5 Aspects of Covid-19 I Didn't Know Until I Experienced it Myself

March 24, 2021 by Michele Cherie in Education, Health

One year into the Coronavirus lockdowns here in Oregon, I caught the Coronavirus myself. This month, March 2021, is an interesting time to have had Covid-19 since our state is at one of its lowest rates of infection and some businesses are starting to relax their regulations. I suspect I caught the Coronavirus at the grocery store since I hardly go anywhere else and I spent over an hour there amidst many shoppers on a Saturday afternoon five days before I got a fever. (For the curious, I was wearing a mask as required, but that probably isn’t the panacea that we’d like to think it is when we consider that mask mandates have not kept developed countries from high rates of infection.)

Meal Planning and Grocery Shopping in Lyon & Paris, France

September 09, 2015 by Michele Cherie in Cultural Reflections, Travel, Home Management, French Culture

Bonjour again from Lyon! This is my family's first extended stay in France, so it's also the first time I've had the role of preparing meals for my children here. Living here has improved my meal planning skills and expanded our palates, I'm glad to say! I've consistently tried to plan French meals so my children can enjoy one of the best aspects of living in France--the food and the culture surrounding it. Here's what I'm doing differently here:

First Aid for Parents & Children: Favorite Natural & Holistic Treatments

March 19, 2014 by Michele Cherie in Learning Resources

In five years of parenting, my children have had blessedly few injuries requiring first aid: a bloody nose or two, two minor burns, and a drinking straw puncture to the palate. When my son punctured his palate it bled enough to make me lightheaded, but thankfully it wasn't deep, and as a nursing toddler he was able to breastfeed until he could eat solid food again. In the emotion of such moments, it can be difficult to remember the best treatments to follow. Here are some basic, natural first aid treatments to make your child's next first aid incident less traumatic:

Living Without Dairy Products: A Healthier Diet

February 24, 2014 by Michele Cherie in Home Management, Cultural Reflections

I've always loved dairy products--I grew up eating cold cereal with cow's milk for breakfast and after-school snack, and if you had asked me in my preteen years to describe my ideal diet, my answer would have included a lot of Kraft macaroni and cheese. (I was an American child of the 80s, when processed foods were proliferating). But in my early twenties I started noticing that certain yogurts gave me gas, and after I got food poisoning in Hungary, I started experiencing brief but recurrent stomach pain. It took a miserable (but free) nasogastroscopie in France for me to understand that my stomach was fine, but it could no longer digest the dairy products I was putting into it.

Nonetheless, it wasn't until I read Alisa Marie Fleming's nutritional guide and cookbook, Go Dairy Free, that I realized that replacing dairy products with plant-based foods was probably one of the best nutritional actions I could take--and it was much easier than I had realized.