. Amazing! It’s been about two weeks now and it’s still closed. I’m pretty happy about the whole thing. I thought I might have to live with this the rest of my life but it seems to be all taken care of.

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I’ve found a new health newsletter that I really like. It’s from Dr. Ben Kim, a chiropractor and acupuncturist from Canada. He’s a proponent of getting what we need from whole food products. That’s part of the beauty of essential oils. They are so helpful in bringing our bodies into balance because we use the whole product, unlike prescription drugs that isolate certain parts for our use. That’s why essential oils don’t cause pesky side effects. (I know that’s a pretty simplistic explanation.)

Dr. Kim says that even most vitamin supplements are actually synthetic vitamins, which are only isolated portions of the vitamins that occur naturally in food. ( http://drbenkim.com/articles-vitamins.html )

“A good example is vitamin C. If you take a look at a variety of vitamin C supplements, you will find that the majority of them contain only ascorbic acid or a compound called ascorbate, which is a less acidic form of acorbic acid. Ascorbic acid is NOT vitamin C. It represents the outer ring that serves as a protective shell for the entire vitamin C complex, much like an orange peel that serves as a protective shell for an orange. …

When you take only ascorbic acid found in your synthetic vitamin C tablet or powder, your body must gather all of the other components of the full vitamin C complex from your body’s tissues in order to make use of it. In the event that your body does not have adequate reserves of the other components, ascorbic acid itself does not provide any of the health benefits that the full vitamin C complex does. …

If the list of ingredients includes an actual vitamin like Vitamin C” rather than an actual food that contains natural vitamin C like “acerola cherry powder,” you can bet that it is a synthetic vitamin.

If you choose to use nutritional supplements, it is in your best interest to use only those products that list actual foods as their ingredients rather than synthetic and isolated vitamins. While some synthetic and isolated vitamins have been shown to provide minimal health benefits, on the whole, most of them cause more harm than good and you are far better off spending your money on whole foods.

These are some good things to think about. Dr. Kim’s basic philosophy of using whole, natural products fits very nicely with what I know to be true about essential oils and herbs.

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Butterfly Express Experience
A very nice trucker named Red stopped by the other day to pick up some oils. He told us that he was using Peppermint to help stop smoking. He said the effect of Peppermint helped him keep his mind off the cigarettes. Go, Red! He also said he loved Lemon and used it to stop cold sores in their tracks.

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Butterfly Express Experience
I felt a cold coming on a couple of mornings ago and promptly filled up the tub, added a few drops of Tea Tree, and soaked for twenty minutes or so. I try to get right on this whenever I feel a cold coming. So far, it’s working. The cold hasn’t taken hold!

the end