Tree of Life Mothering

Happy Mother’s Day! I get a lot of inspiration from a story about an amazing mother, Esther Packard. You can read the story from the Ensign magazine here. Esther bore 17 children. Her husband, Forrest Packard, left their home in Idaho to earn money during their marriage by building an airstrip on Wake Island in the South Pacific. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor while he was gone, so he ended up being a civilian prisoner of war on Wake Island.  Esther suffered nervous breakdowns over this, but she also eventually healed from them and worked to support the family selling corsets door-to-door. She was so successful that when he came home, everything was in fabulous order, including the family, the farm, and her business.

She even managed to play games with her children every day and maintain hope during the dark time of her husband’s imprisonment. It sounds a lot like this time when we are in when it’s easy to give up hope or not feel any purpose for the quarantine life. She didn’t hear from him for two years! Can you believe that? That would have been so hard.

Here’s a quote from the story, about the time of her husband’s imprisonment:

She [Esther] had two purposes: first, to improve herself and her own skills so she could earn a livelihood, and second, to spend every possible moment “living it up” with her family. She made sure to carry on the traditions that she and Forrest had started, and one of those was to have fun, no matter what they did. The children learned to play the piano and to sing. They held regular family nights in which the children performed musically and did dramatic readings. After the work was done in the evenings they played games or had popcorn or a taffy pull or some other fun activity that kept her family members wanting to be home together.

Floyd Packard, now a Regional Representative, remembers those fun family evenings: “Mother would play games with us every night, often until 1 A.M. or later. A real key was that while we were playing she would teach the principles of the gospel in an atmosphere that was easy to accept. There wasn’t much arguing, either, because when some of us started to argue, Mother would stop the game.”

 

Read the story! It is full of sorrow, heartbreak, tragedy, and a family pulling together to help each other. I love it. Our lives each have all of those elements. Despite the tragedies, we can find hope in Jesus Christ and His restored gospel.

I love books like the one above, that have lots of funny cultural references to art or literature, along with a running joke for the whole plot. This is such a funny book! It’s about a termite who won’t eat his food (wood) but wants to play with it as a budding architect. Hilarious! I had to explain the cultural references to Bugsy. Some day he’ll get them. 🙂

(Check it out in scribd.com, an online digital library.  If you want to know more about scribd.com, go here. It’a wonderful alternative to the public library, which we can’t go to right now because of the lockdown.)

I invited my two older kids’ homeschool Pyramid Scholar Project class to play this psychology-based board game via Zoom. (The two older kids who live at home still.) It was a great game! We had six players so it was perfect as the max player amount is 6 players. I was gamemaster. We logged into a laptop so I could control the Zoom room as host, and then logged into the iPad without connecting the audio, and suspended it from the chandelier right above the dining room table above this board game to livestream the action of the board. You can actually learn about psychology while playing this game. Although it’s over 30 years so maybe some of the answers are outdated? (Does science change like that? My teen son kept saying some of the answers had to be wrong.) You can also learn how the mind of each player works. I’m going to play it this weekend with some adults for a Zoom date night. I’m totally looking forward to it.

I really hit the jackpot this day in terms of playing board games. I got to play Therapy in the afternoon, and then that night, I was in charge of activity for Family Home Evening, and I picked these games:

We played for an hour, and played each game for 15 minutes. Whoever is ahead at that point, wins. I love it when we do this! It just injects a lot of variety into my life, which is something I crave. Actually, for the Say Anything Game, we used the cards in Say Anything to play a DIY version of The Game of Things. It worked well, we will be doing it again until I actually buy The Game of Things.

We rounded off the evening by watching this comedy sketch below by funny senior citizen Brad Upton. I’m so grateful for the Harmon Brothers, the guys behind Dry Bar Comedy. It’s great to have a whole storehouse of funny videos besides Studio C, which only hits the spot for me about half the time or less. So hilarious!

Every Sunday night I read aloud to Bugsy 6-8 pages from a book in this series, the Illustrated Stories From Church History. We’re on Volume 4, It’s only taken about four years to get to this point! Slow and steady, we’ll get through all 16 volumes before he leaves the nest, LOL!

Earlier that day, we played my Gospel Restoration Timeline Card Game.

The game has over 100 cards, so we just played four cards each person, according to the standard game rules. I tend to want to play a lot longer than the rest of the family so I reign in my appetite with plans to play a longer game when I have more emotional “money in the bank.” 🙂

A sweet picture book bio about Emily Dickinson. (You can read a digital version of this picture book in Scribd! That’s a website full of digital books. You can read it for free by signing up for a free two month trial of scribd.com over here, using my affiliate link.* )

Did you know that Emily spent most of her life in her house? She created and found meaning living a life we are being asked to live right now, in her home. That can give us all hope. I’m grateful, however, that I have ways of connecting with people outside of my home that she didn’t have.

Some moms here in AZ are doing a contest right now for children all over the US, to create works of art based on Emily’s life and the theme of “hope.” You can read about it here.

That night, I played Jeopardy! by myself by going to jeopardylabs.com and doing a few rounds in categories I love, like the Founding Fathers. Yes, sometimes I just do games solo! As a homeschooling mom, I’ve learned it’s important to take time to do things I love all by myself a little bit everyday, and that day, it happened to be Jeopardy.

*Disclosure: if you sign up for scribd after your trial is over, and start subscribing with the monthly fee, I get a free month. You pay the same whether you sign up through my link or sign up another way. It’s a win/win!

I finished reading the above book to Bugsy for a bedtime story, about the Wright Brothers. I am definitely amazed at their persistence. I wonder if we in today’s society would be able to persist like they did.

Before the bedtime story, we  all played the online version of Secret Hitler. This is my firstborn’s absolute favorite game. He’s been out of the nest for years. By day he is a software engineer, and by night he’s a big time game player. He loves Secret Hitler so much he plays it every weekend with a group of friends. We’ve played it as a board game many times as a family, probably every single time he visits, but this was the first time we’ve played it online. He pointed us to this site here for that.

We seven, five of us here at home and two sons playing remotely, one in Utah and one in Texas, all had a grand time. We met over Zoom so we could hear each other and then everybody had their own device to see the screen. I’ve decided I actually prefer the online version. It tells you what’s going on for every move in the upper right corner. The metagame was wonderful! We all connected well. I hammed up the part of nobody believing me when I kept telling them who the Secret Hitler was in the last round. I turned out to be right, so I’m going to be reminding them of all that next time. 🙂

We miss being able to go to the public library soooo much! Founding Father Ben Franklin, is surely up in heaven commiserating with all of us missing out on his invention, part of his amazing legacy.

Here are two substitutes we are using until we can get there again. One of my friends says the library is opening in her state soon but I don’t see any opening on the horizon here yet.

1. Libby

image credit: apple.com app store

Libby is an app you can get to access digital books from your public library. Even when we regularly went to the public library in person, my daughter would use this. She had to teach me how to use it, LOL! This post explains all about it. So far I’ve found a bunch of picture books to read aloud, but not nearly as many as the public library has in real, hard copy, print books. You can’t expect to find a copy through Libby of every hard copy book the library has. Still, it’s an awesome resource! Yay for being able to still check out books in some form, albeit only digital, from the public library! Digital has its advantages. They can’t get torn, spilled on, or lost, right?

Here’s a sampling of what we have found though Libby (all book cover images below come from amazon.com):

and lots of oldies but goodies like Corduroy, the Encyclopedia Brown series, the Little House series, Chronicles of Narnia, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, and Half Magic, for example. It has a ton new books too!

2. Scribd

Scribd.com is a collection of ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, newspapers, podcasts, documents, and sheet music. It has a TON more than Libby. It’s also much better than Audible, because you have unlimited access to all those resources for a low flat monthly fee, around $10. I have Audible too and love them both! Audible sometimes has books scribd doesn’t, although it’s rare. Just like Audible, it has a website with an accompanying app so you can access the books on the go on your mobile device. I can’t tell you how incredibly fabulous it is to have in audio format all the Little House books, and Anne books, and so many other books, like the ones below, all on my phone to access whenever I want!

Here are some books I have found in Scribd.com:

Those are just some of the many, many book for adults. It has tons of fiction and nonfiction, including self-help books, like Dave Ramsey’s.

Now, here are some I’ve found for the kiddos:

The one above is in audio. You can find a lot of books both as ebooks and audiobooks,

My ten year old is really getting into these books right now, as audiobooks. The whole series is in scribd in both formats..

All of Andrew Clements’ books are there. I’m finding some fun picture book autobiographies like the ones below:

Like the ones above, about Ben Franklin and J.R.R. Tolkien, or the ones below about Jacques Cousteau and Emily Dickinson.

Scribd has lots of picture books by one of my favorite authors, Amy Krouse Rosenthal.

And lots of other fun books:

Plus some religious books too:

You can buy these all in amazon of course during this lockdown, but if you are like me, you don’t have the shelf space to store every book your huge literary appetite craves. Or…you can read them all for free by signing up for a free two month trial of scribd.com over here, using my affiliate link.

After all as Francis Bacon wrote:

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few are to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”

I’m sure he would agree that some are to borrowed, as hard copies, from the library, some are meant to be read through an app, and some are meant to be bought and kept forever as books you can grab off your physical bookshelf whenever you want.

Disclosure: if you sign up for scribd after your trial is over, and start subscribing with the monthly fee, I get a free month. You pay the same whether you sign up through my link or sign up another way. It’s a win/win!

In my scripture reading this morning I noticed how the time of the prophet Abinadi in the Book of Mormon parallels our time today. Abinadi called upon the people, King Noah and his subjects to repent. He warned them that if they didn’t repent they would come under further bondage.

Just as Abinadi was a prophet for his day, just as we had prophets in the Bible, I testify that President Russell M. Nelson is the prophet of God for this day. We as a people, both in and out of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, have strayed from what we know to be true. We see this everywhere with rotten fruits all around us: broken families, broken governmental forms, a culture of death, governments and societies that kill unborn babies, crime, unrest, addiction, bondage, and illness. I can’t help but think that this pandemic is a consequence of us all straying from whatever truth we have known, collectively as families and nations, for generations.

By asking us to “Hear him,” he is asking us to repent. Repenting means turning to God. So when President Nelson asks to “hear Him,” he is asking us to turn to God or repent. Just as Abinadi did with King Noah and his people. He is asking us to pray to Heavenly Father, in the name of His Son, Jesus Christ. Then Jesus Christ will speak to us, most likely through the Holy Ghost. As we listen to the Holy Ghost after earnestly seeking Heavenly Father through prayer, we will “Hear Him.” We will hear Jesus tell us what we need to do personally to change and be like Him and feel His peace.

It is no accident that President Nelson is the prophet today. He has led the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to prepare for the worldwide crisis of the pandemic with prophetic leadership. I testify he is a prophet of God, just like the prophets in the Bible. He is God’s anointed servant to speak and lead for Him right now. President Nelson, (and the prophets before him) prepared the saints for this pandemic in a number of ways. You can see those ways here. The major ones are:

1. Preparing the Saints to have church at home, during the pandemic, and beyond. He did this by reducing our church meeting time from three hours to two hours back in 2019, and introducing the Come, Follow Me Study Guides, to be used chiefly at home, and in a supplemental way at church meetings.
2. Preparing youth and children to be “stuck at home” during the pandemic by introducing the Children and Youth Initiative so they are not dependent on Church leaders for guidance in achieving and learning on the covenant path. Instead, they are dependent on themselves, to seek God in prayer to know what He would have them do to achieve and become like Him, with the parents’ vision, guidance and support, and less support from Church leaders outside the home.

I know this pandemic has been horrible. People have died. People have lost jobs. Businesses have been ruined. My friend’s brother-in-law committed suicide because of COVID-19. This has all been so tragic. Yet we are told to be grateful in all things. “Thou shalt thank the Lord thy God in all things.” (D&C 59:7) All things?! Even death and suffering?!

How can we be grateful in all things, even during a pandemic? Despite this horrible time, I am grateful for it. It has been a “dress rehearsal” to help us practice and get ready for further tribulation ahead. It has been a time to assess where we are in terms of family closeness, neighbor closeness, emergency preparedness, self-reliance, and knowledge of the proper role of government.

As we each individually seek God in prayer, ask to know what He would have us do each day, and then #hearHim and act on it, we will do things to help lift this bondage of the pandemic. As we continue to do this each day, may we be released from further bondage. I hope this means we will repair broken relationships, broken families, broken neighborhoods, broken businesses, broken economies, broken laws, the broken U.S. Constitution, and other broken governmental forms, to prepare for the return of our Savior Jesus Christ. As we do so may we face a much brighter future than King Noah and his people did. He was burned by his priests who turned against him. The people that King Noah left, King Limhi, King Noah’s son, and King Limhi’s followers, were brought under bondage and had to pay 50% tax. They also had to labor support the kingdom of the Lamanites for years (See Mosiah 19-21)

We can choose a better future than King Noah and his people did. We can choose freedom over bondage. We can listen to our prophet of this day and #Hearhim. We can each reach out to God and see His hand in all of this. The prophet is asking us to see what God would have us do individually to repent, to return to the truths in all areas of life (personal, family, business, education, and government, etc.) as we hear Him, and rebuild all these broken forms with our hands that become His hands, to have freedom instead of bondage, and prepare for His return and reign.

I really love this recent devotional by Sister and Brother Gay below that develops these truths further. It’s time for us to end our self-justifications.

This is a fun picture book bio of J.R.R. Tolkien. I didn’t know he was an orphan who met his future wife at boarding school. I read it to Bugsy for a bedtime story. I love that he put all his imaginations into his adult life to inspire a sense of adventure and heroism in his readers. The illustrations are amazing and detailed. The back of the book has a page with a key as to how they relate to Tolkien.

For my game of the day, I played Hero Double Ditto. I used the idea from this game and adapted it to my Hero class which met online. I just made categories relating to our class and tossed them out. I love this game because you can adapt it to any setting. You can research and learn how to play and then DIY your own cards.

image credit: amazon.com

This session from BYU Women’s Conference this AM was so yummy! So full of truths! My favorite was from Sister Kate Holbrook:
“Heavenly Father needs us to follow through on the questions He is waiting for us to ask.”

So true! I see this is a corollary to President Nelsons’ statement that the most important thing for our survival for these latter-days is to learn to receive revelation and act on it. We aren’t likely to receive revelation unless we ask questions, and then the revelations aren’t likely to benefit us unless we follow through.

How do we do this?

I have three helps for this, in addition to the four standard works (scriptures) of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and the Doctrine and the Covenants).

First, Sister Wendy Watson Nelson’s book:

image credit: amazon.com

Second, my Veggie Gal girlfriend Becky Edwards’ Heaven Journaling program, to use with the four standard works:

image credit: amazon.com

The Eternal Warriors goal-setting and accountability class, written by my friends Maurice Harker and Aneladee Milne.

If you already know about those resources, go revive them in your life. If you don’t, I’m jealous of you, you have brand new worlds to explore!

I enjoyed the rest of the sessions today as well. Oh, so many, many gems! You can watch them below.

Since blogging the words that have the strikethrough below, the owners of the video I originally referred to took it down from YouTube. It was Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar being interviewed by Jessa Duggar Seewald, one of their daughters. Darn, I hadn’t even finished watching it. The bullet list I posted below was what I had noticed in it after watching just half of it.

But great news, guys! I found some videos from the YouTube channel of Jessa. These videos share a lot of what was in the original video

Video #1,  above is Jessa’s video she just made to share memories of her mother. So you can learn some mother mentoring tips of Michelle, via Jessa. In this video, Jessa talks about how as a kid she didn’t like going grocery shopping with her mom because it would take three hours, as her mom stopped to chat with people. So, true story: I have a friend here at church whose parents live in Arkansas. She says one time she was visiting her parents a few years ago and went to a Wal-Mart in northwest Arkansas. As she was using the restroom she heard a familiar voice outside the stall, in the restroom. It turned out to be none other than Michelle. Evidence of what Jessa mentions in the video, LOL!

Video #2, below is Jessa’s video of memories of her father. Both those videos contain tips on how to mentor and connect with children as parents. I’m hoping/thinking/wishing that everything I put in the bullet list is in these two videos. I haven’t watched them both completely yet.

Then next in this post I have a cute video, Video #3, about how Jessa’s father and the older boys remodeled the home he and Michelle gave? or lent? or rented? to Jessa after she got married to Ben Seewald. This is a home that Jim Bob’s mother, Mary bought. I believe the Duggars lived in it for a time, before they built the big house, and then Josh and Anna lived in it after they were first married. After Josh and Anna moved out, to go to D.C., Jim Bob remodeled it for newlyweds Jessa and Ben. I just think it’s so fun that the family was there to greet Jessa and Ben when they arrived home from their honeymoon and the family got to see them see the renovations. I guess some people would be mad about that to come home and have the house full of family but I think it’s sweet.

Video #4 is of the newlyweds after they get all their stuff in and decorate it, before the babies come.

Video #5 is of the home today, very well lived in by Jessa, Ben, and their three darling kiddos. Jessa and her son Spurgeon give a tour of the home, first when it’s messy, and then again after it’s cleaned up. Spurgeon is so adorable with his descriptions of the honey and the bathtub. He reminds me of my five boys when they were little, so full of explanations. So cute!

Here’s a brand-new video from the Duggars, some of the most experienced Christian parents on the planet. They gave this question and answer session with daughter Jessa Duggar Seewald last Monday, 4/27/20, as part of the annual homeschool conference they attend in Big Sandy TX. Because of the pandemic the conference didn’t happen person-to-person, but was livestreamed and then recorded. So watch above to see the one from the Duggars.  They have suggestions on the following:

• how to do family devotionals
• how to memorize scriptures with children
• praying with children
• helping children deal with electronic devices
• how to mentor children by talking heart-to-heart
• how to practice hospitality with a family

I don’t agree with all of the Duggars’ beliefs but I do believe we can all learn a lot from Jessa telling about these experienced parents of 20 children (19 biological plus one foster son/grandnephew).

Finally, here’s Jessa on how to have hospitality, which reflects what she learned from her parents. Her little baby girl sitting by her, oh my, she’s melt-your-heart adorbs!

Then here’s how to DIY the canvas prints  of her kids that you see in the background above the couch she’s sitting on. So beautiful!