Tree of Life Mothering

I just listened to this today on my BYU-Idaho Devotional podcast feed. It’s the devotional message that Elder Neil L. Andersen gave at BYU-Idaho last week on Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, 2017. Wow! It was so good!

I almost didn’t listen to it, because I had a thought/heard a voice in my head saying something like, “Pick something more exciting to listen to, this will be boring.” but then I felt the Holy Ghost prompting me to ignore that thought and listen. So I did. I am so glad I did because he shared many things I haven’t heard before and it was anything but boring.

Elder Andersen talks about what an amazing age we live in with all the technology available to us that makes our lives so comfortable and pleasurable. For instance, he shares a story about when he was skiing with his son-in-law recently. His son-in-law said he would get the car ready for them to go home, so he took out his iPhone and by touching the screen, he turned on his car’s heater remotely so it would be toasty warm, with the snow melted off the windows, by the time they go to the car, so they could just hop in and go.

Then he shares that this technological wonder age we live in is in fulfillment of prophecy.”The Lord indicated to the Prophet Joseph Smith that it would not be just a time of spiritual revelations but also a time of understanding and progress in all areas. The Lord promised knowledge ‘that [had] not been revealed since the world was.’ ” (See D&C 121:26)

It’s not just church leaders that confirm that wondrous knowledge started in the days of Joseph Smith. Elder Andersen quotes a non-LDS scholar, William J. Bernstein, who said:

“When we look at the [facts], it becomes crystal clear that something happened … in the early nineteenth century. … [Up] until approximately 1820, per capita world economic growth [the single best way of measuring human material progress] registered near zero. … Then, not long after 1820, prosperity began flowing in an ever-increasing torrent; with each successive generation, the life of the [child] became observably more comfortable, informed, and predictable than that of the father.”

Notice the date “1820”? If you are not LDS, then you won’t know why that date is special. If you are LDS you know that that’s the year that Joseph Smith saw Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ in the Sacred Grove. Wow!

So then he talked about the challenges we have in this day. In order for us to combat the challenges he repeated a challenge that President/Elder Russell M. Nelson shared last month at the CES Devotional

Elder Andersen also talked about courtship and love, probably because he was giving the speech on Valentine’s Day. If you go here you can see his wedding day picture and read the whole text of the speech. He made several comments about courtship.

To the female college students (which includes my daughter, who was there, although she doesn’t need encouragement in this department, heehee) he said:

There are many traditions that need to be expanded. For example, in our culture it is still the norm that the young men generally invite young women to spend time together, one-on-one. Young women, you may need to step forward and not be afraid of forming a friendship with someone in a classroom or in a ward without pushing it to become more than that. There are many young men who have little history in meeting and forming close friendships with young women one-on-one.

My daughter is definitely comfortable in stepping forward and forming friendships with young men. She’s going on a mission though, so sorry, boys, she will be out of circulation.

To the young men, Elder Andersen said:

You young men may need to push yourselves through uncomfortable feelings to form these friendships. You have to be willing to speak, interact, and enjoy activities, one young woman with one young man.

He also shared humor from Elder Dallin H. Oaks:

I just want to clarify, Elder Andersen and Elder Oaks are talking here about pairing off for college-age students. This doesn’t apply to the under-18 set. For them, it’s group dates all the way! I have strictly enforced that with my kids.

There’s so much more to this talk about courting, with quotes from Elder Robert D. Hales and President David O. McKay, that I encourage you to read it or watch it and share it with your teenage and older single children. I am going to with mine and then we will meet online to discuss it! I can’t wait!

I conclude with the four words that Elder Andersen says that are crucial for flickers of love to grow into a true love story between a man and a woman:

“Complete honesty, unselfish humility.” These four words are so important that Elder Andersen used them as the title for this speech.

Here’s the place to watch it and read the text. Enjoy! I think I will make this an annual tradition to listen to this talk every Valentine’s Day.

Is it OK to watch a somewhat fluffy movie every once in a while? I think so. As long as it’s not too fluffy. My kids know how much I hate brain candy, but sometimes I want some entertainment that doesn’t require much thinking. It still has to have meaning though. The above movie was perfect for that. Dh and I watched it last weekend for our date night. I had had an exhausting day with Saturday chores and cleaning out a fridge to fit a bumper crop of produce from the monthly low cost food drop in town, making bread, and of course, supervising children. So this movie was great for some laughs to relax my weary nerves.

You can watch it on amazon prime video here. I give it 4 out of 5 stars, mostly because of some lack of modest dressing (cleavage and nipples showing through clothing, ugh.) Despite that slight lack of modesty in some of the scenes, it was overall wholesome and charming.

Lauren Holly does a dazzling job playing the lead role, a famous author, Abby Houston, who is single. On a book tour to promote her latest novel, she visits a town in the South. All of its citizens are already in love with her and start pushing her to go on a date with the mayor. She resists, thinking the mayor is an older man who she is not interested in. But then she finds out who the mayor is, and…oh boy! What ensues is cute and funny as this whole fandom of a town spy on their first date. Talk about awkward! Of course, my enjoyment of the whole movie was greatly enhanced by the good looks of the two main stars, Holly, and Cameron Bancroft, the leading man. What a disarming smile he has! I also love Lauren’s gleaming red hair, expressive eyebrows, and fashions (except the aforementioned problems). The end has some suspenseful moments and a sweet rescue. So…if you want something light, romantic, and clean, this will fit the bill.

I sing this song almost every homeschool morning with my kids. I start playing it on the piano and my younger kids know that it is a call to gather round the piano to start our homeschool devotional. I love the lyrics, “it’s good for dusty, musty throats to let out gusty, lusty, notes. It’s good for tongues and necks and knees of people, bees, and chimpanzees! So if by chance, you’re one of these, open up, open up, and sing, siiiiing, siiiiiing! It’s good for almost anything!” (Insert a roll of a chord on the piano!)

Yes it is! Singing is good for almost anything! Many a morning in the past few years, when I would wake up feeling stuck and depressed because of some issues going on in my home, this song would help me feel glimmers of hope. Something about singing gets you in a better frequency of energy to help you receive what God wants you to have.

After we sing/sang this song, then we sing our “songs of praise” as my friend Aneladee calls them. These songs of praise get the hope pouring into my soul. We sing some newer Primary songs and a hymn. I like to use this list to find the newer Primary songs. It has a bunch from Janice Kapp Perry, Sally DeFord, Clive Romney, and other great composers. These are songs like “Holding Hands Around the World, ” “Scripture Power,” and “Don’t Kill the Little Birds.” I do this even though I have one child who repeatedly makes negative comments.

If I have my iPad at the piano, I ask the kids to each pick a song and we download the sheet music right there and we sing it. Otherwise we use my binders I have of some of them in hard copy form. Sometimes we do Brite Music, and at the end we end with some fun Disney songs, like Spoonful of Sugar or Davy Crockett.

I read this speech, given in the above video, in the BYU alumni magazine and thought it was awesome. The speaker, Liz Wiseman, graduated from BYU and went on to form the Wiseman Group. She tells a funny story of how her teenage son created a gash in his leg from an accident, and then stitched it up by himself before she got home! I laughed out loud as I read that story because I have a teenage son, who shall remain nameless, who would totally do the same thing!

She also spoke at RootsTech last week, see the video clip above. Both speeches are wonderful. She points out how important it is to remain humble as we gain more knowledge. It’s better to  think like a rookie, or be in the “rookie zone,” as she calls it. Sometimes we do get too big for our britches, and our knowledge blinds our vision! (For the full video of her RootsTech speech, go here.)

I somehow stumbled upon this book on audio and I feel like that was “positively providential” as Rachel Lynde would say. It’s the story of Anne of Green Gables before she came to Green Gables. I started listening to it on the one blustery, somewhat wintry day we had here in Arizona, and oh my, it made me feel so happy! It answers all of the questions an Anne Fan has, such as:

• how did Anne’s parents die?
• where did Anne get her active imagination?
• how did Anne come up with her pretend friend Katie Maurice?
• how did Anne become such a hard worker

it has so many great themes, including the following:

• addiction
• redemption
• friendship
• love in marriage
• broken marriage
• men’s and women’s roles/husband and wife roles
• nature’s beauty
• fake neighborliness and real neighborliness
• education
• sorrow

and much more! I haven’t finished yet, so no spoilers please! I have a feeling that it is going to turn out perfect, just like Lucy Maud’s books always did. If you love the Anne books, you will love this one. I listened to it yesterday and it smoothed over all the stress of my Valentine’s Day. (I ran out of time and felt rushed fixing our family’s Valentine’s Day dinner and ended up burning some of it. So sad.) It’s one of those stories that makes me you appreciate your own problems. The author, Budge Wilson, a Canadian, was authorized to write it by the heirs of L.M. Montgomery.

I encourage you to get it from your public library and read it today! If my county library system has it here in rural Arizona, I bet yours does too. I will be hosting an online discussion for this book in April, so watch for that!

I’ve always loved your basic, run-of-the-mill, white sugar laden Valentine chocolates JUST for the sweet taste as they go down my throat… BUT not for the after-effects. With regular grocery-store chocolates made out of white sugar, I get the immediate blood sugar spike and a slight headache. I start to feel like my blood is getting “sticky” and hot. I don’t know how else to describe it. All of that is no doubt part of the blood sugar spike. Of course, the after-effects don’t end there. Eventually, they show up in a bigger waistline and an appetite for more and more and a feeling like I can’t get enough, despite the hot stickiness that I am feeling. Let’s not forget to mention the rest of the results, all the things that fat used to be implicated for, like high cholesterol and heart disease, when it was really nasty white sugar all along.

So here is some great news! You can have your chocolates and eat them too, without the blood sugar spike and all the evil consequences! The above pictured chocolates, or “chocolate truffles” as they are officially called, are made from a Trim Healthy Mama recipe fail. I tried the chocolate truffle recipe from the Trim Healthy Mama cookbook p. 384. It did not taste good, as it was written! I don’t know what the problem is, but they just did not taste sweet enough!  Maybe my book has a typo of too much cocoa, or too little sweetener, I don’t know. The mixture was just bitter! Or maybe I have a super sweet tooth? I kept adding more and more of the sweetener it calls for, the Super Sweet blend, and it just didn’t taste sweet. Finally I called it quits and started adding good old-fashioned maple syrup, a tsp at a time, since that stuff is expensive, and finally after a loooong time, the concoction finally tasted good. I also added a teeny bit of cream too. 🙂

So…if you have the THM cookbook, do the truffle recipe on p. 384 and add your favorite non-sugar sweetener to taste, like maple syrup, if you like things maple-y. If you don’t like things mapley then try honey or stevia. If you don’t have the cookbook, then you can find similar recipes here and here. If you want the chocolate to taste the most like grocery store chocolate going down, use cocoa butter (from amazon or health food store) instead of coconut oil.

If you want to get all fancy to present these to your Valentine, you can find special little gift boxes and little candy paper cups in the cake decorating section of your local big box or hobby/craft store. You could also roll them in shredded coconut but I didn’t want to take time for that. 🙂

I like these better than “skinny chocolate,” variations of which you can find all over the Internet, because they are soft and chewy, not hard. If you want hard chocolate, then try skinny chocolate, which is basically mixing cocoa, a fat like cocoa butter or coconut oil, vanilla, and a sweetener, like honey, maple syrup, or stevia. Then you set in the fridge or freezer to harden I like Katie of wellnessmama.com’s recipe here. You can add variety with orange or peppermint essential oils. Here’s a variation of the recipe from Pearl of THM fame below, with peanut butter. Skip to the 5:20 mark to get to the actual recipe, although it is fun to see her visit with her mom, Nancy, founder of aboverubies.org during the first part. (Be a purist and don’t use the microwave like she says.)

Here is a yummy cake that is light, fluffy, and won’t add any inches to your waistline. Serve it tomorrow for Valentine’s Day! In the Trim Healthy Mama World, the basic cake, without the strawberries, or the chocolate topping, is known as a Fuel Pull (FP). That means it is low in fat and carbs. So you can eat it with something high carb, or something high fat, and it won’t cause you to gain weight. Just don’t mix high carbs with high fats. That is what is known as a crossover, or XO, in the THM world, and that is what causes weight gain, in the THM world or even out of the THM world. 🙂 The topping is the chocolate gluccie pudding from the THM cookbook, and then I added sliced strawberries. If you eat the strawberries and don’t just use them for decorations, the cake will stay in FP territory if you eat 1 c of berries or less. Once you go past 1 cup, it becomes a high carb, or E dessert. So then you would want to eat it only after an E dinner, so that you don’t gain weight.

Here is how I made it:

The cake is the Butterfly Wings cake recipe from the Trim Healthy Mama Cookbook, p.301. Here is a similar recipe from this blogger over here, called “Angel’s Cake.” It is light, spongy and yummy, just like angel food cake! It’s basically whipped egg whites with a non-gluten flour and a non-sugar sweetener. I baked it in a greased bundt cake pan. It seemed like it filled more than half the pan before I baked it, but then after it baked it deflated. So next time I make it I will double the recipe, and then put a cookie sheet under the cake pan in the oven, just to catch any spills that might happen before it deflates.

The chocolate gluccie pudding is on p. 350 of the THM Cookbook. You can also get the basic recipe from the video below. I used the lower range of gluccie, aka glucomannan, the 1 1/2 teaspoon amount, so it would be pourable and not so gel-like. The puddings are also FP!  Great news, because that means they are low calorie. They hardly have any fuel to them. They make a great light snack or dessert. Enjoy!

So I’ve been having fun experimenting with the Trim Healthy Mama (THM) Diet cookbook. I reviewed it here with a giveaway offer. You’ve probably already heard from reading my blog for a while that I lost weight a while back, not with the THM diet or “plan” as they call it. After my weight-loss journey I ended up having hormonal imbalance and insomnia. It was the THM diet plan book that taught me what to do to fix those problems. The solution was to eat more carbs, which the THM authors, sisters, Serene and Pearl, call E meals.  As I did, both those problems vanished away. Always before, when I introduced more carbs, I would gain weight, but with the THM plan, I know how to eat carbs without gaining weight. It’s wonderful to find a balance! I was in an extreme rut, eating the same 10 foods or so over and over, and they got me out of it. I love having all these new recipes, they are just what I needed to find more joy and balance in eating, not to mention having recipes that both my family and I can eat at the same time!

I am so grateful! To celebrate this NSV (non-scale victory) and to show my thanks, I am passing on the news about the Trim Healthy Mama sale that starts today and goes until midnight CT Tues. Feb. 14th. I have reprinted the marketing email I got today. I don’t receive any compensation if you buy any of these products. This is just my way of showing thanks to them. I haven’t reviewed all of the products so I can’t personally vouch for all of them. That’s a work in progress, to review all of them. The plan is to post reviews of the products here, we will see how that goes…no promises! The video below shows one of their easiest recipes, the Cottage Berry Whip, which is fun dessert when you want something sweet but not laden with fat because you just had a carb (E) meal.

I think it’s totally cool that a pair of homeschooling moms came up with a plan that is helping thousands of people lose weight, get off medications, and find joy in eating without gaining weight! They did this all from Pearl’s home computer, dealing with all sorts of interruptions and emergencies that come from a caboodle of kids. They don’t have any degrees in nutrition, or official “credentials”, just tons of mothering experience (which translates into a lot in my book!), a passion to solve their own health challenges, insatiable curiosities to know the truth, and desires to help others.

OK, enough talking…find the “sale flyer” posted below. If you are interested in trying out a gluten-free baking blend, or the sugar-free sweeteners, lip balm and skin care supposedly without toxins, you will find such products below.  Let me know what you think about them. I have tried the sweeteners and haven’t decided what I think about them.

We know you love your precious THM ingredients and need to stock up when you can. So here we go with special prices on all our most popular items. (and some NEW items too! ) For the first time ever:  We have an extra-special savings on 3 bags of Baking Blend – don’t miss it! *While supplies last. Sale ends at midnight CST Tuesday February 14th Introducing the first flavors of THM Pristine Whey Protein:  Chocolate and Strawberry! No more having to take the time to add sweetener.. then mineral salt… then vanilla or other extracts. Now it’s all infused into the slimming, beautiful whey powder. We’re so thrilled with the result! Too many flavored whey proteins taste artificial. Like those awful diet drinks. Not this stuff baby! We tweaked and tweaked until we got the balance just right. We believe the strawberry flavor is the most natural you will have ever tasted.  The chocolate is divine… it is so hard to get a strong chocolate flavor when infusing whey so feel free to add a teaspoon of cocoa for a stronger chocolate hit. Watch this video to see how to make the quickest whey smoothie ever! Perfect to drink after doing one of our Workins. (*More exercise DVD kits coming as soon as we can make them! ) NEW THM Lip Balms: If you love our all-day sipper drinks, Good Girl Moonshine and Singing Canary, you are going to love our new lip balms with the same flavors. (And yes… The Shrinker version is in development too!)Lick your lips because there is nothing to harm you in these balms. They only add shine and softening, healing moisture to the delicate skin of your lips. Lip junk is outta here!Available in 5 flavors: Mint, Orange, Coconut, Good Girl Moonshine & Singing Canary. NEW THM Lotions: Our new lotions are perfectly natural and perfectly moisturizing to your whole body… or feel free to use them on your face too if you like a lighter cream than our original face creams.Available in 3 scents: Orange Silk, Coconut Dream and Double-Delish Spearmint Other items on sale: – All Aromatherapy Sprays: $2 off – All Creams: $2 off – The Spünj: $2 off – Kit Clear: $2 off – All Hippie Sticks: $2 off – Bountiful Balm: $2 off – Hand-Crafted Sterling Silver THM Butterfly Necklace: $10 off PS: If you haven’t had a chance… check out our new podcast! Click here to listen.

RootsTech Family Discovery Day is tomorrow! I have been watching this for the past three years and have yet to be disappointed. Every year, as I watch or listen as I do chores, I come away feeling so inspired and motivated to connect with my family roots, share the stories with my children, and do temple work. One year it was on Valentine’s Day. It definitely made Valentine’s extra special that year. Last year’s was especially amazing, with Elder and Sister Renlund and their daughter, Ashley, Pres. Russell M. Nelson and his wife Wendy, and Sister Sheri Dew. You can watch those videos here. The above video is a clip from last year, with the Renlund family explaining the meaning of Ezekiel 47.

Tomorrow’s schedule is here and you can watch the live broadcast by going to lds.org.

The speakers who spoke today and yesterday for the regular RootsTech days were just so wonderful. LeVar Burton of Roots, Star Trek: the Next Gen, and Reading Rainbow fame spoke this morning. Below is the video from the speakers that were livestreamed today, including LeVar’s keynote speech. I am guessing that everybody was misty-eyed, including we remote viewers this morning, as a representative from FamilySearch showed him a record. This was a record that LeVar had never seen before from his family history, the marriage record of his grandparents. It was so touching!