Years ago, Oliver DeMille ended up being asked at the last minute to speak at a homeschool convention here in Utah because the keynote speaker died unexpectedly in a freakish accident up Provo Canyon the Monday before the Saturday convention. She was Mollie Hobaugh- Sorenson. She wrote a book called A More Perfect Union. It applies the principles of good government that our Founding Fathers set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to parenting. I am delighted to find out that the book, A More Perfect Union, is available for free online.
and on the same page get her other book about teaching virtue and chastity, called The Forgotten Virtue. It gives reasons why people should live the law of chastity. Here is what Mollie wrote about the second book:
This writing project seemed like “the impossible dream”–to write a rationale showing the benefits of moral virtue–or chastity–and expect anyone out there to read it. Especially, since it has become the forgotten virtue in our society. Over and over I was told that I was being totally unrealistic to expect hormone high youth to even read it. However, this author is happy to report: the impossible dream is slowly coming true. Youth are reading it–some being paid by their parents, others being mandated by their teachers, but the comments have been so rewarding! One college teacher sent the book report comments to me; here’s a sampling: “I could read this book over and over again and find many new insights that I missed the first time. I wish I could have read it in junior high.” “The most important message that I received from this book is that sex is a beautiful gift that God created for a husband and wife to give to each other to bring happiness and passion to a marriage.” “My opinion, it has to be taught in all schools around the world. All kinds of people need to know more about this very important issue and the book ‘The Forgotten Virtue’ is one of the best.” (This comment came from a Russian student.) Here’s my favorite, “My parents always wanted me to remain sexually pure, this I’m sure of. But they never told me any reasons why. . .this is the first book that has offered me good explanations that make sense.” The good news:youth are actually reading it, but more important they are seeing/understanding/appreciating the virtue that was tossed out by their society. Final comment: This book is for all ages, but I wrote it especially for the teenager. Would love to hear your comments.
Here is a Salt Lake City news article about a couple who was able to become pregnant by learning about Natural Procreative Technology. That’s basically NFP, or natural family planning, to achieve pregnancy. They saved thousands of dollars by going that way instead of doing IVF. I love hearing stories like this one! If I could go back to school to get my PhD, I would study how many couples I could help get pregnant by teaching them about fertility diets and NFP. That would be so much fun!
Last week was a big week for us. Honor attended a economics seminar in Salt Lake City sponsored by FEE, the Foundation of Economic Education. See http://fee.org. It was called Freedom Academy I, FEE is all about promoting free market economics. I took him to the Univ. of Utah for that on on Monday and on the way home met with someone to buy a used cell phone, to replace the one that got dunked at Seven Peaks water park with me. Then on Thursday though Saturday I got to go to LEMI training to learn how to mentor the LEMI scholar project called Sword of Freedom, which is a class about the war between the states. I will write a separate post later to capture some of my nuggets and epiphanies.
I got to pick up Honor from his seminar and take him to the Sword training and then take him back to the U. for his seminar. I was a little nervous about putting him in a place with strangers. It worked out OK. He had lots of missionary opportunities to answer questions about the gospel. One of the afternoons they had free time to go sightseeing. Some of the kids, including Honor, went to Temple Square.
Here’s Valor at the end of LEMI training, after I picked him up from the FEE seminar. It looks like this picture was taken in a shopping mall, but it’s not. It was taken where LEMI training was held in the downtown SLC public library. It’s a pretty fancy looking library. I hope it actually has books worth reading. They kept us so busy with training and homework that I didn’t have time to check. .
The seminar was free. FEE paid for all housing and meals. Valor stayed all week and learned all these cool things. I asked him to tell me some of the things he learned. He said he learned that the Great Depression was not caused by the free market. He said it was caused because of all the new money introduced by the Federal Reserve, which got started in 1913. OK, so far I really like what I am hearing. This is stuff you don’t hear in your typical high school history textbook.
Lawrence Reed was one of the speakers. He gave a presentation about men and women of character, titled, “How to Make a Difference in the World.” Some of these people included Thomas Clarkson, Grover Cleveland, and a guy whose name my son couldn’t remember. This guy went on a trip to Czecoslovakia during the 1930s. While there he encountered some Jewish German refugees. This man went back to England and worked to get these Jewish people out. He was able to get over 700 people out into England and Sweden before Hitler put a stop to it in his rise for power.
The students were encouraged to do some readings and watchings of YouTube videos before the seminar on economics. One of the readings was the essay “I, Pencil,” by Leonard Reed. The above video features the essay. It’s all about how so many forces have to coordinate to make something as simple as a pencil. A pencil can not be made by one single person. Many people combine together to make it. Yet It happens without a ton of thought, negotiation, or government intervention because of free market forces.
Here’another take on it.
All in all, Honor had a great time. FEE does this seminar every year in different locations. I encourage you to go to fee.org and sign up for the mailing list so you can hear about next year’s seminars. They do ones for college students and adults as well.
Here’s a message from my girlfriend Jonell, one of the original Veggie Gals (a potluck lunch group my healthy eating friends started over 15 years ago), about a special class she is holding on the connection between diet and yeast infections (you can listen to her presentation from my conference by clicking on the downloads tab above and then scrolling down for her name):
Hello Friends,
I’m teaching a free class this Tuesday, July 17th at 7pm at The Alpine Clinic,offices of Diane Farley-Jones, MD and Steven Jones MD. The Yeast Connection to Human Illness covers the anatomy of candida in the body (from acid-reflux and allergies to autoimmune disease), some eye-opening data about our over-all health along the Wasatch Front, and the relationship between Candida and Cancer. Be amazed at how elevated blood alcohol happens without ever touching a glass to your lips!
Best of all, by the end of the class you’ll have low cost solutions for returning to vibrant health. Of course you won’t want to miss a sample of our favorite fruit-sweetened, diary-free ice cream from The Feel Good Cookbook. See you there!
Visit us at www.myyeasttreatment.com to read more about this missing diagnosis and the real results people are experiencing.
Driving Directions: The Alpine clinic is located at 1175 East, 3200 North in Lehi. From I-15, take the Alpine Exit 284, head East on Timpanogos Highway (State Rd 92) and turn right at 1200 East. After 2 blocks turn right again at 3200 North.
Chances are, if you’ve ever been pregnant, you’ve heard the phrase, “You’re eating for two.” Many times it is given as a license for you to indulge in that next serving of pizza, brownie, or bowl of chips. OK, true confessions time, even I have used it myself as a license in my head to eat more of what is not necessarily the most nutrient dense foods. Unfortunately for my tastebuds when I am pregnant and craving potato chips, there’s a lot more to pregnancy and nutrition then just eating more calories.
Actually, it is really fortunate when you look at it a way other than through tastebuds that crave junk food. Knowing that we women have power to create beautiful babies who are healthful, who will never get ear infections or glasses or cholesterol problems is a fortunate thing! As Chris Masterjohn says, HERE, “Good maternal nutrition during pregnancy can protect the offspring from diabetes, stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, and memory loss later in life.”
We all hear about how when you are pregnant, a mom should not smoke or drink. That’s because the mom has an organ that passes everything she takes in on to the baby. This organ, the placenta, is the first tree of life to the baby. It supports the baby until the baby is born with oxygen and nutrients. It literally looks like a tree as well. How many of us realize the power of this tree of life? We can use this tree of life to pass on positive things to the baby to increase the baby’s facial beauty, bone structure and density, brain and eye development, gut health (which affects all other health) and to make an overall strong constitution for life.
Not only that, but through proper nutrition, we can decrease and even eliminate the common pesky complaints and challenges of pregnancy that we as moms experience such as:
Morning sickness
Cramping in your feet and hands
Cravings for junk foods
Varicose veins
Stretch marks
Swelling and water retention
In addition, a holistic IBCLC, Jennifer Tow, over here, says that a mom’s diet can lead to all the common problems we hear about in modern America after someone has a baby. “…post-partum depression, food allergies, milk supply, PCOS, tongue-tie, reflux, ‘high-need’ infant behavior, slow growth, failure to thrive and numerous feeding difficulties may all find origins in the integrity and vitality of the mother’s internal terrain. In attending to the health of the maternal gut, while supporting the infant in his own healing, we may find that many breastfeeding problems are resolved both acutely and chronically.”
Wow, we moms have power to eliminate all these problems by changing our diets! This is good news!
Does it sound too good to be true? Read on! I have been blessed not to ever have morning sickness, but I have suffered through all of my pregnancies with extremely puffy feet and ankles towards the end of the pregnancy. That’s because I did not have the knowledge I am sharing with you now. How often I would look at my edematous feet and wish I could just pop them with a pin and let the fluid out. I am eager to apply this nutritional knowledge for the next time I am pregnant so I can have increased health and comfort.
My post about nutrition and pregnancy will weave in my discoveries in my journey of seven pregnancies, which span two decades. When I first started having babies, I read the book What to Eat When You Are Expecting.
The guidelines seemed fairly reasonable to me. It recommended cutting out all empty calories, especially those that come from food with white sugar. I guess I was in a very virtuous and obedient phase of life and I dutifully swore off white sugar for my pregnancy. My friends even knew all about that and blessed me with a baby shower that involved raw veggies and no white sugar. Baby #1 was born very healthy. He is 18 years old now and just finished his first year of college on scholarship. I like to think that his smarts came from me eating no white sugar while I was pregnant with him.
I give credit to that book for helping me avoid white sugar. That’s one of the good pieces of nutritional advice it gives. But the book has problems. It recommends the typical diet recommended in the mainstream media of low fat, whole grains, vegetables and fruit, and even that evil fake fat margarine. That is a recipe for health disaster, especially if you are pregnant! I won’t go into any more details of the problems of the book, you can read a criticism here.
With Baby #2 I took a Bradley childbirth course. It was in that course that I learned about the work of Dr. Tom Brewer. Dr. Brewer found that diet in pregnant women made the difference as to whether women had problems with preeclampsia, also known as toxemia. If you don’t know what preeclampsia/ toxemia is, believe me when I say you don’t want to have that condition. It can be life-threatening. It involves high blood pressure. Think of Michelle Duggar with her last live baby, Josie Brooklyn. Michelle had complications with preeclampsia many weeks before the baby was due. She ended up being hospitalized and had an emergency C-section.The baby was born at about 25 weeks weighing only 1 pound. Thanks to God and modern medicine, Josie survived the premature birth and is alive today.
Fortunately, preeclampsia can be prevented! I am not here to criticize the Duggars, only to increase public awareness of how nutrition can prevent preeclampsia. (I think the Duggars are totally amazing. I stand in awe of their willingness to have so many children. Michelle is superhuman to me in her ability to remain so sweet, patient, and softspoken after having so many children. She is definitely one of my heroes.) In his clinic, Dr. Brewer educated his OB patients on the importance of getting enough salt and protein. His patients followed the diet and did not have any problems with the preeclampsia. You can learn more about the Brewer diet here, http://www.blueribbonbaby.org/ifyouarepregnant/daily-pregnancy-nutrition-checklist/
By following the Brewer diet, women can avoid the following problems: toxemia, preeclampsia, HELLP Syndrome, premature birth, low birth weight, and intrauterine growth retardation. As the web site says, these are not random issues. They are not genetic. They can be prevented with the Brewer diet.
It’s great that the Brewer diet recommends eggs and milk, however I wish that it emphasized the quality of the eggs and milk, i.e. eggs from cage-free chickens and raw milk, like the list at the bottom of this post. Anyway, I followed the Brewer Diet with Baby #2 and she was born happy and healthy, full-term. I have since learned that all of that pasteurized milk I took in caused a lot of mucus congestion in me and the baby. This baby had a lot stuffy noses and she was the only baby I’ve had with an ear infection. Many people find that raw milk does not cause the congestion that pasteurized milk does.
That’s what I knew when I was first having babies, but since then I have learned so much more. The next thing I learned is that you can grow a baby on a vegan diet, but I do not recommend it. Veganism was popular in the late 1990s and I decided to become a vegan. The trouble was, I was always hungry. I had to eat three and four servings of food at each meal when I became pregnant again. The resulting baby was 9 pounds at birth and healthy as far as I could tell. With two older children ages 2 and 4, I was either eating, nursing, doing dishes, or chasing kids. Not a very fun time in my life. That was baby #3. If only I had known that all these foods I thought were so healthful: organic produce and whole grains, legumes, olive oil, were a step in the right direction but missing some pieces. I also didn’t realize that all the soy milk I was using on my oatmeal and other whole grain cereals to replace milk was doing a number on my thyroid, which causes me to have hypothyroidism to this day. Soy milk and other soy foods have no place in our diet. Read more about soy here.
I was pretty much vegan with baby #4 too. I had heard the Mad Cowboy speak at a cottage meeting in my friend’s home, about the virtues of being vegan and that greatly influenced me. He was the former rancher who appeared on Oprah, exposing all the evils of the cattle industry, causing Oprah to say she would never eat another burger again. I wanted to avoid the toxins in the mainstream meat processing industry. I did not know there was an alternative, that is, finding meat that is raised without hormones and antibiotics and being allowed to roam the range, free of cages or stalls.
By the time I was pregnant with baby #5, my home birth midwife gently suggested that I start eating meat. she said she had studied women who were vegan and vegetarian and found that with each successive baby the women and the babies were less and less healthy. I started eating meat, and I did feel better. I was starting to feel that I did not have to eat as much food at each meal..
The most important thing to know about diet in pregnancy is that you are growing a new brain. The brain is so important! It is what gives life and personality to your new baby. The brain controls the body. The brain needs food, and not any food, or just calories, but food that makes it work better. Enter the healthy fats. These fats are so important because they allow the body to have access to Vitamins A and D. Vitamins A and D are only accessible or bioavailable to the body by being soluble in fat.
So before I delve into why Vitamin A and D are so important, let’s talk healthy fats. In this world of lipo, skinny supermodels, and six-pack abs, the word fat seems like a naughty word, but fat is actually needed by the body, to hold vitamin A and D, to provide building blocks for hormones, including hormones needed for sex and reproduction, to provide myelination for nerve cells to allow connection between nerves, and to to help the brain function. Fat also gives a sense of satisfaction, fullness, and pleasure. It slows down the digestion of carbs, allowing you to feel fuller sooner, so that you are less likely to overeat.
The following are the healthy fats for you to put in your kitchen, put in your body, and raise your new baby on. These are the healthy fats for you and your family to thrive on! In short, healthy fat makes you happy and well! An added bonus to eating sufficient healthy fats is that cravings for sugar goes down. Watch the video above and read below to learn more about them.
1. Cod liver oil. Mary Poppins was right, a daily dose of cod liver oil is good for children, and just as good for adults, especially childbearing women. Pregnant and lactating woman should take 1 tbsp. a day. You don’t have to gag it down either. You can get cod liver oil flavored with licorice, cinnamon, orange, and sweetened with stevia, at greenpastures.org. Get these Kid Tested Cod Liver Oils here
It will provide you with vitamin A, which we will go into later, and also omega fatty acids, which can greatly decrease the chances of having post partum depression.
2. Coconut oil. Despite the negative press given to tropical oils, coconut oil is actually very good for you. It is full of lauric acid, which is a super germ fighter. It fights bacteria, viruses, yeast, and other fungi.
3. Animal fat. A little animal fat is good for everyone. See HERE to learn about nutritional deficiencies caused by vegetarianism.
4. Olive oil. Olive oil has natural nutrients and is a healthy fat (as long as it is cold-pressed) that is liquid at room temperature so it is perfect for homemade salad dressings.
5. Butter Forget limiting your butter to two pats a day. Butter on vegetables makes them taste better, and it makes the Vitamins A and D in the vegetables actually stay in your body. As Sally Fallon says, “My body is a temple. The vitamins and minerals are the bricks, and the healthy fat is the mortar.” In other words, healthy fat makes Vitamin A and D stick inside the body to hold the bone structure together, and not get washed out by a low-fat diet.
These are the healthy fats that abound in nature. They come from the earth and animals that graze the earth. The reason you don’t hear about them much is because the companies that synthesize fake fat in the factory have more money than the farmers and olive oil producers. Probably the best thing you could do for your health and your future baby’s health is to ditch all the factory fats in your cupboards. These include soybean, vegetable oil, crisco, shortening, corn oil, and any other oil other than coconut or olive. Even that much-promoted-oil that so many “health nuts” seem to adore, canola oil. Canola oil is highly processed, jut as these other oils are. They come from an extraction process that uses high heat and toxic solvents. Canola oil is a made up name, it comes from “Canadian oil.” It comes from the rapeseed plant. The names rapeseed oil did not market well so the oil manufacturers changed the name to canola. Another apt name for it is “con-ola” as the oil manufacturers conned the American public into thinking it is healthful. See the canola story here.
Vitamin A is needed by your developing baby for the development of the eyes, brain, and nervous system. Sufficient Vitamin A ingestion while you are pregnant will protect your child against vision problems, and learning disabilities. Again, 1 tbsp a day is recommended for pregnant women. Vitamin A stores are depleted by your growing baby during pregnancy, so Sally Fallon, a nutrition advocate and founder of the Weston A Price foundation, see the WAPF site here, recommends a three year spacing until the next baby to allow your body to build up vitamin A stores for the next baby.
To illustrate the importance of vitamin A, take a look at this article. It found that firstborn children are more intelligent. Here’s what blogger Sarah Pope, the woman in the nutrition videos on this post, says about the article, “The real reason that eldest children typically have higher aptitude and better health than later borns is because they get the benefit of all of Mom’s nutritional stores, primarily the fat soluble vitamins A and D. Later borns get the nutritional dregs, so to speak. Fat soluble vitamins take time to rebuild in the tissues and unless Mom makes a concerted effort to replenish these stores between pregnancies, the health and ability of later children will very likely suffer as a consequence.” See her post here http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/birth-order-and-intelligence/.
Decades ago the Cleveland zoo had a problem. The lions in the zoo were not able to reproduce in captivity. So the zookeeper went to Africa to observe lions in the wild to see what his lions were missing. he noticed that these lions, after killing their prey, would immediately go for the internal organs of the liver. He went back to Cleveland and started feeding liver to the captive lions and voila, a while later, the zoo finally got some lion babies. The liver is a highly concentrated storehouse of vitamins A and D, that’s why it was so good for the lions to eat. You may be thinking, yuck, liver, as I do. But I have been assured that when you eat liver from a quality meat source that was raised free range on green grass, the liver is very tender and delicious.
Dr. Weston a price, a dentist from the 1930s, traveled the world to study native people and their diets. he studied 14 traditional tribes. He found that these tribes all had healthy babies with no birth defects, no crooked teeth, no impacted wisdom teeth, and no chronic illnesses like asthma or juvenile diabetes. He noticed these tribes had the following in common. The tribes ate:
1. food produced by nature (no white sugar or white flour)
2. traditionally prepared grains (soaked in acidic medium to neutralize the phytic acid, nature’s preservative so that the grain doesn’t spoil, or sprouted) 3. some animal food
4. lacto fermented foods. These foods encourage the healthy bacteria in the gut which keep yeast down.
Dr. Price found that the foods these native people ate had at least ten times the amount of Vitamins A and D, and another nutrient, Activator X, which was later identified to be Vitamin K2, as in industrial diets . These vitamins work synergistically together to provide optimal health.
He also found that the people either soaked their grains or sprouted them to make the minerals in the grains more absorbable.
Here is a video about how to soak grain so that it is traditionally prepared.
Another thing he noticed was that every tribe treated the newly married women and pregnant women with special diets. These people instinctively knew special food was needed for a growing fetus. They used liver, seafood, or insects. These are all sources of vitamin A and D. if the tribes lived close to the sea they used seafood to get the vitamin A, if they lived in land-locked areas they used animal milk and insects. For example. the Masai tribe in Africa would not let young woman get married until the time of the year when the cows were pasturing on rapidly growing grass, and give that milk to the young woman. This insured high amounts of Vitamin A and D, to improve the chances of the young women being fertile and having healthy babies.
Vitamin A is a magic nutrient that growing fetuses and children need. It allows for wide facial structure, with enough room for all the teeth, including wisdom teeth. It builds healthy bones and teeth. Our society’s lack of vitamin A has produced generations of children who are tall without being sturdy (lanky), who are myopic, and have overcrowded teeth.
Starting with Baby #5 I was no longer vegetarian or vegan. But I did not know about the magic of Vitamin A and did not take cod liver oil to replenish my Vitamin A stores in my body. Babies #5 and #6 were born healthy and full term. Both of them, however, were underweight by the time they were a year old. They did not have the chubby rolls of fat my older children had as babies. I have often wondered if my milk supply did not provide as much fat for them as it did for my older children because my nutritional stores were dwindling. They were also 18 months apart. I allowed a 3 1/2 year gap for Baby #7. He is nearing three years old and is not underweight. Maybe it’s because my nutritional stores increased with a bigger gap between babies.
When you are pregnant, it’s more important than ever to have every bite count, so that you don’t gain too much weight. As someone who has gained as much as 80 lbs in a pregnancy, I can witness to the fact that excess weight at the end of pregnancy makes it more miserable than it has to be! It is important to gain weight, true, but too much weight can make a mom very uncomfortable. Although if I had to err on either side I would choose too much weight, to insure that my baby had enough. A growing fetus makes you hungry, so you eat. The more nutrient dense the food is, the less food you will need to eat to feel full, nourished, and satisfied. So you will be less likely to gain too much weight.
Below is the full diet that the Weston A. Price foundation recommends for pregnant and nursing moms. These are the nutrient dense foods that will allow your body to create a beautiful and healthy baby. In Dr. Price’s book, pictured above, he tells the story of a woman who had a baby after a 53 hour labor. This baby girl grew up to have crooked teeth. The mom decided to have another baby, but this time she ate a different diet that involved cod liver oil, green vegetables, and liberal amounts of raw milk and butter that came from cows that were grassfed. This time, the mother’s labor was less 3 hours, and the baby girl had perfect uncrooked teeth. The story starts on p. 405 of the edition pictured above.
Cod Liver Oil to supply 20,000 IU vitamin A and 2000 IU vitamin D per day
1 quart (or 32 ounces) whole milk daily, preferably raw and from pasture-fed cows (learn more about raw milk on our website, A Campaign for Real Milk, www.realmilk.com)
4 tablespoons butter daily, preferably from pasture-fed cows
Additional egg yolks daily, added to smoothies, salad dressings, scrambled eggs, etc.
3-4 ounces fresh liver, once or twice per week (If you have been told to avoid liver for fear of getting “too much Vitamin A,” be sure to read Vitamin A Saga)
Fresh seafood, 2-4 times per week, particularly wild salmon, shellfish and fish eggs
Fresh beef or lamb daily, always consumed with the fat
Bone broth is really good for pregnant women because it provides lots of minerals that are highly absorbable. Bone broth also adds glucosamine which is very good at keeping your joints healthy. Then the gelatin in the bone broth helps your gut ecology fight infection. Here’s a video on how to make bone broth. Sorry about the Obama commercial at the beginning, click on “skip ad” on the bottom right.
IMPORTANT WARNING: Cod liver oil contains substantial levels of omega-3 EPA, which can cause numerous health problems, such as hemorrhaging during the birth process, if not balanced by arachidonic acid (ARA), an omega-6 fatty acid found in liver, egg yolks and meat fats. Please do not add cod liver oil to a diet that is deficient in these important animal foods. It is important to follow our diet for pregnant mothers in its entirety, not just selected parts of it.
Women are much like the lions I wrote about who were captive in the zoo, unable to reproduce. We may be infertile or we may be unable to reproduce the sturdy, robust children of generations ago who were free of chronic illnesses, ADD, myopia, crooked teeth, impacted wisdom teeth, and degenerative diseases. Instead of being captive in a zoo, women today are in captivity by the media and government diet dictocrats as to what is healthy food for pregnancy. Let’s shake off the chains of ignorance and mainstream media to become free to have brilliant, healthy children! Go here to look at some beautiful babies raised on a healthy traditional diet and get inspired!
This is a picture of my son and a friend just minutes after the announcement that he won a scholarship to pay his tuition to the college he really wanted to go to, George Wythe College. (yah, I know his tie says BYU, well, that was his next choice.)
If you have a college-bound son or daughter looking for scholarships, this web site is a great resource. It’s http://www.scholarshipsonline.org/
Scholarships are such a great way to pay for college. It’s free money! You don’t have to pay the money back. I was blessed to have a scholarship to go to college. It was a HUGE blessing. When you have a scholarship that pays for your tuition and living expenses, you don’t have to have a job to put yourself through school. You can focus on being a scholar. What a novel idea!
This site is awesome because it has a big database of lots of scholarships for your son or daughter to apply for. The people who run the site add new ones weekly, if not daily. It also has 100 tips for applying to increase the chances of getting a scholarship. You don’t even have to pay to use the site. Dave Ramsey, of Financial Peace, tells a story of a girl who applied for over 100 scholarships the year before her senior year of high school. She wasn’t super smart and didn’t have the best scores, but she knew she wanted to go to college, and she had hopes that she could get scholarships to pay for all of it. Because she applied to so many scholarships, she hugely increased her chances of getting one. She did in fact get a few, enough to pay all of her college expenses.
So that just goes to show that getting a scholarship can be as much as a numbers game as much as it involves great test scores and GPAs. So go to http://scholarshipsonline.org today and start applying!
My friend and TOLM network member Nancy is in this video with her husband. I think you will enjoy it!
The message is all about strengthening marriage by spending time together. It makes me think of an excellent book about marriage that I read from last year, by John Gottman. In the book he gives homework assignments. One of the assignments is to write down a list of all the things to do with your husband to spend time with him. When I think of the title I will share it here.
We had the best Independence Day ever on Wednesday! This post contains many of the sights and thoughts I had that day. I am not going to take the time to put a caption under each picture. It was such a full day of meaning and beauty.
I’ve always wanted to do something more meaningful on the day then just sit and eat a barbecue dinner and watch fireworks.We do go to the flag raising ceremony that our city puts on in the morning. It is always meaningful with a speaker. I wish I could stretch it out the whole day.
One year we had Stephen Pratt from libertyandlearning.org come. That was such a treat! This year Dr. Mark Baxter spoke about patriotism. He mentioned that our country is in trouble, that the crisis we are facing may reach its peak this year or in ten years.
Some of my kids and their cousins, all dressed in red, by coincidence!
He urged us to prepare for it. I really like those kind of messages instead of the self-congratulatory, braggadocious, “aren’t we awesome American” speeches. I believe in the awesomeness of the America that was founded in 1776, based on the “Hebrew way,” not the America of today that has changed from the Hebrew way to the Roman way. The Hebrew way involves limited government and natural law as set forth in the Bible. The Roman way involves unlimited government and man-made law, including the belief that government is the answer to all problems.
At the flag-raising service my family walked away with some prizes, as usual. Every year the program involves questions about American history and government. My family is always pleased to know most if not all the answers to the questions, since we love learning about history and government. One of the questions was this, “Which president said the following, “Though the people support the government, it is not the duty of the government to support the people.”?
I realized with sudden pleasure that I knew the answer! It wasn’t your typical guess of one of the Founding Fathers. I had just read that quote the previous week in the Freeman magazine, which we now get since my son is going to their free economic seminar for high school students next week. The Freeman is the magazine for FEE, the Foundation for Economic Education. The answer is Grover Cleveland. I had read that quote in this article about the little-known president here http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/ideas-and-consequences/cleveland-passed-the-test-of-character-and-statesmanship/
So I got this prize:
and my 14 year old son correctly answered a question so he got this book:
Sweet! Now we have copies of the Mayflower Compact, George Washington’s Farewell Address, the Declaration and Constitution and other great documents all in one place, besides on the Internet, LOL! This book also has annotations and other commentary.
My friend Linda emailed an invitation to a play her kids were in called Cries of Freedom in the Scera Park. We went to it and it was so inspiring! The guy who wrote the Freedom Bowl book from rootsofreedom.org, Scott Swain, was in charge of it.
The play told the story of freedom from Joan of Arc, to the Pilgrims, then the War of 1812 and the emigrants coming to Ellis Island. The music was so stirring! They played Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America” during the Mayflower voyage. I cried a few times during it.
The park also had a colonial village set up with people dressed up in colonial clothes. They had lots of exhibits about the time period. It was so cool! We loved seeing and touching all of the replicas: the guns, the barrels, the toys, the household items.
We got to see a guy work on a lathe. I felt like I was back at Colonial Williamsburg. It was fun to meet one of my Veggie Gal friends and TOLM network member, Jennifer. I haven’t seen her in over four years! What a joyful reunion!
My daughter had fun doing her cousin’s hair into a “fireworks hairstyle.” She’s very talented and creative with hair!
We didn’t have any fireworks at my parents’ house because of the city asking people not to do them with the wildfires going on and dry weather. But that was OK because I had had enough excitement. I can’t wait for next year!
I love Independence Day! I want the feeling of the day to linger longer than a day, just like Christmas. So as I do at Christmas time I get picture books to read aloud that pertain to the holiday to stretch out that lovely holiday feeling.The above pictured book is Letters of Freedom: The American Revolution. It is a delightful interactive book for kids that I found at our public library. Each double page spread is full of pictures about the Revolution.
What makes it really fun for my 6 and 7 year olds is that each spread has an envelope/pocket with a letter folded inside to read. The letters come from fictional characters who write to relatives or friends about the battle going on around them. They are fictional but describe what life was probably like back then. If I were basing a homeschool lesson on this for older love of learning children I would encourage them to pick one of the battles described in the book and ask them to pretend to be a soldier, writing a letter home to family. But as I am taking a summer break from structured homeschool lessons, we are just simply reading the book, one or two double page spreads a night, and talking about it.
This is a splendid story about a brother and sister who were involved in a spy ring during the Revolutionary War. It describes a secret code involving laundry that was used to convey information about what kind of British ships were in the Philadelphia harbor.
Little Town on the Prairie is not set in the time of the American Revolution, but it has a chapter on the Ingalls family celebrating Independence Day in their new town. After hearing a recitation of the Declaration of Independence, then singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” Laura made this connection:
Suddenly [Laura:] had a completely new thought. The Declaration and the song came together in her mind and she thought: God is America’s king. Americans won’t obey any king on earth. Americans are free. That means they have to obey their own consciences. . . . Her whole mind seemed to be lighted up by that thought. This is what it means to be free. It means, you have to be good. “Our father’s God, author of liberty–” The laws of Nature and of Nature’s God endow you with a right to life and liberty. Then you have to keep the laws of God, for God’s law is the only thing that gives you the right to be free.
So that chapter, (Chapter 8) is an especially meaningful read aloud for the summer holiday. It reminds me of the Book of Mormon where it says that the promised land, which we believe to be north America, is destined to only have Jesus Christ as its king.
We read this book on the drive down to the festivities yesterday:
Here are a few more I got from the library that we are going to read over the next week or two:
This one’s about the women involved with the Revolutionary War. We shall see if it passes my test of being positive about women without adding in a modern feminist viewpoint.
Then here are two more by the same author about little-known stories about the War. They tell the story of Benjamin Tallmadge. The first one is about his involvement with the Battle of Long Island, the next one is about his discovery of a spy ring.
Enjoy! If you know of any more titles please share below.
Tree of Life Mothering 