We were waiting to get through the first trimester.  This is #8 for me, but just three with us, five with God.  So making it through the first trimester is a reason to celebrate!  Alhamdulillah!

Hello World!

Having just returned to the Midwest from the East, less than 24 hours ago, this afternoon finds me limp and lazy.  I pulled out some frozen chicken biryani from the freezer to defrost on the stove, made some hibiscus iced tea, and laid down on the sofa with my feet up.  Flipping through a book, Plains Women: Women in the American West, gave me  a whole new appreciation for my relatively brief and comfortable drive back to the prairie lands, and for my supposed tiredness…

“Women often found themselves surprisingly skilled in their mastery of herbs, bone-setting, and delivery of children…when accidents occurred, women treated the injured with whatever resources they had.  Amy M. Loucks, reminiscing in 1879, said she had always been interested in medicine, even though she had had no formal training.  With no more than a fiddle string and an ordinary needle, she stitched back the scalp of a man.  She removed a bullet from another man and amputated three fingers from the crushed had of a railroad man with a razor and a pair of embroidery scissors.” pp 24-25

Mrs. A. S. Lecleve gave birth to her third child with only her small children for company.  ”Her husband had gone out for the day in search of firewood and her nearest neighbour was 3 miles away.  Her daughter retells the experience: ‘My brave mother got the baby clothes together on a chair by the bed, water and scissors and what else was needed to take care of the baby; drew a bucket of fresh water from a 60′ well: made some bread and butter sandwiches and set out some milk for the babies.  And when Rover [the dog] had order to take are of the babies he never let them out of his sight, for at that time any bunch of weeds might harbour a rattlesnake… At about noon the stork left a fine baby boy.’ Mrs. Lecleve, oral interview, late 19th century” p.26

These women were tough.