This is a lovely tea to drink just for taste’s sake, but it’s wonderful for calming irritated nerves, overheated children (and adults), and addressing any seasonal digestive issues as often happens with summertime bouts of diarrhea. It won’t dry up secretions to the point of causing suppression, but it will cool the body, reduce a fever, and gently lessen any excess loss of fluids. [Get the recipe!]
So this home remedy is a huge family tradition for me. As a kid, if I had anything going on with irritated skin: Bam! Into an oat bath. Chicken Pox? Oat bath. Eczema? Oat bath.
This one is super easy: Start running a bath at your preferred temperature. While it’s going, dump about a half cup of rolled oats into your blender. If you’ve got a good blender, you can just let ‘er rip. If you have a not great blender, add enough water to cover them by like an inch and then let ‘er rip. The goal is to just pulverize the oats as much as you can. You basically want a fine oat flour or smooth oat slurry. Once it’s blended TO THE MAX, just dump it into your bath. Add about a tablespoon of your preferred skin oil (coconut, almond, grapeseed, etc), and maybe some lavender or chamomile if you’ve got it. Then… just soak! Just take a nice soaking bath, and enjoy.
Now when you get out, there are two options. As a kid, my grandma would make me step out and then just stand on a towel in the bathroom until I was dry. The idea is that all the oat goodness would dry onto your skin and be like a soothing protective layer. This does technically work a little bit better then the other method I’ll tell you about, but depending on climate and what you have to do for the rest of your day, it might not be practical.
My modern method is to towel dry as usual, but then just splash a little bit of the oat water onto problem areas (like if my shins get really itchy, I’ll just put a little back on my shins) and let that dry. Ta-da!
There’s a waitress at a diner in my hometown that’s pregnant, and my grandpa told me it was a boy. I asked how he knew, and he said if it was carried low, it was a boy, but if it was carried high it was a girl. He then told me that if you used a pencil like a pendulum over the pregnant person’s wrist, it will go in circles for a boy and back and forth for a girl. He told me he did it for all of his grandkids (there are six of us) and it was right every time.
