The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure

First, here are some pancakes I'm experimenting on this week...sugar free of COURSE, and gluten free. They have coconut flour, egg yolks, ripe bananas, buttermilk, cinnamon, and nutmeg. And coconut oil for the pan. They're a project in progress, but they're edible.  Unfortunately they don't really taste good, but they're edible.  Working on it. And they do smell rather of Christmas, here in August. Maybe by the time Christmas comes around I can make my daughter a Little House-inspired pancake man, like Ma.

I'm taking a break from all my nonfiction study to read The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure...well, I guess it's nonfiction, too, but it's just so much FUN compared to my usual nutrition books. Nutrition is my passion, it does feed my soul and all, but it's nice to read a funny-as-hell page turner for a break. This book is AWESOME.  Little House fans: Go on amazon and view the first page of the book. Anyone who is connected to the Little House (abbreviated LHOP, I've learned) books has just got to be hooked from that first page! This Wendy McClure made me laugh through the whole book, and I love what a crazy obsessed fan she is! I love the way she researched and read up on every angle of the history of Laura. I mean every angle. It actually made me jealous, being a mom, of someone who could actually have the time to do that...we moms usually have less than 2 minutes to follow a train of thought before getting interrupted...in fact this simple blog post will likely take me hours to get done! That's the beauty of it though, McClure did all the research for us, and delivers it all to us, from the 19th century land dispute legal mess, to the whole life story of Rose Wilder, to the last TV episode of Little House where the whole town gets blown up. And she is soooo funny, granted she does have some excellent material that she's working with.

McClure visits all the historical Laura sites, sprinkled all over the map, with her boyfriend, who comes up with as many funny one-liners as she does. It totally makes me want to travel with them both :)

Somewhere in the beginning, page 17 actually, McClure talks about my favorite part of Big Woods, the "now is now" ending. I don't know why, but every time I get to that last page, while reading aloud with my daughter, I get choked up, and get a lump in my throat, but try to play it off and read that part through my croaking voice. I never can put my finger on what it is that gets me about that last page, but I loved that McClure went into detail about her feelings about it, too. I knew straight away that I would love this book.

My daughter is four. We have read mostly the little Little House books, which are great.

And we've read Little House in the Big Woods , but that's the only book of the series I've read. After reading McClure's review of Little House on the Prairie, I think we'll skip that one for now and try Farmer Boy next.  Here's our copy of Big Woods, getting some wear and tear; my daughter does LOVE it.  Next to the brand new copy of Little House on the Prairie, which will have to wait a while.

Even though The Wilder Life is my light summer reading, I can't help but compare everything in the book to nutrition. It's really inevitable, nutrition involves not only science, but anthropology (look at Weston A Price!!), history, spirituality (look at the raw food movement!), western medicine, holistic medicine, politics!  oh so much politics...on and on...so that whatever I see or read resonates in the context of my health-studying mind.

For starters, early on in Chapter 3, McClure starts churning butter and making sourdough. For anyone who follows the Weston A Price foundation, this is pretty basic stuff for us. When I started making butter, I was happy to find that you can make butter without buying any fancy equipment. I use a jar. Wendy McClure, though, was actually not coming from a practical nutrition standpoint, but rather from a "Laura World" standpoint, so she ordered a real wooden churn. Further proof that McClure isn't coming from a nutrition standpoint is that she buys regular supermarket cream to make her butter...pasteurized, and imagine what those cows were eating, what they were injected with, and what their lives are like! whew...anyway, at the end she starts to realize that the reason her butter didn't taste especially different was this:

"Maybe it had something to do with the cream, which was supermarket cream, after all, but for the most part, butter was butter."

AHHHH (scream!!) Butter is most definitely NOT butter! The butter I make is from local, GRASS FED cows. My butter has ridiculous nutrients in it, like CLA, D, A and K2. These are, like, the MOST IMPORTANT nutrients we all need!! Her pasteurized, pesticide, antibiotic, GMO-corn-and-soy-eating cream didn't have ANY of these nutrients, of course! But then again, The Wilder Life is not a nutrition book. Just an example of how my mind is in my studies, even while I'm on break :)  By the way, I will clarify that I'm not in any nutrition program, I just study nutrition.  That's what I do for fun.  At least I'm nourished :)

Next example, Chapter 7: The "end of days" people she runs into and camps next to at a local farm homestead open house weekend.  She and her boyfriend thought these people were totally wacky.  That's when I realized that author Wendy McClure would probably not like me too much, and would think I was wayyy too wacky too LOL.  What she didn't realize is that there's a huuuuge group of people who are in the exact same preparedness-mode as the Wisconsin church group she ran into, but not in a religious way like them.  They're called raw foodists :)  ...we all know exactly what the church people meant when they say "what with all that's happening"...Monsanto, GMOs, the pharmaceutical industry, Fukushima, chemtrails, underground natural gas drilling, on and on...we know exactly what's happening and are prepared.  We don't call it "end times" or think there is burning hellfire involved, though.  But probably, we're just as foreign to McClure as the members of the New Life Testimony Revelation Ministry.  And, I wouldn't have minded a bit hanging out with the church people...they had so much in common with raw foodists!  They were out foraging for wild salad greens and making nettle tea, of which I have a pot on the stove right now!  McClure thought the foraging and herbalism was odd...but foraging is everywhere!  It's hugely popular among secular people, too.  So it's all a great example of why Law of Allowing is a great thing.  Sometimes there's more than meets the eye.  I'm the hugest fan of Daniel Vitalis, whose company is "Surthrival"...because the way to face the future is to thrive in our survival, no matter what happens.

Next up, another little health example. One of the nonfiction books I'm taking a break from for my light-reading-break is Melatonin.



This is another awesome book, but all science, not much of a party. One of those books that would help all who read it though, because melatonin is the only hormone that is also an antioxidant. Get it? That is HUGE. That is how we prevent cancer. But, you have to know how to make sure you don't mess up your melatonin production, or else you will miss your antioxidant activity each night!  People who are in artificial light or near EMFs are missing their antioxidant activity, and melatonin is POWERFUL. People whose internal clock is off are missing their melatonin.  There are a lot of ways to mess up one's melatonin production.  Long story, and there's a lot to it, but this is super important for staying healthy and preventing serious disease. Imagine if a person was sleeping near a high EMF source, could be anything, but like within a few feet of a computer or dishwasher (EMFs go thru walls too)...that means that night after night, they would have no melatonin production. Over time, without the body's antioxidant, imagine the amount of cancer or other diseases which could develop.

Anyway, in my fabulous book, in one scene McClure and her boyfriend are camping out in a covered wagon in De Smet, South Dakota, and have to go to bed early because their lanterns don't give enough light to do anything.  McClure says to her boyfriend, "I think this is what people did in the old days anyway...because there wasn't enough light to do anything else."  But she's on to something way bigger than she realizes with this observation.  Melatonin proponents hypothesize that most of our western diseases are highly influenced by, if not caused by, the invention of the good old electric light, allowing us to be in an endless artificial daytime.  Back to The Wilder Life, though, the night continues with an epic storm that interrupts what could have been a very restorative sleep.

That's enough of my nutrition mind...it's just that nutrition is involved in EVERYTHING!  Only someone familiar with Weston A. Price would pick up on the full significance of Laura's daughter's dental decay (mentioned in this book), and all that it meant for the family's generational degeneration.  Humanity, aside from small but nourished happy groups such as the ones I frequently mention, is generally in a downward spiral of physical degeneration, which explains way more than meets the eye, once someone becomes aware of it.