Tree of Life Mothering

This is me and my husband over 19 years ago with our first baby in my Dr. Sears’ NoJo sling. Now that baby is very smart and on a mission for the LDS Church. The reason he is so smart is in part because I practiced attachment parenting with him.

Babywearing, holding, breastfeeding, and responding to your baby’s cries empathetically really matters! La Leche League and Dr. Sears have been saying this for years, and science continues to confirm this. With attachment parenting, the brain turns out what used to be biologically “normal” but now is becoming more and more rare in our society of detached parenting, crying it out, and over-relying on using pacifiers, strollers, car seats, and swings to soothe babies. Not to mention using artificial baby milk and artificial solid foods. Modern parenting is ruining our babies’ brains! Then on top of that modern America forces academics too early and doesn’t let kids have enough time in unscripted play.

You can go HERE

to the University of Notre Dame’s web site to watch the presentations from a recent symposium about the science behind attachment parenting, including one by Dr. James McKenna, a tireless advocate for cosleeping.

With the holidays over and the New Year starting, many of us are getting back into the rhythm of a school routine. January is a great time to make changes in your children’s education. I have fond memories of my dear friend who I have known for over 15 years, emailing a bunch of me and my girlfriends a year ago at this time, asking us about how to get started homeschooling.With the public school semester break coming up in the middle of January, she was ready for a change.

She had known that a bunch of use are dyed in the wool homeschoolers over the years but we didn’t pressure her into it. It was reading the Duggars book that convinced her to homeschool. Now she wanted to learn more about the “how” of doing it.  Of course, I jumped at the chance and put in my .02. Whether you homeschool or not, I urge you to watch the above video and learn about the difference between compulsory education and agency-based education and think about what you can do to implement more agency-based education in your home. The above video is by Oak Norton and gives a brief intro into what agency-based education is. I will be featuring one video a day from the Agency Based Education conference that Oak hosted lasted November. 

I am so excited this video is done! It features Maurice Harker, founder of Life Changing Services, (his super awesome blog is here) talking about why we fail at goals and New Year’s resolutions. It has an LDS perspective and is full of insights and eternal principles you have probably never heard before. He teaches how Satan changes brain chemistry to get us to do things we know aren’t good for us (insert any addiction here:  too much sugar, Internet, social media such as Facebook and Pinterest, gossiping, porn in any amount, etc.)

It is the video version of the audio that I blogged about at the end of last summer. So some of you already have it as an mp3 file because you requested I email it to you. Well, now you can watch it! I highly recommend you all watch it as a family and discuss it. Then go buy his book here

to get the “how” of how to fight Satan back and come off conqueror! This is a must-have book for every LDS parent, to help you be the victor over any self-deceptive tendencies you have (and let’s face it, we all have them, it’s part of being mortal) and how to mentor your children in being victorious as well.

We had a great teleseminar last night with Tara of Happy in the Kitchen with Tara about healing from health challenges with the GAPS diet. If you want to listen to the recording, you can go here. Follow the directions for the January 2, 2013 phone call. You can also follow the directions to download it onto your mp3 player.

It’s amazing that within 24 hours of doing this call, I got two random emails from people who didn’t know I was doing this teleseminar about more resources that talk about the importance of gut health. We moms have such tremendous power of passing on great health. We can do it before birth, through healing our gut health and then passing it on to our children through normal vaginal birth and breastfeeding. After children our born, we can protect and/our change their health through changing their gut ecology by putting them on a GAPS diet. Anybody with any of these conditions could possibly benefit from a GAPS diet.

In this Duke University study here you can read about a study that found that breastfeeding gives babies good gut flora that bottlefeeding doesn’t:

“This study is the first we know of that examines the effects of infant nutrition on the way that bacteria grow, providing insight to the mechanisms underlying the benefits of breast feeding over formula feeding for newborns,” said William Parker, PhD, associate professor of surgery at Duke and senior author of the study. “Only breast milk appears to promote a healthy colonization of beneficial biofilms, and these insights suggest there may be potential approaches for developing substitutes that more closely mimic those benefits in cases where breast milk cannot be provided.”

Then if you go over here you can listen to an interview with Dr. Tim Jackson about gut health and MTHFR. MTHFR is a disease that involves a genetic lack of an enzyme that can cause many problems. It can be involved in many diseases, such as ALS, hypothyroidism, bipolar, leukemia, heart attacks, even miscarriage. You can see a complete list of symptoms here.

So, just in case you haven’t noticed, Santa doesn’t deliver at least two things: vibrant health, and happy, fun outings with your family. Last week I involved myself in both things. The first I learned more about and the latter one I actually did, both on the same day. The first one comes from daily healthy habits and an understanding of some fun stuff called gut ecology. What I learned about gut ecology last week from my girlfriend is so drastic I am thinking of going off all grains, even whole grains.

What’s wrong with whole grains? Aren’t they the staff of life? Well, before I explain, and get ahead of myself, I want to share the events of the past week, then we will dive in to how grains can interfere with gut ecology.

Before we had our family outing and my girlfriend’s class on gut health  I had to get playing Santa out of the way. That’s one thing I’ve noticed about preventing the after Christmas let-down for me. If I have things in place that I’m looking forward to creating within the days right after Christmas, I don’t feel the post-Christmas let-down.

For the first time in my mothering career I actually fell asleep on Christmas Eve before midnight as I read to my three year old in bed after all the night before Christmas festivities were over. I woke up, fought my tired inner Scrooge, and forced myself to go do the Santa thing with dh. I wonder if any parents have ever fallen asleep exhausted on Christmas Eve thinking they would just sleep for a little bit and then forgot the whole thing. (That would be sad but I would totally relate!)

The first event I planned for after Christmas was to go sledding as a family. Every year we like to do some winter sport on Christmas Eve, but up until two days before Christmas (Christmas Adam) everything was dry and brown as Phoenix. But Christmas Eve transported us to a different world where everything was cloudy, rainy, and then snowy. Dh and I prefer to sled after the snow has accumulated, not before or during, so we promised the kids we’d go after Christmas. So we went yesterday, and these pictures are from that outing. The oldest two kids didn’t go because #1 child in on a mission for the the true church of Jesus Christ

in North Carolina and the second stayed home for some speed healing since she had a cold and sore throat and wants to be well for the Holiday Ball tonight. Thank you essential oils!

The second event was going to a class taught by my girlfriend to learn about the GAPS diet. She has a bunch of friends, now my friends, who live on the west side of my town who are getting into naturally healthy living. They totally remind me of my Veggie Gals group of girlfriends that started over 17 years ago when we were all young moms. Tara started this diet in October.

She is seeing success! She has suffered from eczema and frequent outbursts of shingles. She shared with us why she thinks she keeps getting these symptoms, based on her personal history, and how the GAPS diet has helped her.

She said that in everybody’s gut, there are these little things called enterocytes, or “ents.” They make up the epithelial layer of the gut wall. Their job is to digest disaccharides in carbohydrates. This keeps your body running great. But Things can happen that can make your gut flora unhealthy so that they can’t be good housekeepers and moms for the right amount of ents to be born and move along the ents assembly line. 

Things like: stress, overeating, sugar,  the Pill, antibiotics, and more. All these things cause the bad flora to crowd out the good flora. Then the ents are sad and sick and our bodies get sad and sick. We have undigested food particles go through our gut walls into our bloodstream. We can eat and eat and eat great things like raw food and green smoothies and superfood, but not be able to absorb it all due to the overpopulation of bad flora and the lack of healthy ents.

My girlfriend said that she read in the GAPS book, by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, that there’s even one bad gut flora guy who can absorb all your iron. I’ve been anemic in my past two pregnancies, I wonder if that was the cause.

I am starting to wonder if going on the GAPS diet would help me. Sometimes I can eat and eat, especially if I haven’t had my proper doses of coconut oil, and not feel satisfied and nourished. I invite you to come to a teleseminar to learn more about the GAPS diet, how it would benefit you and your family, how to get started, and how to have continuing support. It’s this Wednesday night, Jan 2, over the phone. Come learn about the teleseminar here.

My son finally got to go snowboarding, yay!

Do you, your kids or your husband suffer from:

ADD, ADHD, learning disabilities, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, asthma, bed wetting, thrush, being finicky eaters, chronic ear infections, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, food allergies, chronic fatigue syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, type-1 diabetes, chronic bladder infection, colic or eczema, being overweight or underweight, sudden bursts of anger, anxiety, mood swings, dark circles under the eyes, violence (against self or others)?

NO?  Then what about any of the symptoms listed HERE?

I think that laundry list covers everybody in America! Do you want to start the New Year with new knowledge to help you gain freedom from all of these symptoms so you can have full, raging health and happiness?

Then you will want to participate in this teleseminar…

Finding Health and Happiness from the GAPS Diet and Essential Oils

with Tara Kinser, mother of 6 and GAPS Diet user

(GAPS stands for Gut and Psychology Syndrome)

Wednesday January 2 2013

7 to 8:30 PM MT

6 to 7:30 PM PT

8 to 9:30 PM CT

9 to 10:30 PM ET

Dial-in Number 610 214 0000

Access Code 738747

We will be discussing how to get to the root cause of these symptoms by using natural solutions. The answer for you may be the GAPS Diet along with other natural solutions, namely essential oils. Tara has found lessening of symptoms on the GAPS Diet and is eager to share her knowledge with you. She will teach us what the GAPS diet is, who it is for, how to get started, and where to find support.

I hope you all had reason to celebrate Christmas joy and be merry despite life’s challenges. Here are my top 10 things about Christmas this year, not in any order:

1. Some generous people, of my extended family and friends, one anonymous, gave us some cash and/or gift cards, to help buy Christmas presents for our large family. Thank you generous people who have the spirit of giving! I believe in Santa, in the form of the spirit of giving.

2. We finally bought the download of the Christmas Chronicles this year. I absolutely love, love, love the story.

3. I got to hear from my missionary son through Skype thanks to the Calhoun family of Charlotte NC who hosted him on Christmas Day with a computer and Internet connection.

4. Missionary son said that even though he had only been in North Carolina for a week he had knocked on over 100 doors and some people were not too busy with Christmas prep and actually let him and his companion in to talk about Jesus Christ.

4 1/2. We had a White Christmas after all. On Christmas Adam (the day before Christmas Eve) it was brown and green with no sight of white in sight. This is the tree in my front yard and it sure looked bleak and brown on that day. Christmas Eve was perfect with snow falling, encouraging us to stay indoors and finish Christmas prep! Then Christmas Day was perfect too with new-fallen snow and sunny skies! This is what the tree looked like on Christmas Day. Thank you God for orchestrating a picture-perfect Christmas Day!

5. My potty-training three year old actually interrupted his play at his cousins’ home on Christmas Day to come tell me he needed to go potty. He uses the potty, but it’s usually at my initiation, sometimes at his. I am thrilled that he decided to tear himself away from the fun to take care of business. I am seeing progress!

5 1/2. My brother’s house has so many darling Christmas decorations. They really go all out with gingerbread houses, snowflakes on the wall and ceiling, and nativity sets.

6. My daughter got a straightening iron so now she won’t use mine, 20 minutes before church starts when we both want to use it. Here she is on her curly girl Christmas day with two of her cousins.

6 1/2.  My sourdough crepes with whipped cream and maple syrup for Christmas breakfast were delectable and a much healthier and cheaper substitution for my usual fare of toasting frozen store-bought (shhh!) waffles. The kids even thanked me for them. And my sister gave me a griddle to replace our worn out electric griddle.

7. I actually finally am getting the meaning of the story of Scrooge. A brother in our ward in sacrament meeting spoke last Sunday about how the natural man is represented by Scrooge so since we are all natural men, we all have a little bit of Scrooge as part of us. The message of Christmas is that because of Christ’s atonement we can change. I have to admit, I have felt more Scroogey this year. I found myself grumbling on Christmas Day that as usual, we have to rush off in the middle of the day to the grandparents’ house instead of being able to relax after opening presents and eating breakfast. It finally hit me that letting my kids play at their cousins is a gift I can give my kids every year at Christmas without complaining about it. Hmmm, what else can I change about my reaction to Christmas…

Then yesterday with the snow my 11 year old wanted to go play in it. I have never really liked playing in the snow. He asked me to come play with him and at first I groaned. But then I decided to swallow my inner Scrooge and play with him. A quote from the story that GWU emailed out to its mailing list helped me, plus a comment by TJED mom Heather Burton:

from Heather:

Now that Christmas is past, will I let the redemptive quality of this “holyday” move me to be better, to live more in happiness with others?

from Dickens’ Christmas Carol:

“He went to the church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and for, and patted the children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of homes, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed of any walk, that anything, could give him so much happiness.”

— Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol via George Wythe University

So I attempted to live more in “happiness with others” by playing in the snow but it was all work and no play with an ungrateful child! My 11 year old wants to build a hill to use with his new Santa present, a snowboard. Do you know how hard it is build a snow hill? God can do it in a few minutes with wind and lots of snow but it took us hours and it is less than half the the heighth of the house. (Oops, there’s my Scrooge coming out…) 11 year old boy wants it to be as tall the house so he can go snowboarding off the roof! We used a snow shovel and wheelbarrow. My son kept asking why we couldn’t go sledding after we had told him no. I reminded him how to take no answers, that we had decided to go sledding after it stops snowing. I didn’t mean to, but laying a guilt trip on him came out when I reminded him what a gift it was for his mom to be even be out there! I said I had never played in the snow with any of his siblings before (besides going sledding or ice skating). This is the first time I can remember I haven’t had a baby or toddler who needs to nurse/nap/have a diaper change as my youngest is 3 now and I could be out in the snow with kids and not feel stressed about needing to be back inside.

8. Santa brought me both a newfangled curling iron without the clip and some hair clips so I can experiment to figure out the best way to get those mermaid curls. I have attempted with my straightening iron as my daughter showed me but it just goes flat. Here’s the daughter of a girlfriend of mine with the curls I covet:

9. My pumpkin cheesecake was divine!

10. I found more Christmas audios to listen to.

11. My daughter took over my long wished-for event of having homemade Christmas presents from siblings to each other. Something I’ve wanted to do but felt stressed and short on time to do it. So she talked to all the kids and made lists and coordinated who was doing what for whom and helped them. She made her little brother a Lord of the Rings cloak and he is in love with it. Hooray!

Worst of Christmas 2012

1. The mashed potatoes tasted like glue! I thought I was being more organized and prepared and homemakey by getting three members of my family to prepare them on Christmas Eve afternoon so we could leave them in the crockpot overnight and have them be warm to take to Christmas Day dinner. This way I wouldn’t be so stressed and Scroogish about transitioning from opening presents to fixing breakfast to seeing missionary son on Skype to leaving to the relatives for more festivities. Someone of my three helpers, who will remain nameless, helped me prepare them and didn’t follow the recipe and added too much liquid. Then the someone left the crockpot on low instead of warm and started burning them several hours later. When I smelled something going crispy around 11 PM I came over to inspect and sure enough some brown was forming on the bottom so I turned it down to warm. If I were more of a Carol Tuttle type 3/red/controlling person I would have been venting about this all day! They looked so ugly and tasted so bad I was so embarrassed to have them at the family Christmas Day dinner. All my relatives were polite and nobody complained. I didn’t even want to get a picture to compare, but for the record, here are my pretty mashed potatoes from Thanksgiving that turned out perfect and photogenic:

2. The 8 year old was mad he didn’t get his sister’s Santa present so he talked her into trading and then they traded back and he’s still complaining about it.

3. Even though I had a gift card to go shopping with since late August, thanks to one of the above-mentioned generous relatives, I still procrastinated my Christmas shopping to the weekend before Christmas.

4. I didn’t follow through on my prompting to tell my son when I talked to him on the Monday before Christmas Eve when he called from the airport on his way to the mission field NOT to open the package being sent to him to the mission office until Christmas Day. It was his “fun” Christmas present, an indoor basketball foam set. He opened it at the mission office and it didn’t pass the test of mission rules and he had to leave it there in the mission home. If he had taken the box with him to his new apartment and opened it on Christmas Day he would still have it. And we wouldn’t know that we were breaking mission rules.  I just feel so bad about this, that he doesn’t have a fun present after eating all the Christmas goodies I sent him. Oh well. Things could be a lot worse. I guess I can have comfort that we’re following mission rules.

5. Christmas Day was the last time I will see my sister till summer. She is moving to Albuquerque. I hate good byes! Here she is with my parents, sibs, and dh. Notice the matching placemats? My sis in law did those with everybody’s name and baby pictures for a Christmas present for my mom one year.

6. I have decided I don’t like the fudge I blogged about earlier as much as I used. to. It’s the shredded coconut. I don’t like that I have to keep chewing the bits of shredded coconut after the fudgey part is gone. I am going to make the fudge again and leave out the shredded coconut and see how it tastes.

I’d love to hear what your best and worst of Christmas was. You can comment below.

Every year we like to watch the same movies the week before Christmas: It’s a Wonderful Life, The Muppet Christmas Carol, and The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey (yes, it’s not just a picture book, but a movie as well). OK, so this year because of lack of planning and procrastination of Christmas shopping, it’s been just one of those, and the others will have to wait until after Christmas.

But I have to admit I am ready for a new classic. I saw this in the Deseret Book catalog. It’s by the same guy, Christian Vuissa, who did the beautiful movie about LDS sister missionaries called The Errand of Angels, as well as the movie about Joseph Smith called Plates of Gold. It’s about the story behind Joseph Mohr, the creator of the classic Christmas carol, “Silent Night.” Show this movie to your kids and inspire them to be a good rebel who is willing to break unnecessary rules. Mohr went against his superiors to organize a church choir full of outcasts who sang in German instead of Latin. We already have plans for Christmas Eve, but we will be watching this sometime later this Christmas Week. You can read a review of it here.

The super news is you don’t have to buy it or call around the neighbors to see if someone has it, you can watch it for free here on BYUtv.

I don’t see my little kids sticking around to watch the whole thing, they will probably go off and play, but it will definitely hold the interest of the 12 and ups in the family. And when we are done watching it, we will watch the making of it right here.

Merry Christmas!

I went for years without letting the wonder of the Christmas Story awaken me to thinking beyond the miraculous parentage of Jesus. I guess all the presents every year overshadowed the simple wonder. But now that I am a boring adult who knows all the Santa presents that are coming, (except for that mysterious beautiful piece of wood that appeared in my living room a week ago and looked like a gorgeous new cutting board possibly made by my son and his Scout leader who teaches high school wood shop and then disappeared just as mysteriously) I can wonder about other stuff.

Just how did a star get born thousands of years after the world was created? And where is that star now? The Littlest Angel story tells us that the star came for the littlest angel’s gift to the Christ child, but there is a more scientific explanation. You can order the DVD here.

Here’s what an LDS astronomer has to say about the star of Bethlehem.

Photo Credit: celebratingholidays.com

If you don’t have a tradition yet for celebrating Christmas Eve, may I suggest the following two ideas. Growing up, I always yearned that we had a tradition for what to eat on Christmas Eve. I remember once having clam chowder but I don’t remember any other food served any other year. Christmas Day dinner was for the traditional turkey, but what could we have on Christmas Eve? I wanted some kind of set food to mark the evening as special. Well, now I have a set tradition and I hope my kids pass it on. It involves the first tradition listed below. I recently read about the second tradition and will use it this year.

You can use these ideas singly or together. I am putting these ideas out today, because you can shop for the food today and then prepare the food Monday for your Christmas Eve celebration. For those of you who are more organized than I am and have all your shopping done, I’m sorry I didn’t blog about it sooner. Next year I will put it  these ideas out earlier in the month, I promise. 🙂

1. Have a Bethlehem supper. Eat the traditional foods that Joseph and Mary would have eaten in their day, in the style they would have eaten it. Diane Hopkins has a great blog post about it here.

2. Tell the Christmas Story with food. These involve desserts so the whole activity is a great motivator for the kids to get the nighttime chores (dishes, clean up, jammies on, only don’t brush your teeth yet!) done before you settle in by the fire with Luke 2. You can get the PDF booklet pictured above by Angie Mosteller of celebratingholidays.com (a great resource for celebrating the Christian roots of our holidays) here.

This would be a great way to reach out to others with a plate of goodies and the poem, or as a way to cheer a lonely person by inviting them over and sharing the night with them. That would take more planning, maybe I will get to that next year.

I sent goodies to my missionary son using the poem for the Christmas story that Angie includes in the booklet. Or course my whole foods preferences came out and I used different recipes. I think we will tell the story on Christmas Eve with our own family using some of the treats. I suggest using substitute recipes adapting some of  the recipes from over here: GAPS holiday recipes. You could use the recipes as follows:

• an angel made out of homemade marshmallows or gingerbread
• holiday spice nuts for the nuts
• fudge made with chocolate chips or nuts for the rocky road, or fudge made with the homemade marshmallows (the recipe for fudge is in both)
• the white fudge for the snow

• for the haystacks, you got me, I just skipped that one in the poem I sent my son. I don’t know how to imitate those hydrogenated oil chow mein noodles
• a homemade marshmallow in the shape of a star
• gingerbread men for the shepherds instead of using candy canes
• for the divinity, you got me as well. I haven’t found a whole foods version of divinity yet!

The point I want to make is to make something yummy to serve with the story. It could be just one food item, or all of them. Go for it if you want to adapt or use what you have or what you are used to making, but enjoy telling the story with some kind of treats to go with it. Even just one treat served with the story would make the whole night more memorable.