Serene’s Musings – Trim Healthy Mama

Serene’s Musings, Tips & Tricks

I’m taking in a huge, refreshing breath of Fall glory. The air is crisp and pours Autumn scent from a blue sky that only comes from the special palette of this season’s shades. Excitement literally crawls up my nostrils at this time of year. Apples are yummier. Pumpkin spice belongs in everything from oatmeal to oolong. Ovens start wafting out the aroma of celebrations.

But this Fall there is more to my excitement than the electrical pep of chilly air and the glorious confetti of crimson and gold leaves. We are about to have a baby! Well, not me to be perfectly accurate, but a grand baby is coming at any moment now!

My son Arden and his beautiful wife Esther are about to welcome a very special baby girl into their arms. Many of you know Arden’s story and were praying for him as he waged a battle against what quickly became aggressive stage 4 cancer. The cancer was discovered the week after he was married. From the get-go of their marriage, this young couple longed to start a family but this dream seemed stomped on and snuffed out as they both battled for Arden’s very life.

The good news is, that God still heals today and He is the God of the impossible. Arden is fit and thriving today (not healed instantly, but through a journey of prayer and conventional and alternative medicine). After a long wait of several years, a miracle baby is about to be held in their very thankful arms.

This baby is extra special for my beautiful daughter-in-law, Esther. In the pic above, she is just a few days away from her due date. She had no idea what to expect from this pregnancy nor her upcoming birth as she’s never met her birth mother. She was adopted from China when she was a child by a precious family who has loved her as their own. But, she has never touched another person related to her by blood. When she reaches for her baby it will be the first time she has touched someone biologically related to her. I can barely think about this without tears of joy and wonder running down my face!

Why This “Serene Only” Article?

Pearl asked me to write this letter to you as she gets to talk to you on Facebook, but I don’t do the social media thing. Many of you hear me on the Trim Healthy Podcast every week but the other day Pearl mentioned that not everyone listens to that. Maybe podcasts are not your thing and if so I guess aside from our books, you never hear from me. Consider this my letter of reconnecting with you. I am alive and kicking!

So, aside from embroidering baby blankets, being giddy with anticipation for the new baby, and taking care of 10 children still living at home – plus all the other sweet grandies to love on oh, and keeping up with the THM business life.. what’s up with me? The joy of growing in Jesus, that’s for sure. I love how He never leaves us where we are at and keeps cheering us on into deeper levels of freedom and peace found in Him.

I was just thinking, as I wrote the sentence before about the THM business… I almost called it THM busy-ness. But I decided strongly against it as I am waging war against the word “busy” and the word “rushing.” It’s a full life FOR SURE!!!!!! But it is full of overcoming joy and wondrous, daily, simple pleasures when I SET my mind on the Prince of Peace. I love Isaiah 26:3 (ESV) where it says, “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is STAYED on you, because he trusts in you.” So now, instead of saying things like … “I’m rushing out the door to…” I say something like … “I’m going out on another adventure…” – even if it’s just to the grocery store.

Maybe you might like to try this switch-a-roo with me. Maybe you have other words that get your nervous system flooded with cortisol. Maybe the word “stressed” might need to be knocked on the head or even the phrase “I’m coming down with something.” When someone in my family starts to feel a bit, or even “a lot” under the weather, we say “Oh, I’m just walking out of a tummy bug or a cold or a headache or whatever.” You might think we are crazy woo-woos, but we don’t stay down for long as we verbally agree with walking out of a problem instead of coming down with it.

What’s Up In My Kitchen?

Lots of yummy different bar recipes are being worked on and created along with Pearl. We got such a great reaction from those of you who got to taste our first bar so now we’re working on different flavors of baobab, peanut, salted caramel, chocolate mint, and more! We’re also working on lots of other THM snacky, yumzer stuff to be produced on a larger scale in our new manufacturing center. We want to bring you healthy chips, crackers, pretzels, candies and such. On a more personal note, I was sharing with Pearl how I love to put my MCT oil in a special oil spray bottle and always have it sitting on our table to spray over our food. We call this our brain spray as MCT oil is such powerful brain fuel. I also do this to all my toddler and baby food for extra brain health for my littlest ones. I love to spray my own S meals for a thermogenic boost and then sprinkle Mineral Salt on top. It gives such a silky, savory gift wrapping and provides almost an “MSG-type flavor boost” to my meal. I prefer to spray it on my salads and sprouted toast and in my Trimmies than deal with pouring and messy measuring. My sprayer has measured sprays which is a genius idea and a full pressing of the trigger is 1/4 teaspoon… so I know how to reign in my fuels when I need to for lighter S, E, and FP purposes… The brand I use is “EVO Oil Sprayer” and comes in a pack of two. I spray 3 or 4 full trigger-fulls into my latest morning coffee creamer which consists of the following…

Serene’s Latest Morning Coffee Creamer

– 3/4 to 1 teaspoon MCT oil (3 or 4 sprays)
– 1 teaspoon of THM Integral Collagen
– 1 doonk (1/32 teaspoon) of THM Simply Sunflower Lecithin
– 1/2 cup of unsweetened almond milk (I like my coffee creamy.)

I blend this up in my blender with my hot coffee and it’s a FP creamy dream. If you need your coffee piping hot just heat the creamer while your coffee is brewing. I have even made this in bulk for the week and kept it in a mason jar in the fridge.

Skin Miracle

Another recent tidbit I have to share from my home to yours is a remedy we stumbled on for severe acne. My 19-year old daughter, Chalice, has always had problem-free skin until one day a few months back when she decided to try the oil washing method. It is my own favorite nighttime skin cleansing method, but it goes to show that all skin doesn’t react as favorably to any one thing. After oil cleansing for a just a week or so, she came down with an inflamed skin infection that became aggravated into full blown acne lesions! Her poor skin had red and painful, very severe acne all over it. It remained for months… nothing we tried worked to heal it and we tried literally everything! My teens have always used our THM AM Clear stick (formerly known as KIT Clear) for little trouble acne spots with great success. They’d just dab some on and within a day or two the red spot would be basically gone. Chalice’s condition proved way too problematic for that to help.

We prayed a lot and I got this odd notion in my head. (You might think me even more overly woo-woo after reading this, but this is actually what happened.) I was reading in the Bible in 2nd Kings where it talks about water being healed through salt, no joke! Here it is. 2 Kings 2 and verse 20, “Then he (Elisha) went out to the source of the water, and cast in the salt there, and said, Thus says the Lord: I have healed this water; from it there shall be no more death or barrenness.”

I thought “salt” hmmm. I started thinking about our THM Mineral Salt and all the incredible healing properties it contains. I remembered growing up in Australia in Broadbeach, Queensland (right on the ocean). If we had any sort of skin condition our Mom would encourage us to go swimming in the ocean as she said the salt in the water would help. I looked online to see if anybody else had ever had the notion to salt wash their skin for serious acne conditions. I couldn’t find much about it except that apparently some Japanese women do this for facial acne and there is a certain method they use for it. A little bolstered by the fact that it is done in Japan, but a little freaked out that it would make her skin issue even worse, we pushed past the fear and jumped right in.

We decided Chalice would try the following salt washing Japanese method: She would put 2 Tablespoons of our Mineral Salt in a ceramic cereal bowl of hot, but not boiling pure water, and would soaks gauze pads in it. Once a day for twenty minutes, five days a week, she would place these salty, wet sterile gauze pieces on her face. Once they felt cold and less moist she would re-dunk them in the warm salty water and replace them all over her face, almost like wrapping her face to look like a mummy. After twenty minutes, she would rinse her face in a larger bowl of pure water with a splash of raw apple cider vinegar.

Incredibly, her skin responded quickly and miraculously! The salt killed the bacteria and actually hydrated her skin. Even though her skin was oil clogged, it desperately needed moisturizing. Other things we did to help: I had her switch all her makeup to the THM makeup samples that we have been working on (coming out early next year hopefully) which allowed her skin to breathe. They contain anti-inflammatory properties to boot. Oddly enough, we noticed her skin condition got remarkably better after days of wearing make up than without wearing it at all.

At night, after washing her face (with non-oil based cleanser), she would dip her finger into the highest strength Manuka honey and mix it with a few sprays of natural rose water or plain pure water and massage into her skin to leave on all night. I feel like this was, and is, a synergistic skin healing program. The salt soak was the bedrock healer for Chalice’s specific issue. Today her skin is back to normal, but she still does the routine for the fun of it and for prevention … but maybe not as religiously.

Back Yard Grand Canyon

What else is up at our Hill Top farm? Oh, you might find this interesting since it is related in part to you. My husband, in his spare time from building and managing our manufacturing center and working from dusk to dawn on many other adventurous endeavors, dug the Grand Canyon in my back yard. Our THM ingredients and products come from all over the world in large shipping containers. He can’t bear to part with them. We’ve now accumulated lots of these containers and they’re sitting around our farm. I gotta admit, they are pretty unsightly.

My husband has been dreaming up grand ideas for them (you can Google house and apartment ideas for some of them, pretty cool). But that’s not what he is going to do. Two of them will be the outside walls and rooms of a huge barn, he’ll cover the sides in wood and another three are going to be buried in my new back yard Grand Canyon. Apparently, he has very good reasons that he is trying to explain to me for burying them. Something about underground walk in refrigerators, tornado shelters, farm and tool storage, and other such things. In the meantime, my children are in Grand Canyon play heaven and I am trying to save them from actually getting to Heaven before a ripe and very old age.