Tree of Life Mothering

I just discovered the web site of my naturally healthy friend Amy Jones. I met Amy when I did my natural LDS Moms conference two years ago. (See http://treeoflifemothering.ning.com/page/free-recordings-from-the-2009) I really didn’t know at the time how into naturally healthy living she was. All I knew was that she had the keys to the building to let me in. Turns out, she’s very interested in being naturally healthy. So much that she did an LDS holistic living conference the next year. She’s doing it again this year and I plan on being there again. It’s June 25, see http://ldsholisticliving.com. Hopefully I will see some of you there!

Anyway, Amy has her own web site, http://amyjones.homestead.com. There, you will see links to the classes she does on herbs, making herbal remedies, childbirth, diagnostic face reading, essential oils, and more. She’s written a series on DVD about birth called Birthologie, http://birthologie.com. Amy, thank you for sharing your wisdom with us!

Sunday night we (my three oldest children, Valor, Virtue, and Honor and I) attended a John Bytheway fireside that our stake hosted. It was so cool! I first heard John when I was in my first year at BYU and my hometown ward of YW that was a half hour away went to the Marriott Center for a mini-EFY on a Saturday in March. They invited me to come with them and relive some old YW times. It was so fun. That must have been when he was just starting his career as an inspiring comedic youth speaker/Barney Fife impersonator. Wow, it was over twenty years ago!

John said that on the drive up he drank the green smoothie that his wife prepared for him out of spinach and bananas. So he has a whole foods, naturally healthy minded wife! Maybe she will join this site! He talked about this year’s mutual theme of the 13th Article of Faith. He pointed out that when Joseph Smith was asked to write about what we believe by a newspaper editor, Joseph did not just write “We believe in honesty,  truth, virtue, charity, etc. ” but he wrote “We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, and in dong good to all men…” Isn’t it interesting that he wrote that we believe in being, not just doing. John said that the Hebrews were all about learning that allowed them to be, but the ancient Greeks were about just learning. Hey, I’ve heard Oliver DeMille say the same thing. Great minds think alike!

He told some neat stories relating to each phrase in the 13th Article of Faith. He included a quote from Elder Jeffrey Holland, something to the effect of “We already know which side is going to win. The victory has already been posted on the scoreboard. The only thing that’s not known is which jersey you are going to wear.” Translated: yes, wicked times are here, but don’t be scared, this has been prophesied in the scriptures, as well God’s victory. You don’t need to worry about whether or not God is going to win, but which side are you on? You can only be on God’s side if you actually are good, chaste, true and benevolent, not just if you pretend to be by going through the actions.

Here is a link to some free downloads of some of John’s talks http://beemp3.com/index.php?q=john+bytheway

One of the personal things he shared was that the brother who introduced him to speak that night at the fireside has a connection to him. Brother Crawford’s grandfather introduced the gospel to John’s dad, while they were servicemen in World War II. So that made me think of the books John has written about WWII, and that made me think of the Hero Generation. That made me remember that I have a Part II to my Thoughts on the Hero Generation that hopefully I will post in the next month.

I have been reading the book by John Pontius called Following the Light of Christ Into His Presence. Years ago my Veggie Gals dinner group friends raved about this book, particularly my girlfriend Becky Edwards. Yes, Becky, I am finally reading this book! I read his first two novels and loved them, although they are cliffhangers.

So last night I found John’s web site and I am so excited! He has the third novel as a downloadable text, so I can find out what happens to his characters, Sam and his wife, a Latter-day Saint couple living in Alaska as diamond wholesalers. He also has free downloads of firesides he’s given. I can’t wait to listen to all of them.

Go to http://followingthelight.org and check it out!

Last night I had a baby shower to go to among the girlfriends in my ward. I went to it and when everybody was leaving I felt something telling me to stay later. I thought it was the refreshments calling me, as I got there late and hadn’t eaten any yet. So I stayed. I enjoyed the cake and got lots of water, since I am always thirsty as a continuous, extended breastfeeding mom (going on 18 years now with a few breaks for pregnancies, although I have nursed through two pregnancies– it can be done).  My girlfriend who was hostessing all the sudden HAD to make a phone call to process through some comment she made to one of the other guests with her best friend. I told her I was going to leave since she was on the phone, but she said, “No, don’t!” I listened and stayed. She got off the phone and we had a really great heart to heart talk that we have never had before. I am glad I took time to listen to her. It was so sweet to hear her experiences of listening to the still small voice.

I am reading a book about how to listen to the still small voice. It’s Following the Light of Christ Into His Presence. It’s soooo good! If anybody’s read it please tell me what you learned from it in the discussion forum on this site.

I got to present an hour-long presentation about the Hero Generation at the Thomas Jefferson Education Forum in SLC last month. It was so inspiring to share this message. An hour was not enough to do justice to the topic. Here’s a summary of what we (Kent, Amy, and Brad Bowler and I) presented, and then more of what I’ve been thinking about the topic. We felt pleased that we did a great job and the 100 youth or so who heard us gave us a standing ovation.

First of all, a Hero Generation is a generation that has the “hero archetype.” The current Hero Generation was born starting around 1984 and the births ended around 2004. So those of you who are parents of children at home, this covers many of your children.  This idea comes from two historians, Strauss and Howe, who wrote the book, The Fourth Turning. They say that American, and I think possibly Western history follows a cycle, just like the seasons of the earth follow a cycle. A cycle of history is called a saeculum. Each saeculm has four time periods, turnings, or seasons. The first turning, the spring, is called the high, the second turning, summer, is the Awakening, the third turning, or fall, is the unraveling, and the fourth turning is the winter, or the crisis. Just like a storm comes in winter, so the fourth turning involves some kind of major crisis or storm.

Right now we are in a Fourth Turning, according to Strauss and Howe. You can see a chart they made here http://fourthturning.com/my_html/body_turnings_in_history.html We haven’t hit a full-blown crisis yet. You would have to have had your head under a rock for the past year or so not to know that the U.S. is definitely headed for some major disaster. Will it involve a world war, like the last Fourth Turning did? Will it involve a fight for independence, like the Fourth Turning of over 200 years ago? Nobody knows.

What we do know is that so far, history has followed  a cycle. It’s comforting to know about this idea because we can prepare. Just like we don’t mind winter coming when we are prepared to weather a storm, we can feel peace by knowing we can prepare for this upcoming Crisis.

What’s also cool is that the Hero Generation always comes of age in a Crisis. This is cool because that means we can educate the youth to prepare to be leaders during the crisis, to take us safely through it. That’s partly why the message of Oliver DeMille and leadership education resonates so much with me. (See http://tjed.org, http://oliverdemille.com, and http://lemimentortraining.com)

Kent shared the story of a U.S. soldier, Guy Gaboldon, who served in Japan. This private actually befriended the Japanese because he had learned about the Japanese culture when he was growing up because of his grandparents. So he had a heart for the Japanese people and refused to see them as objects but saw them as people. The Japanese thought the Americans were totally evil and would eat their children. They would throw their children and themselves off a cliff to die in suicide because that was more honorable to them then giving in to the atrocious Americans. Guy told the Japanese that Americans weren’t really like that. He convinced them to surrender rather than kill themselves and said that the Americans would treat them fairly as prisoners of war. He did this because he felt some call within himself to help these Japanese people from killing themselves.

Amy shared the story of Irena Sendler. Irena was a Christian young woman who grew up with amazing parents. Her father, a doctor, told Irene that even if she sees someone drowning, she should rescue that person, even if she doesn’t know how to swim. Irena grew up in Poland and saw the Germans come in and start rounding up the Jews to send them to concentration camps. She bravely used her position as a social health worker to round up Jewish babies and children and take them away to freedom by putting them with Christian adoptive families. She did not want these children to lose their identities so she kept meticulous lists of their Jewish names and their names with their new Christian families. Then she put these lists in a jar and buried it. So the play and book about her are called “Life In a Jar.” You can learn more here http://irenasendler.org

Brad shared the story of his grandfather, Kent’s father, who served in WWII as a soldier. He was on an aircraft carrier being shot down. He got wounded but did not leave his post until his crew was all safe. Then Brad shared the story of Three Against Hitler, the three youth who helped start and carry on the resistance movement against Hitler. See http://lds.families.com/blog/a-review-of-three-against-hitler

We told the youth that we know that they know that they are the Hero Generation. Last year at the Forum, speaker Julie Earley pointed out that Hitler also told the upcoming generation in his regime that they were the greatest generation. Youth everywhere are used to hearing that they are special. We posed some questions to the youth to get them thinking about what they need to know and do so that they are the heroes God wants them to be, instead of a hero for the wrong side. (I will have to write a later post about the “wrong side.”)

Here are the questions:

So you know you are the Hero Generation, but do you KNOW???

•      What kind of government the Heroes in the Revolutionary War fought against?  What did they fight for?

•      Why there was no Hero Generation during the Civil War cycle?

•      Did America’s involvement in WWII end totalitarian government or did it lead to the spread of totalitarian government?

•      What your core book says about fourth (hero) generations?*

•      What form of government is worth fighting for?

•      What form of government we have today?

•      What kind of a hero you will be?

Are you consistently following your saygobedos?

(if you don’t know what saygobedo is, go to http://site.saygobedo.com/ to get the book and learn more!

* by core book I mean the Bible, and for LDS, the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants. You can find the phrase “fourth generation” in the scriptures. It is fascinating what it says!

I enjoyed General Conference, although it is always a challenge to focus with a baby and many children. I got the idea a while ago from my girlfriend Becky Williams to take notes on Conference right in my journal. I was so impressed once when I asked her a question about somebody’s talk from General Conference. She went right to her journal and told me exactly what the speaker said. This was before the days when every talk was archived at lds.org. So ever since I’ve been taking notes, especially any epiphanies I have as I listen, something I learned from Oliver DeMille. He said that whenever you go to a class or seminar, draw a line down the center of the page and write notes of what the speaker says on one side of the line, and the ideas you hear whispering in your head about what you want to do or are feeling on the other side.

I don’t worry about taking copious notes and catching everything, but even jotting down short notes and my epiphanies can be hard with my baby. He seems to be the neediest and least interested in toys when I am wanting to take notes. There must be some kind of Murphy’s law about that.  The other challenge is staying awake, once I am nursing and that oxytocin kicks in and I am listening to some of those gentle, sonorous-sounding speakers.

The talk that hit me the most was President Monson’s Sunday morning talk about temples. The story he told of the family whose father and brothers worked 3000 miles away in the nickel mines for four years to earn enough money for the whole family to travel to a temple in New Zealand was so inspiring and heart-wrenching. It just makes me wonder if my family would be so dedicated to getting temple ordinances if they were hard to obtain. It makes me all the more desirous of sacrificing to help my deceased relatives get their temple ordinances.

I enjoyed the Young Women’s conference as well the week before. The theme was the 13th Article of Faith. The phrase “we believe…in doing good to all men” really struck me. That’s some thing for me to be better at. To do good to all men, not just the ones who I like or who are nice to me. I’ve never thought about those words before.

I went to a cooking class that I enjoyed done by my friend Tammie Duggar about dips, dressings, and sauces. You can check out her blog here http:///nourishingfamilies.blogspot.com/. She has some recipes up right now about how to beat sugar cravings. She has written a cookbook called Scratch which features cooking dishes made from scratch, which has become a lost art Tammie was my savior who stepped in to drive her daughter and my son and their Williamsburg classmates from Davis county Utah to their outdoor adventure camp in southern Utah last fall. Tammie and her family are part of the Commonwealth School, based on TJEd, that my older children attend once a week. They were recently featured on the Mormon Channel. Tammie’s husband, Dr. Jerry Duggar, is a chiropractor who teaches how to be well. Listen here http://radio.lds.org/programs/insights-episode-16?lang=eng .

The weather has been so on and off with snow, rain, and sunshine. I think we are all impatient for spring to finally be here with warm, go-without-a-jacket-or-coat weather. It reminds me of how the seasons change in our lives. When we go from a figurative winter to a figurative spring, rarely are the edges cut and dried. The same as when our children wean or develop a new skill. Usually there are a few steps forward and then backwards. Remembering that helps me to be more patient. After all, when I make changes, I usually don’t do a new thing perfectly all at once. Why should I expect nature to instantly change from one way (stormy and wintry) to another way (sunshiny and springy) with no backsliding?

I am excited for Easter. This year I am remembering that one of the Easter activities recommended in the Hales’ book about Easter, A Christ-centered Easter, from Deseret Book, is to dejunk your home, akin to the cleansing of the temple that Christ performed in the week before his death and resurrection. I am grateful that I am remebering this now, because it takes more than just a day for more. Dejunking seems like a continual process here. I have inherited my parents’ packrat tendencies. (At a family lunch at my sister’s home over a month ago my mom approached me with long-lost treasures to sort through: almost every bit of piano music my four siblings and I had accumulated as well as a box of barettes, Smurf bobby pins and hair ornaments from the early 80s. Yikes! I had to resist the urge to run the other way.)  I’ve also passed them on to my children.

I definitely want to focus intensely on it the next few weeks before Easter. I would love to feel like all the rooms in my home are blog photo worthy. What a miracle if that could happen. Let’s just say that if I had waited to start homeschooling my oldest (now 17) when he was five until my house was super clean and organized it would never have happened. Things don’t have to be perfect to start homeschooling.

I finished reading Oliver DeMille’s new book The Student Whisperer that I got at the TJEd Forum. It is a fascinating book. I read it while nursing and I couldn’t do the writing exercises while nursing. I am going to set aside a block of time to write in my new Student Whisperer journal. Oliver and Tiffany Earl, the coauthor, write about how important it is to listen to the voices whispering in your mind. Some of the voices are evil. Some are good, namely, the Real You, and the Inspirer. I think these are code words for your conscience or the Light of Christ. I really like the guidelines they give for how to tell the difference between the evil voices that we all hear in our minds and the good voices.

I also recently finished  two books by John Pontius, The Spirit of Fire and Angels Among Us. They are so inspiring and total page-turners. They are novels based on the ideas in John’s first book, Following the Light of Christ into His Presence. I am just starting the latter. It is about how to feast on the fruit of the tree of life. The tree of life symbolizes the love of God, and that’s something we can experience daily, happily, in this life, not in some distant heaven. The basic idea is to be committed to following the whisperings of your conscience and the Holy Spirit, and you will be happy, because you will be following the iron rod (the word of God, the words He speaks to you), and these words will lead you to the Tree of Life. The  fruit of the Tree of Life is the sweetest and that which makes us most happy.

I am wondering if Oliver got some of his ideas for listening to voices from John’s books.Specifically, the idea that you can tell if you are listening to the right voice by how you feel. If you feel anxious and stressed, then you can be sure that you are listening to the wrong voice.

I also just finished The Soft Reply. It’s about the power of responding to people, especially angry people, with a soft response. That’s something I’ve been really working on with my children. My mother was very good at responding to people gently, I don’t ever remember her raising her voice. I have not inherited her incredible patience and have been working on my patience ever since I became a mother.

In my last post I asked why women choose to stop having babies (before menopause hits and they can’t). I mentioned my friend who just had a baby three months ago at age 44, her ninth. Another homeschooling girlfriend of mine, in her early 40s,  just had her tenth. Her oldest is in college. Another one recently told me she’s pregnant with #7, and she just sent her oldest on a mission. I am so pleased to hear about all of this extended childbearing. It cheers my heart!

(OK here’s a disclaimer. Especially if you are one of my personal friends, please don’t think I go around counting how many kids you have or the age of your youngest child and judge your righteousness based on that. I’m judging your righteousness based on other things….just kidding! I know there are many factors that go into the decision to have a baby. I believe that as mothering trees of life, women have to have a nourishing soil to have lots of children and not go crazy, because today’s world is not mom-friendly, baby-friendly, or kid-friendly. A nourishing soil involves great physical, mental, and marital health. I hope that people can see that it’s a privilege to have a baby and that they will want to live up to that privilege by improving their soil or health with better diet, exercise, prayer, counseling, etc. so they can joyfully have as many babies as God wants them to have. After all, “children are an heritage of the Lord.” That means that children are gifts from God that help us to become like Him and qualify to inherit what He has.)

Last year I read this incredible book, called The Gathering about an LDS woman who intensely desired children from a young age. She got married young and immediately started having babies. After ten months of marriage she had twins. The next three came in the next three years. She had health problems and after her fifth baby, right after the delivery, without her consenting, the doctor rendered her infertile. This caused her extreme anguish. For years she wanted more babies. So she did foster care and eventually adopted. Not just one or two kids, a LOT of kids, like, umm, around 20. You can read more here http://thegatheringplaceranch.com/The_Gathering_Place_Ranch/Biography.html.

This book, by Annie Laura Richardson and her husband Brian, was the most amazing book I have ever read, besides the scriptures. It’s called The Gathering. This woman did so many tremendous things in order to give birth to and adopt all of the children she felt she was called by God to be a mother too. It was a very humbling book for me to read, to wonder if I would be willing to do that if I couldn’t bear any more babies. It took a long time for this woman to think she was “done.” Most women say they are done even if they physically can have more babies, but Annie Laura couldn’t bear more physically but she felt she was not done. This women endured pain, bugs, illnesses, traveling to the ends of the earth, deprivation, living for months in Haiti and Vietnam, in order to find the babies that she felt were calling to her to adopt them. Read more here http://deseretnews.com/article/700018657/Family-of-7-opens-hearts-to-20-adopted-children.html They live on a farm in Missouri and homeschool.

OK, back to why someone would stop multiplying and being fruitful. Another girlfriend of mine told me that she recently went to God in prayer and asked if she should have another one (her youngest of six is four). She was feeling it was time to have another baby. She was told, “No. You will be raising someone else’s child.” So there’s my answer. If God tells you to, then it’s time to stop. But who knows, he may tell you to have another one later on.

We modern women tend to think of fertility as something we can turn on and off, instead of something that we honor and let flow, like the seasons of a tree. We were meant to be like trees and go through seasons too. Everybody in the world talks about “saving the trees.” That’s a huge distraction to keep us from working on what really matters. The trees that are the most important to save are the mothering tree, the fathering tree, and the family tree. Instead of focusing on recycling and reusing and reducing waste, let’s focus on helping families, on helping moms with babies and children and strengthening home and family.

The mothering tree is anatomically symbolized by two uniquely feminine structures, the breasts, whose milk ducts have the structure of a tree, and the placenta, which have a tree-like structure as well. When we use our breasts as trees of life literally to our babies by ecologically breastfeeding then our bodies do go through seasons. We can have LAM, or lactational amenorrhea, and be infertile. That’s our winter time, a time when we get a break from having periods. This is if you follow the Rules, the Seven Standards of eco breastfeeding. That’s a gift to help our bodies be strong to bear more fruit. I read a while ago that fruit trees bear better fruit if they have a good, hard winter. If you want to learn more about eco breastfeeding, read it from my LLL friend, Sheila Kippley, who outlines it here http://nfpandmore.org/The Seven Standards Summary.pdf

I remember a year ago visiting a girlfriend of mine, KeeNan. As I entered into her home, I felt I was entering a sacred space, like a temple. I could feel the Spirit there. Here was a precious environment, protected from the world. A woman, the queen of her home, reigned there. It was clean and orderly and safe. Her children felt happy and loved. Nothing worldly was there. She had her children close by, since she homeschools. Her husband was gone because he was out working to provide for the family, so that she as the mom could be home with her little ones. It’s a common scenario among my readers probably, but I think we forget just how precious it is. (I strive for my home to be clean and orderly and happy but sometimes that is a struggle with four big boys who like to wrestle and erupt with weird noises and kids who seem to be genetically programmed not to pick up their belongings.)

It struck me with great force of the Spirit, that this is the environment worth saving. The environment of a mom at home, who is willing to bear more children, who is with her children to teach and train them all day long. The mom is a tree of life to her children, a Christ-figure, and she’s also like a shepherd, like Christ is. She’s there to keep sheep, or to nourish and protect her flock of sheep. (If you ever want to listen to a tear jerker of a song, listen to “Keeping Sheep” by Lynne Perry Christofferson, Janice Kapp Perry’s daughter, http://ldsmusicnow.com/album/302/Lynne-Perry-Christofferson/Keeping-Sheep/. It is priceless, but only .99 to download!)

So, I’ve got two ideas going here, the idea of moms having lots of babies by letting her fertility flow through seasons with ecological breastfeeding, so she doesn’t get burned out as she has lots of babies. Then there’s the idea of a mom being home with all her children all day because of homeschooling. Many people in the world think these are crazy, burdensome lifestyle choices. They think that they bind women down. But here’s a secret: it’s actually a lot of fun to be a wife and mom and have lots of babies, as long as you feel well nourished and rested and protected and provided for by your husband. It’s fun to have your children with you all day, to play learning games with them and read aloud Anne of Green Gables. It’s fun to hear them recite their Shakespeare lines and work on math and help you fold the clean laundry as you listen and sing to http://scripturescouts.com. It’s fun to watch your children interact with the baby. It’s hard work too, but anything that’s worthwhile takes hard work.

Many people think that these choices are crazy because we live in a culture like the ancient Romans, instead of it being Biblically or Hebrew-based. It’s Roman based because society in general, and even some LDS members, worship false gods and reveres women for the seductiveness aspect of sexuality instead of the motherliness aspect of their sexuality, like the ancient Romans did. The Hebrews revered women for being mothers. So this split culture is why you get LDS women like me who grow up being afraid of telling her peers that she wants to have lots of kids and be a stay-at-home mom, even when I could have had any other career I wanted. That’s how you get LDS brides like me who get duped into going onto the birth control pill (I’ve since repented) instead of being told that NFP works and it’s the only birth control method that fully harmonizes with the LDS Church prophets’ teachings on birth control here http://lds.org/si/bc/seminary/content/library/manuals/institute-student/eternal-marriage-student-manual_eng.pdf. 

It’s time for us to change that. After all, remember what happened to the ancient Romans? I think we can have a sexual revolution that returns our culture to worshiping the one true God, and uses the natural forms He has provided of ecologically breastfeeding and natural family planning. Go to http://familyplanlds.homestead.com/ and http://nfpandmore.org to learn more.

What does the family have to do with liberty? Why should youth care about this?

Thomas Jefferson once said that the tree of liberty should be refreshed every once in a while with the blood of patriots. What is the tree of liberty? How does it connect to the family tree? Tree of Life Mothering is sponsoring an event on May 6-7 to help youth explore the connections between liberty, the classics, self-government, family, virtue, and royalty. It will be at building #1 at the county fairgrounds in Farmington, Utah. All youth ages 14-19 are invited to attend. It involves the following:

a talent show

a Liberty Lyceum (lectures, colloquia,  lunch, etiquette training, ballroom dance instruction, and simulation)

a Royal Banquet

a Royal Ball.

 Agenda

Friday night May 6

Meet at 6:30

Colloquium: “Our Heavenly Father’s Home” by Elder Tad R. Callister to discuss the importance of reading, listening, and watching the best and having refinement

Talent Show to showcase the best talents of the youth

Saturday May 7

Meet at 9 AM (Come having already eaten breakfast)

Keynote Speech by Steve Russell “America’s Second Experiment”

Colloquium on John Locke’s “Essay on Civil Government”

Speech by Aneladee Milne “Of Kingdoms and Conquerors: Defending the Family”

Colloquium with Aneladee on “The Doctrine of the Family” by Sister Julie B. Beck

Speech by Stephanie Servoss “Beacons and Knights”

And there’s more…lunch, etiquette training, ballroom dance instruction…please click on the tab that says “May Youth Conference” and read more, then register. Cost is $75 but if you register with a group you get a discount. Hope to see you there!

Whew, last week was fun! I presented at the SLC TJED Family Forum with my friends the Bowlers, to the youth. We spoke about the Fourth Turning and the Hero Generation. (The whole presentation was born when I took my son to the Youth for Freedom Conference last June and finally got to meet the famous Bowlers who my sister-in-law has been telling me about for years. You never what plans will hatch when you meet other homeschooling moms who are reading similar books as you.)

(Diann Jeppson and Jodie Palmer, the founders of the TJED SLC Family Forum through http://tjedmarketplace.com)

I totally forgot to take any pictures when I did have a free moment so you will have to enjoy pictures I have of my family life.

I was going to promote the whole thing more on this site, like I did on my TJED site (http://tjedlibrary.com) but I just didn’t have time. The day before the Saturday classes was especially crazy. We were doing Saturday chores, plus I was gone in the morning, plus I still wasn’t quite ready for my talk the next day, and we had to get groceries and I had to pack the toys up that I was bringing for the Love of Learning Center the next day. It’s funny how sometimes the day before my family has a big event, like leaving for a trip, things get really behind schedule and everything feels like it’s going to fall apart but then somehow it all works out and things fall into place.

I heard Diann Jeppson mention the Wednesday before that she needed a videographer for the Leslie Householder Genius Boot Camp event on Friday. I offered my husband and my son to do it, but then my husband didn’t want to do it so I took his place. I’ve been really wanting to do her Boot Camp for years. This one was an abridged version, but even at the incredible price I couldn’t afford it. Now a way presented itself for me to see it, as the videographer would get in for free. I figured my baby was old enough (19 months) to have me gone for half a day. He is nursing, (notice I didn’t say “he is still nursing”) as I like to nurse through toddlerhood. Toddlers who are breastfed are so healthy.  My oldest son stayed for the afternoon and filmed.

My baby was happy while I was gone with his older brother tending. He had fun playing in the big hole that his brothers have dug up in the backyard garden area. I was pleased to find out that the hotel where the event was, the Sheraton, was the same place that I went to try out for Jeopardy! five years ago when my daughter was a baby. I wrote about that experience here http://www.llli.org/nb/nbnovdec07p272.html. Some pleasant memories came back to me of that time when my husband helped me out by being my root system to my Tree of Life mothering tree.

It was a lot of fun to watch Leslie. Most of the stuff I had heard before but I gleaned a few new nuggets of wisdom. I especially liked watching the activity where she had the students involved with the Stickman figures taped to the floor. It was a clever idea and one that helps me. At first, they didn’t have a decent tripod to hold the camera so I was having to hold it. After a half hour I started silently praying that someone would get a good tripod. Leslie’s husband taped the camera to the tripod, making it flat with a bottle of white board cleaner. I had to turn the whole tripod because the camera could not be moved separately.  My prayers were answered when this guy came back with a tripod he had just gone out and bought. It turned out the guy was one of the speakers to the youth the next day, Eric Proffit. His story sounds amazing from the bio and I can’t wait to listen to the download of the talk, since so far my youth have not been good at telling me what they heard.

It was fun to see a lot of people I know there. My teenage daughter’s Thomas Jefferson Youth Certification (TJYC) mentor was there, as well as Caralee Ayre, my Nourishing Traditions mentor (see http://amodernpioneeringfamily.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2011-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&updated-max=2012-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&max-results=3).

Also my friend Kim who has done so much car pooling for me driving my son who is her son’s age. They both did TJYC together, ballroom dance, and Open High School last year. I also saw my friend Tammie who mercifully stepped in and drove my son down to Williamsburg’s Elevation last year with her daughter and their other classmates. I ran into an old acquaintance from my past as well. We knew of each other because we grew up in the same ward but weren’t close friends, being four years apart,  but now whenever I see her at TJED events I stop and talk and it feels like we were best of friends. She was popular and a cheerleader in our former lives and a glamorous Laurel when I was a lowly Beehive. She is 44 and just had her ninth baby. Last time I saw her, a year ago, she said she wanted another baby but her husband didn’t. Apparently she talker her husband into it because she had a darling, chubby baby boy with her. I have never seen such a big baby! He was so cute! Almost as cute as my darling baby boy!

This woman absolutely adores babies like I do and wishes she could have a million.  We commiserated over the fact that yes, babies are cute, but they grow into demanding, challenging children, who need more than nursing. “If only I could freeze them when they are this small!” she said, about her relatively small baby. At 3 months he is 14 pounds, even though she said he was born prematurely at 3 pounds. He has made up for it really well. His cheeks were so big they looked like he was hiding golf balls inside of them. I just wanted to scoop him up and smother him with kisses. I always love it when older mothers like me keep having babies. Who says that you have to be done with three or four? Who says you can only “handle” five or six? That’s a whole ‘nother topic for another day.

Anyway, I somewhat reluctantly left the party, I mean seminar, and my son, hoping he would do his duty when it was time to break away from his Williamsburger friends, to film Leslie, and went home to a huge list of chores. I still had to have a phone conference with the Bowlers to finalize things. Things were so crazy with them leaving St. George that we never had the phone conference. But Amy’s husband Kent, worked on the slides for the powerpoint as they drove. Thank goodness for laptops and wireless Internet. I had emailed him some slides that I made on Open Office Impress, a new skill I recently learned but still struggle with. He couldn’t email me back with the whole powerpoint he compiled from a McDonalds because the file was so huge. Thank goodness for my teenage daughter’s leadership. She suggested I use Google Docs. Ahhh, perfect. Now we could collaborate much better. He could see what I was sending and I could see the changes he made. He unified all the backgrounds of all the slides the four of us made to make them pretty. What a great guy!

The next day, Saturday, was fun too. We got up bright and early at 4:30 AM and left by 6 AM. The whole family came this time. My two oldest teens were helping with check-in for the youth and had to be there by 6:30 AM. and my husband was helping with the keynote check-in. The four youngest kids were to be with me all day in the Love of Learning Center. I agreed to help in exchange for all the downloads of all the presentations. The kids just kept coming, and Mary Ann, the organizer of the center and the Home School Coach (see http://home-school-coach.com), said we had 140 kids. I was going to take photos but I literally did not have time to take pictures because of my babysitting, er, facilitating of learning duties.

I think everybody in TJED Land decided to take advantage of this service at the last minute, since Mary Ann said the week before that only 30 kids were registered.  At 9 AM I looked at my watch and thought to myself, “It seems like we have been here a long time. It’s only 9?! This day is going to be looong.” It helped that I got a break at 11 to go give my presentation and then we had lunch. All the kids had to go to their parents for lunch so everybody got a break.

I was sad to miss Jim Ferrell’s keynote speech in person. This guy is amazing! I read the Peacegiver, a book he wrote, last year and loved it. It took me awhile to get into it but once I did it really helped me. I also love the book he wrote, Finding the Hidden Christ in the Old Testament, It’s so beautiful. I also love the speech he gave at SVU, an LDS-based liberal arts school. He basically says we can’t be happy unless we acknowledge that we are broken and need God. God the Father, through God the Son, gives us new hearts to fix our broken hearts through the atonement. Listen here http://svu.edu/mp3/2008-06-06-james-ferrell.mp3

The Bowlers and I spoke to about 100 14-15 year olds. They gave us a standing ovation! I definitely felt the Spirit in that room as Brad and Amy and Kent shared their stories of  unselfish heroes from World War II: Kent’s grandfather, Irene Sendler, Guy Gaboldon, and the Three Against Hitler. I felt disappointed in myself that I spent my time the night before looking for pictures for this blog instead of practicing one last time to add a line that I ended up leaving out during my part of the presentation. I wish I had said the line about the importance of youth, the up and coming Hero Generation, knowing who the enemy is for the upcoming crisis/battle. I did suggest to them that they learn who the enemy is, but then I didn’t say more about that. Now I am wishing I had said, “May I suggest that the enemy is the part inside each of us that wants the government to take care of us instead of being self-governing.” That’s code for,
“Wake up guys! Our government is nanny state socialism, which is just as dangerous as communism, since they can both lead to tyranny. It’s time for you guys to throw it off in the Fourth Turning Crisis and restore our limited government founded by the Constitution. Study your little buns off and get really educated so you can fight in the courtroom, the legislature, and resist any imperialistic wars that the government asks you to fight!”

Oh well, maybe next year. My parents attended my session and that made me very nervous so I wasn’t saying everything in my head and heart. The TJED Family Forum is so much fun! I am sooo looking forward to those downloads so I can hear all the presentations I missed plus all the rest.

I’ve noticed that my blog post titled “Catch this Gift For Yourself For Christmas” is the most popular post on my site. For those of you who are disappointed that you are too late in getting the gift of downloads from the LDS Holistic Living Conference last year, here’s another gift. It’s a set of downloads as well, like the gift being given in the afore-mentioned blog post, and it’s still available.

These are mp3 files of talks given by my friends at the conference I sponsored almost two years ago for natural living LDS moms. I don’t know how much longer I will keep them up on my site, so download them while you can. Speakers include Leslie Householder, Donna Goff, Joyce Kinmont, Jonell Francis of http://myfeelgoodfoods.com, Vernie DeMille, Diann Jeppson, Aneladee Milne. Go here http://treeoflifemothering.ning.com/page/free-recordings-from-the-2009 to get your gift and tell your LDS crunchy granola mom friends about it too!