I enjoyed reading Moroni 7-9 this past week. I’ve always loved the definition of charity from Moroni in Moroni 7:45-48.
“And charity suffereth long, and is kind, and envieth not, and is not puffed up, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, and rejoiceth not in iniquity but rejoiceth in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
46 Wherefore, my beloved brethren, if ye have not charity, ye are nothing, for charity never faileth. Wherefore, cleave unto charity, which is the greatest of all, for all things must fail—
47 But charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with him.
48 Wherefore, my beloved brethren, pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love, which he hath bestowed upon all who are true followers of his Son, Jesus Christ; that ye may become the sons of God; that when he shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is; that we may have this hope; that we may be purified even as he is pure. Amen.”
I’ve posted the video from the Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon Evidences Podcast that relates to Moroni 7-9. It features Lori Bean Henderson, talking about her grandfather, Willard Bean. More about that in a minute.
I love finding movies to watch with my children to show this Christlike love, this charity. I was pleasantly surprised that we stumbled upon one recently. Last night as a family we watched a movie called Christmas With a Capital C. It was cute. It shows a family showing Christlike love to an enemy. See the trailer below.
It makes me think of Willard Bean, “The Fighting Preacher.” He was called by the leaders of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to make friends of The Church in Palmyra, New York, where Joseph Smith lived when he got the plates that became the Book of Mormon. Some people made a movie about Willard.
See the trailer for that below. Willard Bean definitely had Christlike love to make friends with people who were originally enemies. People were extremely rude to them at first. Willard and his wife Rebecca won the people over with a combination of boxing (from Willard), love, service, and food.
This clip below shows the bullying that happened
In the podcast episode at the very top of this post, Willard’s granddaughter says that the bullying did not happen to her Aunt Palmyra, as shown in the movie, but to her dad and his brother.
It’s just amazing to know that Christ, as the source of all that is good and glorious, gives people strength to overcome ugliness, meanness, and rudeness, because of His love. I highly encourage you to watch the video at the very top of this page to hear the back story of Willard and the true story of his charity. It’s a bit different from the movie. Then go watch the movie if you haven’t already.
Praise God for the examples of Willard Bean, Corrie ten Boom and her family, and many other Christians for showing us real life examples of charity.
I love that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the church I belong to, is hosting Christmas concerts every night December 2-23. You can view the schedule here. Most of them are live stream only, but the first one below, is recorded. It’s just so wonderful that we live in an age when we can access beautiful music at almost anytime, anywhere. I’m so grateful for my Savior Jesus Christ and that we have a holiday every year to celebrate His birth. It’s no coincidence that it is in December, in order to light up our lives at the darkest time of the year.
The above video is an excerpt from the Christmas Concert called, “Celebrating the Light of the World.” It features the new daddy-daughter duo singing sensation of Mat and Savanna Shaw. The video of the full concert is below. It features some sister missionaries who take you on a tour of Temple Square. Enjoy and Merry Christmas!
The past week of Thanksgiving Day buzz and after-days relaxation slightly distracted me from my series of #GiveThanks posts. So I’m getting back to it, so I can finish the prophet President Russell M. Nelson’s invitation. Today is my #GiveThanks post #7. I am formally giving thanks to God for His Only Begotten Son, my Savior Jesus Christ. I am always thankful for Him, of course. Today I am giving thanks for Him for the crowning touch of my seven days of #GiveThanks. I am just so grateful for Jesus Christ, especially as we enter the Christmas season. Without Him, I would not have anything else to give thanks for on Thanksgiving, or any other day.
We used this turkey recipe I’ve blogged about over here. Another year of having a delicious turkey that is not dry. Thanks to Heather Woods for the recipe!
We had a lovely time on Thanksgiving Day. Blessedly, my mother-in-law got to come. It was so nice for her to get out after recovering from you-know-what. She had been isolated for months before she got it, during her time with it, and afterwards, since she is a widow living in a retirement center. She got to have two Thanksgiving dinners, one at her daughter’s on Tuesday night and then one here on the Day. My husband was in a particular jocular mood. He cracked a lot of jokes during dinner and after. She can’t remember the last time she laughed so hard.
Just like last year, I assigned people to make something. My husband made the gravy. I did the turkey. 16 year old son and 11 year old son did the potatoes, Pioneer Woman style with lots of fat. The 14 year old daughter did the cranberry sauce, also using the Pioneer Woman’s recipe. I’m not a fan of sweet potatoes turned into candy with marshmallows and sugar, so I simply steamed some after cutting them up. After dinner and cleaning up, some of my kiddos and I connected with some relatives on my side over Zoom. We chatted for a while. This was the first time that my parents ate Thanksgiving Dinner alone, in their 50+ years of marriage, because of the pandemic. Every year until now they have had either relatives and/or kids with them.
I definitely wanted to connect with them so they wouldn’t feel so alone. After we chatted, one of the cousins in Maine and some of us living here played Code Names online. That was fun. Then those of us here in person played the Game of Things. That was a lot of fun too. I highly recommend this game. It’s perfect for when you don’t want to think too hard, but you want to connect and get to know each other better, without being too silly. I love this game!
Anyway, it’s so Providential that in the past few weeks using the Book of Mormon Study Guide of Come, Follow Me, that we’ve been reading about the Jaredites being led across the “great deep,” the ocean. Whenever I read that, I think of the Thanksgiving Day Pilgrims. They too crossed an ocean, to come to their promised land. They were not seafaring people normally so that ocean must have been mighty mysterious and treacherous. Why were they so willing to cross it? Because of their faith in Jesus Christ, and their desire to practice that faith in their own way.
I am so thankful for my Savior Jesus Christ. I never really understood the need for him until I was an adult.
Becoming a wife and mother has brought me face to face with all my failures and imperfections. I’m so grateful for second, third, fourth, and many more chances. That only comes because Jesus Christ paid the price for those chances. It is His enabling grace that gives me strength to keep going with a full brightness of hope.
I love that last month of November, I got to talk and hear a lot about faith in Jesus Christ. We talked about faith both in our homeschool group, in all the children’s classes, ages 4 all the way up to age 17. We also talked a lot about faith at home with our Come, Follow Me Study of the Book of Mormon. In our homeschool group we kicked off the month of November in our moms’ class by sharing stories of faith. One mom told this incredible story that makes me feel the Holy Spirit everytime I think about it.
She said that awhile ago, her family had their car stolen right from their driveway. How horrible! I can’t even imagination how devastating that would feel. Her husband had left the key in its ignition and ran inside to do one last thing before he drove off. In that brief time, a thief came and stole it. Instead of panicking about their stolen car, and how they would pay to replace it, they exercised faith in Jesus Christ. First off, they didn’t talk negatively about the thief. They prayed to God and asked God to bless the thief. They decided he must have been feeling desperate if he chose to steal a car from someone’s driveway. He needed help. Then they decided to pray and ask for help in finding the car. After they prayed, they decided to start driving in their other car to go look for it. The mom said she felt the Holy Spirit guiding her to turn at a certain intersection and then go to Walmart. So they did. They entered the parking lot. Her husband decided to click on the remaining remote key fob to see if they could hear a beep. They kept driving around and beeping and guess what? They found the car! So they called the police and waited. The police came and apprehended the crook as he came to get in the car. He was only inside Walmart for 15 minutes. Isn’t that amazing? God directed them to the exact spot where their stolen car was, out of all the places it could have been on this planet, within the 15 minute window that was needed to find the crook. This story gives me chills every time I think about. They prayed in the name of Jesus Christ, our advocate, and got an answer through the Holy Spirit, the partner of Jesus which He gave to us when He left the earth, so we could have His comfort and guidance. That Spirit guided them to get their stolen car back. It was a miracle! Yes, Jesus is a god of miracles! If Jesus can speak to my friend through the Holy Spirit on where to go to find her stolen car, He can help me with any of my problems and any of yours too!
Mormon 9:11 of the Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ says that Jesus Christ is a God of miracles.
“But behold, I will show unto you a God of miracles, even the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; and it is that same God who created the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are.”
Amen! I am so thankful that the god I worship, Jesus Christ, is a God of miracles. To add to those stories from my homeschool group shared by my mom friends, I loved reviewing the stories of faith from the Pilgrims. the Pilgrims experienced a few miracles as they voyaged. Number one was that when they had trouble with a broken main beam, they happened to have the right piece of equipment to fix it, a jackscrew. Another miracle was when John Howland fell overboard. He was able to get back in the ship.
This is how God rescued him, in the words of Governor William Bradford, an eyewitness:
“And one of them John Howland came above and, with a roll of the ship, he was thrown into the sea; but it pleased God that he caught hold of a rope that was trailing in the water and held on though he was several fathoms under water till he was hauled up by the same rope to the brim of the water, and then with a boat-hook and other means got him into the ship again and his life was saved; and though he was something ill with it, yet he lived many years after, and became a profitable member both in church and commonwealth.”
As President M. Russell Ballard says in the video here, the above event was a miracle. It was God’s hand who somehow placed that rope in the water so John Howland could reach it and be pulled out of the dangerous ocean. God provided for this so that John could survive and live to be an ancestor in the New World of Joseph Smith, the prophet of the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The gravestone of John Howland. Photo credit: findagrave.com.
President Ballard goes on to say in that video, “About four years after they arrived in the New World, John married fellow Mayflower passenger Elizabeth Tilley, a brave and committed daughter of God. They eventually had 10 children and nearly 90 grandchildren. But that is not where the story ends. Today, an estimated 2 million Americans trace their roots to John and Elizabeth. Their descendants include three U.S. presidents—Franklin D. Roosevelt, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush; American poets Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; and two influential 19th-century American religious leaders—the prophet Joseph and his brother Hyrum Smith. Think about it for a moment—the existence of these political leaders, poets, and prophets hinged on this one young man finding and grabbing a rope in the ocean and holding on tight to be saved. It was a miracle!”
This book talks about the many miracles of the Pilgrims.
Yes it was! I’m also a descendant of John Howland so I too am grateful he was preserved. I’m not a fan of FDR nor the Bushes but I’m grateful for this insight and President Ballard’s injunction to look for the Lord’s hand in each of our own lives from that talk. I am thankful for the miracles in my own life that Jesus has perfectly orchestrated. Here are some of them:
He gave me the tender mercy of being able to birth my last three babies each on a Sunday. I really wanted that to happen, for various reasons, and it did, three times in a row, after asking for it. You can’t tell me that that was random.
He sent angels to protect my two children, when they were both teens, to be safe and uninjured when my daughter accidentally collided with a public transportation bus while driving. This was a blessing in disguise as it allowed our car to be totaled, and we got a lot of insurance money for that totaled car. So blessedly, this money was enough to pay off the debt we owed on it, with money left over to buy a used car for cash. The previous spring I had listened to Dave Ramsey’s audiobook, The Total Money Makeover. In that book, Dave rants on about why having a car payment is so stupid. I started yearning for a way to get out of our car payment on our minivan. It felt overwhelmingly impossible as we had great money trouble at the time. There was no way to find extra income in the budget to pay off the debt. Little did I know that He would provide a way six months later. Ever since then we haven’t had a car payment. It’s been so wonderful!
He and Heavenly Father knew that I desired a beautiful portrait of Him to hang on my wall in my living room. They gifted it to me in the form of a friend. I couldn’t afford it. Jesus inspired a friend, through the Holy Spirit, to give me the very portrait off her wall to me. It was a Greg Olsen print of the Savior. It now hangs in my home, a loving reminder of the Savior’s omniscience and power to inspire and my friend’s loving willingness to respond to the Spirit. See the photo at the top of this post. It’s so beautiful!
He inspired, through the Holy Spirit, that same friend to have a yard “giveaway” instead of a yard sale. Insightfully and so generously, she invited a handful of friends to come to her giveaway an hour earlier so that her friends could have our pick of what household items she was giving away, before the general public showed up. I was able to get many items that our family was in need of, when we didn’t have money to spare. Things like blankets, towels, and dishes to replace what had worn out after many years of marriage with lots of kiddos. Amazingly, He knew that something that wasn’t a necessity of mine was broken and it would delight me to get a new one to replace it. A year or so before this incident, one of my children had broken my cake decorator set, a wedding gift, by attempting to put peanut butter in it! Ugh! God knew I would like a new one. I love to use it to decorate my pies. I hadn’t told anyone about this, but God knew. I was able to get a like new one to replace it, this Pampered Chef one pictured below, because my friend gave it to me at her yard giveaway. This was no coincidence.
He inspired, again through the Holy Spirit, a man who shared office space with my husband, to say something to my husband. That something was the same thing that I had been saying to my husband for over a year. I needed a second witness and this man provided it. That something was a suggestion for my husband to apply out of state for a job, specifically in AZ, during our money troubles. My husband needed to hear it from someone else. You probably have experienced this too. I too have been in the same boat. My husband will tell me a truth, but I have to hear it from someone else to take it seriously. Anyway, that second witness of looking for a job in AZ prompted our move to AZ five years ago. In fact, I am publishing this post the day after the date, December 2, which marks our five year anniversary of moving to AZ. We have since moved back to Utah. Each move deserves its own separate blog post of inspired events orchestrated by Jesus. Those are for another day! Suffice it to say He was behind both moves.
He spoke through the Holy Spirit to my then 16 year old son to ask his siblings, if everyone had their seat belts on. I was the driver of the car with my four youngest as passengers. It was around 9 PM on a drive to Utah, as we wended our way through Las Vegas. That question saved my other son’s life. He did not have his belt on at the moment but then put it on because of his brother’s prompting. Five minutes later I collided head on with another car, going at least 45 mph. I am certain if my then 13 year old had not had his seat belt on, he would have gone sailing through the windshield and been seriously injured or killed. I am so grateful for this prompting of the Spirit. God still has work for this son to do.
He has inspired people through the Holy Spirit to offer to help us movea few times. In particular I had three friends who spent hours helping me dejunk, pack, and clean during the last move. I thank God for such amazing generous friends. When we moved to AZ we had amazing family and friends who helped us move as well.
He has been my refuge and my comfort during my troubled times. I have prayed in His name to my Heavenly Father and felt tremendous peace. Especially during this past year with the pandemic and my husband’s job loss a year ago, on Thanksgiving Eve.
He spoke to me through the Holy Spirit to guide us where to live when we moved when my husband got a new job in Utah. That guidance ultimately landed me in a place where I could meet The Candy Bomber, which is a dream come true.
He surprised me with blessings of two unspoken desires. I had not told these desires to anyone, not even my husband. Years ago, actually decades, LOL, when I was in college, I thought it would be wonderful to live in a certain neighborhood. Now, 30 years later, I am blessed to live in that very neighborhood. Another unspoken desire I had developed over the past 15 years was to have a light, bright, white kitchen. I have always lived in kitchens with dark cupboards. This last move, I was delighted to finally be blessed with a light kitchen with only white cupboards, countertops, and floor. I can only chalk this up to the miraculous intervention of God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ.
As Moroni says in Ether 12:38, copied below, I advise you to seek this Jesus. He is a God of miracles. Praise His name! Let Him show up in your life. Pray to the Father in His name, asking Him to be your advocate for your specific desires.
“I would commend you to seek this Jesus of whom the prophets and apostles have written, that the grace of God the Father, and also the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost, which beareth record of them, may be and abide in you forever. Amen.”
May you be surprised and delighted by the miracles of Jesus in your own life!
Gluten-free recipes of holiday faves are here, courtesy of Mommypotamus blogger Heather Dessinger. She’s got stuffing without bread (amazing!), pumpkin pie, and more! They all look delicious.
A super easy way to have grain-free pumpkin pie is to just go crustless. I use the Healthy Home Economist’s pumpkin pie recipe here and just put the filling in a well-buttered pie dish. I decorate generously with whipped cream and don’t miss the crust!
Thank-you card printables are here, courtesy of blogger Jennifer Flanders. They are beautiful, Victorian style.
Thanksgiving-themed games are here. For ready-made Thanksgiving Scattergories, go here, again courtesy of Jennifer Flanders. Her ultimate Thanksgiving printable bundle is here. I highly recommend you sign up for Heather, Katie, and Jennifer’s mailing lists on their web sites.
I also suggest listening to the prophet President Nelson’s video below with his invitation to give thanks, then complete the #GiveThanks challenge.
Did you know this year marks the 400th year anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth? Here is a great website about the Pilgrims’ Quadricentennial. It has free documents to download to read aloud with your family, full of primary sources, and videos to watch. It’s so important we teach our children the sacredness of the Mayflower Compact and the Pilgrims’ search for liberty.
I also recommend listening to William Bradford’s own words, his “History of Plimoth Plantation.”
It’s totally OK to keep reading about Thanksgiving and Pilgrims after the Feast Day. I have a bunch of Thanksgiving and Christmas picture books that I’ll be reading throughout November, December, and even into January and February. Here is my Thanksgiving list and here is my Christmas list.
Lastly, to help preserve liberty today, I highly recommend getting Connor Boyack’s Black Friday deal, to teach yourself and your family about how to apply the principle of liberty in real life. Go here to learn more. Full disclosure: that is an affiliate link so I do get a commission if buy the deal.
If you want resources to get educated on principles of liberty, for yourself and your family, this is the deal for you. Please read this message below from Connor Boyack, the creator of the above resources, including the Tuttle Twins books.
This massive deal has been in the works for quite a while.
Those three new guidebooks? We’ve been working on them for two years.
They’re perfect for teens (and young adults) and are packed full of helpful information about:
Stories of inspiring entrepreneurs and how they overcame challenges
Tales of courageous heroes and how their lives can be an example for us
Logical fallacies and how to spot bad arguments that prevent us from learning truth
We also have brand new parent guides that provide helpful information about each of our children’s books, so the adults can learn even more and better help their children learn as well. These are going to be an amazing resource to help you.
And speaking of helping you…
We’ve also got a brand new 115-page e-book where we have rebuttals to 40 of the top economic and political myths…
I’ve been meaning to watch this movie for years and finally got around to it this week. You can see it in Amazon prime video or probably find it at your local public library like I did.
It’s a great “family togetherness” movie. After all, it’s from the Hallmark Channel. Being extremely loosely based on the short story of the same name by Louisa May Alcott, it takes place in the 1800s. I love to read that short story every year to my kiddos in the form of the picture book as shown below. The only thing in common, however, between the movie and the short story is the title and the name of some of the characters. In the short story, which the picture book below contains, the children of a family unite to put on a grand Thanksgiving dinner while the parents are called away. The whole story takes place in a day.
In the movie, a widowed woman finds herself estranged from her mother. Forces bring the two together, early in the movie, after they’ve been apart for years. The rest of the movie takes place over weeks. It’s all about how mother and daughter navigate their strained relationship after even more emotional battles and then illness, in order to have a happy Thanksgiving dinner together. I give it five out of five stars. It’s sweet and charming, perfect for family viewing.
Here are some discussion questions:
When is it OK for a grandchild to go behind a parent’s back and ask a grandparent for help?
Is it OK for a grandparent to give gifts to grandchildren without consulting the parents?
Is it possible to give too many gifts to family members?
How does one heal from broken family relationships?
What does one do when family secrets are spilled out?
What principles does this movie show?
Do you see any of these principles in your life?
“Life purposes are greater than our imagination.” — one of the great quotes from the movie.
You may wonder why I’m putting a picture of summer flowers here instead of something fallish or related to Thanksgiving. These flowers are from our yard in Arizona. They would come back in late summer, at the time of our wedding anniversary in August, if we took care of them by watering. The picture is a reminder to me of the importance of nurturing marriage in good times and bad.
It was a year ago at this time, the day before Thanksgiving, that my husband came home and announced that he had lost his job. Yeah, his old boss does not get any points for being diplomatic enough to at least wait until after a major holiday known for family togetherness to dump bad news on us.
I have always been thankful for my husband and marriage, but this day I am especially thankful. A year later after DH losing his job, our marriage has improved because of that very trial. So I’m grateful for the trial of job loss as well. It wasn’t easy to go through 8 months of unemployment and underemployment, but it was for the best. He didn’t like his old boss. It’s so nice now that he doesn’t ever have to deal with him again! Who would have thought a year ago when DH lost the job, that a year later we would be back in Utah, with a better job that pays a lot more, with a boss he likes? Who would have thought that we would be back living within a 30 minute drive of so many old friends, especially homeschooling friends, two adult sons, and extended family? It’s all because we worked as a team to figure out where God wanted us to go next and what God wanted us to do. I’m so grateful for my husband for being patient, prayerful, and determined to keep looking and applying for jobs. I’m also so grateful that we followed the Dave Ramsey Baby Steps while living in AZ for five years. Because we followed the steps, we were prepared when the job loss hit. We were out of debt and we had a three months’ supply of money saved up to deal with our normal monthly expenses. So thank you Dave as well!
I have benefited from wisdom people have shared with me over the years about building marriage. Most of it has come through books, and from God, through the Holy Spirit. I highly recommend these tips from my wise girlfriend Joyce, her 7 Keys to Marital Bliss. Thank you Joyce for sharing these!
You may wonder why I posted summer flowers at the top instead of something fallish or related to Thanksgiving. The picture at the top is from our yard in Arizona. Those flowers would come back in late summer, at the time of our wedding anniversary in August, if we took care of them by watering. The picture is a reminder to me of the importance of nurturing marriage in good times and bad.
After blogging yesterday about Thanksgiving picture books, along with my other favorites, I decided to do a separate post today about Christmas picture books. They really do deserve a separate post. Christmas picture books abound, which I thank God for. Reading aloud a meaningful Christmas picture book is so fun! After listening to Christmas music and reading the Christmas story in Luke 2, reading Christmas picture books have got to be the third best way to bring in the Christmas spirit. It’s just so much easier than decorating and it doesn’t involve any calories. This is part of my series to share what I’m grateful for to follow President Russell M. Nelson’s invitation.
Imagine my delight when I discovered some “new-to-me” Christmas picture books yesterday when I visited my public library. See the one above and the rest below.
Don’t these look luscious? I haven’t read any of them yet so I can’t vouch for them, but they look promising. Here’s my list of tried-and-true favorites, with no Polar Express in the bunch.
Here’s one not on that list, that my husband’s family has enjoyed since he was little, in the 1960s. It’s the book below. Just this past month, he had to hunt high and low to find an original copy. It was so fun to see him show it to me last night after it came in the mail. He bought it from an etsy shop. He pored over the illustrations and smiled, saying, “Richard Scarry really knocked it out of the park when he did this book.” His family has a tradition of reading aloud the poem from this book called Grandfather Monkey.
In the poem, Mr. Grandfather Monkey dreams of getting yellow gloves for Christmas. So DH’s mom always has a pair of yellow gloves on her Christmas tree, ready for the holiday ritual of the family Christmas party reading of the poem. Years ago, my DH’s brother bought a copy of an updated version that looks like the one below, including sparkly glitter on the cover, but sadly, it doesn’t have the Grandfather Monkey poem. A few years ago, he gifted a copy of the updated edition to each of his 8 siblings for Christmas. Many of the poems and stories contained are the same, but we have missed having a copy of the poem in each of our homes. My mother-in-law has been the only one with the poem. Each of the siblings can say it by heart. It’s definitely delightful! Someone else blogged about it over here. So that is a second witness of its charm.
It looks like amazon and Target each have a version for sale. I’m not sure if they are true “original editions.” I highly recommend you get the original so you can have the Grandfather Monkey poem. An added bonus is that the original book has a full 3-D pop-out Santa Claus in a chimney in the very front of the book!
Anyway, here are few more of my favorites from my original list, but you really must go check it out over here to get the full list.
Not really a picture book, as it’s a compilation of Christmas stories from the Little House books. It does have the lovely illustrations from the original books, just not on every page like true picture books.
Today, as I continue President Russell M. Nelson’s challenge to give thanks, I am thankful for picture books, and the public library. I wouldn’t be able to access all these picture books without it. I am actually thankful every day for this combo, and just writing out the thanks today.
Picture books have been a companion for me practically my whole life. at least as long as I can remember. The one below is a particular one I remember my mom reading to me when I was five or six.
Picture books are such a surefire way to make me smile. They make my heart skip some beats as I contemplate the delight I will either get from reading a new one, or reliving the joy of an old one.
I read the Jack Prelutsky one at the top of this post to help ease into the day this morning. It was perfect to clear out the groggy cobwebs of the brain. My little guy snuggled on the living room couch while I read it to help us wake up and get ready to tackle the jobs of the day.
I’ll start with sharing with some of my favorite Thanksgiving picture books, in celebration of this wonderful week and month. I do love sharing my and my daughter’s birthday month with the amazing holiday of Thanksgiving :-), even though the month of November outside of Thanksgiving and birthdays can be dreary.
Then I’ll share my some of my all-time favorites for year-round.
Now, some of my favorites for year-round. I particularly love picture book bios, like the one below. You can find more of my picture book bio recommendations over here.
I’m sure I’ll think of more after I leave this post. So check back often, as I will be updating this list. I can’t get enough of them! Happy picture book reading everyone!
I give thanks today for nature, the creations of my Creator, Jesus Christ.
“And he shall be called JesusChrist, the Son of God, the Father of heaven and earth, the Creator of all things from the beginning; and his mother shall be called Mary.”
“For if there be ano Christ there be no God; and if there be no God we are not, for there could have been no bcreation. But there is a God, and che is Christ, and he cometh in the fulness of his own time.” 2 Nephi 11:7
If I ever feel lost, I know that I get help from prayer. I also know that time spent serving others or time alone, basking in nature, reminds me that there is a God, there is a Savior, Jesus Christ, and that He loves me.
Tree of Life Mothering 