I don’t know if any of you long-time loyal readers of my blog remember me lamenting years ago about the lack of movies out there about married love. That’s what I want to watch more of for my date nights at home. Hooray for married romance movies! We got this one at my local public library on DVD. I give it 4 stars out of 5.
This is a Hallmark movie, so expect some implausibility and cheese. Nevertheless, it’s worth watching to hear the marriage counsel embedded in the conversation between characters. I thought I had the whole plot figured out but I was wrong. It’s fun and light and great for a night when you don’t want to think too hard. Maybe some day I’ll come up with some discussion questions for it but I don’t want to think too hard right now :-).
I don’t know what it is about Mother’s Day, me, and car problems. Yesterday was the third Mother’s Day in the past 7 years where we have had car trouble. Oy! That plus another challenge that is too hurtful and personal for me to blog about made yesterday the second worst Mother’s Day ever. The worst was four years ago when I had a head-on car collision and totaled the family car in north Las Vegas around 9 PM. After that disaster, we had to wait over an hour for the police to come, and another hour for the tow truck. I didn’t get to bed in a hotel until about 2 and couldn’t fall asleep until 5 AM. Yeah, fun times.
But the great news is that because of the car troubles yesterday I had got to meet a fifth cousin I never knew before. And get my belief in angels reaffirmed.
All was going well except for the aforementioned issue I won’t go into. We had a beautiful time at our church meeting in the morning with the theme of Mother’s Day. One of the young speakers, about age 14, even bragged about how much his mom is a Tiger Mother, like Amy Chua. He gave a few examples that sounded OK but one was a bit brutal. Another young man said the sweetest thing about his mom. He said, “I know that Jesus is like my mom, and that gives me the most comfort than anything else.”
The man who conducted the meeting spoke of his mother and how even though she’s 5 feet even, and weighs 100 lbs, she can take him out in martial arts. He also said he loves his mother-in-law, even though he argues with her. She was sitting in the congregation. In the next meeting, which was right after, she told the women, “For the record, I don’t argue with my son-in-law, I’m smarter than that!” Funny!
Later that day we embarked on a long drive out to a rural area to have dinner with my parents in their vacation cabin on a mountain. I was feeling on a high because of the previous day when I got to have a day out with like-minded mom friends, doing something super healthful and beneficial for our families. I got to hear gems of wisdom and just went home feeling so loved and invigorated on Saturday night. Then I got to cap it off with a Zoom meeting with my parents and siblings and a great date night movie.
Despite another issue that came up on the way to the cabin that definitely gave me cause to complain, but for which I bit my tongue instead, and did not complain, we had an overall lovely time at the cabin. Dinner was Hawaiian haystacks. Then I got to have a Zoom meeting with my out of nest children: my missionary son, my oldest child/son, and my married daughter, all at the same time with my parents and mother-in-law in the room. I told my oldest who joined us from Texas over Zoom that he had “one stop shopping for wishing his ‘Happy mother’s day!’ greetings to his mother, and both grandmothers.
I also got to see my two adorable grandbabies in Zoom and hear the two-year-old repeatedly announce how cool it was that he could make a tow truck out of a phone charger base and a giant clothes pin that my daughter bought on etsy to use for building forts with play silks. (What?! Such is the strange imagination of little children. He is a true Shumway child who would rather play with random objects than toys.) Little did I know how prescient my grandson’s exclamations were. I got to show to my mother and my mother-in-law the pictures and audio files I had uploaded into familysearch.org for them, onto their personal pages. I got some gifts I asked for, for which I am super excited about. I have no shame in asking my husband and children for the exact gifts that I want for Mother’s Day, birthday, and Christmas.
I remembered to get a group picture and then we left before it got too dark, much to my disappointment, as we didn’t get to play the board game I brought. Anyway, we left before it was dark, which was hard because I’m a night owl. My fun, childish party side of me wanted to just stay and play games and talk all night with my mom and mother in law on coconut oil and diet and preventing Alzheimer’s. The taskmaster, disciplined, boring, practical mother side of me knew it would be better to leave and not get home when we can hardly stagger into the house out of the car after the 1 + hour drive because we are so tired. (I’ve had plenty of Sunday family visits, for decades, where we stay past ten so I speak from experience.) I have a son who has work on Sunday (boo- having to work on Mother’s Day!) and I wanted to get home to see him too before he went to bed.
Let me tell you, angels are real. Angel mothers are real. On the way home, our engine overheated. We pulled over and some young men, Good Samaritans, stopped to help us. They were driving in a family caravan of cars, with their parents driving behind them. They determined that the lid on the coolant tank, popped off, causing us to lose coolant and have the engine overheat. Even though it was late and dark, they insisted on driving back to town (a 15 minute drive) to buy some coolant for us. Then they came back to put it in. They refused any pay for the coolant.
We thanked them profusely, said good bye, said a grateful prayer of thanks to Heavenly Father for these angels, and started driving. After a few hundred feet, the car was still smoking from under the hood so we stopped again. This time the dad of the two young men stopped to help. We explained the problem, that it wasn’t fixed by adding coolant, and that we should leave the car there and have the car towed to a fix-it place. So we needed a ride. He and his wife offered to drive us home, on the way to their home.
Complete strangers! But they felt OK about giving us a ride and we felt OK about accepting. So we had a pleasant ride home in a warm car visiting with what turned out to be relatives. I found out a the mom is my fifth cousin on my Dad’s side. We’re both descended from Zera Pulsipher, a Utah pioneer. This woman was an amazing woman to have taught her sons to be so helpful to help us. An angel mother.
I definitely felt the hand of God in this encounter. These people were angels in human form. They helped us when we were in deep need. I hope we can each be angels for each other and help each other in loving kindness and service. I’m learning that whenever I feel sad or alone, I can look out for people who are sad and lonely and help them. Just doing that eases the sadness and loneliness.
The other great thing about this whole challenge was that it put the hurt I had felt earlier in the day in perspective. The car trouble and the rescue allowed me to put my pain in a much bigger place. It was cold in that car and dark. It would not have been fun to have to wait for my dad to drive down the mountain to come get us, and then have to drive back up the mountain, and then figure out how to get us all home the next day. I just felt so grateful that we could still be going home, thanks to these angels. It feels so grand knowing that kind people, Good Samaritans, are out there. They just are, no matter the doom and gloom of the negative news outlets. So I am feeling blessed, it was indeed the best and worst Mother’s Day ever.
I had never thought about doing my own graduation ceremony for my homeschooling “senior” until I watched a clip from the Duggars’ show, “19 Kids and Counting.” I think it’s a great idea! Maybe my younger kids will let me do it for them. My love of language is words of affirmation and quality time. So far nobody else in the family seems to show that love language so a graduation ceremony doesn’t matter to them. But maybe if I combine the ceremony with other love languages, like food or gifts, they’ll let me do it.
Sally Clarkson, in The Life Giving Home, pictured at the top, has detailed a complete commencement/graduation ceremony. You can listen to it right now if you sign up for scribd.com and find the audiobook there. It’s in Chapter 8.
Then if you go here you can read some of the gifts the Clarkson family bestows on the graduate for their homeschool graduation ceremony. Scroll down to the heading “Gifts for Our Home Graduation Ceremony.” I love that Sally has a scripture for each gift. You could assemble as many gifts as you want using her ideas and read aloud a scripture before bestowing each gift on your young adult. What a great memorable rite of passage, home-grown and customized to your child.
I found this book in Audible and am so happy I did! A friend of mine has been wondering if homeopathy could help with autism. The answer is an emphatic yes! Amy Lansky, PhD, the author of Impossible Cure, pictured above, tells the whole story of how her son was cured of autism by homeopathy. Read it in scribd.com. (Go here to learn about scribd.com.)
Amy is an academic so if you are all into credentials and research, you will appreciate her background. She was a computer scientist and researcher for NASA. Her website is here. It is chock full of treasures: curing autism stories, referrals to practitioners, and recommended treatments, plus Amy’s blog.
Amy’s son Max got autism from a conventional vaccine as a toddler. He rarely talked. He exhibited many self-soothing behaviors and seemed “spaced out” in his preschool, hardly connecting with the teachers and other children, with no eye contact. Homeopathy cured the autism and today he is a fully-functioning, working adult with a degree in film from USC.
This book is fascinating! Not only do you learn about the Lansky family’s experience with autism and homeopathy, but you get a great primer on HP. The book has stories of HP curing all sorts of things besides autism, including Alzheimer’s and a cute little dog who overdosed on a box of chocolates. Amazing!
Here are podcasts featuring Amy:
This one is an excerpt from her book above, from the Naturally Recovering from Autism with Karen Thomas podcast.
This one is an interview with Amy and her husband Charles.
A friend of mine taking the Teach me Health and Homeopathy Class by Paola Brown that I’m facilitating asked a question in behalf of her friend, “Have you learned about the homeopathic remedies for childhood vaccinations?”
Here’s my answer, “Yes!”
Cilla Whatcott is the “go-to girl” about this. She wrote a whole book about the answer, pictured above. According to Sarah Pope at thehealthyhomeeconomist.com, “Cilla PhD, HD RHom, CCH is a classical homeopath, instructor at Normandale Community College, mother of several adopted children from around the world and advocate for safer healthcare. She is the founder of the website Real Immunity. Cilla holds a B.A. degree from Arizona State University and a PhD from Kingdom College of Natural Health. She is also a graduate of Northwestern Academy of Homeopathy, Minneapolis, MN.”
I highly encourage you to to Cilla’s site, Real Immunity and get her DVDs and watch them to learn about real immunity. Read her book above about alternatives to childhood vaccinations. Listen to her interviews below. She has another book here, pictured below.
I love that blossoms are a sign of spring. I took a walk on Saturday and this tree was in full bloom.
This past week for the Come, Follow Me study guide I read Doctrine and Covenants section 45. In Sunday School class in Zoom yesterday the teachers asked us what we are supposed to do with those truths given in section 45. I had never thought about that before. Section 45 is all about the signs of Christ’s Second Coming, some of it quite frightening at surface level understanding, like the moon turning to blood and the stars falling from heaven. We, meaning people I know in my circle of friends in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, talk about the signs of the times all the time. But what’s the point? Why does God give them and why should we know about them? The teachers sent us into different breakout rooms to discuss the answer. So I started looking in the section to find the answer. Here’s what I came up with:
So that we know that God is so incredibly amazing, because He fulfills his Word. He tells us these signs and as we watch them come true we can increase our reverence for Him. He controls all things with His power, which is all power. So seeing His prophecies come true increases our wonder and awe of Him. (Again, verse 35 relates to this as well.)
So that we will look forward to the Second Coming of Jesus with great anticipation. Think of waiting for Christmas, or the anticipation of having a new baby born into your family or you or a family member getting married, and times that by infinity. That’s how exciting the coming of Jesus Christ is. We can increase our testimony that He is coming. If we are following Him, then this is exciting! It is not a dreadful thing! It is a wonderful thing to share with our neighbors so we can all prepare. We can each repent every day and help our neighbors repent. Repent just means to turn to Jesus and think, act, and feel like He does.
“And it shall come to pass that he that feareth me shall be looking forth for the great day of the Lord to come, even for the signs of the coming of the Son of Man.” D&C 45:39
Jesus is coming again! As it says in The Living Christ proclamation, “We testify that He will someday return to earth. ‘And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together’ (Isaiah 40:5). He will rule as King of Kings and reign as Lord of Lords, and every knee shall bend and every tongue shall speak in worship before Him. Each of us will stand to be judged of Him according to our works and the desires of our hearts.”
More blossoms from my neighborhood walk. So beautiful!
The Family of Anson Perry Winsor II and Sarah Alydia Terry (more about them here)
I attended a recent event about family history over Zoom for my ward (church congregation). The event involved three or four people who each presented in a different breakout room. One of the presentations was about adding memories to Familysearch.org. By attending that class, I learned an idea that I’m going to put into full force for the rest of my life. What is that idea? It’s that familysearch.org, particularly the “memories” section, is God’s Scrapbook!
This is a major shift in my thinking. I had been thinking that familysearch is just for adding photos and audio clips of deceased people, like the one at the very top of this post, of my great-grandmother, Ethel Windsor, who is the little girl in the photo. I watched the video above a few years ago. It presents the idea that familysearch.org is like a museum of your ancestors. So I started thinking of it as a place for pictures of ancestors. But the presenter pointed out that we can be adding photos and audio clips into the “memories” section for those who are living, including our children. She showed us how to do it and called it “God’s Scrapbook.”
Ahh! This is is so ground-breaking! I’ve been into preserving memories for years. My life, however, happens faster than I can preserve it. Because I am an idealist, and want my memories preserved in perfect scrapbook pages that capture the theme and intensity of the event with colorfully coordinated specialty acid-free scrapbook paper and embellishments, alongside words to document each photo, I can’t keep up. That all takes a lot of time and money. Henceforth, out of my seven children, the progress I have made on documenting their lives in a scrapbook is ridiculously, painfully, pathetically slow.
I dutifully made a scrapbook album of my firstborn, a boy, covering the first two years of his life, with acid free paper and glue, and lots of borders and stickers. More children came along and what with homeschooling and the other duties of keeping them alive and fed, I am still stuck on my oldest daughter’s baby album. She’s 25! I haven’t gotten past the second month of her life!
Actually I had added a few memories of my two older boys, from their mission, into familysearch.org. So my thinking had progressed from viewing familysearch.org as a repository for dead people’s photos to a place to put living people’s memories. But I had only thought that “super important” memories go there. I had only put in some missionary letters from my two older boys’ missions.
But this presenter showed us how she has been adding tons of miscellany memories of her children and grandchildren, all living. She had audio clips of her grandchildren giving talks in Primary, pictures of their recent Easter family picnic, and ball games of her grandson. She said she loves scrapbooking this way because she knows it’s going to last forever. She doesn’t have to deal with paper and glue. It goes super fast and it’s super safe.
I agree! This can go so much faster. You can do it from your phone using the familytree app. You can use photos from your Facebook, Google photos, and Instagram accounts. You don’t have, however, the “hold a book in your hand” factor that you do with scrapbooks. That’s the only drawback. We might not always be able to have access to electronic devices. So I’ll continue to do Chatbooks. I have been making photo books using Chatbooks, but you can’t add audio clips to Chatbooks. So now I’m going to do both. I’ll preserve memories of living people, especially audio clips, in both familysearch and chatbooks. I’ve made Chatbooks on and off for Christmas the past few years. I like to make a Chatbook for each child for their “meaningful” gift on some years. See my post on Three Gifts for Christmas Tradition here.
Happy scrapbooking in God’s way! Go over to familysearch.org and get started today! I’ve included a bunch of videos here in this post to help you learn how to capture and organize your photos and audio clips in familysearch. You can even do this on your phone, using the familytree app and photos from your camera roll. God indeed does think of everything! He is providing painless ways for harried moms like me to do a little bit of “family history work” everyday. It’s so important and healing to have family stories and pictures prominent in our brains.
The video below shows some new features of familysearch.org, as of Feb. 27, 2021. I love the new “Discovery Pages” of each person. It takes the features of Family History Discovery Centers to each person’s page. Amazing!
Pickleball! (That plus bowling. We did both on the same day! Fun!)
I’ve been wanting to learn how to play it so I was happy to oblige! We had a great time! This is a great activity for ages 6 and up. It’s so much easier than tennis! I’m hooked! The learning curve is much less steep than tennis. You have all the fun of tennis without the stress. I’ll be playing this again for family time!
If you want to play it without an official court do what we did. Buy a pickleball set on amazon, then go to your nearest public school playground that has asphalt. Bring duct tape with you and use the duct tape to mark the boundaries after searching online for dimensions. Just be approximate. This is not tournament play. If you have to conserve your tape, play on the playground’s basketball court and use those lines for outer boundaries, and use the duct tape to make the kitchen line. (If we had a flat driveway we would play on that but since it’s sloped that won’t work. We’d always be chasing the ball into the street, since we’re not that good at playing yet and miss a lot of shots, LOL!)
I’m still basking in the glow of the amazing Homeopathy on the Hill event I participated in on Thursday 4/22/21. Basically, 700 homeopathy advocates, both consumers and practitioners of homeopathic drugs, joined forces to have phone and online meetings with Congressional staffers. We communicated to these staffers our reasons that homeopathic drugs should be protected by the FDA and not outlawed. We asked the staffers to tell the Congress people they work with to collaborate to restore a 1979 bill to keep homeopathic drugs legal. Already, some homeopathic drugs are being blocked by the FDA, and we want to stop any more from being blocked. This is just the beginning of the campaign!
I’m grateful for Paola Brown as president of Americans for Homeopathy Choice for leading the fight. Paola accomplished a Herculean task. Kudos to her and her team!
Anyway, for the capstone of the event, we got to hear from Lindsay Wagner, the Bionic Woman. She appeared on Zoom for all of the participants to see and hear her story of using homeopathy. Wow! Can you believe she’s 71? Someone in the Zoom room showed us all her Bionic Woman lunch box. That’s the photo at the top. Lindsay looks the same on the lunch box from decades ago as she does today!
Book Cover Image Credit: thriftbooks.com
It must be her use of homeopathy that keeps her so young! She told her story of discovering homeopathy in the early 1980s. She first used it for some emotional issues and then turned to it for her delivery of her first baby and then for her children’s health issues. She said that when her children were little, they knew if they had aches or pains to bring “the yellow book” to Lindsay to ask her for help. It’s the book above, by Stephen Cummings and Dana Ullman. It was so fun to see that Dana was in the zoom room so he could see/hear this acknowledgement from Lindsay that she relied on his book to be a Dr. Mom.
If you are curious about becoming a Dr. Mom yourself with homeopathy (HP), I encourage you to sign up for Paola Brown’s Homeopathy for Moms Book Club. I’m starting it on Tuesday May 11 so don’t delay! Go here to get all the details!
I also just discovered this wonderful resource about homeopathy here, a collection of HP videos from wholehealthnow.com. Paola has a video in the collection, and so does Joette Calabrese.
Did you see the online class for moms and kids using Paola Brown’s Teach Me Health and Homeopathy curriculum over here? It’s so amazing! I’m having so much fun teaching it, learning about health, terrain theory, and how healing really works. Maybe it interests you, but you decided it’s not for you because you don’t have children.
Or maybe you’re interested in learning all these truths yourself without involving your kids in a formal class. Or you have kids, but they are too young to take the class with you.
Great news! I’m launching Paola’s Homeopathy Book Club just for moms, to study health and homeopathy, sans the kiddos, using a book club culture!
It’s Paola’s Homeopathy Book Club for Moms!
You use the same book as the kids use in the kids class, Evie and the Secret of Small Things, which Paola wrote, but you study it in a book club culture. Fun and learning at the same time without managing the kiddos!
-it’s for newbies to homeopathy, laying a sound foundation to learn about this completely reliable and amazing system of medicine
-it’s also for not so newbies, who want to clarify understanding of things like the law of similars, provings, using a materia medica, how to take a case, and how to use a repertory
-you learn what potency and dosing can look like for an acute case
-you learn how we need to avoid bias when taking a case
-you learn about the history of homeopathy with Samuel Hahnemann and you delve deeper into the dangers of suppressing disease.
–you also learn to think about various treatments found in conventional medicine
-you learn what sources are used for homeopathy remedies
-you get to watch an interview Paola did with the director of pharmacy at Boiron
-you will learn how to find a homeopath for your family and best practices to use
-dive into terrain theory, and learn who was right? Bechamp or Pasteur?
-you learn how to make a health and illness timeline for each member of your family
-you get to practice taking lots of cases to boost your confidence for doing it in real life
-you learn the key notes for 19 remedies each used for acute cases: Allium cepa, Nat mur, Arnica montana, Rhus tox, Bryonia alba, and Silicea, Symphytum, Ledum, Apis, Arsenicum, and Nux vomica, Cantharis, Causticum, and Urtica urens, Hypericum, Staphysagria, Belladonna, Carbo veg, Aconitum napellus
-the Online Book Club Area includes over 45 custom made or curated videos tailored to the Book Club to help you and your friends make the most of the material.
-you get a fabulous, fun Graduation Gift! (digital, included with Handbook)
For all your dedication and hard work in completing this 8-week Book Club Program, and to support your journey of growing homeopathy knowledge, Paola is so pleased to provide you with an amazing, special digital gift. It provides you access to digital copies of several forgotten (yet truly wonderful) homeopathy books, a coupon book for homeopathy related products from several of the best homeopathy stores, access to continuing education resources from some of Paola’s favorite homeopaths, and additional printables and infographics. This is indeed a small treasure chest of value that Paola and I know you will enjoy!
Logisticsof Class:
-8 weeks
-Tuesday nights, starts 5/25 and ends 7/6, 7:00 to 9:00 MDT, online
-over Zoom, so no need to pay a babysitter… put the kids in front of a screen and come in your PJs with some treats!
-tuition fee is $100, $50 early bird price if you register by Wednesday May 12, midnight. Pay by Venmo to @Celestia-Shumway. Register after May 12 and pay $100
-at least $79 materials fee, which you order here. Scroll down to the bottom of the screen and order the following pictured below (these prices are the discount prices which occurs when you buy at least 2 items):
Those materials are required for the class. If you want to invest in something extra, but so lovely and infinitely handy for your family’s health life, I suggest you get the beautiful hardcover Family Homeopathy Journal. It’s $55 but It won’t ship out until after April 30th.
You will find the family journal so convenient as a place to keep all your case taking notes for your family, as well as your notes for what remedies you gave your family.
I hope to see you in class on May 25! If you have any questions, please email me at info (at) treeoflifemothering (dot) com.
Tree of Life Mothering 