This is the time of year I used to dread. For many, many years, the “back-to-school” season meant to go back to my sad reality of living in a too-tiny house where I didn’t want to be homeschooling my large brood. Summer was a break from being cramped because we went on trips and played outside a lot.
Things have changed a lot since then. I’ve moved twice, and 5 out of the 7 kids have fled the nest. So, I no longer have those feelings. I live in a different home that is still small, but with so many gone, it fits us OK. It has a lot nicer features than the old one that I love, including a set of French doors.
If I were still in my old situation, I would perk myself up a bit with something that is noncaloric and inexpensive. Picture books do that for me, but I’ve already blogged about those a lot. Here’s another delightful perk-me-up: cute kitchen towels.
They are inexpensive and can be oh so cute! I’m talking about both kitchen hand towels (the fluffier the better) and dish towels with the flatter weave. They dress up your kitchen and brighten any day.
See the variety here and here. I love the Pioneer Woman line designed by Ree Drummond. Susan Branch has a fun blog here about them. Oh the power of cute kitchen towels! Somehow just looking at them makes me feel happy! Hint: I also use the hand towel ones in the bathroom as bathroom hand towels, just because they are ohhh so cute and I can’t find regular bathroom hand towels as cute AND soft. Getting new towels don’t solve any major problems but some how they make life a little easier.
Today is Julia Child’s birthday! Let’s celebrate by eating more butter! I got to see her kitchen four years ago, as it is entombed in plexiglass at the Smithsonian museum of American history in Washington D.C.
She has definitely inspired me to enjoy life by enjoying great food (including fat, meat, and butter!) and sharing it with others. I also love that she was so OK with who she was and her passion for food. She didn’t fit the mold of a typical TV star, as she was tall, ungainly, and not a great beauty. Yet she had her own TV show, a huge following, and is probably more popular than ever, after her death. We can learn a lot from her.
This picture book shown below is loosely based on Julia. I look at it as the author’s imaginary view of what Julia would have been like as 10 year old girl playing in the kitchen with a best friend.
It’s fun, clever, and the illustrations are so whimsical. Just know it’s not from Julia’s history.
If you really want to know about her life, I highly recommend the book below. The author intersperses so many comments on how Julia’s life affected her own life. It’s such a delightful read!
I really enjoyed these thoughts shared by Dr. Adam Miller, Hank Smith, and John Bytheway. One wonderfully memorable line by Dr. Miller is “Love is the law and not the reward.” When love governs our whole journey, life is so much better than thinking that love is something we only get at the end.
A few years ago, I blogged about Sharyl Atkisson, the fearless journalist, over here. Guess what? She’s moderating an online roundtable discussion with RFK Jr. (author of The Real Anthony Fauci, which I found thrifting for only $4!) and other whistleblowers on Thursday 8/17/23 at 8 PM EST online!
The participants are:
Journalist Glenn Greenwald
Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Attorney Jenin Younes
Former New Jersey Assemblyman Jamel Holley
Here’s what the page at Sharyl’s website says:
“According to organizers, ‘Each of these participants has been a steadfast supporter of the First Amendment — Greenwald broke the Edward Snowden story; Attkisson stood up to government intimidation; Younes has represented plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden; and Holley has stood for the free exercise of religion in his state, even against the wrath of his political party.” Sounds fabulous!
This week’s game is Half Truth by Ken Jennings of Jeopardy! fame and Richard Garfield of Magic the Gathering fame. If any of you know anything about those two guys, then you can probably guess that this game is a winner, with each contributing such awesome talent. Perhaps Ken wrote all the trivia questions and Richard provided the game strategy? Or did they crossover with what seems to be the least obvious talent and knowledge of each?
I don’t know, but I do know that I looooove this game! Lately it’s been my favorite game to pull out for date night. Dear husband and I play it and then watch a movie. It’s taken me a while to figure out my personal strategy for winning, after losing so many times, but I finally figured it out and beat my husband at it last Saturday! My strategy shall remain a secret forever more! I’m planning on playing it this weekend at my neighbor game night, where I shall test it out again. The same person who beat me last time will be there so we shall see if my strategy works on her.
In this game, you take each card and play it by finding out the six true things that complete the statement at the top of the card. Half of the concepts on the card complete the statement as true and half are false. You can vote for three, two, or one. You only get rewarded with points if everything you voted for is correct. After three rounds, the person with the most points wins. It’s lots of fun because it combines pulling random facts out of your head with how sure you are about those facts. Each card is a puzzle to solve, often with traps such as red herrings. For an example of how to play the game, the top card shown on the deck above says, “Is a word that was once protected as a trademark.” Your choices are:
-elevator
-aspirin
-trampoline
-gasoline
-toothpaste
-videotape
So, which of those three used to be trademarked names, and which have never been trademarked? Make your guess, and then a quick Internet search will tell you the answer!
Even if you don’t love or know much trivia, you might enjoy playing it with the right crowd because of the discussions it can generate. The topics of each card are all over the map: from pop culture (lots of rappers) to history to geography to literature to science and technology to nature and wildlife to grammar to so much more! I give it 5 out of 5 stars! It plays quickly and the components are all high quality. I love how the chips are so thick! They feel like the gem chips in Splendor. The game involves trivia with a twist of the “press your luck” mechanism, and it teaches you stuff! It’s educational and entertaining at the same time. With over 500 cards, you can definitely play it over and over and not run out of cards and be truly tested, unless you play with a big gamer person who plays it enough with a photographic memory who memorizes every single card. It can even draw non-board gamers in! I played it for a game night with my sister while she was visiting from Maine and we even got her husband, who doesn’t like board games, to play a few turns. I even saw him smile during it! So great job, Ken and Richard! Watch the backstory of the game from Ken and Richard below.
Hint: So many cards involve things we don’t know anything about. It’s my house rule that if everyone agrees, we skip any card we want to. Such as the rappers’ cards, or any TV show that has appeared since we got married, since we haven’t watched much TV since then.
Tom Vasel of the Dice Tower’s review is below. Enjoy!
It’s that time of year when I feel that summer is slipping away. People around me are planning classes and curricula for fall. I feel like saying, “Noooooo! Let’s stay in summer forever!” I wish I could just stop the march of time, and bask forever in the heat, the green grass and trees, the colorful fruit that hangs from trees, and the abundant flowers blooming everywhere. I guess I was meant to live in the tropics! But I also like living close to extended family, so I won’t be moving to the tropics anytime soon.
So, here’s my tip for enjoying this last month and a half of summer. It won’t cost you any money and just a little bit of time. Go sit or lie in the sun and read a book. This will work whether you are home or on vacation. If you feel like you never had a proper vacation this summer, this will allow you to have a little, mini-vacation every day. Even just doing 5 minutes a day, either just sitting in a chair, with your bare feet on the grass, or lying on a beach towel or blanket, or in a hammock, will help you bottle up some sunshine for the upcoming winter. It will help you feel like you had a summer that totally refreshed and recharged you.
Want some ideas of books to read? Here goes:
–Enchanted April by Elizabeth Armin
–Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife by Peggy St. Vincent
–Brainiac by Ken Jennings
–The Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennett by Katherine Cowley
and get more ideas from Sarah Mackenzie over here. Happy reading and summer-bottling!
This is such a lovely book! In it, the reader goes on a berry-picking journey in the author’s native land of the southeast coast of Alaska. As the illustrator and author of the book, Michaela Goade delights me with her pictures of a variety of luscious berries that grow wild in Sitka Alaska. She features the names of familiar ones as, like raspberry, strawberry, cranberry, and blueberry, as well as unfamiliar ones: nagooonberry, chalkberry, bogberry, cloudberry, soapberry, crowberry, bunchberry, and lignonberry.
The story involves a grandmother taking her granddaughter on a berry-picking trip. First, we see them on a boat. I can almost feel the salty spray of the ocean as I see the watercolor illustrations of dotty white sea foam splashing up against their sailing vessel. They then dock the boat and pick berries, singing a song of thanks to the land for giving them fruits. They acknowledge that as the land takes care of them, giving them food, they must take care of the land. They take the berries home and make yummy food: pies, syrup, scones, jams and jellies. It’s just a beautiful book celebrating nature, the rhythmic seasons, the beautiful Tlingit people, and for me, the God of nature who makes it all possible.
I love that at the end the author includes a personal note giving more background to the story, along with photographs of some of the berries. In a world where many children think that all food comes from the grocery store, this is an important book to share will all children everywhere to get them knowing where food ultimately comes from and our stewardship to care for the earth.
After losing weight, 30 lbs. in 4 months, as I blogged about here, I’ve decided to share something about the carnivore and ketovore diets regularly here on my blog. One of my favorite carnivore vloggers on YouTube is Kelly Hogan, from myzerocarblife.com. She is featured in the video below with Dr. Ken Berry. She lost over 100 lbs and healed all her health problems (IBS, and skin boils) by eating 2 lbs of ground beef a day as her main diet. Incredible!
It’s amazing that she got that solution from her regular M.D. Watch her story below. If you want to lose weight, going carnivore is definitely worth a try. In my experience, the closer you are to goal weight, you might have to combine intermittent fasting with carnivore or ketovore to get to your goal.
She also solved her infertility with carnivore eating. She had been married for 8 years without having children. When she went on a high fat carnivore diet, she got pregnant in less than a year’s time. As Sally Fallon teaches, the fertility vitamins, Vitamin A & D, are fat soluble. Women who want to have babies need to eat fat to keep those Vitamins.
I wish I could go back to my younger childbearing years and erase all those years when I was vegan. I started being vegan after Baby #2. I had Baby #3 and #4 as vegan. With Baby #5 and #6 I ate meat after my midwife suggested I do so for the health of me and the baby. Oh how I wish I had known to eat more fatty meat. I was eating whole foods, with some meat, but I had to eat like a horse (2-3 servings every meal) until I felt satisfied. I think that’s because I wasn’t eating much fatty meat, more like chicken breasts and leaner ground beef. Anyway, I hope anyone out there who struggles with food addiction, carb addiction, weight loss, cravings while pregnant or nursing, or veganism will watch this video below and learn from it.
Remember when I posted last summer about my thrifting miracle in finding the board game Moods? Well, I have two thrifting miracles from this most recent spring/summer!
My firstborn, a son, got married last May. He announced that his bride-to-be had chosen dusty blue and rosy pink as the wedding colors.
So, I spent a good part of April and May looking at clothes for my younger daughter and me. You wouldn’t think it would be that hard but ugh, it turned out to be so. My daughter tends to be picky about clothes. What seems like a job that would take a few hours just to find something at a big box store can extend into a months-long process finding something that will work. It has to be very comfortable, not too girly, inexpensive, small, and the right color. To find that perfect combination is almost as hard as finding a chartreuse polka dotted unicorn. She doesn’t’ like dresses, preferring to wear a top and skirt.
We won’t go into the saga of finding the right dress for me. I don’t even have those same requirements, but the process was agonizingly long full of twists and turns with unfulfilled promises from online sellers. That’s another story for another day. Anyway, with my daughter, I thought I was doing so well when I found a shirt on Amazon that fit the bill, four weeks before the wedding, and a skirt. The shirt looked perfect on the screen, but it turned out looking and fitting horrible! It had shoddy workmanship. Loose threads hung down from the seams, and it fit too tightly in the arms. Ugh! Then with the skirt, she took one look at it after it arrived and announced she would not wear it. She didn’t even try it on, all it took was one look to tell her that she didn’t like the texture, without even feeling it.
On top of that, the sandals I ordered from Amazon were too loosey-goosey, with straps gaping away from her ankles. They would never do. Triple ugh. So, despite my efforts at juggling wedding shopping on top of all my other duties, here I was TWO DAYS before our departure to the wedding in Texas, looking at having her wear the same outfit she wore at her other brother’s winter wedding the previous year. Which she was totally fine with, but I just wanted something new and spring-y for her. We decided she would wear the same skirt, a neutral gray, instead of the khaki skirt I bought, but I hoped I could find still find some sandals and a new top for her.
So, we went on a last-ditch shopping effort to Target and Walmart, the day before packing day. In between the two stores, I felt a whisper of the Holy Ghost suggesting we go to Savers, which is pretty close to Target. Because it was so close, and I am a sucker for thrifting, I decided to go. I sent my daughter to look at tops after we looked at the sandals, while I went to look at the board games. (Because, if I am at a thrift store, I have to look at board games.) She came and found me and said she couldn’t find anything. I felt another stirring from the Holy Ghost telling me to look harder, and to go down a particular row. After looking at four or five tops, there it was. The perfect top for her! It fit all the requirements! It was truly a miracle! See the blue top in the photo above. It fit so much better than the one from Amazon. It fits her small frame perfectly and is feminine as it tapers into the waist without being too girly. Plus, it’s high quality, with the brand name L.L. Bean. Its crowing virtue? It was only $2.99! This was definitely a blessing straight from God! It was if I heard Him saying to my heart, “Dearest daughter of mine, I know how overworked and underpaid you are, juggling all these demands and projects as you strive to serve me by serving your husband, children, church, and community, all the while you are wanting to stay healthy and sane with a modicum of beauty and fashion. Let me just bless you with this item. I am happy to do this for you! Here you go!” Thank you, Heavenly Father!
So that was in May, then in July I had another miracle. We had a family reunion coming up for my husband’s siblings and their descendants. These Shumway reunions are more than just a few hours in the park having a potluck picnic. They are multi-day affairs with a super fun agenda involving more than one picnic. They involve tubing down the river, a water park visit for one of the days, more than one museum visit, storytelling, and smores around a campfire, AND more. Anyway, the day before the reunion I remembered that my same daughter needed a new swimsuit, having outgrown last year’s. So, we went looking. Again, the requirements are high. It can’t be too girly, has to fight her small frame just right, can’t be too expensive, and I never know what color will appeal to her in swimsuits. Everything is either too bright or too neutral. We didn’t find anything at Target or Walmart. On Friday she met up with cousins on my side, who had come all the way from Maine for a reunion on their dad’s side. I decided to let her go have a sleepover with them instead of coming shopping with me for another effort to find a suit. We decided she would just wear last year’s swim top that was too small with a shirt over it. It was just the top that needed replacing. The next day, the first full day of the reunion, we ended up having some down time after the museum trip, before the picnic up the canyon. So, in between reunion events, again, I felt prompted to stop at Savers. Guess what? She found a swimsuit top to go with the swim shorts from last year that still fit. It was only $1.99! She surprised me by picking a color I thought she would never pick, as it seems too bright for her liking, unlike anything she has ever worn before, a fluorescent pinkish-orange, but I wasn’t about to argue.
So those are my two Thrifting Miracles for the Spring and Summer of 2023. God truly is in the details of my life! I know He is in the details of your life too. Spend some time pondering the scriptures, praying, and writing and I know you will see Him too.
Tree of Life Mama’s game of the week is Concept for Kids: Animals.
I was blessed to find the above game at a thrift store a few weeks ago and I’m so glad I did! This is the Jr. version of Concept, which I reviewed over here. This version is simpler because you just focus on animals, instead of anything under the sun, which happens in Concept. Both games are basically “picture charades,” meaning you get the other people to guess the word by giving them clues in the form of pictures.
You take turns drawing a card that has an animal pictured on it, and then you try to get the other players to guess the animal. You do this by placing little plastic squares on the pictures you want. So if you draw the card “rabbit,” you would put the squares on the pictures of “four legs,” “fur,” “small,” “weak,” “forest,” “leaves,” and so forth to show that the animal is four-legged, furry, small, weak, lives in the forest, and eats plants. You can also denote habitat, nocturnal vs. diurnal, speed of animal, the color, and more.
Every time my four-year-old grandson visits he asks to play this game. It is so fun to see his eyes light up when he guesses correctly. We have a lot of fun together playing it. I give this game 5 out of 5 stars! It’s easy, fun, helps kiddos learn logical thinking, and gets them away from screens. What a bargain I found for only $3! I will definitely be using it this coming school year with any jr. classes I teach at our homeschool co-op. Watch the video review below and keep your eyes out for it when thrifting. I definitely believe that angels led me to find this game by telling me by the power of the Holy Ghost (see 2 Nephi 32:3) to go look at the games section when I had just been at the same store less than 12 hours before and hadn’t found anything. For more on angelic help with thrifting, go here.
If you want more ideas for family board games and gameschooling, especially how to buy them on a budget, get my free ebook over here. I hope you have a great time playing games as a family and encourage you to get the regular version of Concept. The jr. version is for under 10, and Concept is geared for 10 and up. Enjoy!
Tree of Life Mothering 