The Bates Family from Lake City, Tennessee are good friends of the Duggars. Both families homeschool, and both families have 19 kids. I actually fell in love with the Bates family first, when I saw a special that ABC TV did about them a few years ago. (Here’s my first blog post I ever did about the Duggars and the Bates with part of the video clip of the first video I saw of the Bates.) The above video is a great example of happiness in a family. It shows the family working together to do the household chores and then having fun together at a restaurant having dessert after learning proper behavior for going out. It’s a good reminder to me of what Nicholeen Peck teaches, to prep your children before you go out about the proper way to act. I also like, how at the end of the video, one of the older boys says that his dad is his best friend. It’s so sweet! Then the dad, Gil, talks about how he started thinking about his risky job of running a tree business. He wanted to make sure that if he ever died on the job, his kids would know that he loved them. So he wrote them each a letter telling them so. I really teared up at this.
Now the Bates family has their own show like the Duggars. Their original show that started over a year ago got dropped, called, The United Bates of America. But now they have a new show called Bringing Up Bates. I’ve posted a few videos about them here. It’s refreshing to see families who live simple wholesome lives, working and playing together, striving to follow the Bible. In the video below, it shows them having an “I Love You” party for Valentine’s Day. Maybe we will try something like that in my family. I teared up at the end of this one too.
Now, below, here’s the premiere episode of Bringing Up Bates. I love the way that Alyssa, one of the married daughters, decided to announce her pregnancy. It’s so fun to see her family swarming around her, taking pictures of her.
If you know me very well, you know that I am super into family history research and temple work. So much so that I gave family history-themed Christmas gifts this past year. I have been to the temple almost every week in 2014, mostly with my own family names that I find for my youth and me. My two older college kids have caught the spirit of Elijah as well, and are finding names on their own and going to the Rexburg Temple. It’s a great family project to share names to do the work. I just have to say, there are no lines in the temple on Halloween, Black Friday, or the day after Christmas or New Year’s. Yep, Friday has been my temple day lately, as all of those days came on Friday this past year. I am not saying any of this to brag, but to say that I am convinced of the blessings we get from doing this work, that we can’t get in any other way, and I don’t want to be without these blessings. (Now that my youngest is 5, it is definitely easier for me to get the temple than when I had a nursing baby.)
I take Elder Andersen’s #TempleChallenge seriously! I have received the following wonderful blessings that Elder Andersen promises, from taking on the temple challenge:
I would love to help you all learn how to find your own names. Today’s technology makes it so easy, you don’t have to leave the comfort of your house to do the research. I put together a page over here showing the basics of how to get started. I am having so much fun finding out who my long lost cousins are! One of them turned out to be my good friend and former LLL co-Leader. We share a Johnson line back to Lorenzo Johnson, a Mormon pioneer, who is descended from William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth Plantation. Lorenzo’s grandmother was Rhuama Stevens, whose grandfather was William Bradford’s son, William Bradford IV.
Today’s technology not only makes discovering your genealogy easy, but also fun. Using Google Earth, you can see places where your ancestors lived without leaving your cozy nest. I am so excited to announce that Lisa Louise Cooke, one of my favorite genealogy bloggers and podcasters, from lisalouisecooke.com, is doing a free webinar on using Google Earth for genealogy very soon. You can see her talking in the video above with a Google Earth guru at Roots Tech. She’s a Google Earth guru herself. You usually have to pay to have access to her full Google Earth video as a premium member of her website, so I am hoping she covers a lot of the same stuff in this free webinar, sponsored by Familysearch.org, via the Illinois Genealogical Society.
Here is a description of the webinar from the web site page I just linked to above.
WEBINAR DESCRIPTION: In this extremely popular class Google Earth Guru Lisa Louise Cooke will teach you how to unlock mysteries in your research: from unidentified photographs, to how an ancestral location looked a hundred years ago or more, to plotting homesteads precisely using land patent legal descriptions. You’ll learn how to interpret the genealogical records you already have in new and exciting ways, and be amazed to discover that Google Earth is one of the best free genealogical tools available!
ABOUT OUR PRESENTER: Lisa Louise Cooke is the owner of Genealogy Gems, a multi-media production company, and host ofThe Genealogy Gems Podcast at www.genealogygems.com. Her podcasts bring genealogy news, research strategies, expert interviews and inspiration to genealogists around the world, and has been downloaded over 1.5 million times. Lisa is the author of four books including “Turn Your iPad into a Genealogy Powerhouse,” and “The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox,” a regular contributor to Family Tree Magazine, producer of the video series “Google Earth for Genealogy” and over 60 videos at the Genealogy Gems YouTube Channel, and a popular international speaker.
WEBINAR FAQs: For additional information about ISGS webinars, please refer to our Webinar FAQs page here.
UPCOMING WEBINARS: For a listing of upcoming webinars, visit the page here.
ISGS webinars are held on the second Tuesday of each month and begin at 8 PM Central. Each webinar is about an hour long.
I hope you come! Lisa has a way of explaining genealogy and technology in clear and easy to understand terms so I know you are going to love it. Below is an intro to her website.
Come empower yourself by discovering simple, effective habits that will help you conquer your self-defeating habits!
This month marks two years since I started teaching my Mothers Who Know class, which is the Eternal Warriors class for moms. I started out using the Girl Power journal pictured above. I filled it up and and since then I have filled up almost all of the other journals in the picture, plus the ones I didn’t even put in the picture. After I had kids, I dropped my consistent journal writing habit. I wasn’t sure how to connect my real life to what to write so that it was more than just “surface-y” reporting the days’ events. But NOW, my friends, because of the Eternal Warriors/Mothers Who Know class developed by Aneladee Milne and Maurice Harker, I learned to write in my journal in a way that gave me Girl Power!
I have been going through a struggle for over two years now that I never would have expected to happen. Because of the following skills I have learned from the Eternal Warriors/Mothers Who Know class, I feel I can bear with this struggle/burden and not go crazy. Here are the skills I have learned that you will learn by taking the January Mothers Who Know course:
how to set goals and achieve them
how to conquer the negative voices in your head
how to overcome your “I don’t feel like following through” moments
how to write in your journal so that you achieve your goals
how to help your family set goals
how to keep track of the progress of your goals, even more than one at a time
how to master daily prayer, scripture reading, and journal writing
how to feel like a rock star in your own home!
how to get out of feeling stuck and alone
how to increase the flow of the feel good hormones of oxytocin and endorphin
I hope you sign up for the January Mothers Who Know Course! I am pushing back the starting date. It was going to be January 9 but now it is January 16. If you register by Monday January 12 midnight you can save $22 and get the early bird discount of $97!
January 2015 Mothers Who Know Class
January 16 to March 6 2015
1 to 3 PM MT
12 noon to 2 PM PT
2 to 4 PM CT
3 to 5 PM ET
for LDS Mothers Who Want to Mentor their Families to Be Addiction Proof
So Christmas is over, New Year’s is over, and we’re supposed to be back to the grind. Except I don’t want to be! This time of year is when Utah’s sun disappears and we may as well live in the North Pole. So I am posting pictures from Easter to remind me of spring, which I wish it were. For a long time last month, there was no snow. I thought maybe Phoenix, the land of my nativity, had descended upon the Wasatch Front. People were doing Christmas shopping in shorts, sandals, and no coats. Then, everyone’s dreams of a white Christmas were answered as the snow fell silently early Christmas morning. It really was magical to go to sleep with everything, besides our front yard evergreen tree, brown and drab and wake up with deep mounds of snow that looked like royal icing. So I’ve had our white Christmas and I want it to go away now. Can we just skip to the Easter egg hunt?
One thing I am doing to get me through this blue time of year is to focus on new recipes, new books, and new traditions for the coming year. Here is something that is inspiring me, I hope it inspires you. It’s a collection of ideas from LaDawn Jacob about fun family traditions.
I am also reading some Pioneer Woman books by Ree Drummond, featured below.
I first heard about Ree, a blogging and homeschooling mom who lives on a cattle ranch, when she came to Utah last year to give the keynote for the RootsTech conference. (I’ve been trying to find the video of her keynote but alas, it seems to have been taken down, whereas the other video links are found here. I am pretty sure it used to be up last spring and summer, I kept meaning to go watch the whole thing, but for some reason it’s not there anymore. Or maybe I am having a false memory.) Anyhoo, I just finished her love story, From Black Heels to Tractor Wheels. I read it to my husband on our way home from Idaho dropping off our oldest two babies at college last Saturday. It was a fun way to pass three hours of drive time. We didn’t finish the book so two nights ago my dear husband read some of it to me as a bedtime story. We’ve both been sneaking off to read it on our own as well. I finally took my bookmark out so he wouldn’t know where I was. I am sad that I finished the book today by reading it at my hairdresser’s. I want another light romance novel that is clean and the story ends after marriage and then a baby. That has a happy ending. Not Charly, because even though she has a baby, she gets cancer and dies. Anybody know of one?
Now I am perusing her holiday cookbook. It’s not a Nourishing Traditions-type/ancestral foods cookbook by any means but at least she does includes lots of real foods like butter, meat and vegetables. The color photography is making me drool and be happy that I have a kitchen and a family to cook for and a year full of holidays ahead. I will have to adjust some of the recipes to eliminate the canola oil, the white sugar, and lighten up or eliminate the grain flours, but that’s what some of my favorite blogs like Mommypotamus and The Food Renegade. It’s fun to be reminded that all of the holidays, not just Christmas, are for special food and family togetherness!
I hope you all had a marvelous Christmas! Some other time I will have to recap our holiday. It’s been wonderful sleeping in, not to mention having all my kids home this year. This is the first time in three years, since the past two years my firstborn, a son, was serving a mission in North Carolina. We’ve had fun playing new board games and eating dinner together with enlivening conversations. We also have Child #2, my oldest daughter, home from college. I love having adult children around! I have two adults besides my husband who can and will do dishes, take little ones shopping, run errands, take kids sledding and put them to bed, be a second witness to all of my motherly instructions, and spontaneously vacuum without being asked! This is motherhood nirvana, I tell you! The only thing that can top it is having grandkids.
I also love this time of year because it feels good to have an excuse for a fresh start as we clear out the old and find places for new toys, new housewares, and hopefully new routines and habits.
I have all sorts of plans for the new year, including new recipes for dinner. Here’s a video recipe of fried chicken from Melissa Gilbert’s new cookbook, My Prairie Home Cookbook. Melissa played “Laura Ingalls” in the Little House on the Prairie TV series. My 10 year old son has been asking for weeks to have fried chicken for dinner. I keep saying it’s too hard because that’s what my mother always told me when I was a kid and I would ask for it.
But the above video makes it look so easy, I think we will try it out. If you are into ancestral nutrition, be aware that it does use unsoaked wheat flour. If you have grain allergies, I wonder if substituting arrowroot flour would work? I don’t know, that stuff can get mighty gelatinous. One time I made some kind of main dish with it and the kids thought that one of the gross green globby casseroles from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip had appeared on the dinner table.
Here’s a cute video below of Melissa talking about her new cookbook. You might not want to watch with your impressionable kids, as she does show cleavage in her low-cut dress. Maybe just listen to the audio and have another tab up on your computer if the kids are around. It also takes over three minutes for the audio to start. Melissa sounds like she could be anybody’s best friend, as she is so down to earth and lives in Michigan, away from the Hollywood scene. One of my favorite lines from the video is “I am not going to try to be size 2 at age 50 anymore!” Yes, she is 50, can you believe it?
I loved hearing little tidbits about her Little House days. In the 80s, my little sisters and I enjoyed watching reruns of the show. We never could watch the original airings as they were always Monday nights during Family Home Evening time. So we caught the reruns. We even wrote to the show and got autographed (mass copied) pictures of “Laura” and her TV sisters mailed back to us. It’s funny how Melissa says that people ask her all the time to sign Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, thinking that she is actually Laura. Come on, people! How old do you think Melissa is? It reminds me of my sleuthing on ancestry.com this past year, since I found out that Almanzo Wilder is my 6th cousin 4 times removed. Somebody had posted a picture of the Little House cast and attached it to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s profile. I just hope everybody has enough sense to know that those people are not the actual Ingalls family. Another funny part of the video is when she says that one lady actually told her to her face that she “looks like Melissa Gilbert did, before she had plastic surgery.” Amazing!
I hope wherever you are today, you take a moment to read Luke 2 and ponder what it means to you, despite your circumstances. It really is amazing that the greatest power of all, God the Father, shared the gift of his perfect son so that we can be reconciled with God. We have hope, that no matter what life is like right now, it can change!!! Then share that knowledge with others by being more loving, more generous, kinder and a better steward of your time and talents. I love this video above because it shows so many people coming together to share that knowledge in the world’s largest nativity scene ever.
Here’s the video of behind the scenes. Merry Christmas!
I’ve had some trials this year that have spilled over into Christmas and threatened to make it less than merry. I know God has watched over me and given me His Son, along with many gifts, including the restoration of His church through Joseph Smith, priesthood power, and the Holy Ghost to provide me with the comfort, guidance, and peace to get through my trials. Because of all those things, I am truly blessed with a merry Christmas. I was feeling a bit of a grinch/grouch/scrooge this year but this video below restored the peace and wonder that I want to feel every year and every day. I hope you enjoy the video of this speech by a BYU professor. He’s not your typical professor, he’s funny, so watch it, especially if you feel grouchy or lonely.
I love this brand-new video of the Duggars at Christmastime! It’s interesting that for once, they don’t have something massive in their huge home for their large family. Their Christmas tree is only about two feet tall, because the tree is actually from pagan roots and they want to focus on Jesus Christ. I love that they show in this video how they all work together: the boys are doing dishes, some girls are doing the neighbor gifts, and another girl is handling all the mail and packages coming in. They set a great example to us of pulling together to lighten mom’s load at Christmas time, and of the true reason for the season. JOY comes from putting Jesus first, Others second, and Yourself last. Merry Christmas (but sometimes as a mom you have to ask for the others to put others first, including you as the others). This is the first Christmas I have turned over most of the shopping to my kids to get Santa presents for each other and it feels so wonderful! I have hardly had to do any shopping this year. I highly recommend you doing this when your kids get older and can drive!
In case you don’t have all your gifts ready, here are some last-minute gift ideas. You have one day left to buy materials and get crafting! First I have some girly ideas and then some guy ideas. Enjoy!
Here’s one for lip balm:
here’s one for a tutu:
How about some refrigerator magnets? Everybody could use more to hang up their stuff and you can use any images you can find, from old church magazines to photos of your ancestors.
I missed posting yesterday something for my countdown to Christmas, so you get two goodies for one day today!
Here’s an interesting documentary about the Bethlehem star. I haven’t done enough research to say I agree with it, but I think it’s fascinating.
The second goodie is BYUTV’s new Christmas special about Handel’s Messiah. Learn the story of how Handel created his masterpiece musical work about Jesus Christ.
As an extra treat I have another picture of the Duggars with some other people…
Photo Credit: Adam Hughes of the Hughes Brothers Band
Just who are these people with the Duggars? Can you believe it’s another MEGA homeschooling family? It’s the Hughes Family, from the Hughes Brothers Theater, in Branson, Missouri. The Hughes family is a family of entertainers who do a show at Branson: mom, dad, and six adult brothers, each with a wife and kids. They are the world’s biggest performing family, and they are LDS! My firstborn son got to meet one of the granddaughters, Kristina (she’s in the pic above, let’s see…standing to the left of the blond girl who is two people above Jackson Duggar…now you just have to know who Jackson is to find her, hee-hee). My son and Kristina met when they both tried out for the Andau scholarship for GWU three years ago. They became friends, so the following summer my son and his buddies took a road trip to Missouri to be special guests at Kristina’s family’s home and see the whole family perform.y
How cool that the Duggars and the Hughes know each other! The Duggars went to Branson last month to perform at a benefit concert, where this picture was taken. Maybe the Hughes can get the Duggars to come to Utah, where he Hughes used to live, to visit and perform! You can tell both families believe that children are a blessing from the Lord.
Here is the latest video I know of the Duggars, speaking at a Christian college in Missouri last month, sharing some secrets about being married for 30 years and raising 19 kids.
p.s. Jackson is the little boy standing two people to the left of Michelle.
Tree of Life Mothering 