Want to hear me speak about long-term breastfeeding along with 61 other presentations on natural family living from 68 other (amazing) speakers? And want to hear it all for free?

I'm a presenter and happy affiliate of the Nourished Living Summit, which brings together natural health, wellness, and parenting professionals who are dedicated to helping parents care for their family naturally. These experts know that this parenting gig is not easy and as such are equipping you with the information you need to either begin, continue, or expand your journey as a natural-minded parent.

The Nourished Living Summit is a FREE online event
that runs March 24 through April 29.

Awhile back, I wrote a post bemoaning our limited choices for U.S. health insurance maternity coverage as a self-employed family.

Let the politicos argue about Obamacare — I'm just happy to report that Health Care Reform has solved those problems!

Back in 2010, here were our choices:

1. Upgrade our health insurance before conception to a plan that includes maternity coverage, which ended up being one of the two most expensive plans offered by our insurer.
2. Pay out of pocket for all our prenatal, birth, and postpartum expenses.

I thought this was all horrifically sexist for so few insurance plans to cover maternity — sure, not all of us get pregnant and have babies, but all of us have been babies. It wasn't just penalizing women of childbearing age — it was penalizing the most vulnerable members of our society, the soon-to-be and recently born. I'm so glad someone told the insurance companies they needed to stop being weasels.

With Alrik's pregnancy, we ended up going with upgrading just my insurance to the most expensive plan — so expensive, in fact, that I ended up paying more per month to insure just myself with maternity coverage than we paid to insure the other three family members (once Alrik was born) combined on a non-maternity plan.

I thought I'd give some glimpses into our homeschooling / unschooling,
natural-learning process. Here's one of our educational visits to the aquarium.


Mikko talked with this tidepool helper for ages and asked him
every aquatic question he could think of. I love that homeschooling
doesn't mean we don't get to approach the experts for info!


Mikko really dug the sea cucumbers.
We were shocked to find out starfish eat sponges, though.
Patrick, noooooo!






We finally scored an activity backpack they have available during the off-season for homeschoolers and other nerds. It was fun!

We continue to be delighted with the inspiration and wisdom our Carnival of Natural Parenting participants share, and we hope you'll join us for the next carnival in April 2014!(Check out March, February, January 2014, December 2013, November, October, September, August, July, June, May, April, March, January, and summaries of all our 2012 posts and 2011 posts if you missed any.)

Your co-hosts are Dionna at Code Name: Mama and Lauren at Hobo Mama.

Here are the submission details for April 2014:

Theme: Family Pastimes: We all have our free-time passions. Which ones do you share with your kids? How have you incorporated family life into your hobbies, or the other way around? Have you struggled to balance “me time” with parenting? Is there something you and your family would like to take up? Get on your hobbyhorse and tell us all about it!

Deadline: Tuesday, April 1. Fill out the webform (at the link or at the bottom) and email your submission to us by 11:59 p.m. Pacific time: CarNatPar {at} NaturalParentsNetwork.com

Carnival date: Tuesday, April 8. Before you post, we will send you an email with a little blurb in html to paste into your submission that will introduce the carnival. You will publish your post on April 8 and email us the link if you haven't done so already. Once everyone's posts are published on April 8 by noon Eastern time, we will send out a finalized list of all the participants' links to generate lots of link love for your site! We'll include full instructions in the email we send before the posting date.

Please submit your details into our web form: This will help us as we compile the links list. Please enter your information on the form embedded at the end of this post, or click here to enter it on a separate page: April 2014 Carnival of Natural Parenting participant form

I thought I'd give some glimpses into our homeschooling / unschooling,
natural-learning process. Here are just a few of our fun artistic explorations.

When I decided on the theme for this post, I thought I wouldn't have much to fill it, because my boys are in the minimalist category when it comes to drawing and crafts. But it turns out we've had plenty of opportunities, and they dove into quite a few!


Trying out tempera paints in our new spill-proof cups.


Color explosion


Twist-tie king at a children's museum!


Making music at another


They put on their own performance there, too.