Wow, the fireside with Aneladee Milne was such a spiritual feast!  We had it in our backyard. The above photo is our apricot tree in our backyard. For years I have dreamed of hosting a fireside around this tree. It is just so pleasant in the evening to be there. My plans didn’t quite work out though. I have also dreamed of having a big home so I can host firesides indoors with lots of people. I finally decided I could host large groups in the backyard a few years ago and so I have hosted a few gatherings. The other turnoff for hosting inside, besides being too small, is that my carpets have tons of stains. We haven’t been able to afford an all-over carpet cleaning like we used to do every year or so. It never occurred to me that I could spot clean it, until my husband mentioned that that is what his mom used to do. Two years ago it was looking really bad, right before my baby was born, and my  mom took pity on me and cleaned it. That was a great service, not only to get it clean but to show me that really, it’s not that big of a deal to get down on your hands and knees and scrub the carpet.

I haven’t gotten around to doing that again two years later, and the dining room carpet (don’t ever have carpet in a dining room if you have lots of kids) looks so bad. I am embarrased and didn’t want anyone coming in to see it. I meant to clean the spots before the fireside but with everything else going on, like being gone all day to the Summit for Knights of Freedom the day before, I would have to choose sleep over clean carpet and pride, and I chose sleep. But then with it threatening to rain I wondered if we might have to use my living room, which is connected to my dining room. So people will see it.

Well, I figured out that I could move the living room furniture to cover up some of the spots. So I did that and felt better.  I was ready to host if it rained. But then it didn’t rain so I decided to have it outside. But when we went outside I discovered that since Aneladee wanted to plug her laptop into the outlet on the house, everyone had to be facing the house, and the cluttered patio, instead of the lovely tree. The patio had the remains of my kids’ homemade Tom Sawyer raft propped up on buckets and assorted sundry items. Oh well. And then we ended up going inside when it got dark, and some efficient fairy in my family had returned all the furniture to the original places so the carpets spots showed! So much for pride. I learned that I should tell people my plans and not to move things until we are truly over.  I had to swallow my pride and just hope that people appreciated my willingness to bring Aneladee and her knowledge to the gathering and that they didn’t care about the spots.

Well, 26 people RSVPed saying they would come. I think they all came,but one, plus Aneladee and and me and my husband, so we had 28 people. Two people from Idaho even came! Wow! Aneladee shared some amazing things. Basically, the three types of education look like this: telestial education is force and rules. Terrestrial education involves choice, and celestial education is conversing with the angels. What would that be like to have a home where you and your children converse with angels daily? She said that you can’t give your child a celestial education. You can only create a terrestrial education environment which encourages your children to choose it for themselves.

She shared how the prophet went to BYU-Idaho and gave it five charges five years ago straight from D&C 88 and how that is being implemented. I don’t have time to go into it all right now, but watch for a blog post soon where I recap the fireside.

The line down the left side is the rope for the tire swing for my kids.

Aneladee is such a pioneer in LDS education. She is finally getting what she asked for ten years ago, which is homeschool seminary. A group of youth from our commonwealth school have a seminary class just for them at Woods Cross Seminary that meets once a week and does the rest of the work at home. This is such awesome news! I won’t go into my seminary tangent, but sufficeth to say that my daughter went off to the class this morning, even though she had been going to Layton Seminary since the start of school..

For my finishing school two weeks ago we learned why Mary Poppins was so right. Children need cod liver oil daily. It makes healthy children who have round heads, broad chests, and glowing skin. Imagine what life would be like if there were no degenerative diseases, no birth defects, no ADD, no autism. This is what life was like for the 14 primitive groups of people that Dr. Weston Price studied. I have a whole other blog post about this coming up. Why are the children of deseret so sickly? Even though we have the Word of Wisdom, LDS still have health problems.  I once got to see a list of youth going on a Pioneer Trek for their summer youth conference. The majority had major health problems that required taking daily medication! Is that what a multitude of children “bright and strong” is? We’ve got so much more to learn and do about nutrition to be truly free from the grasp and greed of “conspiring men” in the last days that the Lord told Joseph Smith about in D and C 89.

I thought it was very fascinating that in this powerpoint I found from Sally Fallon, student of Dr. Weston Price, that she said our bodies are temples, and the bricks are the vitamins and minerals, and the mortar is good fat, like cod liver oil. Makes so much sense to me. Some vitamins are only soluble in fat, like A and D, so they need fat to be used by your body. You can be taking in tons of vitamins and minerals with vegetables and fruits and green smoothies, but unless you have good fat, which is saturated fat, then those vitamins and minerals are going to pass right through. I think that’s why I always felt so hungry when I was vegan and vegetarian.

Here’s the corn we grew in our garden! I know Dr. Mercola thinks corn is evil but I have a hard time accepting that.