Captured Sunlight

Today's cuppa: Rosehip and apple tea
A 'toast' to my boyfriend...who's 59 today! (25th August) I love you, Paul ~ you've made my life. The Universe couldn't have conjured me up a better husband! And happy birthday to my lovely friend, Amy, in Panama City...breastfeeding her beautiful new (VBAC) daughter, Isabella.

Only a week until the little ladies are back at school. If I could sum up this summer in two words, apart from 'crap weather', it would be 'captured sunlight'.

There can't have been more than a day or two that's passed without the girls foraging. They've eaten their way through strawberries, gooseberries, apples, raspberries, black currants, blackberries, wild cherries ~ not to mention stripping my pea plants bare. It's all I can do to keep them off my ripening blueberry bushes!

They've always been little fruit bats, but it still gives me such a kick to see them devour man's natural foods. Both of them will literally stand at a bush of fruit for hours, nibbling away. They have no need to coat these fruits in sugar, bake them in a pie, turn them into cordial or boil into jam… My girls eat fruit raw, ripe and fresh, just as nature intended.

I've seen many mothers who have a fear of their children eating 'real fruit'. "Oh, no, she'll get a sore tummy. All that fruit's not good for you."

"WHAAAAAT??"

It's not surprising that people get sore tummies, but let's be clear here ~ it's not the fault of the fruit!

Fruit likes to be eaten on its own. Look at the average western diet and see how fruit is consumed. Many people consider it a dessert and usually eat it after a heavy carb-based meal. Fruit, on any empty tummy, takes 20 minutes to digest, like breast milk. If you eat it with steak or bread, it is going to ferment in the tummy! It's no wonder the body reacts! Give a body fresh, raw, ripe fruit on an empty tummy and it will literally dance with joy. "WOW…at last, enzymes! Unprocessed vitamins and minerals!" Can't you just hear your cells dancing?

The beauty of freshly ripened fruit is that it is, literally, captured sunlight. And it is this sunlight, these stored electrons, which gives us a zest for life.