This week’s picture book is Seed School Growing Up Amazing by Jean Holub, illustrated by Sakshi Mangal. This book is so adorable! It shows that seeds come in all shapes and sizes, just like people do. In this story, a little seed with a spiky cap goes to school to learn what he needs to grow. He learns that he needs sunshine, air, soil, and water. But then he notices that he’s not growing like the other seeds. So what does he do? Read the book to find out!
If you want some other spring titles, please go here to my other website. Enjoy! Remember a picture book a day, even if you are grown up, keeps the blues away!
If you can’t find the book at your local public library, you are blessed by the magic of YouTube. Watch below!
Have you heard? A new movie about homeopathy to introduce this powerful medicine is coming this weekend, screening for the first time! You can go here to learn more about how to watch it. Basically, you pay $25 and have a window of time to watch it online through April 23. Gather your friends and have a watch party! When you purchse the pass to watch it, say you learned about it from AFHC, Americans for Homeopathy Choice, which is how I heard about it. That way the organization will get more recognition for its work.
I’m so excited about this! I enjoyed the movie/documentary a few years ago, Magic Pills, and now we have a new one.
Here are some interviews, below, with Kim Elia and the team behind the movie.
If you want some of my stories about healing with homeopathy, go here about healing from a bee sting, here about bed bug bites. and here about the flu.
If you want to learn about homeopathy with a course, round up 5 of your friends and I will facilitate the Homeopathy for Moms Book club for your group.
If you want a free ebook to learn the basics of homeopathy, go here.
Homeopathy is so magic! Once you learn about it and then practice it, and witness its powerful healing, you will almost want to be sick just so you can see more magic at work!
Jacob 5 is all about the Allegory of the Olive Tree, which is all so interesting as a sweeping history/prophecy of the world. You can see a great diagram of it all below. See video above to hear all of his commentary.
Even though that is all so good, I especially loved even more what Jared had to say about the story of Sherem and Jacob in Jacob 7. Jared points out how prideful that Sherem was in saying that he knew that there could be no Christ, and then how he also told Jacob that there was no way Jacob could know that there is a God. Jared explains how prideful that is, to say, I can know that there is no God, but you can’t know that there is a God. So, he’s claiming that his epistemology, his method of gaining knowledge, is superior to Jacob’s epistemology. Jared says that at least with agnosticism, there’s humility, but atheism is full of pride. It reminds me of an old Trim Healthy Mama podcast where Danny says basically the same thing. Watch the video below around the 48 minute mark to hear those comments from Jared. I can’t remember which THM podcast it was where I heard Danny say the same thing. If I eventually find it I will put it here. It’s interesting how Jared quotes the Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor who said that for someone to be an atheist they have to know everything there is to know, which is impossible.
I just found this great resource for finding wholesome picture books! It’s called goodbookmom.com. Watch the video below to learn more about it! It’s an interview with Abbie Halberstadt, mom of 10, and Korrie Johnson, mom of 3. You can go to the site to read reviews of books for children 0-12, so picture books, and even buy books from the site, similar in price to what you would do with a Scholastic book order.
The mom who started it, Korrie, talks about being a Christian parent and how to get books harmonizing with Christianity at the public library. You can also join the premium membership part of the site and get access to lots of different lists.
If you’d like some free lists of picture books that harmonize with Christian values, please see my site about Christian family read-alouds and traditions over here.
Have you heard about Emily Morrow, the star of the Really Very Crunchy Mom social media platforms?
She just published her NEW book, shown above, a guide to being crunchy without being annoying. My married daughter showed me some of her videos two years ago, and now I’m bingeing on the rest while I wait for her book to come out in Everand in two days. (Everand is a subscription service to digital books, go here to learn more.)
I’m having fun watching her stuff. Seeing her videos, I laugh, seeing my young mom self from the 90s, and the crunchy granola mom path I started down once I became a breastfeeding mom. It’s interesting to see me in these and then see how my married daughter, 2nd generation crunchy, has pushed the crunchy fronter even further than I do. She does some of the stuff Emily shows, that I never did, like Forest Friends School, the Pickler gym and reusable food pouches. I didn’t even know a Pickler gym existed until I learned about it from my daughter.
As I watch her stuff, the words I wrote for my Tree of Life Mothering Vol 1 book over 15 years ago come echoing back to me as well. I basically wrote that once you start down the crunchy mom path, you eventually come to a wall that stops you, with either your finances, your time, or your sanity. Is it really practical to have only all natural materials for all your clothing, including your swimsuits and pajamas, your bedding, and your mattresses? What about having only all beeswax candles and natural lighting in your home? Or never buying anything that was produced by slave labor from Walmart? Recycling and reusing everything? Does one mom have the time and money to feed her family only all organic, locally grown food, practice cloth diapering, use cloth feminine hygiene, and elimination communication, garden with a compost pile, raise bees for her family’s honey, a cow for raw milk, and chickens for her eggs? What about only using “family cloth” instead of toilet paper? Is it possible to tend to kombucha, kefir, and kraut, make sourdough bread, and protect children from all screens, all plastic toys, and all toxins? And all this on top of homeschooling, ecological breastfeeding and self-care, not to mention cleaning our homes with just vinegar, using toxic tree makeup, and preserving our marriage!? I haven’t even mentioned getting daily earthing in, xeriscaping, or eco-friendly funerals. This video below about the Really Very Crunchy Mom at a funeral made me laugh so much as I thought about a certain girlfriend and her crunchy standards for funerals.
We each get to decide how much crunchy we can be, and in the process, let’s give each other grace, not be judgmental, and laugh in the process as well. It’s so easy to let crunchiness be a badge of honor and try to outcrunch other crunchy moms, unless we find a balance.
Here are some videos of Emily telling her backstory of her platform and book. I enjoy all of it!
It’s been a truly wonder-filled day! I’m not going to bed until I blog about it! Here I am above, waiting to see the eclipse. Below is the scene right behind me as I sat watching and waiting. So beautiful!
I got to be in Dallas today for the much-anticipated solar eclipse. That means I was in the path of totality.
It was amazing! I am here to be granny nanny for my new grandson. Providentially his birth was close to the date of the eclipse, thus I got to be here for both grand events. I planned it this way, and it worked out wonderfully! Today we packed up the baby, all the gear, and drove to a nature center to commune with rocks, grass, trees, birds, and flowers. While there we watched what just might be a once-in-a-lifetime event.
I keep thinking of the following scripture from the Book of Mormon Another Testament of Jesus Christ:
“…all things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator.” -Alma 30:44
As we all know from first grade science, our planet earth and its moon are always moving, the moon around the earth, and the earth around the sun. I am fascinated by the fact that smart people out there can predict the movements and know when these movements coincide to create an eclipse to tell us all so we can watch it.
Watch the video over here to see one way these movements “in their regular form” witness that there is a Supreme Creator, namely Jesus Christ. It shows how the paths of totality of some recent eclipses bear record of Jesus Christ by making the shapes of some of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, specifically the “aleph” and the “tav,” which are the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Jesus himself calls Himself Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the ending. (Revelation 1:8)
It was a slow show. We got there with about 45 minutes left before the 4 minutes or so of totality. We kept watching with our glasses, seeing the moon gradually cross in front of the sun, looking away to visit, look at the flora, and in my case, delete files off my phone, something I often do when waiting for other things. As the moon moved completely in front of the sun, we were plunged into darkness that looked like twilight had settled across the park. How strange for it to be early afternoon, 1:40 PM, but feel like early evening. Here’s my feeble attempt at taking a photo of it with my cell phone, below.
This photo below of the bushes and flowers across the sidewalk from where I was sitting shows how it felt like nighttime in the middle of the day.
I took a photo of the complete eclipse, as shown two photos above, but you can’t really tell it’s an eclipse as there’s no dark center in the sun. So here’s a much better photo, below, a screenshot of a YouTube video from a local Dallas TV station.
Photo Credit: Dallas Fox Channel 4 News YouTube Channel
It didn’t feel any colder. The birds started making more noise, and we could hear cheers from the children at the neighboring public elementary school. I felt so much joy to be a witness to this! It’s inexplicable in a way, other than saying I felt the power of the Creator Jesus Christ behind it all. It was simply breathtaking! How amazing that He planned it that the moon is 400 times smaller than the sun, and 400 times closer to the earth than the sun. Because of this, there is a time in the “movements of their form” when the moon and earth line up with the sun. It was as if God was saying, “I created all of these for you to enjoy. I love you and want you to enjoy movement and beauty.”
Overall, it was beautifully symbolic to me of the death of Jesus Christ, how He was gone for three days, and then came back to life. How wonderful that this event could be so close to Easter, just a little over two weeks later.
Right after the eclipse I took a walk through the nature center while the new parents took baby on a walk in more stroller-friendly direction. I walked on dirt paths; they went the opposite way on sidewalks, pondering what we had just witnessed. The bees were making their rounds. I saw an orange moth light on the ground by my feet.
Everything felt the same but different at the same time.
Then we all went back to regular life, except not my true regular life, due to being away from dear husband and two youngest children back home in UT. But sort of my regular life, full of the mundane and the fun and relationships. I am forever changed for witnessing this wonder. It just reminded me of the goodness of God. That goodness came through as a complete stranger walked over to us, offering anyone free glasses to see the event. When he found out we didn’t need any, he said, “OK, very good.” It just reminded me of good people in the world who want to share the beauties of creation with others. When they see that people are able to enjoy the creation, they say “very good.” Maybe someday I’ll figure out how to explain it more completely. Maybe it will be by the time when the other new wonder of my life, my new grandson, is old enough to hear me tell the story. I’ll tell him how we all watched the eclipse while he was sleeping, how I was changed for the better by it, and how I was changed for the better by his birth as well.
I am loving this book! It has so many wonderful quotes!
Here is a summary of the book from goodreads.com:
“In Original Grace, Adam S. Miller proposes an experiment in Restoration thinking: What if instead of implicitly affirming the traditional logic of original sin, we, as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, emphasized the deeper reality of God’s original grace? What if we broke entirely with the belief that suffering can sometimes be deserved and claimed that suffering can never be deserved?
“In exploring these questions, Miller draws on scriptures and the truths of the Restoration to reframe Christianity’s traditional thinking about grace, justice, and sin. He outlines the logic of original sin versus that of original grace and generates fresh insights into how the doctrine of grace relates to justice, creation, forgiveness, and more.
“As we embrace the reality of God’s original grace and refuse the logic of original sin, we achieve a deeper understanding of our relationship with Christ and the meaning of his atonement. Christ suffers with us in order to heal our wounds and redeem our suffering. He rescues us from sin by empowering us to exercise our agency and accept. God’s original offer of grace. He fills us with this pure love by teaching us how to respond to all suffering the same way God does: with even more grace. Indeed, as Miller suggests, the very substance of salvation has always been a grace-filled partnership with Christ.”
Sounds amazing right?! Yes to a grace-filled partnership with Christ!
Here are some interviews with the author. I love his thoughts!
I also love his thoughts over here, where he elaborates on Romans 1-6 of the Bible, with the summary principle that “Love is the law and not the reward.”
Before it gets too much past Easter…I want to preserve my memories of this most wonderful Easter season I’ve been enjoying. Easter came early this year, on March 31st. Here are all the things I did to enjoy the season and remember my Savior Jesus Christ’s sacrifice for me.
-I updated my list of Easter picture books over here on my other website, on the “Spring” page, under the April heading. Right after St. Patrick’s Day I checked out as many of those books that I don’t already have at the library and read them aloud for our Morning Basket time and to my grandsons. I found some new Easter titles for this year which I’m so excited about. So go to my new site that I mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph to see them!
-I displayed Easter picture books in a corner of my living room that has become my “shrine” to seasonal picture books. For some reason doing this make me so happy! I just wish I had discovered the happiness this brings me before most of my children were out of the nest and done it back then. Sometimes I wish so much I could bring them all home and do my mothering better, all over again, with more picture book reading, more happy decorating, and more thriving instead of just surviving. Live and learn!
-I also kicked off the beginning of the Easter season sometime in March by finding this songbook above while thrifting for $1! I played at least one song from the book on the piano as a call in the morning for the family to gather for family devotional, where we pray and read the scriptures. It is so delightful! My favorite song is the song about the Resurrection of Jesus.
-We talked about the artwork as shown above, during Holy Week, and made a timeline of the Holy Week, using the scriptures on the back of the print. The prints are from my Gospel Art Kit that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints now publishes as the Gospel Art Book.
-I read aloud some Easter stories to my family from my Family Devotionals Ebook. The Easter section full of stories, songs, and poetry is here.
-we did an Easter egg hunt with the grands (grandchildren) the Sunday before Easter, on Palm Sunday, since they were leaving the next week before Easter to see their other grandmother in CA. I’m glad we did because on the actual Easter Sunday it was rainy and even snowy for about 30 minutes! Too cold and wet to do a hunt on that day.
-I took a break the last week of March from my usual reading (one book a month for my co-op school, and one book for my sisters’ book club, and then other random books) and read books relating to Easter. I’m not done with all of them, so will continue to read them in April. I have been reading these Easter-themed books, three serious and one for fun:
I finished this one. It is so beautiful and a rather short read. I especially love the story at the end about the author’s wife.
I’m still in the middle of this one above and the one below. Both are so good!
This one is pure fluff. I haven’t finished it and predict it will be totally predictable…as in the two characters fall in love and get married. That’s OK, sometimes predictability is just what I want.
-My husband and I went to the temple on Good Friday to do some temple work for distant relatives. I felt so much peace being in the temple on that day, remembering my Savior Jesus Christ’s immense sacrifice and love for each of us.
-later that day on Good Friday, we took our 14-year-old son to a Good Friday concert with Eric D. Huntsman and his wife Deann, as narrators. They told the story of Holy Week with musical numbers interspersed. It was amazing and sacred. One little girl sang “I Wonder When He Comes Again,” with a fourth verse that is not in the Children’s Songbook. It was so beautiful! I’m so grateful we could go. The video below has Eric sharing a bit about the backstory of his creating a Holy Week celebration. I was sad our 18-year-old daughter couldn’t go because of her work schedule.
Eric also has books for Christmas and Easter to help families make these holidays more Christ-centered. Shown below. I haven’t studied them yet. I’m excited to delve into them this summer and fall and use them to prepare for next Christmas and Easter.
-I got out our Immanuel Wreath with the candles. Starting on Palm Sunday we lit at least 3 candles a day and talked about the name of Christ below each lit candle, either during dinnertime or right before bed.
-we watched Emily Belle Freeman’s videos for Holy Week, during dinner, and then did some of the traditions. My son got a branch of an apricot tree on Palm Sunday which we put in a vase of water, and we dyed our Easter eggs the Serbian way that Emily talks about with yellow onion skins to make them red.
-we attended our church service on Easter morning and heard beautiful testimonies of our Savior and ways of following him
-after church we came home and had a brunch of fish and boiled eggs and parsley
-we had Easter Sunday dinner at my brother’s house. There was so much food! It was easy to stick on my ketovore diet there, as there were lots of low-carb options, especially meat: fish, chicken, roast beef, and ham. Yum! I had some of all the meat plus some green beans and brussels sprouts. Eating that way made me feel so satisfied I was not even tempted to eat any of the multitudinous desserts brought out later.
-after dinner we came home, and I broke out some jelly beans and read aloud the Jelly Bean Gospel from Jennifer Flanders, over here. No jelly beans for me however, as I’m staying keto. I made low-carb/keto chocolate for my husband and me to enjoy instead of jelly beans. My recipe is here.
-then we did the Parables of Jesus and Temple Sculpturades, with the three children who currently live at home. It was a hit! My youngest, the 14-year-old boy, helped me make the play doh. I got this idea from this book I reviewed over here, The Holy Week for Latter-day Saints by Wendee Rosborough. I put the words related to the temple and parables of Jesus from the author’s lists from that book on pieces of paper and put them in a bowl. Then we each picked one out and sculpted the word or story out of the play doh to see if the others could guess what we depicted. We did it all once for simultaneous play. IT was so delightful! Everybody laughed out loud at least once and smiled big. We are going to do this every year! I love the pig my daughter sculpted for the Prodigal Son story, as shown above. My 14-year-old really got into sculpting the story of the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard. I had the parables book pictured above (which I found thrifting for $1, yay!!!) handy so we could refer to the parables as needed.
-the Monday night after Easter we gathered with some friends for soup and bread and sang Easter songs that I played on the piano, songs from my list over here. I love this! I definitely felt the Holy Spirit as we sang.
I believe in stretching out Easter to be a season. It was so early this year that I wasn’t quite ready to celebrate it completely the way I wanted to. Here’s what I still want to do for the month of April:
-write down our testimonies of Christ on small pieces of paper, put them inside plastic eggs, and then hang them on our apricot branch
-write down our favorite scripture for the year to add to our Easter banner that we have added to in past years.
-do our plan of Salvation Treasure Hunt as outlined in the book, A Christ-centered Easter, written by my husband’s cousin Janet Hales and her husband Joe Hales. This Treasure Hunt talks about Jesus’ visit to the Spirit World between his death and resurrection.
What I’m going to do next year:
-all of the above
-plus I want to do the Good Friday bag on Good Friday as shown in my post over here which Lani Hilton does.
-I also want to do the service project/Easter basket talked about in Wendee Rosborough’s book Holy Week for Latter-day Saint Families.
This past Easter season meant more to me than usual, in the context of death and new life. I’ve heard about three deaths of different people in my larger circle of friends in the three weeks before Easter, and then my son and his wife had a new baby the end of March. A new grandbaby for me! I’m so grateful for our Savior Jesus Christ and his gift to each of us of the opportunity to be cleansed of our sins and have eternal life. I know He’s real. I’m so grateful for His gift. I testify He lives and He gives grace to each of us with all our problems, weaknesses, trials, and sins. This beautiful video of the Crosby family singing the song Goodness of God summarizes my feelings of our Savior Jesus Christ.
I love this quote from Elder Gary Stevensons’ General Conference talk of April 2023 where he quotes N.T. Wright:
“We should be taking steps to celebrate Easter in creative new ways: in art, literature, children’s games, poetry, music, dance, festivals, bells, special concerts. … This is our greatest festival. Take Christmas away, and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else. Take Easter away, and you don’t have a New Testament; you don’t have a Christianity.” (Elder Gary E. Stevenson, Liahona, May 2023)
Can you imagine the shift in our society when we have several generations of families and neighbors having joy together and getting renewed each year by an intensive celebration of Easter as our “greatest festival,” even greater than Christmas? I love this challenge/invitation! I invite you to join me in it!
Happy Maundy Thursday! This week I am loving this YouTube commentary on the Holy Week from two faithful scholars, Andrew Skinner and Kerry Muhlestein. Every day I watch the day’s commentary. I hope you enjoy these too! When the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday videos are published, I will add those.
I had been wondering why Holy Thursday is also called “Maundy Thursday.” The video below explains that.
Want more resources for celebrating Holy Week, day by day?
Go here to read my review of a book about the Holy Week, full of family tradition ideas.
Go here for the compilation of Emily Belle Freeman’s daily family traditions for Holy Week.
Did you know that some people believe that it was on this day back in 1820 that Joseph Smith saw Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ in the woods of upstate New York? The video below, narrated by Bruce Lindsay, shows the reasons why it is highly likely that that was the date.
You can read the account of Joseph Smith’s vision over here. He says that his vision was on “the morning of a beautiful, clear day, early in the spring of 1820.” The video below combines the research of astronomy, meteorology, and the history of Joseph Smith’s family as maple syrup farmers. I love that it features Dr. Susan Easton Black, one of my favorite historians. It all makes sense to me that March 26 1820 was the day.
I am so grateful for Joseph Smith’s courage in seeking God and bearing testimony to the world that what He saw was true. The Holy Spirit bears witness to me that he told the truth. I am so grateful that he translated the Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ. It gives me great comfort and guidance.
Tree of Life Mothering 
Commentary on the Holy Week from Two Faithful Scholars: Andrew Skinner and Kerry Muhlestein
Happy Maundy Thursday! This week I am loving this YouTube commentary on the Holy Week from two faithful scholars, Andrew Skinner and Kerry Muhlestein. Every day I watch the day’s commentary. I hope you enjoy these too! When the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday videos are published, I will add those.
I had been wondering why Holy Thursday is also called “Maundy Thursday.” The video below explains that.
Want more resources for celebrating Holy Week, day by day?
Go here to read my review of a book about the Holy Week, full of family tradition ideas.
Go here for the compilation of Emily Belle Freeman’s daily family traditions for Holy Week.