My board game of the week is How Do You Doodle? by Outset Games. This is similar to Pictionary. It’s different though in that each card has three words on it that are similar in meaning. So for example: pretty, beautiful, and gorgeous. Everyone draws a number to tell them which corresponding word to draw. Then you draw your picture, all at the same time. When the timer is up, you stop drawing and vote for what everybody drew. You get points for people correctly guessing what you drew, and points for correctly guessing what the other people drew. It’s a simple game but can generate a lot of laughter. I found it thrifting for only $3 and am happy to add it to my collection of drawing games: Pictionary, Pictomania, Oodles of Doodles, and Bob Ross’s Happy Little Accidents, among others.
We played it during my wedding anniversary getaway weekend. Go here and scroll down about halfway to read about that.
Then watch the video below to learn more about it. It’s not a game I would spend full price for, but if you see it at a thrift store, snatch it up. It’s worth a few bucks to give a bunch of laughs when you want a low-key game, and everyone involved is willing to be a good sport about his or her drawing ability.
My picture book of the week is the one above. To go with the fall, back-to-school theme that happens with September and October, I’ll be highlighting books that showcase a love of learning over the next few weeks. This book is definitely one of those. This is a true story, based on the life of Malala Yousafzai. It shows how one girl changed the world. Growing up in Pakistan, Malala thought that her life would be so much better if she had a magic pencil like a boy in her favorite TV show. Then she could erase the garbage dump by her house with its awful smell, create beautiful dresses for her mother, and conjure up an extra hour in the morning to gain more sleep. Because of her fight for education for her and other girls in her village, she ends up finding out that her magic pencil is in her writing. Read this book aloud to your children to show them how one girl valued education for girls and put her feelings into action. If you want to know more, you can read her book for older people below. She is the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
I listened to the Come, Follow Him podcast/video this week with John Bytheway and Hank Smith. The guest of the week was Dr. Larry Nelson, a professor of human development in the college of family life at BYU. I just love the insights he shared about 2 Corinthians 1-7. One of them was that God is not the cause of our trials. He isn’t up on His throne in heaven sending us problems. Instead, he is like a patient parent, who is there to comb out the tangles in our hair. Trials are an inevitable part of the mortal probation that we agreed upon before we were born. Watch the videos below. It has so many great quotes! The part about the nature of God is at the 28:35 mark.
I experienced a healing miracle this past week due to prayer, homeopathy, and inspiration from the Holy Ghost. I am so grateful! As I was walking from the temple to my car, I looked down and saw a bumblebee by my foot. I just kept walking hoping it would fly away. It had other plans, as within a second of noticing it, it stung me. Ouch! My foot immediately puffed up and throbbed with pain. Fortunately, I live just five minutes away from the temple. All I could think of in those five minutes was, get me to my Ledum. That’s the generally recommended homeopathy medicine for puncture wounds, which includes bee stings.
As soon as I got home, I took the Ledum. I took four doses, as I learned to do in Paola Brown’s Homeopathy for Moms Book Club. No relief of the pain. The pain was still 8 out of 10. I went to bed with it hurting. In the morning I switched to the homeopathic Apis mellifica, which is recommended for swelling. Still no result. At this point my foot had swollen even more to a puffy pink with an edge. See below. My skin is as pink as my nail polish! I’m sure you can tell which foot got stung. It also itched. Still 8 out of 10 on the pain scale. (Excuse the worn-off nail polish job, it’s been a few months and it’s time for a new one, LOL!.)
I was determined to find the right medicine to relieve the pain and swelling with the resultant tight skin and itching. “I don’t have time to deal with pain in my foot!” I thought. I needed this to get healed, what with all my activities, plans and goals. I did not want to be hampered by this pain. I prayed fervently that God would heal my foot by leading me to what homeopathic medicine would work. The two traditional medicines weren’t working. It was easy to give into despair of finding something that would work. So, when we had family prayer I asked my family to pray for me that I would find the right medicine. I pushed forward in faith that I would find the right medicine. I then did an Internet search and settled on Carbolic Acid. I made a water dose of the medicine and started sipping it off and on before bed, and then sipped on it during the night, keeping the Mason jar full of it right at my bedside.
In the morning, I woke up and cautiously rotated my foot around my ankle to test if the pain was still there. It no longer felt so tight. The pain was down to a 3. That was Friday morning. I’ve continued to sip on my water dose of homeopathic Carbolic Acid. Now it is Sunday night, the swelling is down, and the pain is down to a 0! I am overjoyed! Balance restored! I know the Holy Ghost inspired me to keep looking for the right medicine and not give up. I know the Holy Ghost led me to homeopathic Carbolic acid. I am so grateful for homeopathy and for God inspiring Samuel Hahnemann to discover this beautiful, elegant, powerfully healing medicine that has no side effects. It has definitely empowered me to be much more self-reliant in health care for me and my family. It truly is like magic! I am so grateful to live in a world graced by the magic of homeopathy. It is truly a gift from God! I have a friend who has quoted President Ezra Taft Benson as saying that “Homeopathy is God’s medicine.” I can’t find anywhere in print to back this up, but I agree! It is a Christ-like medicine. It never forces. It leads and guides the body to heal. It operates on the principle “like cures like.” That’s the same way Christ heals, right? He heals us because he knows our pain, because he suffered all our pains.
Did you know there’s a statue of Hahnemann in Washington D.C.? Here it is pictured below.
Two weeks ago, dear husband and I celebrated 32 years of marriage, the weekend of August 17th. I insisted we spread out the celebration over four days. I really had to stand fast and follow through with this vision, as all sorts of temptations came to pull us into ordinary life with our ordinary responsibilities. These temptations threatened to obliterate all celebratory plans, including a major two-day event for my homeschool co-op. I didn’t want to postpone my anniversary plans to accommodate these other things. I felt it was important to put my marriage first and nurture it. If I didn’t, and put it off, the plans would then just fall apart as the weeks went on with school starting and more responsibilities added on. I just knew that would happen. So, I held fast and carried through with my plans. It was such a needed break from the day-to-day grind, a wonderful spell of days to recharge our batteries for the upcoming school year. My husband works long hours with an hour commute each way. We badly needed this time together.
Our marriage has had ups and downs like probably all marriages do, but overall, it is getting better and better! It’s this upward spiral journey of increasing joy and connection. It’s like wine that gets better with age. Not that I’ve ever had wine, that’s just what I’ve heard about some wine, LOL.
So, to celebrate my increasing joy of being a traditional wife, 32 years of it in fact, in the spirit of #tradwives, I am blogging all about our multi-day anniversary party. I spread out the celebration over a few days: Thursday night through Sunday night. We did these activities:
-having some romantic conversation by a fire in a fire pit in our front yard, using the book full of quizzes for couples (which I looooove doing), shown above. Another thrifting treasure!
-eating out. We went to a buffet restaurant and ate every bit of fatty meat we could find for staying on our carnivore diet: ribs, roast beef, fish and steak.
-watching a romantic comedy, it was so fun and thought-provoking, but ugh, the language was a little offensive a few times. I’m always on the look-out for pure romantic comedies about married life so let me know if you know one in the comments below
-eating Lily’s stevia chocolate, which took us off the carnivore diet, LOL. I bought two bars for each of us. We nibbled them through the weekend. Sometimes you just have to take a break from strictness, as long as you are willing to deal with the consequences. It did slow down my weight loss but I’m not in a race to be a certain size in a movie or anything like that. I surprised myself by being too full after the carnivore bash at the restaurant so that I couldn’t even eat any during the rom com. I actually had leftovers that lasted more than a week.
-going thrifting (which I also loooove). This is something I usually do by myself. I think the last time I went thrifting with the hubs was New Year’s Eve of 2009. I’ve been wanting to go thrifting with him for a few months now. We each found one amazing treasure! See below. I have started Jordan Peterson’s book more than once on audio and never finished. One of my sons asked for the hard copy book last Christmas. It was hard to find at an inexpensive price on amazon, separately, not in a bundle, so we I sent my husband to hunt it down at Barnes and Noble for over $20. It was so great to find it at Savers’ for $8 so I can have my own copy. Pricey for a thrift store book but given that it’s even more expensive to buy new I was happy to pay $8. Now my son and I can discuss it! Then there’s the Princess Bride. That one needs no explanation. We’ve watched it a lot but haven’t ever had our own copy.
-going to the temple to do marriage sealings as proxy work for deceased distant relatives (which I also love). That was wonderful! We did names that my children did baptisms for years ago at the Tucson Temple when we lived in AZ.
-watching a movie as a family. This was a movie I’ve been wanting to watch with DH for years, ever since my sister showed it to me at a family gathering that my husband missed. It’s the movie below, called Dangal. Dangal is an amazing movie based on a true story of a father who mentors two of his daughters to be wrestling champions in India. It has lots of thought-provoking moments about family life and mentoring. You can read more about it here.
– playing board games as a family (with just the two kiddos left at home at a cabin in the mountains (which I also love). See games below.
Playing games is one of my absolute favorite things to do. It was so fun!
I really lucked out finding the game How Do You Doodle? the week before when thrifting. It made us all laugh hard several times. How funny it was to look at my husband’s attempt to draw “beauty.” See below. He was attempting to draw a beauty pageant winner to denote beauty, but she looks more like a sad-trying-to-be-happy, deteriorating, ill-proportioned Statue of Liberty.
Look at my teen daughter’s drawings below! She is an amazing artist! Can you tell the bottom right hand corner drawing is for “medication”? Yes, I bet you can, she’s so great at depicting real objects, plus fantastical ones too. I’ll have to review the Doodle game here on the blog soon.
You can read about the Family Reunion game over here.
Stella is a game kind of like a sequel to Dixit. I enjoy it more though because the images on the cards aren’t so creepy looking. (I briefly review it halfway down over here.) We played two rounds and my teen daughter won both, with me in last place both times. Boohoo! Usually I do well at this game but I was not jiving it with that day. You basically have to try to read other people’s minds as they connect words to pictures.
-watching another family movie, The Fighting Preacher. A great true story of Willard Bean and his family who lived in Palmyra New York in the early 1900s. I definitely felt the Holy Spirit while watching this. This wasn’t part of the plan but as I let everyone pick a game, my teen son picked to watch this movie instead.
We also met with the out-of-the-nest children over Zoom to celebrate the wedding anniversary, also known as our family’s birthday, on Friday night, before the cabin trip. I showed baby pictures of family members and asked the kiddos to guess who-was-who. My firstborn, who lives in TX, surprised us by walking through the door 10 minutes before the Zoom meeting started. Wow! We had no idea he’d show up in person! That was so fun! I love surprises like that! He was in town for a wedding of a friend of his new wife. I’m sad we missed seeing her, but she was off having fun with her friends and family on the eve of the wedding of the family friend. I went to bed that night feeling so full of joy after seeing and talking with all of my children. Truly “children are a heritage of the Lord.” (Psalms 127:3) I’ve had a hard time with one of them but things have improved in the past six months.
We capped off the family birthday celebration on Sunday by attending church via livestream at the cabin, watching a Come Follow Me scripture study show at BYUTV called Come Follow Up, and then playing the game above with our two kiddos left at home. We then left the cabin for home and had pizza at home, including a keto pizza for my husband and me (again breaking the carnivore diet a bit in honor of a special celebration). Then I did a volunteer shift at my local Family History Center with my husband in tow. I helped an elderly man navigate familysearch.org and ancestry.com, looking for spouses of some deceased relatives. We didn’t find any, but I helped him find some other deceased relatives that he can do temple work for. That was so satisfying! I am feeling full of the family spirit! I love families and all the stories involved with them.
The ways we have celebrated our anniversary has evolved over the years. When all the kids were under 12, we were doing well just to get a babysitter and go out for a dinner at a restaurant. Sometimes we did, and sometimes we just took the kiddos and had a family picnic. Honestly, I have no memory of how we celebrated some years when all my kids were under foot. As the children grew older, we could easily go out while the older kids who were teens babysat the littles. I finally figured out that it was important to me not to just go out for dinner, but to go to the temple and do sealing ceremonies as proxy work so I could hear my “vows” that I made 32 years ago on my wedding day. So that’s a mainstay now in the annual celebration.
One time, I decided that a business trip my husband had to take for work, which was paid for by his work, would count as our anniversary celebration. He had a two-night stay paid for at the Zermatt hotel in Midway, UT, so I went along with him. We had the kids join us for one night of swimming and s’mores, and then sent them home with a teen driver, while we had the second night to ourselves. This happened for a few years in a row. One year, two years ago, my oldest two children treated us to an all-expenses paid second honeymoon trip to Key West Florida. That was our big 30th year anniversary bash. You can go here if you want to see my tips for how to stay married for 30 years and see photos of our second honeymoon to Florida.
Some years I like to include a big outdoor activity for the family like Frisbee golf or a visit to the canyon. Some years I like to get a family birthday present, like an ice cream maker, or something else that the whole family will enjoy, even simple things like Frisbees for Frisbee golf. I haven’t always had the money to do that so when I don’t, I make do with what I have. The important thing is to do something that we both enjoy, to remember that we are in love and committed to each other. I hope this has given anyone out there ideas for celebrating wedding anniversaries.
I’m so grateful for my testimony of Jesus Christ and his ordinances available in temples to seal us as a couple together and our children to us for eternity. We’ve experienced joy and pain together, but the joy far outlasts the pain. I look forward to experiencing this joy eternally. My heart aches for anyone who doesn’t feel this joy of intact marriage and the joys of being able to raise children and see them connect with you as adults. I pray that all people the world will have any strained or broken relationships heal through the atoning grace of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior.
Today is a great day! It’s at the end of a week where I officially got down to below my wedding day weight!!!! I have been waiting for this for day for decades. That’s a long story I won’t go into. That’s for another blog post. I owe it all to the carnivore diet plus intermittent fasting. I did keto off and on for years. What I didn’t realize was that I needed to avoid dairy, including my beloved Greek yogurt, and all carbs, and sweet-tasting things that taste like sugar/carbs, like stevia, in order to break through my final plateau. (Greek yogurt with stevia has been a comfort food for me that I ate daily on my keto diet.) It has been totally worth it! Eating more fatty meat, even fatty meat with butter on it, nourishes and satiates me so I can just walk past carby-treats like pizza, bread, candy and donuts, potatoes, and even my delicious yogurt.
Watch this video below from Kelly Hogan of myzerocarblife.com to learn how you can eliminate cravings for sugar and carbs.
If you want to read about my long story of weight loss (it needs to be updated though because I wrote it over a year ago) go here.
If you want to know how I reconcile the carnivore diet with the Word of Wisdom, go here.
Yesterday at my church services, one of my church friends shared such a fun story, in a talk she gave to the congregation. I’m going to call this friend Jane. Her story involves a game show I’d never heard of. It’s called Cross Wits. Jane said that when she was a young adult, living in the Los Angeles area, she watched this show every weekday with her parents. She did this while going to college. As she played the game along in her living room, her parents noticed she was very good at it. So, her parents encouraged her to audition for the show. She ended up getting on. She said that she took second place, winning a year’s supply of peanut butter, a dining room furniture set, and a few other odds and ends. What was more remarkable was that she developed a crush on the first-place winner, who I will call Jack Rogers. She found that this guy was in law school at the same university where she was an undergrad studying English lit.
So, with her heart all a flutter, Jane decided to start walking through the law school building every day instead of around it when she went to class. Lo and behold, who should she happen to discover but Jack. They ended up eating lunch together, which she said, wasn’t as romantic or expensive as it sounds because they had each brought a lunch and just decided to sit together while eating lunch.
She kept hoping he would ask her out on a date, but he never did. Her romantic fantasies continued, for several months, as she wondered how she could get him to date and fall in love with her.
One day, on a Saturday morning, out of the blue, on a whim, her father proposed that the family take a two-hour drive to go to the San Diego Zoo. This was completely uncharacteristic of Jane’s family. Usually such a trip took days to plan and always happened in the morning, not in the middle of the day. But, for some odd, inexplicable reason, the family went on this spontaneous trip anyway.
Imagine how surprised Jane was to discover her crush appear round a corner while she was visiting the zoo. He was with a female, who Jane learned was his new wife. Jane found out that Jack had taken his new wife to Mexico for their honeymoon, using the first-place prize trip he had been awarded on Cross Wits. Jack said that the trip was horrible and launched into all the reasons why. Meanwhile Jane felt disappointed that he was married, but inwardly, smugly satisfied that the honeymoon was a disaster.
Jane’s father did not believe in God. He solely used reason to guide and explain his life, never faith. Jane said that anything others attributed to inspiration or the hand of God, he called coincidence. On the trip home, he repeated over and over, “Wasn’t that amazing that we happened to see Jack Rogers at the zoo?!”
Jane, who did and does believe in God, smiled to herself. She said that the knew that God had inspired her dad to take the family on this trip to the zoo, because God knew that Jack would be there. God knew Jane’s heart. He knew she needed to put this fantasy of fulfilling a crush to rest. In her talk at church yesterday, pointed out that all good dads everywhere, whether church-going or not, whether God-believing or not, can be inspired by God, to help their children. Her dad was a good dad, she said, and he was inspired to bless his daughter in that way, that day.
I love it! It reminded me of how the week before, when I was wanting to take a three-day mountain cabin family getaway to celebrate our family’s birthday, my plans got frustrated. I found out my daughter had signed up for a work shift. So, our three-day getaway got shortened to two days. But God worked it out for my good, as that night, my oldest child, who lives in TX, surprised us by walking into our home without previous notification while we were watching the movie I had planned to watch while at the cabin. If we had been at the cabin, we would have missed him. Earlier that week, in a family group text message, I had announced a Zoom family birthday party to my out-of-the nest children. I was about to tell them we would be at the cabin while I conducted the Zoom party but stopped short. Something told me not to tell them about being at the cabin. Now I know why! God is good! He can communicate with us on a day-to-day, even moment-to-moment basis. It is up to each of us to fine-tune the skill of receiving His communication.
After losing 30 lbs on the carnivore + intermittent fasting diet this past spring and summer, I’m spreading the news about these protocols for weight loss!
The picture above is from the video below. This woman lost 150 lbs by eating fatty meat. She did keto for 5 months but knew there was a diet even better for her. She found it with carnivore. At age 62, she is maintaining her 150 lb weight loss that she achieved on the carnivore diet. Kudos to her! If she can do it, you can too!
If you ever want to play a game that will encourage family members to tell stories, get this game shown above. It’s Family Reunion the Game. I found it thrifting for only $3! The goal is to be the first to collect one each of the cards shown above. The categories of the cards are Hand-me-downs, Traditions, Magic Moments, and Happy Days.
You get to collect the card by telling a story about anything that comes to mind from looking at the photo on the reverse side of the card. The photos are of random people doing different family-type activities, like vacationing, camping, eating, playing instruments, working, etc. If anybody disputes your story that person can play the “You are not telling the whole story” card. Then that person tells the rest of the story. Then the players vote on who is telling the true story. Then whoever wins the vote gets the card. I can see that this game could cause some contention depending on who plays the game and what mood the people are in, so just beware. Play when everybody is in a great mood and willing to be great sports. At the end, the winner opens the envelope with a family secret card. Then everyone has to answer the question on the card, potentially revealing family secrets. I definitely learned some secrets today!
I’m excited to play with this all my children and in-law children. I can’t wait to hear all my children all interact with the stories they tell. I hope to play it this Thanksgiving or Christmas time, but if that doesn’t work, we could do it in a video conferencing platform.
Want another family history themed board game? Go here to learn about Generations. Scroll down to the middle of the post to the picture of the Generations game. It’s another thrift store treasure.
Tree of Life Mothering 