I just got wind of this, otherwise I would have spread the word sooner. Today’s the last day! It’s a bundle of more than 35 books about increasing fertility, natural childbirth, breastfeeding, whole foods eating, elimination communication, herbs, and natural baby care. I think you will like it, click here to buy.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640
Congratulations to Anna Duggar on the birth of her baby, Marcus Anthony on Sunday June 2! TLC will air the show about the birth tomorrow on Father’s Day.
This group of gals provides the environment that I wish every woman could have! We can talk about anything and feel loved. Here we are last week at our what-used-to-be-monthly-but-isn’t-now gathering. Some of us have known each other for over 15 years. We have cried with each other, supported each other, and watched each other grow through trials of motherhood and wifehood. It started through some of us meeting through La Leche League. We started meeting for dinner or lunch because one of us didn’t want to meet at a restaurant because she wanted to avoid any evil ingredients a restaurant might serve. So in the true spirit of DIY and Mormon self-reliance, we do potluck. We called our group “Veggie Gals” because we wanted to eat healthy whole foods, which generally means eating more vegetables.
Our hostess, Miss J, lovely, talented mother of nine, had everything ready for when we arrived. She has always been the hostess with the mostest! She has the most incredible backyard with a zip line that the kids have always loved playing on.
One of us is suffering from Parkinson’s disease so we learned what she is doing to heal from that. It was very interesting to hear her story. I don’t agree with her that all bacteria are bad and cause disease. I have read different writings that say that good bacteria is needed in the gut to be healthy, namely probiotics.
I am interested, however, in learning more about her point of view. Two of us are moving to Japan and Oregon, so this was a rare moment in time to have us all together. Two of us are grandmothers now which is very strange as we started meeting when we had babies and toddlers.
Here’s “Grandma B” (she’s the same age as I am!) with her new grandbaby and Miss S, totally laughing it up!
Miss R brought the prettiest dessert that is also good for you with a secret ingredient.
Thanks ladies for the lovely day! I wish we could live on the same street!
I am giving away one registration to the June session of my Mothers Who Know Class. It starts Wed. June 26th, at 1 PM over the phone! This morning at my Hebrew alphabet hike we were talking about Sister Julie Beck’s talk that she gave a few years ago called The Lioness at the Gate. Here is the talk she gave at the BYU Women’s Conference, but I heard that that version is not as good as the one she gave at the regional conference. You can read a summary of it here. That talk is what this Mothers Who Know class is all about. Which makes sense, since Sister Beck also wrote the talk that popularized the phrase “mothers who know.” Being a lioness at the gate, or a mother who knows, takes commitment and training. You can get more of these things from our class. So if you have been wanting to join the class, enter the giveaway below! Winner will be announced on Monday June 24th around 5 PM! The details of the class are right over here
This picture is of me with my youngest baby, under the blanket, nursing for the first time, minutes after his birth. I love to hear birth stories! One of these days I will put my birth stories up on this web site. I just read this beautiful story of a mom who gave birth to twins and was told by the doctor that one of them didn’t make it. This mom refused to accept that. She started stroking the baby, talking to him, and cuddling him skin-to-skin, also known as “kangaroo care.” She expressed some of her colostrum and fed it to him on her finger. Miraculously the baby came to life! He had been dead for two hours! Such is the power we have moms! Sometimes, it’s true, we can’t change things, even sad things like death, but sometimes we are told in our heart by God not to listen to authorities and trust in the power of our motherly abilities to pull a child from either literal or figurative death. Never forget that moms! You go, girls!
I recently had the pleasure of immersing myself in the Waldorf education world. It was such a peaceful, lovely day! When I was a young mom, meaning my oldest child was 4, I investigated different educational philosophies. I fell in love with the Waldorf education model, which was developed by Rudolf Steiner. I started out using the Oak Meadow curriculum, which is Waldorf-inspired homeschooling guides.
I didn’t know anybody else doing Waldorf, so I fell off the bandwagon. It seems like something that is best done with a culture around you doing it as well. I kept on with homeschooling, and that boy who inspired my search is now on a mission for the LDS Church. I am still homeschooling his younger siblings, and I recently got reinspired to do some Waldorf stuff with them. I am so excited to find out that Waldorf education is a blossoming movement here in Utah.
By the hand of Providence, I met someone in charge of the Utah Waldorf Conference last month and she invited me to the conference that was held last week. We had so many connections, mutual interests and friends, it was fascinating. When I got to the conference, the atmosphere was so incredibly peaceful and loving when I walked into that room. The two presenters just exuded love. I had so much fun trying my hand at all those Waldorf crafts I had read about years ago: wet on wet watercolor painting, beeswax modeling, and using block crayons. This was a dream come true! Thank you Krystelle for inviting me!
Last year, Melisa Nielsen, a homeschool Waldorf Curriculum writer, moved to Utah. She has many great podcasts, curriculum by grade, a Waldorf homeschool training course, and other great information on her website at:
Other Waldorf homeschooling curriculum can be found at:
Live Education! http://www.live-education.com/
Christopherus–http://www.christopherushomeschool.com
Some videos on Waldorf Education:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auPFtjKfqTo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZmAX5adCl0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp5I10ehMVc&feature=youtu.be
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PBonIM3_IQ
f you’d like more information about the Cottage Schools and the Utah Waldorf movement, join the Utah-Waldorf Facebook group! See you there!
My friend Becky Edwards has created a super-duper packet of handouts with her latest and greatest tips for organizing. She shared it at the Moms’ Renewal Retreat hosted by another friend Tammy Ward last month. I am determined this summer to get a lot more organized! Every morning that we are home, my nonscholar children and I are going to tackle one closet, one room, one cupboard at a time. I am so excited!
Click on the link below to download her packet!
2013 Eight Systems of an Organized Homeschool.pdf
You can also check out her blog here for organizing, (where all these pictures came from, not from my home) and her motherhood blog here.
Thank you Becky! Now excuse me while I go get organized! When fall starts my home will look like this!
When I was young, making homemade French fries ranked right up there with the same mysteries as to why Elvis had to get fat and die so young, how our neighbor down the street made her Christmas neighbor treat of sugar-coated cheese puffs, why my mom couldn’t have any more babies, and how do Santa’s reindeer fly. How and why? I wanted to know!
As I got older, I wondered why things that taste good have to be bad for you. I felt so sorry for my friend’s dad who was told he had had high cholesterol and he was forever banned from things that taste good. Everything for him was low or no fat, which translates into, NO TASTE! For years, we have heard that to be healthy we have to avoid things like beef and butter and whole cream and bacon and French fries cooked in real fat! Everything that was naturally yummy was supposedly bad for us. No more friends, no more! The truth has come out! Whole fat made by God, found in nature, is one of the best things you can eat!
The great folks at the Weston A. Price foundation have been telling us for years the TRUTH, as witnessed by the book, Eat Fat, Lose Fat, by Mary Enig PhD and Sally Fallon. And now more people are hopping aboard, like the heart surgeon In this article.
Yes, folks, it’s the high white sugar, high vegetable oil fake foods that are slowly killing you!
I made these French fries pictured above and they were so good! I fried them in beef fat, which I collected after I made some beef broth. These fries were so yummy that I didn’t even need to eat them with ketchup. Did you know that McDonalds used to make fries out of beef tallow? They stopped because of the public pressure to use “healthy” partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. It’s these kinds of oils that are bad for you, as they contribute to atherosclerosis.
So make some fries with your burgers this summer and enjoy every last salty, fatty, crispy, potatoey bite! Here is the recipe. I did not use specifically beef tallow, just beef fat that I had saved from making beef broth. Tallow is the fat around the kidney. It still worked!
If you’ve ever struggled with a sugar addiction, you will want to be on this call.
Tuesday June 4, 2013
7 PM MT
8 PM CT
9 PM ET
6 PM PT
Call 610-214-0000, use access code 738747 and you’ll be there! We will discuss diet changes and essential oil usage to ELIMINATE sugar cravings and sugar addiction.
Our Sunday School blog post for today involves a lesser-known person from LDS Church history, Zerah Pulsipher. He has the claim of fame of being the missionary who brought the restored gospel of Jesus Christ to Wilford Woodruff, who became the fourth president of the LDS church. He is also my fifth great grandfather.
Here is what a web site, moroni10.com, has to say about him:
Zera Pulsipher was born in Vermont on June 24, 1789, to John and Elizabeth Pulsipher. His father, John, and his grandfather, David Pulsipher, were veterans of the Revolutionary War. His father and grandfather fought side by side together at the battle of Bunker Hill. When Zera turned 21 he married Polly Randall and had one daughter. Unfortunately, his wife died less than a year after they married.
Zera was a very spiritual person and had several notable experience. One such experience occurred shortly after the death of his wife in 1811. According to his account:
“After the death of my wife I had some anxiety about her state and condition, consequently in answer to my desires in a few weeks she came to me in vision and appearing natural looked pleasant as she ever did and sat by my side and assisted me in singing a hymn – beginning thus: “That glorious day is drawing nigh when Zions Light Shall Shine.” This she did with a seeming composure. This vision took away all the anxiety of my mind concerning her in as much as she seemed to enjoy herself well.”
In 1815, he met and married Mary Brown, with whom he reared eleven children.
Zera was first introduced to the Book of Mormon in 1831. He was living in Pennsylvania, and was attending a Baptist church. He heard the pastor say something about a “gold bible” that had been discovered. He said that the words hit him like a shock and he had a desire to learn more about it. In the fall of that same year a missionary came to his area with a Book of Mormon and preached to groups. Zera interviewed the missionary about the book and about the Gifts of the Spirit. The missionary told the group that he had prayed and received a confirmation about the truth from the Holy Spirit and that all were entitled to the same. He prayed fervently for seven days to learn the truth. He gives this account on what happened on the seventh day:
“I think about the seventh day as I was thrashing in my barn with doors shut, all at once there seemed to be a ray of light from heaven which caused me to stop work for a short time, but soon began it again. Then in a few minutes another light came over my head which caused me to look up. I thought I saw the angels with the Book of Mormon in their hands in the attitude of showing it to me and saying “this is the great revelation of the last days in which all things spoken of by the prophets must be fulfilled.” The vision was so open and plain that I began to rejoice exceedingly so that I walked the length of my barn crying Glory Hal-la-lu-ya to the God and the Lamb forever.”
Okay, so he didn’t actually see the plates, but I think seeing angels holding the Book of Mormon and bearing testimony of it is close enough. Following his experience he shared the experience with the people of his church and declared that he was going to join the “Church of Latter-day Saints”. A large body of the congregation followed and were baptized along with him.
In 1833 he went on a mission converting and baptizing several people, including Wilford Woodruff, who would later become the 4th President and Prophet of The Church. Zera followed the church from New York, to Ohio, to Missouri, and all the way to Utah. He was ordained and set apart as the President of the Quorum of Seventy in Kirtland, Ohio, and would later become a patriarch in Utah. He died January 1, 1872, in full membership in the church.
References:
Zera Pulsipher Autobiography, BYU Special Collections
Lyndon W. Cook, The Revelations of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p.270
Tree of Life Mothering 