Tree of Life Mothering

My online discussion about Lincoln tonight was sooooo fascinating. We discussed the myths of Lincoln, which was a paper written by my friend Amy’s son Brad. Amy said during it that she is reading a book by Ludwig von Mises called The Treatise of Human Action. It’s over 700 pages so if I start now maybe I can finish before I die. She is reading it to help her understand why Lincoln did what he did. I don’t think he was evil, just wrong.

I just found out that you can watch a free class given by a great man who has a PhD in Constitutional studies from GWU every Wednesday night. Scott Bradley’s Constitution class is live every Wednesday night from 7 – 9 PM MT here http://tinyurl.com/scottnbradley

I went to my friend Shauna’s home last Sunday night to hear Scott Bradley speak at a Preserving Freedom Fireside. He is running to win the election for the Senate in Utah as a Constitution Party candidate against Mike Lee and whoever the Democrat is, Sam Granato I think. He is like a modern day Moroni. Last January I heard Phyllis Schlafly speak in SLC. She said that we should not vote for third party candidates because they have never won and they never will basically. She also said that the only intelligent thing Joe Biden has said is that if the Republicans win control of Congress everything he and Obama are fighting for will go down the drain.

So at this fireside someone asked Scott why we should vote for him even though that risks splitting the conservative vote and getting the Democrat it. Scott said that Mike Lee has three fatal flaws. He wants term limits, he wants a balanced budget amendment, and those two things will lead to a new constitutional convention.. Anyway, he said to go to his site to study the issues and understand them. http://scottbradleyforsenate.com and click on the issues. Study the term limits and the balanced budget ones.

He also pointed out that we will be accountable to God for our decision as to who to vote for. I’ve changed my mind. I am going to vote for Scott. If you are in Utah, I encourage you to vote for him too!

What I have learned lately:
-if you ask your older son to make a gingerbread cake be sure to specify what size pan to bake it in.
-if the cake spills over the too-small sized pan onto the floor of the oven, remember to clean it up the next day. If you don’t clean it up it can catch fire. If too much lands on the heating element it can eventually burn the element through and break it. I am forever grateful that I already knew how to put out an electrical fire. Important: turn off the source of electricity and use baking soda not water!

-it is fun to observe your young son “carve” a crayon with a K’nex piece during schooltime, and decide maybe he would like something bigger to carve, then get him some ivory soap to carve. The process is definitely more important than the product.
-it is fun to have a closet for your homeschooling where you keep things that you only do during school. My kids actually ran to the closet when I announced that it was school time! Thanks to applying Mary Ann Johnson’s “Rules of Engagement.” You can read all her fabulous tips and see my pictures on her blog at http://home-school-coach.com
-A great chapter book that reminds me of the power of maturity in young children, like in Little Britches, is Stone Fox. I can’t wait for our schooltime to find out what happens next.

-I can actually go jogging for 30 minutes now. Woo-hoo! Maybe a marathon is in my future after all.

-I now have a daughter who some would officially call a “teenager” because she now tells me when clothes are out of style. I was relieved that it wasn’t something I was wearing but rather it was from a hand-me-down bag from the neighbors that I was considering for her. It’s been well over a year now that she can wear all my clothes, including my shoes. We are still working on asking before she takes things. Generally though she is a GREAT young lady who I call a youth and not a teen. See Michael Platt’s article about the difference at http://tjedforteens.com/bonus-gifts/

-Kim Simmerman’s recipe for roasted Mexican potatoes is really yummy! I will post it soon.

-The annotated book of Pride and Prejudice is better than the movie. I learned what Elizabeth Bennet meant when she said that “four ruins a picturesque.” I am sooooo enjoying having these obscure references explained.

-My scholar son doesn’t have enough homework in his Williamsburg physics class. That is going to change for that boy! Loads of story problems like I had in my college physics class, here we come!

-I have a great group of friends in my homeschooling community. I already knew that though. What I didn’t know is that these people actually believe in many of the lifestyle choices I do, like not vaccinating and the importance of reading the Uncle Eric books.A lot of these friends have read more than I have about history and politics. One of them even keeps up with Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief, which I gave up years ago because it is so depressing and hard to understand. See http://worldaffairsbrief.com I don’t feel so radical when I am with them. Another friend started reading Jack Monett’s books at my and this other friend’s suggestion.

-After you read some books you almost wish you hadn’t read them because of scary things they say. Let’s just state the scriptures are true and God’s side will win. Isaiah gives me a lot of comfort. In chapter 4 he tells us that the covenant people of God in the last days will have protection that was like the pillar of fire by night and cloud by day in their homes, their assemblies (church meetings) and their temples. that gives me a lot of peace.

-it’s uncanny how the law of attraction works. I was just thinking about an old friend of mine from my YW/Girls’ Camp days who I haven’t seen in over 20 years. Then just a few days later she friended me on Facebook and told me she was at the Knights of Freedom summit that I went to last month. I also attracted some new white tops that I have been wanting since all my old white knit tops have either stains and/or holes.

-I am learning more from the Story of the World CDs/downloads while listening with my children than I ever learned in 2 years of AP U.S. and art history classes in high school and my honors world civilization class at BYU. A lot of famous historical people aren’t so great after all. It’s amazing how kings and queens killed their own flesh and blood or wives for political purposes.

-the Civil War was more complicated than the typical story that the North fought the South to get rid of slavery.
-most of the cool things in our nation come from the South.
-Alexis de Tocqueville was right. The reason slavery started in Jamestown is because of the lazy men there who didn’t want to work. They were not family men of principled character like the Pilgrims of Massachusetts.
-one of the first slaveholders in the U.S. was actually a black man.

-my life is full of blessings and more are flowing to me!

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I finally have time to post about day two of my journey to TJED Land last summer.

Last summer my seven children and I journeyed to TJED Land, aka southern Utah, for my oldest son to go to Youth for Freedom, a summer camp for leadership ed youth. While he
went and played we stayed and played at our cousins’ home in St.
George. On Day Two of our visit, my sister-in-law Sally said to me
that her neighbor was going to a rest home and had invited her to
come and take whatever books on her shelf she wanted. Oooh, the
possibility of free classics tantalized us and off we went next door.

So while we were perusing the shelves, Sally saw one about Abraham Lincoln. “Hmmm, Abraham Lincoln and His Age. You know, .my
friend’s son wrote a paper for his TJYC (Thomas Jefferson
Youth Certification) class all about Abraham Lincoln and how he
ruined our country.”

“Really?” I asked. “I want to read that!” It sounds overly dramatic, but in all honesty, years had prepared me for this moment. A long time ago we had a neighbor
who told my husband about how Lincoln was wrong in forcing the
seceding states back into the union. At the time it all seemed too
nebulous and complicated for me. I put the idea on a mental shelf.
Then over a year ago, I watched a video by Stephen Pratt on his
libertyandlearning.com web site. He said Lincoln did some things that
were unconstitutional during the Civil War, like suspend the writ of
habeus corpus. Hmmm, I thought. Stephen said that Lincoln’s actions
at this time created the Second Founding of America. Then my friend
Shauna read a book about Lincoln and told me that the Civil War wasn’t
about slavery, it was about the tariff. Another thing that has
piqued my interest in the Civil War was that ever since I’ve studied
the idea of generations and turnings from the book The Fourth
Turning, I have been curious as to why there was no hero generation
during the crisis of the Civil War.

So I read this young man’s paper and that was the beginning of answers starting to come to me. His paper opened my eyes and helped me to see things about history I haven’t seen before. It
challenged my assumptions and got me thinking, embarking me on my own
study of Lincoln and the ideas of democracy, republic, freedom,
slavery, and war. This is exciting, to feel that I, and other adults,
can learn from the fruits of the leadership education of the youth in
our communities.

(This is a photo of my son and some of his TJYC classmates at his “graduation,” reading his summary of what he learned during his TJYC course.)

As this young man states at the beginning of his paper, “If we do not know our history, and if we do not defend the truth of what has actually happened in the past, then ignorant or
even evil men will create a fictional history that will justify their
plans exerting more control over us or further restricting our
freedoms.”

We will be discussing this paper for an online colloquium. If you would like to join us, then please send me a message here on this network and I will send you the paper. We will be discussing it on Tuesday October 26 at 7 PM MDT.

I really appreciate learning about the idea of getting off the conveyor belt from Oliver DeMille when it comes to education. See http://tjed.org to learn more about that if you don’t already know. I have been applying the idea of getting off the conveyor belt in other areas of my life as well.Basically it means that you don’t just accept everything that comes to you at face value, as if you have to consume everything on life’s conveyor belt.You actually think before saying yest to things. For years, I just assumed and didn’t think when it came time for my son and daughter to go to Mutual activities when Mutual night rolled around every week. I just assumed it was best for my kids to go every time. When my daughters’ Beehive class watched Church Ball or some other lame “Mormon genre movie” I decided that wasn’t the case.

When the new school year started, I finally convinced my husband and kids in our Family Meeting (thanks to Nicholeen Peck’s inspiration of http://teachingselfgovernment.com we have been doing these on Sundays) that each of the older kids 12 and up should wash their own laundry. In the past the whole family’s laundryhas been one scholar phaser’s duty to own. First it was my son’s and then it was my daughter’s. The problem was after it was all washed, it was a nightmare to sort through for reach person to do their assigned clothes folding. If the three oldest each did their own then the rest of the family laundry would be easier to sort through.

For the previous two Wednesday mutual nights of the new school year, my three oldest kids have been leaving for Mutual without so much as a good bye from me. Then the next day, while they were gone to their Commonwealth school (see http://thelemi.com), I would find out that they had laundry they had washed but not put away. Or they would be doing homework early Thursday morning before they left for their classes all day. So I got the bright idea, Mutual is a checkpoint. They don’t get to go unless their laundry is done, folded, and put away, and their homework is done. And they certainly don’t get to go if they are watching videos or doing silly activities.

So the first week I implemented this AND communicated properly about it so that there was no misunderstanding, it happened to probably be the best ever Mutual night for the Young Men, with the visit of Larry Gelwix from Forever Strong fame. My two Young Men didn’t get their stuff done, so they didn’t get to go on time. I feared having a weaping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth for the regret. They were both almost done, and I was going to take them late after they finished, but then my older son said he realized he should stay home and do more homework (not for his commonwealth class but to study physics) and then my younger son said he felt sick. He vomited an hour later. Boy was I glad that he hadn’t left. I was so pleased that they both realized that it was for the best that they didn’t go. It was so swell the next day to have the mountain of laundry that the core phasers and I folded to be cut in half. I feel so pleased to have had that bright idea.

The next day at the commonwealth I saw my friend Katie. She organized a moms’ retreat last year about the Hebrew way. I mentioned to her that it had been a year that week since it happened. She agreed and said that this week, like last week, was the start of the new Hebrew year. Hmmm, interesting, I thought. The new Hebrew year starts with the General Relief Society meeting for the LDS Church, and then with the General Conference the next week. Is this a coincidence? I don’t think so. And Joseph Smith received the plates to translate the Book of Mormon at this same time, during the Feast of the Trumpets. At this retreat my girlfriend Kelli Poll spoke about the Hebrew way. She said if you are a member of the LDS church then you are surrounded by the Hebrew way, even though you might not notice it. You are also surrounded by the Roman way, because that is what the world is modeled after. I have been thinking A LOT about this since then. Different books I have been reading have given food for more thought about this.

I’ve got a presentation I wrote that explains more about the Hebrew way vs. the Roman way and how it affects us today. I hope to be giving it sometime in the next year. It is really startling. It involves ideas from history, fourth generations, Abraham Lincoln, World War I!, and 9/11. If we could all truly live the Hebrew way, as Jesus taught, then we would have world peace. Not a false world peace, like the Pax Romana, but true peace. The Founding Fathers, at least a lot of them, admired the Hebrew way and knew that the the ways of Europe, modeled after the Roman way, were not the way America should go. The Hebrew way was for America.

Did you all love the general Relief Society meeting? I had a party afterwards with three friends, a widow in my ward who I felt inspired to reach out to, and two of my homeschooling mom friends. One of them said that Pres. Monson’s talk about not judging others was sorely needed. She grew up in a home with a nonmember father who smoked. She said that she was shunned by some of the Young Women in her ward and their home was vandalized. I am so sad to hear this. Then my widow friend said that her husband smoked and many church members treated her and her children harshly. Sad. I hope we as Christians can be nice to people even if they aren’t like us. Thanks for calling us to repentance, President Monson!

Tonight was the ward fall social and dinner. I won first place for my chili. Woo-hoo! This was the first time in four or five years that I have been there in enough time to actually get my chili entered. Usually I am very late. The judges were the missionaries so they were easy to please. My chili wasn’t that great. But these 19 year old young men did not have discerning enough palates to appreciate my moist, yummy carrot cake that was made from whole wheat flour and free of evil white sugar, which I entered in the dessert category. It should have won first place. My visiting teacher’s Jello cake won. I am probably the only Utahn who doesn’t “do” Jello. It just doesn’t seem like real food. It is just slimy and cold and squishy. Ugh! (Sorry to offend you Jello-lovers.) I haven’t eaten it in over twenty years. I took the liberty of putting my first-place blue ribbon on my cake when I got home. I am going to make it again tomorrow for our extended family dinner and birthday party and put on whipped cream frosting that I learned how to make from my girlfriend and TOLM network member Tara. Yum, yum, yum!

Here is the recipe. I wish I could take credit for it. I got it from an old issue of A Real LIfe, which I used to subscribe to. I can’t believe I had never tried this recipe before. It is almost the perfect birthday cake. The only thing lacking is that it doesn’t come from soaked flour. Maybe Tara can figure that one out.

3 c whole wheat flour (use pastry flour if you can, but I didn’t and it still tasted great)
2 1/2 c Rapadura or sucanat
1 T cinnamon
1 T baking soda
1 t salt
1 c melted butter (actually A Real Life calls for canola oil, which I take issue with. Canola oil is not a real whole food!)
4 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 T vanilla
1 1/3 c pureed cooked carrots
1 c crushed pineapple
1 1/2 c chopped walnuts (I left these out, I am not a fan of nuts in cakes.)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease your baking pan. I used a 9 x 13. Mix the dry ingredients. Then make a well and add the eggs, vanilla, and butter. Mix well. Then add the other stuff. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes. Be sure you don’t overbake.

Then use Tara’s frosting, reprinted below from her blog http://happyinthekitchen-withtara.blogspot.com/2009/09/soaked-dough-recipe.html. I took out the cocoa. I think for a carrot cake a hint of lemon juice in the frosting would be divine.

3 cups heavy cream (raw is best, don’t use ultra-pasteurized)
1/4 cup (or so) sucanat
1 tspn pure vanilla

Mix the cream with handheld beaters. When it starts to thicken a little
add the vanilla and a few tablespoons of the sucanat while you keep
beating. Taste this and keep adding sucanat until it tastes
right to you. Beat until it is thick, smooth, and creamy. Don’t OVER
beat it, it will become lumpy.

Enjoy!

Two weeks ago was my firstborn’s birthday. He turned 17. It is so hard to believe he’s that old and that I’m old! He is such an impressive kid. He does a lot of good things on his own initiative and is anxiously engaged in many good causes. This past year has been interesting watching him start to date and learn how to drive. I was hoping he would wait until he was off his mission to do both but no luck with that. Every year I wonder what fancy treat I can make for him to celebrate. I am sure he’s tired of my whole food birthday cakes that taste like cardboard. This year I found a recipe in Kim Simmerman’s cookbook. She spoke at the TJED forum over a year ago and sold a cookbook that i love, except for the lack of salt in her recipes. Last winter I sued a recipe from my friend Tara for a soaked overnight whole wheat flour birthday cake. I learned from Tara the idea of using slightly sweetened whipped cream for frosting. I absolutely love that idea. This time I thought I would try Kim’s recipe.. Her recipe involved a layer cake with ice cream in the middle. I was going to make it totally from scratch and whole foodsy, including the ice cream, but I ran out of time for the homemade ice cream. It turned out to be a hit anyway. The oohs and aahs that came as I served it were worth every ounce of effort I put into it.

The next day was Constitution day. Hardly no one knows that these days because we are so ignorant of history. Homeschooling definitely has increased my knowledge of history. I passed the A.P. U.S. history exam in high school so I have a rudimentary knowledge of it but I am always learning more about history in our homeschooling and I love that. I love the Constitution Day celebration that Bountiful City has with all of the flags and activities. My daughter won the Constitution Bowl with her commonwealth school team that was part of it. Her school beat all the other high school teams last year, as a “junior high” age level team. Only one team was willing to come back this year, a charter high school, and the commonwealth school won again, to no one’s surprise. As a parenthetical aside, the judge of the competition urged us all to go home and Google Elder Dallin Oaks’ talk on the Constitution that he have the night before in SLC. I found it here. http://www.ksl.com/?sid=12472423&nid=148

As always I love watching a good mental competition. I got this great idea all of a sudden and suggested to my daughter that maybe we form a homeschoolers’ academic decathlon team, after explaining a bit about it. She said, “So then we would have to spend all our time studying trivial things that no one in the real world cares about.” She had a point there. At least for the Constitution Bowl, she is studying important things that no one in the real world cares about.

The next day was Sunday. I was gearing up for another day of wrestling with my son in church. He is in that limbo state of being able to walk but not old enough to to go to nursery. So basically, church is kind of a drag, because he is so active. He won’t take naps anymore during church, even though it is from 1-4 which is prime nap time for one year -olds. He ended up throwing ups so I get to stay home from church with him and that was a huge break because he ended up sleeping the whole time. Oh, how lovely was that! I always wanted a big family Sometimes the logistics and responsibilities of mothering a crew from ages 1 to 17 get so overwhelming that I have to remind myself that I wanted a big family and I am living my dream. I have to take advantage of these nap times to catch my breath and sharpen the saw. I had fun studying Isaiah while he was asleep at the COOL website the LDS Church has for scripture study at http://scriptures.byu.edu I found some really interesting quotes from Brigham Young and Orson Pratt.

The quote from Brigham Young was about how a woman can learn all sorts of interesting cool things and think she is really something but if she doesn’t know how to help her husband by managing her home providently then her knowledge isn’t worth as much as she might think. I have to confess, I started to feel like this was a HUGE hint from the Lord, that he was talking to me. I won’t tell you how old the clothes are in my mending pile! This was the Lord telling me to stick with the plan I made a year ago last fall to retrench on my homemaking efforts

This last week started out with a bang on Monday with my two core phasers getting sick on Monday. Baby brother had been sick the day before. and I guess they caught it from him. It was actually quite hilarious looking back on it. Mondays have turned into our busy day. I am still figuring out when to exercise now that my baby doesn’t sleep as much in the morning. I used to exercise when he went down for a morning nap but he doesn’t always nap in the morning any more. So I had decided to exercise after I dropped my two middle boys off at their love of learning/transition to scholar weekly class and my older scholar son at his speech and debate class.

So I was settled into the park in South Weber down the street from the debate house. Baby was asleep in the car with the windows rolled down of course. Core phasers were playing on the playground. I started my fast walk to build up to my run. (I can now run for fifteen minutes at a time without feeling like I am going to die. This is a big deal for me. I have never been a runner. But the book Running With Angels, along with my fat, has inspired me.) Then the baby woke up when I was in the middle of my run. He had a full diaper that needed changing desperately or I would be sorry If I waited. So I changed him. Then my daughter yelled that she felt like throwing up. So she did. We covered it up with dirt the best we could. Then she and her brother needed to go potty. There is no rest for mothers, or exercise, at least focused exercise for the point of exercising. We get our exercise in running around to fulfill our children’s needs.

By the time I got home after finishing my walk/dash/run with interruptions, aborting a trip to the grocery store for fear my daughter might upchuck there, and driving all over to pick up the three brothers, my daughter and her brother were alternating turns throwing up. It took over an hour to go back and forth up the stairs emptying their buckets and cleaning out the car and the car seat where my son had thrown up. I felt like I was playing that arcade game where the groundhogs keep popping out in different places. Through all of this I listened to my iPod, the Isaiah podcasts from http://byub.org/scripturediscussions. That made cleaning up actually fun. I learn so much from these. Another thing that helped with the drudgery of cleaning up was thinking, “I am doing something for them that they can’t do themselves. I am acting as a savior on their behalf.

Needless to say dinner was simple with plain brown rice and canned vegetables. UGH! That’s all I had time to muster up. FHE was very simple and then we went to bed, skipping the ice cream leftover from the birthday. What a depressing day. The clean laundry was all over the family room. I wondered if I would ever have the energy or time to do more than care for sick people to organize the troops into folding the luandry nad putting it away. I wondered if my two children would ever stop throwing up.

During the night my other son started throwing up as well. Fortunately I had a bowl right by him when he had gone to sleep. As I revived my body from its comatose/sleep state to empty my son’s bowl, I thought of the scripture, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” That made getting out of bed easier. The next time you have to clean up after your kids throw up, try thinking that thought. It helps!

Everybody ended up getting sick but my husband and me and the oldest. They all got better thank goodness. I was going to write more about my week last week, including closet webinar I’ve been participating in to help me become more of a Mary Poppins at homeschooling and the Relief Society general broadcast, but that will have to wait till next time.

I was going to write the following…”My life is so full of good things that I think I am going to burst. ” Lest that is too sickening sweet for you and you feel like gagging, rest assured that I am no longer going to write that because then today happened. It was a day where I felt like LaDawn Jacob’s poem where the husband comes home. The house is quiet and very clean, dinner is cooking, and the wife is radiant. He asks her where the children are and she says, “Gone dear. I sold them today.” This was a day when I felt like selling some of my children. The morning went horribly with two children bursting into tears and had tantrums when I asked them to either, 1. redo some math problems (this is one who is practicing at being a scholar) and 2. pick up her dolls. I also had a child who “forgot” what he was supposed to be doing for school and started playing with Legos right after he was done with kitchen clean-up. . I think I will close that Headgate and give those Legos away, or at least hide them for awhile. The baby would not settle down for a morning nap. He’s a year now and I can only hope that he is not outgrowing his morning snooze. He cried and cried but would not nurse, and then would not be happy while I had him in the sling so I could fix lunch and he would not be happy just playing. Finally my daughter got him to be happy with some frozen apricots. We think he must be teething. The bright spot: my oldest son was being a scholar during all of this and watching/listening to his Williamsburg Academy classes via the Internet (http://wacademy.org during all of this yelling and crying. Thank goodness none of it showed up on the audio or video feed. It was not a happy homeschool day.

Another bright spot was that the previous week was so wonderful. A week ago on Saturday my niece got baptized and I got to visit with my aunt who was in town to buy an RV with her husband. She lives in the hometown where my mom grew up which I dream about moving to because it seems like Mayberry. It has been corrupted by the presence of a McDonalds, I noticed on my last visit, but it still doesn’t even have a stoplight yet. We had a great visit. She shared that she has been listening to Cleon Skousen’s talk on the Meaning of the Atonement. That reminded me that I never did finish listening to it and it’s time to go back and finish. I found it as a download at http://www.latterdayconservative.com/downloads/w-cleon-skousen

I found this quote by Elder John Widtsoe that I love.

“In our preexistent state, in the day of the great council, we made a[n]
… agreement with the Almighty. The Lord proposed a plan. … We
accepted it. Since the plan is intended for all men, we became
parties to the salvation of every person under that plan. We agreed,
right then and there, to be not only saviors for ourselves but …
saviors for the whole human family. We went into a partnership with
the Lord. The working out of the plan became then not merely the
Father’s work, and the Savior’s work, but also our work. The
least of us, the humblest, is in partnership with the Almighty in
achieving the purpose of the eternal plan of salvation…That places
us in a very responsible attitude towards the human race. By that
doctrine, with the Lord at the head, we become saviors on Mount Zion,
all committed to the great plan of offering salvation to the untold
numbers of spirits. To do this is the Lord’s self-imposed duty,
this great labor his highest glory. Likewise, it is man’s duty,
self-imposed, his pleasure and joy, his labor, and ultimately his
glory.”

I am very grateful to Tammie and Kim for doing the driving last week. If I had gone, I know I would have had fun once I got there, visiting with my sister-in-law, but it would have wiped out at least two days. Because Tammie and Kim drove, that allowed me to focus on cleaning out my family room and homeschooling study room, along with the closet, for all of last week. This is something that I have been meaning to do all summer but it just never happened with all of the other summer’s goings-on. Back to school time left me feeling guilty that I didn’t have a clean study room.

I skipped exercising and made sure we had enough food the week before so I wouldn’t have to go shopping. I made a lot of progress. I got rid of some books we never use and even threw away a few bags of stuff. I’ve mentioned before how much of a pack rat tendency I am over coming. I finally am ready to depart with on old search-a word puzzle book I found from when I was eight years old and pages and pages of non whole foods recipes I clipped from the newspaper when I was in high school. Now I am feeling somewhat ready to start another year of school. I have also been listening to the Closet Webinar by homes school coach Mary Ann Johnson, the fairy godmother of homeschooling. After 12 years of homeschooling, sometimes I need all the inspiration I can get. That’s another topic for another day!

1. My friend Tara Kinser is teaching a breadmaking class using the Nourishing Traditions principle of soaking your dough to make the grain-based flour more digestible and nutritious. It will be at her home tomorrow (Saturday, Sept. 11) in Clinton Utah at 11 AM. Sorry for the late notice, I just found out about it last night at a homeschool activity. Email Tara at knsr6@aol.com for her address.

2. My friend Caralee Ayre is having a Weston A. Price Foundation Chapter meeting next week, Friday September 17, 2010 from 6:00 to 8:00 PM at her home in Clinton, Utah. Caralee is Tara’s neighbor and mentor. You can see her informative blog at http://amodernpioneeringfamily.blogspot.com
She has a recipe for her bread dough that Tara uses with a correction.

She says, “I’d like to discuss the following articles found in the last Wise Traditions journal, and also answer any questions about lacto-fermentation and food storage that any of you may have. If you could bring a Nourishing Traditions-style dish to share, and a favorite lacto-fermented food of any sort if you feel so inclined, I would appreciate it!

A week ago, I got to spend a glorious whole week at Park City, Utah with my family and extended family of parents, sibs, and their spouses and kids. We slept late and got up when
we were done sleeping, the cousins played games and went swimming all
day, and the moms took turns fixing dinner so we each had lots of nights
off dinner duty. It was heavenly! I feel grateful that thanks to my
parents’ generosity by buying time-share condos, we can enjoy this
luxury. Almost every morning brought the feeling of, hmmm, I wonder what we will do

today?

I also got to do something else that I’ve always wanted to do, and that is go to This is the Place State Park. If you haven’t ever gone, you are missing out. If you go on
Wednesdays, it is only $2 a person, and so worth it. It feels so
different there. As I walked under the trees and saw the replica
pioneer buildings I felt such a peace. My sister Emily and I and our
children felt such joy and freedom as we explored the treasures that
are around ever corner. Things to touch, explore, learn and play
with. See thisistheplace.org.

I also got to do something else I’ve always wanted to do…send family names to the temple to get the work done for. Since I am still nursing my baby on demand, I didn’t go to
the temple myself but I organized the trip for the 7 youth in our
family to go do baptisms for. I have always wanted to find names from
my family tree and get the work done. Last fall I took a family
history class in my ward and learned how to use the
new.familysearch.org site. This trip was the harvest time for my
efforts. Trust me, if I can find family names, I with limited
research skills and a huge ancestry of people “with the work all done,” anybody can. This is a major victory for me! I sued to think, I can’t do family history work because I can’t leave my kids to go do the research, but now I can do it from the comforts of my home.

I also got to make some beads for bracelets and necklaces out of sculpey clay, and that’s something else I’ve always wanted to do. My dear sister Emily always seems to
have something fun and creative up her sleeve. She brought all her
bead-making supplies and taught me how to make them. For her, a
normal day is to make apple pie and artisan bread. I love to learn
about all of her delights in homemaking and creativity.