Tree of Life Mothering

This is not the TJEd event I want to five and a half years ago, it was another TJED event.

It was five and a half years ago that I went to my first Face to Face With Greatness Seminar. It changed my life! Homeschooling has been funner and simpler since then. I’m grateful for the knowledge I learned at that seminar. This knowledge helped me be less of a Sergeant Mom, backing off on my kids, so I could study on my own more and let them get the education they want.

If you want to improve your homeschooling so you feel less stress and more peace, come to this great event. Here’s more:

You will learn principles and gain hands-on experiences in:
♦ The 3 Types of Education
♦ The 7 Keys of Great Teaching
♦ The 4 Phases of Learning
♦ How to Inspire Math, Arts, and Science through the Classics
♦ How to Make Every Colloquium Great
♦ Path of All Success
♦ Pre-Readings: Colloquium on Little Britches, The Chosen, and The Merchant of Venice
Strongly Suggested Preparation: A Thomas Jefferson Education, Little Britches, The Chosen, The
Merchant of Venice (These books are essential reads. We want you to get the most from this seminar experience. To do
that, you will need to do your part by preparing properly. Those who really prepare in advance get so much more from the
seminar. Those who have not prepared by completing all of the readings will be frustrated and will be the source of frustration
for others. Seminars will be taught from the prospective that all attendees have prepared and that all readings have been
completed.)
Do you want to help your children get a superb, leadership education… but just aren’t sure how?

THIS SEMINAR TEACHES YOU HOW!!
Date:
November 4-5, 2011

Time:
8:30am to 5:00pm both days

Cost: Up to October 3 – $95.00 per person*
Time:
8:30am to 5:00pm both days
After October 3 – $150.00 per person*
Location: North Logan Library
475 E 2500 N
North Logan, UT 84341

This seminar is hosted by JoDean Bailey.
Registration is limited to 60 participants.
————————————————————————
For more information or to register, please contact
JoDean at:
Phone: 435-232-4342, Email: jodeanb(at) comcast (dot) net

This is my niece and my daughter at the latest baby blessing of the newest grandchild of my parents.

So after writing my recent posts about vegetarianism, I am wondering, does it automatically set you up for tooth decay?  I think so.  The good news is though that you can heal cavities. Why is it that my friend Caralee and Diane Hopkins of lovetolearn.net got cavities even though they were eating whole grains, veggies, fruits, and avoiding bad stuff. I have tooth decay as well, perhaps it is from my years of vegetarianism and having babies. I have had seven babies. With Baby #5, my midwife told me I needed meat. She said that she had studied women who lived in vegetarian communities. As they kept having babies, the babies were not as healthy and the moms were weaker.

Teeth and bones need minerals. Everyone knows that, and the glue or mortar that holds these minerals, or as Sally Fallon calls minerals, bricks,  in your teeth is the Activator X, found in butter oil, and Vitamin A and D found in cod liver oil. As Caralee told me, having babies depletes you nutritionally. It is really important that if you want to have lots of babies and not be a weak, tooth-decayed mom that you nourish your body with the mortar that will hold the bricks in your temple together.

My parents, sister, and new baby niece.

It makes sense to me. Having babies takes a toll both emotionally and mentally. If you found yourself tired, screaming a lot at your kids, feeling put upon by the demands of your kids, not feeling joy,  it’s time to perhaps take a break from having more babies and build yourself up physically, with intense nutrition (butter oil and cod liver oil, and other wholesome traditional foods) and then mentally with creating systems in your home so that everyone does the work involved, not just mom. More on that later.

I just started on the cod liver oil and high butter oil and I have faith I can heal my small cavities. I have had them for years and have put off getting them filled by the dentist because I know they can heal. Here’s a simple story from one mom, Sarah Pope,  who shares how she healed her son’s cavity. http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/2011/05/how-i-healed-my-childs-cavity/ I am doing this for my cavities and I will let you know the results!

My brother-in-law surprised us at the baby blessing with a full bushy beard. Guess that laid-back fishing trip to the wilderness of Alaska really got to him!

It;’s kind of ironic, Amidst my studies of finding this out, my 15-year-old daughter recently decided to become vegetarian. She found an article online by an LDS Church apostle (I am thinking it was Elder John Widtsoe) who promoted vegetarianism. It convinced her that the Word of Wisdom advocation to only eat meat in times of famine meant she shouldn’t be eating meat right now. She said that even in the Little House books, Pa taught that you should only meat in the winter-time, when you couldn’t grow plants or gather fruit.

I told her what her grandma (my dh’s mother) said. It was this… that for grandma, her body was in a state of famine in terms of nutritional deficiencies so it was OK for her to eat meat year round, not just in winter or the regular meaning of famine. Grandma had been vegan for years and helped her husband lose weight on the McDougall diet (which is vegan) but she ended up giving up veganism and vegetarianism. My daughter  wasn’t convinced. She has cavities as well and thank goodness she is willing to take the cod liver oil and butter oil to heal them. With the CLO and the butter oil hopefully she will build up her teeth. I am grateful that she hasn’t chosen to be vegan. I think we have found a compromise. She won’t eat flesh, but she will eat the oils. Yet my daughter says that this doesn’t make sense. She says it’s not right that God would make it so we are dependent on eating forms of life that don’t naturally grow around us, like cod, to build our health and maintain our health. Hmmm…I’m not sure how to answer that. All I know is that I want to heal my cavities and hers.

Sarah Pope, over at http://thehealthyhomeeconomist.com, claims that most people return to eating meat after being vegetarians. See her article here http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/2011/06/most-vegetarians-return-to-eating-meat/. I have seen it happen with Diane Hopkins, Caralee, Grandma, and me.

What about you? Are any of you out there recovering vegetarians? Have any of you been vegetarians and stayed cavity-free?

If you are vegetarian or vegan you will want to read this:

Last week I posted an abbreviated form of my girlfriend Caralee’s story. She was vegetarian, and sometimes vegan, for 12 years. Then she ran into health problems and decided not to be vegetarian anymore. She now has her own farm with her own cow, chickens, and a big garden. Plus lots of kids. Whenever I go to her home I feel peace and happiness. Here’s a longer version of her story:

“I became health conscious when I was 15 years old, and to me, at that time, that translated into becoming vegetarian and exercising regularly.  By nineteen, I had become a naturalist and gave up all refined sugars and flours, avoiding additives, preservatives and other chemicals like the plague.  I was very much into herbs and natural healing.  I married at 21 and went on to have a bunch of babies quickly.  Up until my fourth pregnancy, I had never had a dental cary that needed filling in my life.   I had been able to get by with sealants only.  Then, after my fourth child was born, I had a wisdom tooth rot out of my mouth that had to be pulled.   I was sick about it.  I couldn’t figure out what was happening to my teeth!  But that was only the beginning…

“After my 5th pregnancy, my teeth were in really bad shape.  I was so low on minerals that my body did not have enough reserves to grow another baby and feed my teeth.  

So another trip to the
dentist revealed rampant decay with two molars that were rotted to the roots and needed root canals, two that were nearly there, and about eight other cavities.  😦 many tears…

“I went home reeling- and determined to do whatever I could to save my teeth!  Thankfully I pulled out my new copy of Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Dr. Weston Price and read for the first time Chapter 16 where it discusses Primitive Control of Dental Caries, and how he used 1/2 teaspoon cod liver oil along with 1/2 teaspoon high vitamin butter oil three times per day to stop and reverse tooth decay.  My husband ordered me a six month supply of both and I got busy taking my oils.

“I started taking:

1/2 teaspoon Green Pastures High Vitamin Butter Oil three times per day along with

1/2 teaspoon Green Pastures Cod Liver Oil three times per day (of course, they now only produce fermented, and you need less per serving- about 1/3 teaspoon three times per day)

“I did use Dr. Christopher’s Tooth and Gum powder in place of toothpaste some of that time.  I used essential oils of clove and cinnamon to help with the sensitivity at the beginning before the CLO and HVBO had enough time to do their magic.  It didn’t take long though.

“Only a couple of weeks and I felt a difference.  It was amazing to me that I could have such horrible holes in my teeth and not have any pain or sensitivity after a couple of months.  Two years later I
decided to return to the dentist.  I began to get the promptings of our next baby that wanted to come to our family and I was concerned about dental work and pregnancy.  I was also curious to see if any healing had actually occurred.

“The four teeth that needed root canals were completely healed with secondary dentin.  The other eight were in varying stages of healing.  They were no longer decaying and were filling in with
dentin.  The dentist commented that, to his surprise, the structural integrity of my teeth was strong.  What was left were a few teeth with dark spots.  Three years later I went back to the doctor again.
There was one dark spot and after going back and forth between my teeth, my chart, and the x-ray, he told me that I was supposed to have a cavity there but that I didn’t.  After further examination he told me that it was a cavity that had gone clear to the root but that had healed completely to the enamel.

“During this time, I did not take any other supplements at all on any regular basis.  Of course, I was careful about my diet and only consumed high quality dairy products – but nothing that you couldn’t find around here (Brown Cow yogurt – now I make my own, Daisy Sour Cream, raw milk from a local farmer – now we drink our own, and only regular butter from Costco- even though I would like to only purchase organic, it’s too expensive for our budget, and we have had healing in spite of it.)  I think a big thing for me was soaking my grains and beans because it allowed me to keep and use the minerals in my food instead of having them be bound with the phytic acid and having them leave my body unused.  However, I had made that change before adding the cod liver oil and I didn’t experience the healing in my teeth until I added the CLO and HVBO into my diet.

“Then we had to deal with my oldest sons and their poor teeth!  They were vegetarians in utero and through their early years of life.  My oldest son’s teeth are horrible, so soft and prone to decay.
This is a child who had never had a meal from a fast food restaurant!   Can I tell you how important those animal fats and proteins are?!! He had a number of teeth pulled, and was scheduled for a pulpotomy or two, as up until that time, we hadn’t given the kids the CLO and HVBO (too expensive, said my husband).  Try dental bills in comparison!  So we bought some for the kids and got them taking it.  Six weeks later, we took him in and he did not need the pulpotomy!  His secondary dentin had grown back, protecting the nerve once again.  Yea!  Another success.

“So, what I believe now, based on my experience is this:

“CLO and HVBO added to a diet that is rich in nutrients and minimal in healthy sweets will reverse tooth decay.  I recommend WAPF’s diet guidelines, keeping the Word of Wisdom in the forefront and using the Spirit as your guide.  We have not been perfect, but tried to do our best, and we have experienced healing many times over.” 

This is my new baby niece and my sister at the baby blessing gathering my sister held after Q’s blessing.

Here’s a link to the blog that Elder Anderson quoted in General Conference. Latter-day Saints believe in gathering truth from every source, even bloggers who aren’t LDS. See http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/motherhood-is-a-calling-and-where-your-children-rank

Here’s the part that Elder Anderson quoted:

“Children rank way below college. Below world travel for sure. Below the ability to go out at night at your leisure. Below honing your body at the gym. Below any job you may have or hope to get. In fact, children rate below your desire to sit around and pick your toes, if that is what you want to do. Below everything. Children are the last thing you should ever spend your time doing. 

Motherhood is not a hobby, it is a calling. You do not collect children because you find them cuter than stamps. It is not something to do if you can squeeze the time in. It is what God gave you time for.”

I just got word that some of my homeschooling mom friends Sarah, Teena, and Lori from northern Utah and Amy from St. George are going to be on the Glenn Beck show tomorrow Thursday Oct 20. The topic will be homeschooling. Tune in at http://gbtv.com from 3 to 5 PM MT or 5 to 7 ET, or adjust to your time zone. You can sign up for a free two week trial.  Should be very lively! I don’t watch the show regularly, but I am going to watch this one. All of these ladies have big families and three of them gave birth in the past year. I wonder if their babies will be with them.

Here’s what one of the producers said about the show:

“We will be discussing the following: -Why you decided to home school and how long have you been doing it with your kid/kids?-Do your kids like or dislike it? Why? What are the benefits your finding from it?-What other organizations are you or your kids in (if any) ex: co-ops, church groups, girl scouts, cub scouts, academic groups, etc.- Details on the curriculum your doing at home school-How do your kid/kids go about making friends? Public school/home school or outside of school?”

Future Good Wives, my niece and my daughter, clowning around in a hammock.

A while ago I finished reading Good Wives, part 2 of Little Women. I read Little Women in high school for my Honors English sophomore class. The version I read must have been a condensed version of both Little Women and Good Wives, because I remember Meg getting married, which happens at the beginning of Good Wives, Jo and Amy getting married, which happens at the end, and Beth dying, but I don’t remember a lot of the other stuff. Maybe I will review the movie this week.

This book is so delightful and charming! It features so many topics for discussion that relate to being female and having a good character. And then how to carry that on to be a good wife, mother, and homemaker. Some of it correlates with Fascinating Womanhood. We are going to discuss it this week at my online Zion Finishing School, from 2 to 4 PM MT on Friday October 21. We were going to do it last week but it didn’t work out so now it’s this week. Please comment below if you want to attend this session for free to try out the school if you haven’t done so already and I will send you the link.

I have lots of questions about Louisa May Alcott and Little Women/Good Wives. How much of it is autobiographical? I heard that LM based her story on the classic work Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. Has anybody else heard this? LM supposedly found God at an early age but was she Christian? Did she attend church? How come she never married? Some internet sites I have found contend that her book is not a wholesome read for Christian young girls. Why would they say that? Join us for a rousing discussion!

I am excited that Sarah Pope, over at http://thehealthyhomeeconomist.com, just made this video to explain why lacto-fermented foods and beverages are so good for you, not only why, but how to make them.

It’s a hard concept to grasp at first. I know I struggled with it in our germo-phobe culture. You mean it’s OK to purposefully eat bacteria? It’s OK to purposefully cultivate bacteria in your kitchen? YES! Some bacteria are good and our bodies need them to fight the bad bacteria! You will be sick less often if you consume lacto-fermted foods and beverages! Grocery store Pickles, cabbages, and salsa are all mass-produced imitations of their nutritionally-rich lacto-fermented traditionally prepared ancestors.

This video shows how to make salsa, old-fashioned ginger ale, and other cool foods! Enjoy!

This is my husband and me with Baby #4, almost ten years ago, at a Stake Valentine’s Day Dance. We like to take our baby with us on dates.

Just as a tree has seasons when it’s attached to the fruit, and then when it is not, so does a mother. Healthy babies begin by being attached to their mothers, first in utero, then through babywearing, breastfeeding, and co-sleeping. As the child grows other attachment-promoting behaviors replace the intensely physical ones of babyhood. Things like reading books together, talking, sharing jokes, eating mealtime together, and working and playing together.

It was 18 years ago this past September that I discovered Dr. Sears and Martha Sears’  The Baby Book, right before my oldest child was born. The ideas totally resonated with me so much so that Attachment parenting (AP) is almost like a religion to me. After seven babies, I still think AP is the way to go although it involves more from the mother than the mainstream philosophy of child rearing, which is to get kids to be as independent and isolated from the parent as soon as possible. But the return on the investment is much greater. Kids who are emotionally attached are more likely to be healthy and happy.

The LDS religion says that “families are forever.” Attachment parenting shows how to make that bonding/sealing/attachment start with birth.

October is Attachment Parenting month! In honor of that, I will be blogging a few times about my journey of AP with seven children. I’ve been in no way a perfect mother, but I’ve found some tips and tricks along the way to ease the give-a-thon involved in AP. 

This is the yummy chicken paella that Veggie Gal Annette fixed for us.

A few weeks ago my informal group of girlfriends, called the “Veggie Gals,” met in Park City for a Veggie Gal lunch hosted by one of us, Annette, who we don’t regularly see. She moved from Provo to Park City, and at that time we all sadly thought that was the end of the earth and we would never see her again. That was about eight years ago or so, before I moved from Provo as well. Last June we had a Veggie Gals shindig just to reunite with Michelle, who was in town from Guam. Annette came to that, and afterwards I guess she decided Park City wasn’t so far away. She invited us all up to her place in Park City for September’s Veggie Gal lunch. (We get together about once a month for a potluck lunch.) Annette is the only non-LDS in the group. We have all loved getting to know her. She has a wry sense of humor and a perspective about living among Mormons that refreshes us.

Our group started out as an offshoot of our La Leche League Group of Provo. Our shared meals are a place where we can meet over lunch or dinner and discuss life and mothering.  We started out with a common devotion to breastfeeding and loving life. Since the start, others have joined us who are not involved with LLL but who share a common devtion to loving learning and life. Some have come and gone, and some have been with the group since it began, over 15 years ago.

Every time I go to Park City I fantasize about bumping into the Food Nanny, Liz Edmunds, somewhere in town since she lives  around there. She’s an LDS mom of 7 and cookbook author of the same name. See http://byutv.org/foodnanny/  Well, Food Nanny, move over, here’s the Food Maven, Annette. She used to bring these to-die-for cheesecakes to Veggie Gals that we all appreciated except one of us, who was a diehard anti-dairy person and food ascetic. She has been known to have a fetish for cabbage for about 8 years now. That’s her pleasurable indulgence. All I can say is, she missed out. Annette’s dishes always look too pretty to eat and taste as good as they look.

Dining on the patio.

Annette invited a bunch of her Park City friends. We didn’t know them, so when we sat down to eat we sat in our comfortable groups, the Veggie Gals on one side and the Park City gals on the other. She jokingly said that her lunch was a meeting of the U.N. to unite the Republicans and the Democrats.

A tribute to hospitality on Annette’s wall.

I just love pretty sandals like this. Veggie Gal Shauna sported them on her pregnant feet.

Veggie Gals Becky, Shauna, and Annette.

Even the refrigerator at Annette’s was beautiful! Yes, that’s a fridge!

Thanks Annette, for opening up your home and nourishing us!

My son who is away at college, George Wythe College, see http://gw.edu is reading Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy for his class on family culture. I was amazed to text him last week and discover that instead of watching the BYU football game he was actually reading that famous Russian novel. When I found out that he is reading it reminded me of two points.

The first point is that one of the really cool aspects of Fascinating Womanhood, a much maligned-somewhat- cheesy-but-is-worth-reading-and-applying book about how to increase the happiness in your marriage, is all the references to classical literature. I love it! The author, an LDS woman named Helen Andelin, who was about the age of my grandmother, tells a story of an author of classic literature, Tolstoy. She tells the story to illustrate the principle that you shouldn’t try to change your husband. You should accept him as he is.

Leaving home for the second time…after a visit to see his ortho here at home.

She writes that Tolstoy converted to Christianity after they married. His new religion changed his views on materialism. He decided to give away his wealth to the poor. His wife hated that and begged him not to. She became very unhappy. because she did not accept his new religion and died a bitter woman. I love hearing stories like this that show the power of Christianity. This is something that you don’t hear in public school! I have been Googling Tolstoy to see if I can confirm this story and so far I have been unable to. But I hope it’s true, at least the part about him becoming Christian.

Some web site authors write that Tolstoy didn’t really become Christian. I am wondering if he did, but he just didn’t fit into the Christianity that was prevalent in that day, or the Christianity that is prevalent today, so they discount his conversion. It seems like he had a broader view of the universe and man’s place in it that fits right in with the Mormons.

Here’s a video that claims he did become a Christian.

This reminded me of my point number 2, that Tolstoy had something to say about “the new American religion,” Latter-day Saint Christianity, or Mormonism. I can’t remember where I heard this, was it in my BYU Honors History of Western Civ class, or at church? Probably in my BYU class, because the professor had an affinity for Russians. He believed that more of the blood of the tribes of Israel was in Russian than any where else.  Anyway, I did some sleuthing and found this cool video that tells what my faded memory was grasping for. This is  what Tolstoy thought of Mormonism. It makes me wonder, maybe if LDS missionaries had found him, maybe he would have been baptized! Now I am thinking I want to read Anna Karenina, or at least get it free at http://librivox.org and listen to it, in my spare time, that would be my multitasking  time when I drive, dejunk, or organize. He sounds like a fascinating man!