As a follow-up to my blog a few days ago about last-minute slightly crunchy-mom gifts, over here, I’m blogging today about gifts that are even more last-minute, and even more crunchy! They are truly last-minute because you can get them digitally, so that means if you procrastinated and the stores are closed and it’s too late for amazon, you can still get these! They are even more crunchy because they are for moms who are into holistic living: breastfeeding, cooking real foods from scratch, home birth, home healing, homesteading, homeopathy and more! These are all subscriptions to digital products. Three advantages to that: they don’t take up any more space, they are gifts that keep giving all through the year, so the beneficiary gets the fun of opening the present and then the fun of using the service over and over, and you don’t have to ship anything if you live far away.
Photo Credit: For Two Photos Above Anastasia Shuraeva at pexels.com
So, if you don’t have a lavender field in your backyard, a cow, chicken coop, or a sourdough starter to gift, never fear! I’ve got you covered with these instantly-bought and delivered-in-a-flash gifts that keep on giving for the crunchy mama in your life!
I mentioned Everand in the blog two days ago, over here. It’s an audiobook subscription similar to Audible. I’m mentioning it again because it has lots of ebooks and audiobooks for crunchy moms about gardening, growing and using herbs, homesteading, home birthing, homeschooling, and homeopathy, including such titles as Backyard Homestead, The Rebozo Course Companion Book, Master Herbalist, Magical Herbs, and Home Birth On Your Own Terms. The basic plan is $11.99 a month. That plan has a limited selection of titles. The Plus plan is $16.99 a month with a much bigger selection. With both plans you also have access to scribd.com, a library of documents, and slideshare.net, a collection of slide shares.
This book in ebook and audio format by mamanatural.com is in the Plus Everand subscription as a title to unlock! Read my review of it here.
When you sign up be sure to get Plus, at $16.99 a month. It’s so worth it! that allows you to unlock three premium book titles a month. That way you are more likely to get the bestselling, more popular books that Audible also has. The Plus plan allows you access to the Mama Natural book above, which is available in ebook and audiobook formats.
2. Paola Brown’s Momeopath Insider Circle subscription service. It’s $49 a month, so it’s pricey but would make a fabulous bounteous educational gift for any mom you know who loves being Dr. Mom at home with her own family using the most effective medicine with the least side effects, ever, homeopathy. She’s offering a deal right now to either have one month free or sign up for half off the first month. Go here to learn more. It involves weekly Zoom meeting with Paola to learn about homeopathy, as well as a monthly meeting with a professional homeopath. Paola is not a professional homeopath but is passionate about educating about the power of homeopathy after having a profound healing experience of a chronic disease, interstitial cystitis, that plagued her for years.
3. Sue Meyer’s Homeopathy for Mommies Members Corner. Sue is a mom of 11, grandmother of 49, and a longtime professional homeopath. She is also a friend of Paola. She started a subscription service/club for moms long before Paola did. Both look wonderful and with different benefits. It’s $34 a month. Go here to get the details.
3. Sarah Pope’s Healthy Home Economist Plus Members service. Sarah has been blogging about ancestral foods and holistic healing for 16 years. She has been a chapter leader for the Weston A. Price Foundation so has a deep understanding of real, ancestral foods nutrition. This subscription is $59 a year. Members get access to articles on her blog that aren’t available to the general public, all 4 of her books in ebook format, and access to asking Sarah questions via her live chatbox feature. With a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in government administration, and as a mother of 3 children, she shows that she can think critically, all with a mother bear chemistry perspective to uncover all the scams in the holistic health world. Go here to sign up!
That’s it for subscription services for natural crunchy moms! I was going to suggest MightyNest, but they are going out of business. That’s so sad! For $10 a month you could get some fun product for kitchen, bath or gardening that made life easier and was toxin-free. Hopefully some other company will do the same thing soon.
Anyway, here’s a little bit more for the crunchy mom in your life, and this stuff below is all free!
The following is not a subscription service. It is an ebook by another Weston A. Price mom member, Kelly Moeggenberg. Go here to get in Kindle (ebook) format!
Sign up for Kelly’s newsletter, The Kitchen Kop Krew, for free here. You’ll get access to her Real Foods for Rookies video class for free. I always love getting her emails! They are packed full of useful ideas and deals!
A few other holistic mamas out there also have amazing websites with email newsletters that are free. If you think the crunchy mama in your life would be OK with getting more emails, I’d sign her up for the following:
Katie Wells of wellnessmama.com, here. She does such wonderful podcasts with interviews from tons of people in the holstic world.
Heather Dessinger of mommypotamus.com is here. She is friends with Katie, Both have amazing resources! Lots of cool recipes and DIY ideas!
I’ve been thinking a lot about music, children, and families lately, ever since I resurrected my violin to play in a church Easter concert last month, after not playing much for decades.
It all goes back to my orchestra playing days as a youth. I started playing in 4th grade when I heard our grade school was starting an orchestra. I had fallen in love with the violin and asked my mom if she would get me one so I could be part of an orchestra. Thus began my humble violinist career. I played in my school’s orchestra from 4th to 11th grade and then put it aside until now. I took private lessons from 9th to 11th grade. My ending triumph was memorizing Vivaldi’s Concerto in A minor 1st movement from Suzuki Book 4, which I performed as a solo at a church event.
Then I quit orchestra and private lessons, because I just didn’t feel that good at the violin. I was not good at it like in the other skills I had mastered, including reading, writing, and math, with all the AP classes I was thriving in. I also took piano lessons and enjoyed piano much more than playing the violin. As anyone knows who has played both piano and violin, the piano is so much easier! I stuck with the piano lessons until I graduated from high school. I had two friends in the neighborhood who were sisters and played in the orchestra. One on the cello, one on the viola. They had a mother who was superb at playing the piano. I always felt, haha, pardon the pun, second fiddle to them. I gave in to the thought of “I’ll never be as good on a stringed instrument as them, so I may as well give up.” One of them graduated in cello performance at BYU. She was my roommate at BYU. The other sister, I’m not sure what she did regarding college, but I do know they both went on to play in the Orchestra at Temple Square. It’s been fun to look for them through the years when I see the Orchestra perform on TV and a few times in person.
Looking back, I just wish I had reached out to my teacher and asked for more help in getting better. Not so that I could be a professional musician, but so I would continue to have the joy of mastering more and more songs.
Fast forward from my high school days of quitting the violin to being a mother of 7 children. I knew all of the benefits that children get from studying music, having learned about the Suzuki method and having sold Brite music. I wanted to be like a woman I had heard about in my early mom years and raise a family orchestra, like she did with 11 children. She was Utah Young Mother of the Year. We hardly ever had the extra money for lessons and instruments. I did manage to get a used piano for $100 and impart some piano knowledge to some of the children and get lessons outside the home for four of them for a season. It was much later that I met the daughter of the violin teacher for the afore-mentioned Utah Mother of the Year’s children. I found out her secret for paying for all those lessons for all those years for all those children. She had traded raw milk from their family’s cow for lessons. The violin teacher had 8 children, hungry for milk, so it was a win/win. Interestingly enough, my cellist roommate met the two oldest daughters of the orchestra family at BYU in the music program.
Anyway, I’m bringing all of this up because I am fascinated by families who have children who play instruments and get beyond the beginner point. Not to offend any Von Trapps out there but managing a family playing instruments seems A LOT harder than managing a family choir, singing variations of do-re-mi and Edelweiss. What motivates the children to practice when it’s so hard at first? How does mom get the children to practice? How does mom withstand all the squeaky squawky horrible sounds on the way to music mastery? How do the families pay for private lessons if they don’t have a cow? When you have a big family, it adds up quickly. How do the parents deal with the cacophony of instruments going off at once?
All of this was brought back to my focus when I participated in this Easter concert recently. In our 55 voice orchestra we had a family group, a mom and 5 teen children: three violinists, two cellists, and one violist. To top it off, the mom has 4 younger children at home, and she went back to school a few years ago and is now an attorney! How does a mother have the time to do all this?! Work full time plus manage her children’s music careers on top of ordinary life as a mom?
OK, on to my story of two musical moms that show drastic differences in how to foster your children’s musicality.
First is the famous De La Motte family. They moved to NYC from CA so their children could have the best music teachers in the USA. Here is their story below.
TLC did a special on the De La Mottes called “Big Family, Big City.” You can rent it here. A few excerpts are below.
Then there’s the Holladay family, of singlemomonafarm.com. This family of ten children is not wealthy by any means but all of the children play the piano, and some of the older ones play other instruments: harp, violin, guitar, flute, oboe, and maybe more. They used to live in Utah, and after a divorce, the mom and the 7 children left in the nest moved to Virginia for the mom, Marcie, to follow her dream of living on a farm. Her story is below.
Here’s Marcie’s method in the video below of how to get your children to play the piano when you aren’t rich. She also has a text explanation on her blog here. I love her idea of not despairing that you can’t afford certain instruments that your child wants to play. For example, her oldest daughter always wanted to play the harp, from a very young age. They couldn’t afford a harp or lessons. Marcie decided that was OK, because when her daughter got to college she could play a harp in college. Marcie bought a used digital piano and helped her daughter learn piano. It all worked out too, as Marcie hoped.
In one of Marcie’s recent videos, she showed her daughter performing in a harp recital at BYU. The plan worked! The daughter never played as a child, started harp lessons in college, and learned to play well enough to be in a college recital. Here’s Marcie’s video of how she raises a large, musical family on less than $20K a year.
Recently, Amber De La Motte published a video with some sad news to burst my bubble of admiring them from afar. I was shocked to discover from watching the video below that they spend over $12K a month on rent for their brownstone in NYC, and that they have over $30K in credit card debt. Now they are being evicted because their neighbor has complained about the noise from all the music practice.
As harsh as this might sound to say this to Amber, I will play “Dave Ramsey” for a moment and give her the following tough love advice in his place (she even mentions in the video that her family’s situation is prime fodder for Dave): “I admire you for raising such a musical family, but you seriously can’t afford to live in NYC. Find a place you can afford without going into more debt, pay cash for your children’s lessons and instruments, and let the older ones figure out how to attend Juilliard on their own even if you have to move to Alabama. Shrink your overhead and pay off your debt. Take Single Mom on a Farm Marcie’s approach and be OK with letting your children’s plastic minds miss out on being taught by the best of the best in their younger years. Let them figure out how to play musical instruments if you can’t pay cash for lessons. When they are adults let them figure out how to earn the money to pay for the best of the best teachers. Sometimes we can’t afford our dreams right away, and that’s OK. It’s part of being human. Struggling to achieve dreams is part of growing up.”
How does all of this apply to me with my emotional baggage of failed violinist angst from teenage hood? Here’s what I say to my former teenage self, my younger mom self, and my today self:
To my teen self: “I can experience the joy of playing an instrument even if I’m not as good as the neighbor girls. I can keep learning how to play even if I know some people are better at playing than I am. There will always be someone better. It’s fun to be in an orchestra and feel that vibe of working together to blend harmony and melody.”
To my younger mom self: “Don’t despair that you can’t pay for children’s lessons or instruments. Keep exposing your children to music on your used piano and recordings and concerts, expose them to YouTube tutorials for piano, and let them find the drive to figure out how to get instruments and get better.”
To myself of today: “I can enjoy playing the violin at any age. I don’t need to give it up because I’m not as good as other musicians. I can pick it up and play at any time and keep learning, especially because of all the YouTube tutorials. It’s fun to keep learning so I can keep creating beautiful music, alone, and with a group! I’ll never be Lindsey Stirling or Itzhak Perlman, and that’s OK. Playing and performing music doesn’t have to be all, as in perfect, the best professional music, or nothing. It can be somewhere in between.”
I hope that Amber sees that she can foster her children’s musician skills without breaking the bank. I can see that in my teen years and young mom years, I fell prey to Amber’s line of thinking somewhat which is “Enjoying music and learning an instrument has to be at the top level with the best teachers to produce the best outcome possible. If I’m not first chair violin (or have the best teacher, or in Juilliard, or a concert violinist) then it’s not worth continuing.” I hope Amber will find a balance of increasing her children’s music skills without going into any more debt.
Here’s a mom of 8 (with Utah roots, interestingly enough) who seems to have found a joyful balance of sanity and building your family’s musical skills after being sucked into what she calls “Suzuki Uberparenting.” Read what she has to say here.
If you want more of Marcie, go here where I have her video of money-based and other non-money miracles, intertwined with my own miracle stories.
If you are looking for some last-minute gift ideas for Mother’s Day, here you go! Since it’s the Wednesday before Mother’s Day, almost everything here is what you can get from Amazon Prime or at Walmart, which are probably the easiest retailers for most of you out there to access and get the product before the big day. The one thing in my list below that is not at Amazon or Walmart is shipped from Paola Brown’s company in Idaho. So if you order it today it will come after Mother’s Day, but you could write down a note on a pretty piece of paper explaining that a totally wonderful magical surprise will be coming soon. For the rest, order on amazon today or hop on over to your nearest Walmart.
An electric teakettle. I don’t know how I survived mom life before I had one of these! I got a Pioneer Woman version about 9 years ago and have loved it. It’s just so great to have a way to get water super-hot, super fast. I am one of the rare people who doesn’t like ice water. First thing in the morning I enjoy drinking some warm water to help me wake up. I make it by taking boiling hot water from the teakettle, filling my Mason jar water bottle half-way up, then topping it off with water from the fridge water dispenser. That’s the perfect temperature for me. In winter I might make it warmer. It’s fun to add stevia and lemon juice, and a little mineral salt, or to make hot cocoa with stevia and cacoa powder, but I have to limit my stevia, so I don’t drink those every day. I also like to use the teakettle to get boiling hot water to pour over any frozen food in a bowl that I want to thaw when fixing dinner. I also use this to make herbal tea, especially when someone has a sore throat so I can make Throat Coat tea.
(If you want to be super fancy and can afford it, get this one shown above. It’s a lot more expensive and isn’t available in Prime, so you’d have to write a coupon saying it’s on its way, but it might be worth the wait for the mom in your life, especially if she’s into herbal tea. It has an inner container where you can insert the tea material to steep. It also has preset temperatures and a 30-minute keep warm function.)
Everand Audiobook and Ebook Subscription. Everyone, unless they’ve been living in a cave, knows about Audible, so I’m mentioning everand.com instead. I love it for all the reasons here. I’ve had both subscriptions at times and enjoy both for different reasons. I don’t like that Audible just offers me one book a month, whereas Everand gives me unlimited access to a TON of ebooks and audiobooks for about the same price. Certain bestsellers are only available on Audible not Everand though, but I usually can then find the bestseller book from my library to borrow in Libby. Everand has a ton of homeschooling mom favorites, like the LIttle House books, Little Britches books, Jim Weiss stories, Your Story Hour books, The Story of the World, and so much more. You can download the books, and they are yours forever.
Anything Pioneer Woman: bedding, kitchenware, clothing, jewelry, bags, tablecloth, dishcloths, bath towels, rugs, and more, even furniture! Many senior citizen moms probably haven’t updated their bed linens, kitchen towels, bath towels, table lamp, or rugs in decades. A fresh version of any of these would probably be well-appreciated. They are just all so beautiful! I have the bath towel below and love it, it’s soft, thick and gorgeous.
Photo Credit Just Above and Just Below: amazon.com
Mason Jar lids with straws. If your crunchy-mom mother likes to drink from glass instead of plastic for her everyday water bottle, she probably already uses Mason jars. These pretty lids in rose gold with holes for straws turn the Mason jar into an easily-sipped-from water bottle. Years ago, one of my sons gave me a set of Mason jar lids with straw holes and I still have the lids and use them every day. He really nailed the gift that year!
Photo Credit for Just Above and Just Below: amazon.com
Beautifully Embroidered Cover Journal from Rifle Paper Co. I love just about everything from Rifle Paper, designed by artist Anna Bond. I’ve noticed some of their products at the BYU Museum of Art gift shop. This journal is expensive for a journal, at $38, but the beauty makes it totally worth it! It’s 400 pages with an exquisitely gorgeous cover, ribbon bookmark, and lie-flat binding. If you have a mom who loves to journal or take notes, and loves floral patterns, she will probably love this! It comes in 4 designs. I can’t decide which one is my favorite.
Massage Gun. If you don’t want to shell out nearly $150 for the top-of-the-line TheraGun shown above, cheaper guns exist. The LifePro brand seems to be a reasonable cheaper alternative. I have that one and so far it’s worked well. It has about 6 different attachments. Just last night I used it to knead a knotty muscle in my neck and today I feel so much better.
Just Above and Just Below Photo Credit: amazon.com
Julia Rothman Collection of Anatomy Books about farm, nature, and food. These are such fun books to look at, for all ages! For all the nature loving and wannabe homestead moms out there. In our increasingly urbanized world, this knowledge is becoming lost! I’m grateful for the author creating these works, inspired by visits to her husband’s family farm. I love to read a few pages a day for our homeschool morning time.
Pioneer Woman Air Fryer. The model above is the newer version. I have the floral patterned one below. I love this for so many reasons. My children gave it to me for my birthday years ago, and I use it every day. I don’t use a microwave, because of what Sally Fallon Morrell has said about them. I use this for so many things I would use a microwave for. I can pop in burger patties or bacon and cook them in 10 minutes without tending to it or worrying that they will burn. I line it with unbleached parchment paper, both under and top of the inner tray to minimize the mess. Then after cooking, I dispose of those and can pop the bottom drawer, and the tray insert into the dishwasher for easy cleaning. So awesome! (I don’t know if the bottom drawer of the model above is dishwasher-safe, probably not, what with the wooden handle.)
Paola Brown’s Homeopathy Family Journal. I gave this to myself for Mother’s Day a few years ago. Yes, it’s ok to give gifts to yourself! It is so wonderful!!!! As a budding Momeopath (trademark of Paola Brown), I keep track of the homeopathic medicines I give my family and what the results are. This journal is perfect for that as it has a section for 8 family members, beautiful illustrations of materials that are used in homeopathic medicine, and much more! Go here to read more about it and buy it!
Any of the Books here for reading for mom to read for pure pleasure. Combine a book with Everand for a most wonderful bibliophilic gift!
A Pretty Board Game That Also Challenges the Mind. See my choices for mom here.
If you want more holistic mom Mother’s Day gift ideas, go here, and wrap a pretty note saying it’s on the way if the delivery is after Mother’s Day.
If you want homemade ideas, go here, the same link as just above, but scroll way down to see the homemade ideas.
If you want some picture book ideas for Mother’s Day go here.
If you’d like some stories about the power of mothers, go to my Family Devotionals Ebook here, under the May section.
I got a little behind on the recaps of this current season of Relative Race, Season 15. In this video below you get a two for one: two episodes, 5 and 6, recapped in one video. It’s done by Cheri Hudson Passey, aka, Carolina Girl, and her GenFriends. If you haven’t watched these episodes yet, go here for Episode 5, and here for Episode 6.
Episode 5 shows something that has never happened before in the show’s history. I’m pretty sure this is what the host, Dan, mentioned in his interview over here.
Want more of Relative Race? See my pages here and here with all the times I’ve blogged about it, including some fireside talks from Dan Debenham, the host.
Wow! This man’s story is soooo incredibly amazing!!!! I listened to it this past week and love it so much! His name is Dusty Smith. He shares how he came into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and served a mission. Later, because of various reasons, he fell away. He tells of at least three miracles that happened to bring him back to the fold on the covenant path, showing that God loves Him and cares for him and his wife. (He may have mentioned more miracles, but I counted three.) If you love stories of miracles, you will love this! Have a listen!
I promise you that God loves each of us, He has a plan for each of us, and He cares for us personally in His infinite wisdom and love. This man’s story tells of God’s orchestrations that go beyond mere coincidence.
Are you eating enough meat for your mental health? I encourage you to watch this video with Kelly Hogan and Dr. Kelli Ritter to help you determine that. Whether you suffer from anxiety, depression, or other mental health challenges, you may benefit from eating more meat. Kelly talks about how something seemingly benign as soy sauce in her mother’s pot roast causes her to lie awake at night with anxiety, “doubting every life choice I have ever made, ” in Kelly’s words.
I was either vegan or vegetarian for over 5 years, starting back in 1997. I feel so much better now that I eat meat, and not just some meat, but mostly meat.
Hey if you enjoyed the podcast episode on holographic blood that I shared a few weeks ago, over here, you are going to love this sequel. Listen here. The description of the episode is below, copied and pasted from the episode website.
” ‘If we don’t understand how nature works, we’re just guessing at trying to fix things.’ Adam and Josh Bigelsen provide insight today in how to listen to the body’s messages, in order to address them. If you have trauma (and, naturally, most of us do), it doesn’t mean just doing emotional work for healing. The physical has to be addressed as well.”
“Today the Bigelsen brothers, from the Bigelsen Academy, offer insights on what the body is telling us, along with uncovering the emotional ties behind cancer, rashes and hives, asthma and mononucleosis, for example.”
“This is a power-packed episode building on Wise Traditions podcast episode 523, which was the beginning of this conversation. You may want to go back and listen to that one for context and then follow it up with this one!”
The Bigelsen brothers have a YouTube Channel called “The Blood Diaries.” I have a few videos below. The last one about a man who worked with Dr. Bigelsen after becoming paralyzed from the waist down is astounding. He now walks again with prostheses and holds the world record for lifting weights with his legs! Amazing!
Before I let any more post-Easter-2025-time pass, I’m capturing my memories of it. I just love that the celebration of Easter, remembering the atonement and resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, happens at springtime, at least in North America. I love the amazing change from winter to spring with the bursting of blooms and greenery. It’s such a perfect backdrop for feeling the possibility of change of our own lives from being sinners in bondage to sin and death, to saints in the kingdom of God in joy, redeemed through the blood of Jesus Christ.
These lilacs are on my walk to church. I’m enjoying them while I can before they fade away.
Even though Easter came late this year, I still wasn’t quite ready. Not everything turned out the way I wanted to. Here are my memories, musings, and lessons learned.
First, I love the tradition from Emily Belle Freeman of cutting a branch off a tree or bush in your yard on Palm Sunday and putting it in a vase. Then later in the week for one of her other Easter traditions you are supposed to write testimonies on slips of paper and put them in plastic eggs and hang them on the tree. I’m still figuring that other tradition out. It seems easy enough but it just hasn’t happened yet, either because every night over dinner, we don’t have time for this activity to not feel rushed. I’m also stuck on the logisitcs of hanging the eggs. I have the tiny eggs but they don’t have holes in them to thread the twine through. Maybe I will get eggs that have holes or just tape the twine on the eggs for next year. Or switch out my Resurrection Eggs that do have holes in them for the eggs I bought last year for this purpose but haven’t used.
2. I participated in a Good Friday concert involving an orchestra and choir for my church, playing the violin. What an amazing experience! It was a 55 voice orchestra. I played 4 songs: one that was super difficult with lots of sixteenth notes, called “Worthy is the Lamb,” “I Feel My Savior’s Love,” “He Sent His Son,” and a piece from Handel’s Messiah. I missed a lot of notes and had some bowing out of order (going the opposite direction as the rest of the violins), as I am a very rusty violinist after not playing much in over 30 years. I have been wanting to get back into violinist mode for years, as I miss the beauty and joy of playing. When I saw this opporunity, I knew it was finally time. I have a friend who is a professional violinist, having been raised by a professional violinist, but that I am not. I started playing in 4th grade when I heard our grade school was starting on orchestra. I had fallen in love with the violin and asked my mom if she would get me one so I could be part of an orchestra. Thus began my humble violinist career. I played in my school’s orchestra from 4th to 11th grade and then put it aside until now. I took private lessons from 9th to 11th grade, then quit because I just didn’t feel that good at it, not good like in the other skills I had mastered, including reading, writing, and math, with all the AP classes I took. I had two friends in the neighborhood who were sisters and played in the orchestra. One on the cello, one on the viola. They had a mother who was superb at playing the piano. I always felt, haha, pardon the pun, second fiddle to them. I gave in to the thought of “I’ll never be as good as them, so I may as well give up.” Looking back, I just wish I had reached out to my teacher and asked for more help in getting better.
Playing again, in this Easter orchestra as an adult, was a great brain exercise for me and a lesson in humility. This was was my Easter offering to the Lord. I’m grateful the director didn’t kick me out with all my slowness and wrong notes! Let’s just say, impostor syndrome is real! When I was playing the right notes, LOL, it felt so good to feel that orchestra vibe again, of being part of a team that creates beauty synchronously, under the direction of a master conductor. It is a great simulation of life under the direction of Jesus.
3. My married daughter and I dyed Easter eggs with her two little boys. This is the first Easter she has spent with us in years because they lived away in Califnornia for a a few years. But now they live about 25 minutes away! I haven’t dyed eggs in probably 8 years or more because nobody has seemed interested in it since she flew the coop, years ago to go to college, and the younger ones have grown up to be teens. Married daughter and I both love arts and crafts so this was heaven for me. We used this Martha Stewart book shown below, which picked up when thrifting a few years ago, for egg decorating ideas.
I love her tip to use electrical tape for blocking off sections that you don’t want colored. See the photo in the upper right corner of the book cover. Or course ours didn’t look nearly as elegant. When I was a child we used masking tape but electrical tape works so much better as it’s more flexible. I made an egg with stripes, an egg with checkered squares, and an egg with a cross on it. I figured I’d take photos of them the next day when I set them out for Easter dinner.
Sadly, the next day, when I went to warm up the eggs by putting them in a bowl with some hot water boiled from the teapot after taking hgem out of the fridge, the hot water washed all the dye away for them all to be uniformly pink. I guess we didn’t use enough vinegar with the dye so it would be colorfast regardless of temperature. So I ended up not getting photos of my art before it washed away! So sad!
The photos above are the ones my daughter and grandsons did. Anyway it felt so good to be back in crafting for holiday land again with my dear daughter. Next year I’m going to make sure we do the right amount of vinegar, so the dye doesn’t wash away in hot water, invite my mom to join us since she loves to craft too, and have a foam board with pins like Martha says to use in the book in order to dry the freshly dyed eggs. We used a regular old egg carton to hold the freshly dyed eggs. The problem with that though is that the water collects in the bottom of the carton and then that can get the next egg you put in there a different color on the bottom of the egg where it touches the puddle of dyed water.
4. We lit up our Immanuel Wreath on Easter Sunday instead of every day leading up to it like at Advent time. This time I put a platter under it to keep the wax from getting on the tablecloth. (I sill haven’t gotten the wax off the tablecloth from the time I went platter-less at Christmas. Ugh.) And I still can’t find my original glass platter I used in the old house before our move a year ago which fits the wreath much better. It was a wedding gift and has beautiful, embossed fruit images on the glass. Anyway, we did this over Easter Sunday Dinner when my married daughter and her little family were here. We only talked about three names “Good,” “Life,” and “Advocate.” The original plan was to light up each candle only after someone told a story of Jesus showing up in their life in that role, as we ate dinner. I could see it would take a long time to do that so I decided to just light up the whole wreath of candles after we just did three names.
The discussion of “advocate” took up a lot of time because my youngest child, the only one that I’m still homeschooling since the others are graduated from college and married, in college or on a mission, had just participated in a mock trial with other homeschooled students. I was the team coach. It was for the Hero LEMI Project class I am mentoring. We won! So it was fun to talk about this as a family. My husband, married daughter and son-in-law are all great conversationalists. My married daughter also did mock trials when she was a teen so this conversation was very engaging. By the time we were done talking about that and the role of advocates and that Jesus is the best criminal defense attorney ever, the grandsons were restless. I’m thinking that next year I will have some quiet toys ready for the grandsons during our discussion or just send them downstairs to play with Legos or Magnetiles while the rest of us talk. I will also have some note cards to pass out to everybody and give everyone about 5 – 10 minutes to write down. Then I want to keep the note cards in some kind of special Easter notebook or binder that has pocket pages. I want to keep everyone’s they write every year and see the changes that happen. I also want to keep the slips of paper with their testimonies. I wish I had started this years ago, but at least now I can start this when my grandsons are young and they can grow up with doing at Grandma’s.
Emily Belle Freeman is the creator of the Immanuel Wreath and the instigator of this tradition. I know she has small grandchildren. So I want to pick her brain and find out how she does this tradition with restless children. If anybody knows her personally will you please send her my way so I can ask her?
This year we did the egg hunt on Saturday instead of Sunday, after dinner. We are missing my child who loves to grill so we didn’t have a BBQ. When he was home he loved to be on BBQ duty. We are missing him because he left to go on a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That’s the greatest reason ever though so I’m not even sad. I did the Resurrection Eggs activity afterwards after the hunt while everyone was eating candy. I hope to make this a yearly thing with my grandsons so they look forward to it and can tell the story of the atonement and resurrection of Jesus by heart and know how much He loves us.
Then on Sunday we went to church and had a glorious sacrament meeting. A little bit of a recap is here. I sang in the ward choir as part of the church service, singing the hymn from the new collection of hymns, “Behold the Wounds In Jesus’ Hands.” Listen below. The words are here. It is just so, so, so beautiful!
I got the banner in the photo above that says, “He is Risen Indeed” from Jennifer Flanders over here. I just love how festive it looks!
After Sunday dinner we played parable charades, as directed by this wonderful book. The author says to use playdoh for temple sculpturades and regular charades for the parables charades. She suggests doing Temple Sculpturades for Holy Week Monday, because that’s when you talk about Jesus cleansing the temple, and then do Parables Charades on Wednesday for Parables Wednesday. I saved the charades for Sunday when the married daughter and her family would be here. But I wanted to do parables sculpturades. But the playdoh I made for sculpturades didn’t turn out because I didn’t realize we were so low on flour, on Easter Sunday, so the playdoh was too sticky. So that’s a lesson learned, to check for the ingredients needed way ahead of time. Next year I’m going to skip the playdoh and make cloud dough, out of corn starch, and hair conditioner, as shown below and here.
After the charades, my married daughter and her family, including the grandsons, left. So then we had singing time with three of my children with me playing the piano. We sang a few Easter songs that are linked in the April section of my family devotionals ebook. Then my BYU son left to go back to his place. So then we did our Come Follow Christ scripture reading and had family prayer and then watched Relative Race. It was a peaceful, glorious day. I’m so grateful for no snow or rain. I have experienced a few Utah Easters with each one. It actually started snowing on Good Friday but then stopped thank goodness. Crazy Utah weather!
We also watched Narnia the next night, Monday night, for Family Home Evening. It’s such a great story with an allegory of Christ, with His atonement and resurrection. I look forward to watching it with my grandchildren for a future Easter time.
All right, here’s what I’m going do next year, to make Easter even better, in addition to applying the lessons I learned above:
I think from now on I want to do a family Easter basket, like shown below, just for a little more fun, and say it’s the family Easter love basket, from our family love, not from the Easter bunny. I want to give family members the credit for giving, not some dumb pretend bunny made up to sell more toys. Of course all my kids are older so the ideas for little kids don’t apply. I’ll ask everybody who lives at home, now that I have teen and adult children, to contribute one inexpensive, simple thing the family will enjoy, whether it’s food, socks, a puzzle, a game, or even some pages of meaningful thoughts in the form of a letter or poetry. I’ll ask them to deposit it in the basket after people go to bed. The item can even be thrifted to save money, as I am all for thrifting, as you’ve seen here. Here’s a family Easter basket video, below, that I enjoyed, even though I’m not huge on the pirate theme of one of the games. And I don’t like Peeps. In my fantasy life I envision having all the time and money in the world to make gloriously naturally crunchy mom nontoxic, sugar-free treats and gifts including jewelry that promotes faith in Christ, scripture study aids, classic books, gardening tools, items for summer like new beach towels or swimsuits, puzzle books, aprons, kitchen gadgets, and fidget toys. Reality is settling in though to bring me back to the idea of having each family member contribute, even with cheap thrifted items. It just sounds fun and encouraging of generosity to ask everyone to give of themselves in some small way, to remember the infinite way Christ did, which we are celebrating at Easter time.
2. I want to give Easter baskets anonymously to lonely and elderly people, like the Holy Week for families book talks about on page 22.
3. I want to find my Gospel Art Kit with my pictures of the Holy Week timeline events to put in order on the wall like I have in years’ past. Another casualty of the move apparently. The photo below is of the art prints from a previous Easter.
4. I want to plan a sing-along time with friends to sing Easter songs like I’ve done in year’s past, and introduce the songs from this songbook below to my friends. Many of the songs pertain to Easter. I found it while thrifting last year, one of my best thrifting treasures ever!
5. I want to do the Plan of Happiness Treasure Hunt with the grandsons and the children still at home on the Sunday after Easter, as outlined in the book below, on page 31. My husband’s cousin Janet Hilton Hales and her husband Joe Hales wrote it. They were pioneers in pushing for Christ-centered Easter celebrations, over 20 years ago. We’ve done this treasure hunt on and off over the years, it’s fun and spiritual at the same time. It’s wonderful for teaching what Jesus did in the spirit world on Salvation Saturday, after the crucifixion and before He appeared to Mary in the garden. I keep an envelope full of the clues taped inside the back cover for easy use.
6. I’m thinking I want to create some sensory bins that are Easter and spring-themed for my grandsons to play with while we discuss the names of Christ for the Immanuel Wreath. This is for when they are done eating Easter Sunday dinner but the rest of us aren’t ready to leave the table. I want them to hear the conversation, and I don’t want us to be pulled away to play with them away from the conversation. More ideas are here and here for DIY sensory bins and materials. I’d also like to buy the pretty one here.
If I’m really ambitious, I’ll create some kind of Christ-centered Easter sensory bin inspired by this video above. Or maybe just make tiny tokens out of sculpey clay that are featured in the DIY Resurrection Eggs here and put them in a bin of colored chickpeas. Or just use the regular tokens that are in those instructions I just linked to. It would be so cool to somehow come up with little tokens that represent the names of Christ, like a light bulb or lamp for “light” but some of those names are too abstract liked “advocate.” Hey maybe my married daughter and I could spend an afternoon making these sensory bins next winter! It would totally be something so fun to look forward to doing in the January doldrums. A girl can always dream right? I could also buy this one on etsy shown below. I’ll only get it out on Easter Sunday to make it extra special.
7. I also want to get an Easter creche with figures the grandchildren can play with, like this one maybe.
8. Finally, I want to act out the Easter story, just like we do the Nativity story at Christmas, like Elder Stevenson shared that his family does, in the talk below. We could act it with the items shown in the basket above or do it with people moving and speaking different parts.
9. I finally read through Emily Belle Freeman’s book shown above to find out if the traditions described in the book match the traditions she shows in her videos over here. I figured out two things:
a. They match up except for the first day. On the first day, in the book, she suggests you plant wheat berries in soil in a small container, to turn into wheat grass. She focuses on Lazarus, saying that the grass represents life coming forth from a dark place. I realized this past week that her traditions in the book are not actually linked to the days of Holy Week. Her traditions focus on people involved in the story, not on the events of the days of Holy Week. In the set of videos, the only tradition that actually focuses on a day is the tradition with getting a branch in a vase on Palm Sunday.
b. It is too hard for me to do her traditions, one each day of Holy Week, plus the traditions for Holy Week in the Holy Week book shown below, on each day of Holy Week. So, I’m going to do Emily’s once a week, in the 5 weeks leading up to Easter. Then we will end on Palm Sunday and do her Palm Sunday tradition of the branch in a vase. That means if Easter is in March, like it sometimes is, we will be starting Emily’s Easter traditions in February. That definitely sounds fun to break up the winter monotony. It will be fun to plant Easter grass in February. Then the last tradition we will do on Easter Sunday like she says.
One of the glorious springtime scenes I get to see whenever I walk outside in my front yard.
So that’s my debrief of our Easter 2025. I’m excited that I already have plans for Easter 2026! Every year, I get closer and closer to making it my ideal, a festival of celebration in line with Elder Gary E. Stevenson, who quoted N.T. Wright in the April 2023 General Conference:
“We should be taking steps to celebrate Easter in creative new ways: in art, literature, children’s games, poetry, music, dance, festivals, bells, special concerts. … This is our greatest festival. Take Christmas away, and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else. Take Easter away, and you don’t have a New Testament; you don’t have a Christianity.” -Elder Gary E. Stevenson, Liahona, May 2023,
I’d love to hear what went well for your Easter and what you plan for next year, please share them in the comments, if you’d like, below.
Easter 2025 is over, but just like with Christmas last January, I’m not quite ready to let it go. I just love Easter! I thought it would be fun to share some Easter videos from some different families who shared their Easter thoughts and memories on the Internet.
First is this video from Cindy, of Families in the Millennium YouTube Channel. I love her idea to give each family member an index card and pen to write down how they saw Jesus show up in their lives recently, acting in the different roles with the different names, which I talk about over here. From now on, I’m thinking I’m going to do this first, instead of asking family members to verbalize their thoughts, when we do the Immanuel Wreath candles. Then at the end of five minutes or so, ask if anybody wants to share. So far when we’ve done this, in the past few years, not everybody talks. I’m thinking if I give them the chance to write first, they might all open up more after getting the thoughts going with writing. We’ll see.
Second is this video from Michaela Bates Keilen and her husband Brandon Keilen, which you can watch over here.
Credit for Photos Above and Below: Keilen Corner YouTube Channel
I love that towards the end they share their testimony of Jesus. They talk about how we are all sinners, we each have broken lives. Jesus is the way to restore us. I also love that they share their time visiting Brandon’s family farm in Michigan. He shows how his mother really gets into baking for the Easter holiday. See her cupcakes above and the bunny cake. Something I will probably never do but I appreciate when others do it. I’d love to make them sugar free and or keto.
Then there’s the Holladay family, of singlemomonafarm.com. It looks like the Holladays and the next family I highlight are both families who do the egg hunt and Easter baskets without the Easter bunny bringing gifts like a springtime Santa Claus. I’m not the only one.
Then there’s the Happy Caravan family, the De La Motts who live in Harlem, New York. They are a musical family of 11 children. I remember my sister telling me about them a while ago. I’m fascinated by their story, of how they have been able to foster their children’s musicality and support their children in following their dreams of being professional musicians. I love the Easter egg hunt in the backyard with the timid French cousins watching.
Speaking of music, there’s another musical family I enjoy watching. The Crosbys shared this video below right before Easter, so I assume it was meant for Easter. We don’t often think of gratitude linking with the Easter holiday but this is an invitation to do so.
This video shows a domestic fantasy of mine, living on a homestead as a large family, and prepping a huge family dinner from scratch.
Happy post-Easter time! I invite you to do what Sister Cindy says in the top video of this post to carry the Easter spirit/the spirit of Christ with us through the whole year.
Tree of Life Mothering 