Come see the movie Doctored! It will rock your health paradigm! It features the Parker Jensen family, the family who has harrassed by doctors and the state of Utah, about 10 years ago, when they refused to follow a certain medical protocol, as well as many other holistic health care advocates.
Thursday February 28th 7pm at Jordan Commons
and March 21st at 7pm at Jordan Commons
cost is $5
Do any of you want to come get some sourdough breadmaking tips face to face with one of the “Bread Geeks”? Melissa Richardson, coauthor of the above book, will be coming to Roy UT on Wed. Feb. 27 for a sourdough breadmaking class!
Here are the details:
At a private home west of the Winco in Roy UT.(Comment below if interested or email me celestia at treeoflifemothering dot com, and I will email you the address.)
Class is on Feb 27 at 10 am. Price is $10 per seat and be sure to bring a quart jar to take home yeast start. The yeast book will be available to buy for $20 (but it’s cheaper on amazon.com).
Grains for starting milk kefir and water kefir are available if interested, please let me know so the person who has them will bring them.
For years I cringed every time I bought baby wipes at the store. I didn’t like buying stuff that had unpronounceable ingredients, a sure sign of toxins, but I didn’t have a great recipe for homemade ones. The one recipe I had used baby oil, which is not healthful, and rubbing alcohol. At least I looked for wipes and was always able to find wipes without propylene glycol. But I was never able to find any without alcohol. And I wasn’t willing to buy pricey all-natural wipes at the health food store. Or go really natural and use just plain water on homemade cloth wipes that I recycled from rags by finishing the ends on my sewing machine so they don’t fray. No more, friends, no more! I have found a non-toxic recipe that is easy to make.
All Natural Baby Wipes
Mix 2 cups water with 2 T fractionated coconut oil
mix in 3 drops each of lavender and tea tree oils
(easy, just remember 2 and 2 and 3 and 3!)
Cut a roll of THICK paper towels in half. Just use your serrated bread knife and start sawing. Don’t worry, you will be able to cut through the tube! Just keep sawing! Take out the center cardboard tube and put the roll in the baby wipes container and turn the roll around to get all the moisture. Better yet, use a cylindrical plastic container and put the half paper towel roll in upright and pull the wipes from the center.
Last Friday we went sledding and had a ton of fun! I started my Mothers Who Know class two weeks ago and it has been very helpful to my family. I decided to teach them the principles that I am learning and teaching the other moms in the class. I feel the positive energy and fun from this class spreading into my family already as I share the ideas.
So I taught them one of the ideas of the class, which is that you have six goals you are working on: three of the goals you choose and three are the same for everybody, which are to read your scriptures daily, write a letter to God in your journal, and pray every morning and every night for five minutes each. There’s a lot more to the class, like how to actually fight off the negative voices in your head so you accomplish your goals, but if you want to learn more, come take the class. It’s over the phone so it doesn’t matter where you live.
I used FHE to teach my family and just taught the kids younger than 12 to pick one goal. So we are working on praying every morning, because they are already good at doing it at night. We split up into teams at FHE with a big person helping a younger person make a chart. Then I told them if they got 7 perfect days they could have a reward. I like to choose activities rather than prizes. I told them if I got seven perfect days I would take them sledding. I did get my seven perfect days last week so I took them sledding on Friday. Plus I gave myself a reward of eating some ice cream when they were all gone last night. 🙂 (Yes, I fell off the wagon on my GAPS diet but might go back on soon.)
It was so fun to hear them while they were sledding, saying, “This is awesome!” and “Yabba dabba doo!” We had the whole hill to ourselves since it was Friday morning (one of the MANY benefits of homeschooling). The place is packed on Saturdays. My little girl was singing as she sled and then hiked up the hill to sled again. We had such a great time, I want to always remember how good it felt to take a break from homeschool and have an outing that was a reward for me working on a goal and tracking it. But I’m thinking now, “This should be a reward for them accomplishing a perfect week of hitting their goal.”
I realize more than ever before how important it is to always have goals that I am working on. And to create a goal-setting culture in my family. Not just goals in our heads, but goals written on paper on a chart for all in the family to see, like we do in the class with our Girl Power calendars. It’s so important for me to check in through the day by seeing the goals on the fridge to see how I am doing and also write down my progress.
So I am seeing how I can use FHE every week, and/or weekly mentor meetings to help my kids set their goals. Today is Day 7 for the little ones, and tomorrow they get their reward for a perfect week of skyping their cousin in New Mexico.
Napoleon Hill wrote a book that just recently got published called Outwitting the Devil. In the book, Hill shares how the main goal of the devil is to get us to drift. He wants us to be half awake through life, not really thinking or aiming at anything, just moving from one stimulus to another, always reacting, never acting for ourselves. So he does things to help distract us and make us forget. Napoleon wrote this book after his hit Think and Grow Rich to explain why some people weren’t succeeding with that book. It never got published until just a few years ago, decades after his death. His wife thought it was too controversial because Napoleon shares the truth about how most organized religion and public schools teach people not to think, so that they will keep drifting. She did not want all the people affiliated with those entities to be angry about this so she told him not to publish it until after her death. Then the manuscript got passed on to his nephew, and reportedly his wife said the same thing, don’t publish this until after my death. I guess both wives are dead now because it is published. It is a very powerful book!
I can see how I have been a drifter so many times in my life. I’ve had goals and accomplished great things like graduating from a major college but many times I go through phases where I daily stray from what I really want. I can see totally that using my Girl Power Calendar, over and over, every day, for the rest of my life, is a way to keep from drifting, from straying, and accomplishing so many more great things! I imagine having pages and pages of Girl Power calendars, each one as evidence showing that I accomplished doing a certain thing for 28 days in a row. Using this calendar is one way to keep me from drifting on a daily basis.
Maurice Harker, creator of the Eternal Warriors/Mothers Who Know Course, told us in a training that his wife hasn’t missed a day of reading her scriptures or saying her prayers morning and night for over 10 years or something like that. I want to be able to say that! I want to leave a recorded legacy to my children, papers and papers, showing that I cultivated such other daily habits as:
It is so fun to dream about all the daily habits I want to master! Maybe someday when my kids have all flown the nest I will be able to do all of the above! Like reading to my grown kids over the phone, ha-ha! Maybe I will read to my grandchildren over the phone or better yet, live next door to them! What habits do you want to inculcate? This program is the answer I have wondered about for years. I remember hearing President Monson say once in General Conference:
“Where performance is measured, performance improves. Where performance is measured and reported, the rate of improvement accelerates.”
The devil wants us to think that our goals don’t matter, that it doesn’t matter if we write them down, or talk about them, but he’s wrong. It matters sooooo much to have goals, to write them down, and to report them to others. It’s the difference between achieving our dreams and not achieving them. This is the way to measure our performance and report it! I feel so happy to have found this course that I can learn from and share with others!
Saturday I had my monthly cooking class (handouts to be posted soon) and a bridal shower for my cousin’s daughter, pictured above. Wow, I am feeling sooooo old with a son on a mission and with children of cousins getting married. One of the guests gave the new bride this darling apron made out of a man’s dress shirt. To make it more feminine, add rick rack like in the photo. What a great idea! I found instructions here.
And here are more photos of the shower. As you can see, we had fun! It was so great to see some cousins I haven’t seen in such a long time.
Little baby T was so cute!
Want to make some healthful Valentine’s Day treats? Out of something besides white glue (flour) and artificial colors?
How about some healthful cut-out sugar cookies? Here’s one. I didn’t get a picture of them with the pretty, naturally pink frosting, sorry, but they were good!
How about some marshmallow popcorn balls? Go here or some homemade peppermint patties? Enjoy!
I am so weary of this dreary weather! I brightened my family’s day with these completely natural chewy fruit snacks and you can too. The recipe is at the end.
In my mothering career that has now spanned almost 20 years, I’ve often felt a bit alone. I am a mother who has never been big on fruit snacks. I should clarify that, I’m not talking about using fruit as snacks, but the bite-size gummy things that quite presumptiously pass themselves off as real food. Maybe it’s just because I don’t really like gummy things, unless they are gumdrops. Maybe because I don’t like fake food full of the following:
Corn syrup, sugar, modified corn starch, juice from concentrate, fruit purees, citric acid, lactic acid, natural and artificial flavors, sodium citrate, gelatin, coconut oil, carnauba wax, red 40, yellow 5 and blue 1.
The food dyes alone are enough to give any conscious parent the heebie-jeebies! Here’s what Huffington Post says about it:
The food colorings found in fruit chews are red 40, yellow 5 and blue 1. Red 40 and blue 1 were originally manufactured from coal tar, but are now mostly made from petroleum. Those two colors have been banned previously in many European countries including Denmark, Belgium and France, though are now widely used in countries belonging to the European Union. Despite their attention in Europe, they’ve been used in the U.S. without too much resistance.
Yellow 5, however, is a different story. This food coloring, also know as tartrazine, has been known to cause serious allergic reactions (particularly for people who are allergic to aspirin). In 2008, the Food Standards Agency issued a warning about yellow 5 causing hyperactivity in some children. And according to board certified family physician Dr. Joel Fuhrman, yellow 5 poses risks of cancer.
A month ago at one of our church meetings, this little girl sitting in front of us, turned around and proceeded to eat a huge ziploc bag full of “fruit snacks,” just two feet away from my little 3 year old’s face. The look on his face was so heart-tugging. Her mother was fully aware and sat there grinning, not having the sensitivity to encourage her daughter to either turn around or offer to share.
If she had offered to share them with my son, I would have cringed but let him have it anyway. I wish I had had some of these homemade fruit snacks to share with him instead. I just found out about this recipe from Robin over at thankyourbody.com. They are full of four basic things: real fruit juice, real, pureed fruit, gelatin, and honey. Simple, basic, and real! Thank you Robin! Just click on the link to get to her recipe. The ones I made in the picture above have pureed peach and orange juice. You could even add essential oils to them, lemon or orange! Yum!
Mothers Who Know
A Book of Mormon-based Addiction Prevention Mentoring Course for LDS Moms
over the phone
Friday afternoons
March 8 to April 26, 2013
2 to 4 PM MT
1 to 3 PM PT
3 to 5 PM CT
4 to 6 PM ET
for LDS Mothers Who Want to Mentor their Families to Be Addiction Proof
The Book of Mormon-based principles used in this course, when applied, will help any mother to minimize self-betrayal tendencies, so she can succeed at daily habits and goals. She can also then mentor her children to be self-disciplined, which is necessary for staying away from addictions. The Book of Mormon as Pres. Benson said, was written for our day, for so many reasons. I am convinced that one reason was to teach us how to fight battles against satan, not just physical battles, but the battles he starts in our heads.
As I’ve pondered the porn epidemic that is sweeping our world as a plague, I am convinced that as mothers, we must fight back with a deep knowledge of his tactics. We must fight back by arming ourselves with more knowledge of how satan works at getting anyone addicted to anything from as young of age as possible. he wants to get us addicted to sugar, food, video gaming, screen time in general (Netflix, YouTube, social media, DVDs) yelling, getting angry, gossiping, reading fluff books, talking negatively, depression, anxiety, complaining, alcohol, drugs, and of course, porn, the king of addictions.
G.K. Chesterton once said, “Woman is the center and pillar of health.” This applies as much to physical health, in terms of preparing nourishing food for our families, as it does to mental and spiritual health. Addiction prevention starts in the home, and it starts with mothers: mothers who know what moral decency is, mothers who know how satan works to lower our standards of decency, and mothers who know how to fight satan and how to teach their children to fight satan and come off conqueror.
Do you want to be a Mother Who Knows? Do you want to be equipped with full knowledge of satan’s brain chemical warfare so you can teach your family how to kick his fanny? Then join us for this course!
Cost: $197. This includes a journal, Maurice Harker’s book, Like Dragons Did They Fight (pictured above), DVD, and 16 hours of phone mentoring. You pay $147 to Tree of Life Mothering and $50 to Life Changing Services to order the journal, book and DVD. We will meet once a week for two hours, in a phone conference call, at the times above, for eight weeks. If you register by Mon. Feb. 25 you get the early bird discount price of $97 for the course.
Register by going to paypal.com and paying $147 (or $97 if done by midnight Feb. 25) to info at treeoflifemothering dot com. (Put the @ and the dot in the right places, I wrote it that way to prevent web bots from harvesting my email address.)
Payment installments are available! Send me an email to info at treeoflifemothering dot com or call 801-544-7548 for payment or registration questions.
When you are registered, I will then send you the link to the online classroom and information on ordering the journal and DVD.
The course is written by Maurice Harker, a licensed therapist, founder of Life Changing Services.Here is his description of the Like Dragons They Did Fight book:
This book bravely bridges the gap between the Spiritual and the Temporal (physical) factors of addiction and addiction recovery. It pulls the essential elements of many psychological theories and fits them into an eternal paradigm as can only be seen through the eyes of those who are inspired by God. The reader will be taken on a journey from seeing the battle from high in the heavens down to the gritty and sweaty clashing of swords a warrior must experience day to day. We live in a time when many are in bondage before they are aware that there is a war. As with many examples in world history, one cannot get out of bondage with just will power and thought control. Warriors must be trained, and then trained some more, in the classroom and on the field. They must learn, how to escape the bondage they find themselves in, as did warriors thousands of years before:
You can watch his video below, which gives a basic intro into his amazing insights into how satan works. His mission is to help LDS young men recover from porn addictions especially before their LDS missions or if they are sent home from a mission. For help for your son and porn addictions, go here. There is help and hope! These principles that Maurice draws from the Book of Mormon apply not just to porn and masturbation addictions, but to all self-betrayal and addictive tendencies. If your son attends the porn addiction class, either online anywhere over the globe, or in person in Farmington, Utah, it would be great for you to do this class for mothers so you are learning the principles alongside your son.
I love that Maurice teaches that the root word psych does not mean “brain” but “spirit.” He says modern-day psychologists are like blindfolded dartthrowers. Lasting change to come off as victor over satan doesn’t just come from understanding the brain, but the spirit.That’s what this course is all about, how to connect you with God more and fight satan back. Let the conquering begin!
Every Sunday I am going to attempt to post a video illustrating LDS Church history, doctrine, and perspective. Here’s the movie the LDS Church produced about the prophet Joseph Smith.
Tree of Life Mothering 