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!
I had a dinner party last week with my dearest girlfriends, the Veggie Gals. Go here to get more about them. I’ve known most of them for over 24 years and they are the most crunchy-granola, earthy-goddess-green mom friends I could ever hope to have. We have cried and laughed together over the decades, sharing stories of veganism, natural birth, breastfeeding, child rearing, eating seaweed, adopting, doing enemas, xeriscaping, eco-friendly funerals, gardening, yoga in salt caves, herb and homeopathy healing, and so much more. We are always learning new stuff together. One of them delighted us with her tale of recently reviving a nearly dead bird in her garden with a Bach Flower remedy. The bird then stayed in her hands and wouldn’t leave her for hours. She tucked it into her bra pocket (the space you have as a woman between your two breasts and your top or dress when you wear a bra) while she weeded until she took the bird to find his mama and he flew to her. We were all laughing and exclaiming with squeals of delight! It was the stuff of a Disney princess movie!
Another of the girlfriends shared with us her trick for picking apricots. My neighbor has a bountiful tree and they have welcomed anyone to come pick so I let the girlfriends have at it. Girlfriend Shauna’s method is to to get a rake, an old sheet you don’t mind getting stained, four other people, and shallow boxes. Have four people each grab a corner of the sheet. Then take your rake and jiggle the branches. Let the fruit fall onto the sheet, then dump into the box. That’s it! So efficient, saving you time!
I love the song from the Children’s Songbook, written by Elizabeth Cushing Taylor, that says,
“We do not see the wind, we only hear it sigh. It makes the grasses bend whenever it goes by.”
The song is about God’s love, hence the title of it, “God’s Love.” The same words also apply to how the Holy Ghost works. We don’t see the Holy Ghost, but we can see and feel the effects of listening to Him, just as we can see wind blowing the grass.
Yesterday in church, two speakers each shared a story about listening to the Holy Ghost.
The first said this was his first time he remembers getting revelation from God. He was 17 and worked construction as a summer job in California’s Central Valley. He said that he had a busy day, waking up at 6 AM to get to his construction shift before it got too hot. After a long day of doing construction, he and his brother then went banana boating on a lake. They had fun creating “rooster tails” of water in the wake of the boat. Then they went home for dinner. After dinner, he went to water polo practice. After practice, his whole body ached with physical exhaustion and his brain was tired too. On the way home, he thought of friend’s name, Anne. He wondered why her name popped into his brain? Maybe he should go see her? He vacillated between going home and crawling into bed right away or stopping to see her. He finally decided to go see how she was doing. They visited for an hour on her porch. As she said goodbye to him, she thanked him for coming. She said she had felt particularly lonely that day and prayed that a friend would come see her.
Wow, I love that story!
Then another speaker shared this story. She said that she had been making crepes in her kitchen. She was almost done when she heard a voice in her head to move the margarine and put it back in the fridge. She thought that was strange. Why should she do that? Couldn’t it wait until she was all done cooking? She resisted the voice, but it repeated. She felt irritated that the voice was so bossy. She finally gave in. Within a second after putting it away, the light cover that had been close to the ceiling crashed to the floor. She had been standing right under it while cooking. She said that if she hadn’t moved to the fridge, she would have been seriously injured. Her youth summer camp was starting the next day. If she had been injured, she wouldn’t have been able to go. She realized that the Holy Spirit guided her, saving her from harm, allowing her to have future fun and growth.
Both speakers said that each story was the first time that the speaker recognized the Holy Spirit, in other words, revelation from God. That made me think of my first time. I had been practicing my violin and misplaced the bow. I prayed that I would find it. Righter after I said amen, the image popped into my mind of the bow sitting in the space behind the head cushion of my parents’ huge, overstuffed sofa. I looked and there it was!
I’m so grateful for the Holy Spirit! The Holy Ghost allows us to know the mind and will of God, to know anything He wants us to know for our eternal happiness and the eternal happiness of those around us. As the first speaker whose story I shared above said, “I didn’t grow up in the Marvel Comic movie universe, but I can’t think of any superpower I’d rather have than the constant gift of the Holy Ghost.”
Indeed, President Russell M. Nelson, the president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has told us that the most important ability we can get is to hear and follow the voice of Jesus Christ, as revealed through the Holy Ghost. Watch his speech below or read it here.
My movie of the week is The Hundred-Foot Journey. This is so delightful! Calling all foodies and anybody wanting a great date night movie! You will love this! It involves an Indian family that moves to France after losing their home, business, and mother to a fire, in India. After they move to France, they start a new business, a restaurant. Despite the naysayers saying that an Indian cuisine restaurant won’t thrive in France, the business does, with the dad’s ingenious marketing.
One of the sons in the family has a gift for cooking. So…the competitor across the street, 100 feet away, the owner of a French cuisine restaurant, takes an interest in the son’s gift. Her restaurant already has one Michelin star. You’ll have to watch the movie to see how that all plays out.
I loved how this movie was clean, that it had gorgeous cinematography, and that not one, but two romances, emerge. The women’s dresses are so adorable too. I also love that it involves food!
It made me curious about learning more about what makes food great enough to garner a Michelin rating for a restaurant. It also makes you think about neighborliness, kindness, and overcoming racism. With a family theme, it also sparks questions about “What does it mean to be a family?” and “What makes a home?” To top it all off, the son with the cooking gift is so good looking! “Easy on the eyes,” as my sister’s mother-in-law likes to say. His name is Manish Dayal. Watching him took me down memory lane a bit as he looks a lot like one of my husband’s BYU roommates when we were dating. The Indian food featured further spurred the memory lane stroll as when my first grandchild was born, I played granny nanny and cook. While visiting my new grandbaby, and my daughter and son-in-law to do that, they took me to a wonderful Indian cuisine restaurant in Boise. Wow, what a treat! I love Indian cuisine! It’s probably my favorite! Given my love for pizza, that’s saying a lot!!!
With this movie, I finally landed on a date night flick that wasn’t cheesy. When it was over, my husband wasn’t rolling his eyes, thinking the acting was bad and lines were predictable and mediocre. Being produced by Stephen Spielberg and Oprah, the movie of course has got to be fantabulous! I know you will enjoy it! It’s based on the book by Richard Morais, of the same title, so now I want to read it. I also get get a book I found at my local public library when I lived in AZ about cooking and pore over it again, to learn the building blocks of great cooking. According to the author, Samin Nasrat, the four basics of gourmet cooking are salt, fat, acid, and heat. Ahh, so many books so little time. What a great problem to have!
The movie makes me wonder, what hundred-foot journey is waiting for me to take?
P.S. If you’d like to get a digital copy of Salt Fat Acid Heat, you can get it in scribd.com! Go here to learn more about scribd. Scribd has it in text format as well as audiobook. Hooray!
This is something fun we used to do when all my children were at home. Sometimes I just wanted to reward my kiddos after a day of work with a fun, screen-free activity, but couldn’t afford to take them to an amusement place. They wanted to be motivated by something more than a hike or a visit to a city park. So this activity fit the bill perfectly. That’s because it combines the physical exercise of hiking and/or walking, reading comprehension, getting out in nature, and the thrill of discovery.
This activity is called “letterboxing.” It’s basically exchanging imprints from stamps, often custom-made, in a blank book that your provide, from different hidden locations. So it’s kind of like collecting “stamps” in your own “passport book” from “treasure boxes.” You get directions to find a little box or container, and it will have a rubber stamp inside for you to stamp your book. Then you stamp the book in the box to leave your imprint. Go to letterboxing.org, then click on your state, then your city or a city close to you, get the directions, get blank book and ink pad, and your own stamp, then start exploring. It’s a great exercise for you and your children in teamwork and following instructions.
This week’s game is Fun Facts by Repos Games. I loooove it! It is the perfect getting to know you game! We played it last Sunday night with my daughter and son-in-law. I got some laughter and meaningful conversation out of it, so that makes it a winner!
In this game, each person gets a plastic arrow and a dry erase marker. Then you take turns asking a question from the deck of cards. See examples below.
After each question is asked, everyone secretly writes a number on the arrow, as an answer. The person who asked the question puts down his or her arrow first, with the answer face down, then one by one you each put your arrow face down, guessing if your answer is above or below the arrows/answers that are already down. The goal is, as a group, to get your answers in perfect order, from lowest to highest numerical value. Some of the answers could be over 100, and for some questions, you limit your answer on a scale between 0-100. Then you turn over all the arrows to see if you got them all in ascending order. You get one point for each one in the right place.
So it’s a cooperative game to see how well you know each other.
So for example, for the question, “How much do you enjoy making lists? from 0-100” the players in the photo below have written answers between 11-99. You can see that some of the arrows were placed out of order. So the group collectively gets 6 out of a possible perfect score of 8 points. (I’m assuming the orange arrow at the bottom is below 11.)
A game consists of answering 8 questions. Then you compare your group’s score to the scoring scale printed on the instructions to see how well your group did. That’s it! It’s super simple and involves thinking, conversation and laughs! I give it 4 out of 5 stars. I took away a star because it’s marketed as a family game, at least on amazon, but some questions are not appropriate for children, such as “How many alcoholic drinks do you have a week?” If it’s going to be labeled as a family game, it shouldn’t have any questions like that.
So instead of following the rules that say to lay out 8 cards face down at the beginning to use all of those 8 for the game, my “house rule” is to let each person when it is that person’s turn, go through the cards until he or she finds one that resonates with him or her to ask. You might want to dump any cards along the way you find inappropriate.
I do hope you get this game and enjoy learning Fun Facts about your family and friends! I can’t wait to play it with my out-of-nest children as well with my neighborhood game gang. I think it will work for some Zoom game nights too. If you want more details about it, watch the Dice Tower review below.
You can even use this game in your homeschooling as it counts as language arts!
If you want to learn more about gameschooling, go here.
If you want a guide to using games remotely, as in playing games in Zoom, go here. You can play games with your friends and family across the world!
Tomorrow’s Pioneer Day! I love it! It’s a state holiday here in Utah. We’ve never had a huge family tradition involved with Pioneer Day. The way we celebrate it changes every year. Sometimes we get together with extended family and share pioneer stories and eat homemade ice cream. Sometimes we eat food that is easier to prepare and just talk. One year we happened to be on the way home traveling by Cove Fort UT from a family vacation to CA, so we stopped to tour that pioneer building. Some years we have lived outside of Utah, but our church still had activities about Pioneer Day for which I’m grateful for.
What’s MOST important to me is to share stories about pioneers, whether they are related to me or not, whether they were literal pioneers who trekked across the plains or figurative pioneers who were the first to cross into unknown territory, pursuing truth. I want to make this pioneer storytelling an annual thing, so that my children left at home miss it if we don’t do it. I want them to leave my home knowing some of these stories so they will share them with their children.
Here are some pioneer stories you can share with your family.
-this one is about my husband’s ancestor, Charles Shumway. He was the first one to leave Nauvoo Illinois, crossing the frozen Mississippi River in February 1846. What bravery! I don’t know if I would be willing to be the first to trust that ice! As they crossed the river, Charles told his wife, “Don’t look back!” His life’s story is told in the novelization above by one of my husband’s distant cousins, Eva Conover.
-this story involves my ancestor, Zerah Pulsipher, photo above. He was at the meeting with other Saints after Joseph Smith was killed, where many, including him, say the face and voice of Brigham Young transformed to look and sound like Joseph Smith, so that they knew Brigham Young was to be the next president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This story was a prelude to the trek west, to lay the foundation for Brigham Young’s leadership.
-many people know this story of another one of my husband’s ancestors, Levi Savage Jr. He was part of the Martin Handcart Company. He was the one who told the people not to leave for the Utah Territory so late in the season, the end of summer. He was outvoted. He went with the group anyway, committing to them his full support. Never did he say, “I told you so!” even when they were caught in horrific snowstorms on their way. What a guy! Such a gentleman. You can watch his story played out in the Movie 17 Miracles, shown below.
-here’s a story of a pioneer in another land. He was the first in Austria to preach of the restored gospel. His name is Thomas Biesinger, and he ended up going to prison for teaching the truth of the restored gospel. You can read it here.
Julie Mavimbela was a pioneer in Africa. I love her story! Go here for more.
Here are a ton more Utah pioneer stories over here.
Then here are stories of pioneers in every land. Go read them! They are so awesome!!!!
And I have even more in my Family Devotionals Ebook. Go get it here.
Tree of Life Mothering 