why I love working from home

I'm having one of those weeks that makes me really appreciate my decision to work mostly from home. Firstly, my 4 year old has been sick for the last 5 days and counting :-( Nothing too serious, but enough that he hasn't been able to go to preschool. I love that I can keep him home with me, and let him recover in his own time, without having to pump him full of antibiotics to make sure he can get back to school and I can get back to work. Instead he is doing nicely with homeopathy and home-made (organic of course) chicken broth...

Although I must admit, I'm feeling a little funny about the chicken broth since we are now the proud owners of 3 chickens... another reason I'm glad to be working from home. It's been so nice being able to wander outside throughout the day, checking to see if the hens have laid any more eggs in their nest hidden away in the corner of our veggie garden... collecting the brown and speckled eggs while they are still warm, and eating them fresh the day they were laid. I love this life! I'm also saving about $20/week that I was spending on organic eggs.

The other half of why I love working from home is the nature of what I do... I love my "job" so much it hardly seems fair to call it a "job"... it's more of a lifestyle that happens to bring me an income. I am an Independent Representative of ONE Group, the makers of miessence certified organic products. This means I have my own website where people can choose from over 100 certified organic skin, hair, body, health, household and baby products and have them shipped directly to their door almost anywhere in the world. (And I don't have to do the shipping which is great).

The best part is that I get to train and support a team of like-minded reps around the world who have their own reasons for wanting to create an ethical and sustainable income from home and to help increase the availability of certified organic alternatives to toxic everyday products. I spend most of my "working" time talking, skyping, emailing and meeting with wonderful people who are passionate about health, the environment and making the world a better place.

Just this week my team has grown to include a Pharmacist in Ireland who ordered certified organic baby powder to sell in his Pharmacy in County Cavan, a massage therapist in West Virginia, and a raw food enthusiast in Phoenix Arizona. And all this while spending time looking after my son, making sure he is getting sunshine and rest and fresh organic food while he's home sick.

If I was still a lawyer I would have been stressed about taking time off work, stressed about clients who needed me and stressed about letting down my colleagues. Instead I am grateful that I can be there for my family when they need me and still support a team of reps who have ended up becoming dear friends while we are trying to make the world a safer and better place. I really am very lucky :-)

how to get pregnant

For us getting pregnant was a journey that started two years before our son was born, when I bought the book The Natural Way to Better Babies: Preconception Health Care for Prospective Parents by Francesca Naish and Janette Roberts. The book was also published in America as Healthy Parents, Better Babies: A Couple's Guide to Natural Preconception Health Care. Around the same time, my Mother-in-law gave me a copy of The Chemical Maze, which is published in the USA as Eat Safe: The Truth about Additives from Aspartame to Xanthan Gum. Together these two books changed my life more than any others. I already thought I was being pretty green and healthy with my lifestyle choices, but this was my wake up call that a lot of products I was using in my house and on my body were not safe for me or the planet, especially not if I wanted to conceive and give birth to a healthy baby.

When I actually started reading all the ingredients (or tracking down the ingredients when they weren't listed) I found that I had to get rid of about 90% of what I was using. It took me a whole year to find effective replacements for all the synthetic chemicals in my life... I threw out mountains of personal care products and had to find a safe way to dispose of most of my cleaning products. It was during this year that I tried everything on offer in every health shop in Melbourne (not a cheap exercise). I found a few brands that stood up to my new criteria, ie nothing toxic. This is harder than you might think. Most of the products that claimed to be "green", "natural" or "organic" were mostly the same old chemicals dressed up with a couple of new ingredients, ie greenwashing. I had to educate myself as a consumer, and learn how to read a label and de-code all the ingredient names. I checked everything against the Chemical Maze (you can download a free excerpt of it here).

I was not being crazy, I was just a bit ahead of my time. Since then (five years ago) there have been many more books and articles published on how chemicals can decrease our fertility and increase our chances of health problems after exposure in the womb. Just this week Newsweek published an article on how exposure to chemicals (including BPA) as babies can make us fat later in life. And Gabriela Rosa has written books like The Awful Truth About Cleaning Products And Fertility Revealed and Protecting Your Fertility.

The concept of pre-conception health care has become so mainstream in the last five years that now even major pharmaceutical companies such as Bayer, which makes Elevit and Menevit, has published a booklet on how to boost your fertility. Amazingly, they have included a paragraph on "going natural" which states that naturopathy, acupuncture, traditional Chinese medicines, homeopathy, and hypnotherapy have all had reported successes in helping couples get pregnant. I can vouch for that, we did everything (except the hypnotherapy, but we used that for childbirth!) and we got pregnant the first time we tried, but of course that was after four months of detoxing, and a whole year of research and preparation before that. Normally I wouldn't recommend trying so many different tactics, but there's no harm done here (except for the cost) because all of these things (especially the detox) will help your general health and wellbeing, even if you could have gotten pregnant without doing it all.

The other things which have become more mainstream (and are recommended by Bayer) are to stop not just smoking, but to also give up alcohol and caffeine before you start trying. They point out that high caffeine intake can stop a fertilized egg implanting. It's not just women who have to cut out the bad stuff, it goes for men too, caffeine can increase sperm DNA damage and smoking and alcohol also reduce sperm quality. This is not some crazy health-nut idea, this is a major multi-national pharmaceutical company telling you this: if you're thinking about getting pregnant, or having trouble getting pregnant, then try cutting out alcohol, cigarettes and caffeine. I would add to that to replace all of your household and personal products with safe, natural, certified organic versions, such as miessence and Seventh Generation. It also helps to eat fresh, local, organic whole foods, sleep well, get plenty of exercise, fresh air and good sleep. Stress can actually play as big a part in (not) getting pregnant as anything else I've mentioned. So make some big changes, but try not to stress about them :-) Your body, your baby and the planet will thank you!