Tree of Life Mothering

OK, so this isn’t a Christmas picture book. It doesn’t exactly fit in with the countdown of picture books I am doing here on my blog. But I just had to share it will of you. I found it at my public library last week and I am so happy I found it!

I started reading it Sunday night and I was hooked! I had to force myself to go to bed after reading “just one more.” These aren’t your typical saccharine sweet stories. Some of these stories are heart-warming, some are joyful, and some are downright sad. Like the story that Elder Vaughn J. Featherstone shares about his childhood Christmases, living with the burden of an alcoholic father. One year all Vaughn wanted for Christmas was an overcoat. He asked for it and didn’t get it. I like that this book has stories like that because it shows that despite disappointments at Christmas, life moves on, and we do too. We have heartaches and learn and grow. Because of the Christ in Christmas, things will eventually be all right.

Another sad story is told by Elder Dallas Merrell, who shares that his baby daughter at 2 months died of SIDS on Christmas Day. I can’t imagine having such a tragedy associated with Christmas! Yet, Elder Merrell’s wife eventually found solace. Get this book and read the whole story. It will definitely bring the spirit of Christ into your heart and home as you read the stories aloud for FHE, bedtime, or mealtime.

Merry Christmas!

We recently got this game for our homeschooling closet on the recommendation of a friend. So by putting it in my closet, that means we can only use it during homeschool time (the time between when the little kids and I get the breakfast dishes done and the time we eat lunch). I thought it would be fun to tell you about it and count that as a toy review for Christmas too.

The game is Tell Tale Fairy Tales. It’s a small round tin filled with brightly colored cards. Each card has a different image on each side. For the basic game, each player gets 6 cards, and then the player tells a story using the six images. I give it 5 out of 5 stars. I mean it’s not a super exciting game, but it’s still fun. I played it with my 4 and 7 year olds. I can see that if I played it with more people and maybe older people, it might evoke more chuckles, especially if you used inside jokes or cultural references that older people “get.”  I have never thought of myself as a storyteller but this game made me discover that I do have one inside me. I thought it would be hard to come up with a story but it was not only fairly easy but fun, and as a bonus, I made sure I had a little moralizing in there as well. I like that the game is so compact and little. You could easily take it on trips and play in the car or on the plane. It’s not a flashy game, but it encourages the oldest form of entertainment, stories, and I am all for that. I think we as a culture are just beginning to scratch the surface of the power of stories. i am all for anything that encourages storytelling, and when it can be used to bring a family closer together and have fun at the same time, while encouraging brain flexing, that’s even better. This game would make a great stocking stuffer, although you might have to take it out of the packaging to tuck it in a stocking.

This week has been so busy…I  haven’t blogged much. I am sooooo happy to report that this stage of motherhood I am in is the best! I no longer have to do any Christmas decorating. I just say the word, after the kids have been begging all Thanksgiving Day week to get out the Christmas tree and all the decorations, and poof! The Christmas tree goes up along with everything else. The best part is, my 18 year old daughter capably cleaned up the mess of getting everything out. I utterly love having responsible, older children! This is the earliest our tree has ever been up, before Dec. 1!

I am going to see if I can blog every day about a picture book for Christmas and a game for your gift lists. So here goes. The book pictured above gets 5 out of 5 stars from me. It’s a cute book about a mouse who lives in a hole in the wall, and he stumbles upon a nativity set in the living room of the home he lives in. He finally figures out what it’s all about when he hears the Christmas story. The pictures aren’t cartoony, something I don’t like in picture books, and I like that it focuses on Christ.

The Bread Geek is coming to Davis County! She’s the coauthor of the following book:

When my mom asked me what I wanted for my birthday last year, I told her I wanted this book, written by Melissa, aka The Bread Geek. I have loved learning from it and using it. In case you don’t know, “natural yeast” is the same thing as sourdough. If you used to think that sourdough is some quaint food that only belongs to people long ago or to San Francisco, get this book. You will get an education about the dangers of whole grains that aren’t properly prepared. Even whole wheat, not properly prepared, is not good for you.

The way to properly prepare whole wheat is to soak it, sprout it, or sour it using natural yeast or some other souring agent. At the class I attended last winter, the lady hosting the class claimed that her husband, who had been diagnosed with celiac disease a few months ago, could actually eat the wheat bread she made using Melissa’s recipes. That’s the power of natural yeast? You make think that since you aren’t celiac it’s OK to keep eating wheat, but did you know that commercial yeast can be highly allergenic? It can cause health problems we are not aware of at first, but can lead to problems down the road.

As Melissa said in the class I attended, “If it takes a lab to create it, it takes a lab to digest it.” I used to take such pride in making my whole wheat bread years ago, not knowing that it wasn’t truly natural since I was using commercial yeast. Come learn how to make truly all-natural, completely wholesome whole wheat bread with natural yeast! Natural yeast is simply flour and water mixed together with the right consistency, and then left to go slightly sour. This book by Melissa explains all the whys and hows about it. If you want all the chemistry and science behind it, it’s there. It’s also a cookbook, and it’s full of lots of bread recipes, along with recipes for rolls, flat bread, waffles, pancakes, cinnamon rolls, even chocolate cake! There’s an art to using natural yeast to make these delicious goodies so come learn how!

Wed. Dec. 11 at 10:30 am

Clinton UT

Tara Kinser’s home

text 801-628-8753 to get the address

$10 for the class, another $10 for a book. 

Everyone needs to bring a jar to take a start.

DATE CHANGE!

Come one, Come all,

to a

Victorian Christmas Charity Ball

Do, do, come join us!

For the whole family

on

Monday, December 16th

Thursday December 19, 2013

7:00 to 10:00 pm

Admission: one can of (non-expired) food per person

Location: the LDS Chapel at

6100 S Kamas Dr Taylorsville, Ut. 84129

Come dressed in grand Holiday attire

Think Anne of Green Gables, Dickens, Jane Austen and the like.

(Or, if you’re not up to it, Sunday best will do in a pinch 😉

The kids lined up with their cousins, ready to dive in for the feast at Grandma’s!

I had such a lovely Thanksgiving Day! It was full of surprises. Here are the highlights:

As we went over the freeway and through the billboards to Grandma’s house (about an hour’s drive) I read aloud in the car the story pictured above. I’ve always used the picture book in past years. This year I was delighted to find out there’s more to the story, as I read the complete story, downloaded free from the Internet, since it’s in the public domain. The complete story is even more delightful! Louisa May never fails me with her wholesome stories of childhood. You can read it here or listen to it for free here.

We will be reading the complete version every year.

This was my first Thanksgiving ever that I’ve been able to feel satisfied with just one helping of food! This high-fat, low carb diet is working. I drank my dairy-free coconut milk egg nog as part of my Thanksgiving dinner, and that made it so I didn’t want more! The cauliflower “fauxtatoes” were delicious, even though dear husband thought I put in too much garlic. That’s OK, he had the regular mashed potatoes that my daughter whipped up to nosh on.

My daughter and her cousin surprised us with “whipped cream artistry” as they decorated the pies.  She made a stevia sweetened pumpkin pie for me. It didn’t quite turn out. There’s something about stevia and salt in the same recipe. The salt seems to stand out more with stevia in it. We will keep experimenting! Anyone know a good stevia-sweetened pumpkin pie recipe we can fix for Christmas? This ketogenic diet I am on doesn’t allow for honey. It might not even allow for pumpkin but I am not ready to give up pumpkin pie on the holidays!

Here’s a close-up:

Yum, dig in!

After pie, my son entertained with his rendition of Studio C’s Marco Polo episode. If you haven’t watched, you’ve got to, it’s so hilarious!

So I am not giving away any iPads for $90, but I will give you my favorite Black Friday sale. It’s not for essential oils, baby slings, or real food cooking classes. It’s Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom. I gave you his wife’s Thanksgiving turkey recipe a few days ago. Now it’s time to pass on his deal: registration for his Liberty Classroom! Get 35% off if you enroll today! It’s $64 instead of $99 for a year’s access to videos and audios where you lean real U.S. history, world history, and economics from a liberty-based, free market perspective!

Here’s more, copied from the Liberty Classroom home page:

At LibertyClassroom.com, one subscription gets you access to eight courses – and we add more every year. Imagine learning the real thing in courses like these:

• Constitutional History of the U.S.
• John Maynard Keynes: His System and Its Fallacies
• Austrian Economics: Step by Step
• Introduction to Logic
• Western Civilization to 1500
• Western Civilization Since 1500
• U.S. History to 1877
• U.S. History Since 1877

Every course is available for download at your convenience, in both video and audio according to your preference. You’ll also find recommended readings, Q&A forums where you can get your questions answered by the experts, and a monthly live Q&A session where faculty take your questions in real time.

So go HERE to get the coupon code and register today!

Happy learning in liberty!

                                                (Photo credit: Heather Woods)

So I was listening to the Tom Woods Radio Show today and got to hear Tom’s wife share her uh-MAZ-ing recipe for a perfect Thanksgiving turkey. For those of you who don’t know, Tom Woods is a liberty-supporting author who happens to have a Master’s and PhD in history from Harvard but who hasn’t been brainwashed by the mainstream media. I read his book pictured below and learned a ton that I didn’t learn when I passed the U.S. history AP exam in high school.

He is a big supporter of Ron Paul and nullification and free-market economics. So far I have loved everything I’ve read or heard by him.

Anyway, apparently his wife is into Primal cooking and has a blog! Go here to see it and get the turkey recipe! She says you don’t need to brine the turkey, contrary to the video recipe I shared yesterday. She also says to throw away your turkey baster, you don’t need it to make a juicy turkey. What are her secrets? Click on the above link to find out!

I would love to hear all of your secrets as to how to make a perfect turkey! Please comment below.

I can’t believe that 18 years ago, I was spending Thanksgiving week having a baby and then being so engorged with breastmilk that I could hardly sit up for a proper Thanksgiving Dinner! My daughter “Virtue” was born 18 years ago the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. It was my first natural birth, a Bradley birth. Let’s just say I got a new respect for the forces of nature after birthing her. Whew! I am so happy she came into my life. She has been easy to raise and so helpful and cheerful and wonderful. I can hardly believe that 18 years of childhood have gone and she is now going to fly the nest and go to college in January. She fixed low carb ice cream for me on my birthday this year and then four days later I fixed some non-white sugar-free ice cream for her.

This year it is certainly different. I am not postpartum or engorged, and the baby is grown up and is helpful! She has volunteered to fix my delegated portion of the Thanksgiving Dinner: a salad and mashed potatoes. I am also going to ask her to fix cauliflower faux mashed “potatoes” for me.Click here for the recipe we are going to try!

Here is a promising recipe for the best turkey ever! Maybe I can convince my mom to do it this way. The chef in the video has cooked a turkey for 25 years. He says the secret is brining.

Now, what about the pie? Keep scrolling down…

Go here for last year’s recipes. Yum! The one pictured above is grain-free because it has no crust! That makes it easy! No searching for an alternative crust, just go without. I will use that trick again this year! 

This video shows State Senator Aaron Osmond of District 10 in Utah, describing his proposed legislation for the next Utah legislative session. His bill purports to end compulsory education in Utah, replacing it with “agency-based education.” He presented this information at the Agency-based Education Conference two weeks ago, which was held in Lehi, Utah.

I feel Senator Osmond cares about people, and wants what is best, but he is misguided. He says that the parent is the #1 person in charge of a child’s education. If that is so, why, Senator Osmond, are you proposing that the state get involved in testing the child every year to see if the child is on “grade level”? He proposes that if the child is not at grade level, the state will require the parents to pay for “remedial tutoring.” If the parents don’t do this, the state will take the parent(s) to court. Then I suppose if the parents are found negligent, the child will be taken away by the state. I usually don’t get sarcastic, so excuse me while I do so.  Yeah, that really sounds like the parents are in charge. 

Here is some news for Senator Osmond and other draconian law pushers: yes, there are some people who neglect their children and don’t do anything to help their kids get a good education. It is OK for parents to fail at their responsibility! It is OK for kids to fail! Government does not need to get involved. Please trust the natural consequences of failure! Please trust relatives, neighbors and the local community to step in and help people who fail, if the people who fail, including children, ask for it. Failure and natural consequences are principles of life, being at grade level isn’t. Please don’t force help and remediation.

This proposed legislation gives the government more control and parents less control. If you live in Utah, please urge your state senators and reps to vote no on this bill. It is doublespeak! Senator Osmond, I invite you to read Uncle Eric’s books by Richard Maybury. We don’t need more government regulations! If this is his version of “agency-based education” I fear what his version of compulsory education is!

If you take the time to watch the video, please tell me what you think by commenting below.