Tree of Life Mothering

I’m in the middle of this series of videos by patriot Rick Green of patriotacademy.com. It behooves us all to be responsible citizens and know our Constitutional rights  all the time, but especially during this time of pandemic and quarantining. That way we can preserve our freedoms within Constitutional law, not setting the stage for loss of freedom during or when any crisis, like this pandemic, is over. Go here to watch the series. Start at #1 at the bottom and then move up the page to the top. I’m not sure if I agree or disagree, as I’m in the middle of watching them.

I also highly recommend the series of videos by Stephen Pratt so you “know your liberty.” Knowing the history of our liberty will help us preserve it. I especially like these videos about the first three foundings of America.

My friend Olivia is getting me and a bunch of other friends into baking with natural yeast, aka sourdough, which is new for some and “again” for me. I did it for years but then seasons shifted and I got out of the habit.  With the near-apocalypse upon us, it is time to discover or rediscover the self-reliant and health-promoting skill of using natural yeast, since commercial yeast might not always be in stores.

Melissa Richardson, coauthor of the book at the top, hasn’t had her blog up for a while, to share her knowledge beyond her two books.

Book cover image credits: amazon.com

Her Facebook group hasn’t been active either, but she just posted a video in the group recently (March 31). In the video, she spoke about natural yeast baking during the pandemic! Yay!

Go here to watch.

You can see my recipes using natural yeast here:

• breadmachine bread
• chocolate chip cookies
• pizza

Have you thought of playing board games via video chat, like through zoom?

We had a blast recently playing the board games above. We did it via Zoom, on Easter Eve, with some family friends who live 900 miles away along with a family member who lives even farther.

Here’s how we did it and you can too!

Codenames: go to horsepaste.com, follow the instructions to label your game, and then share the unique URL that is generated with your label with your friends you are meeting with remotely. Then use your video chat platform to speak as you look at the same screen. You could also just play this over the phone while each looking at your own computer screen. If you don’t know how to play Codenames then go here for directions. The spymasters can be looking at the same screen or different screens. You can’t have, however, a spymaster and an agent sitting side by side looking at the same screen. Then the agent can see the key code and can’t guess honestly.  So use that as a guide when picking who the spymaster is for each team. In other words, the spymaster has to click on the “spymaster” button at the bottom of the screen so they can see the cards in colors that the spymaster is supposed to know about (the key code). The agents, the people who aren’t the spymaster, click on the “player” button so then they see the cards without seeing any colors (the key code).  So that’s why the spymaster and any other players, the agents, can’t be looking at the same screen. When we play online I like to do boys vs. girls and have the boys be the blue team because that’s easy to remember, “B” for “blue” and “boys.” Or we play brown eyes vs. blue eyes, and have the red team be brown eyes because there’s an “R” in the words “brown” and “red.” That only works if you have even numbers for both sides of that division and only brown and blue eyes, LOL. If not you will have to figure out a different way to divide up into teams. We are blessed in my family to have nearly even amounts of brown and blue eyes, but not boys and girls. That happens more often when we play with friends or cousins. Another way to play is with the regular Codenames game but then suspend your iPad from your dining room chandelier with bungee cards so you have a webcam above the tabletop to show the cards in the original game.

Whoonu: we set the cards up in a grid of 5 x 4 on a whiteboard background and used the iPad trick above. (This takes trial and error, adjusting the length of the chandelier and also we had to get the whiteboard “platform” close to the webcam in the iPad closer with a stack of books underneath.) Then the remote people would look at the grid on the Zoom screen and pick a card, and type it in, and then I would take that card away from the board so other people couldn’t pick it. Then I’d type the list up, of the words from the cards selected by the players, for the Whoozit, in the chatbox, then send it back to the Whoozit, and the Whoozit would place the list of words in their order of preference so that points could be awarded. This is a great “getting to know you” game. It’s also a great game for people who don’t do well at trivia quizzes if they  know the other players’ likes and dislikes. Then they can do well at this game. That gives them a sense of success that they don’t often feel after trivia games.

Spontuneous: the easiest of the games pictured above to play online. You don’t have to use a board or the cards from the regular board game. Just have people make a list of five songs, to be kept secret, on a piece of paper or whiteboard. Then they each pick one different lyric from each song, an obscure lyric that they don’t think other people will be able to remember occurring in a song. The purpose of the game is to stump people with your knowledge of song lyrics, by picking a word in a song that nobody knows or remembers. I like to start with the youngest player and go to the oldest. So starting with the youngest, you have that person be the Tunemaster. The Tunemaster says his or her one word. Then have a timer count down 30 seconds. First person to shout out or sing a 5 word phrase from any song containing that one word, before the timer runs out, gets a point. Keep score on paper or whiteboard. (If playing the actual board game you get points by rolling the dice if you can say a phrase with that word, and you move along the path to race to the end to win.) If nobody can sing or shout a phrase, then the Tunemaster has to prove to the others that such a song exists with that word by singing or shouting the five word phrase. If that person can’t then you penalize them somehow, like lose a point or miss a turn. I have a house rule that if you guess the phrase from the actual song the Tunemaster was thinking of you get two points. (When we play with the actual board game we double the roll of the dice as the reward.) First person to 10 points wins. You could play this with the iPad or other webcam showing the board and cards, and move the remote players’ pawns, but I haven’t tried that yet.

Quiplash: I used the cards from the Say Anything game above to play Quiplash. Google Quiplash and you can get the gist of the game. It’s a game meant to be played electronically with mobile devices. I wasn’t sure how family friendly it would be so I used the questions from the Say Anything Family Edition. (I have since discovered from my son that the real Quiplash has filters you can use to make it more family friendly.) As gamemaster, I sifted through the Say Anything cards till I found a question I really liked and announced the question nice and loud. Then the first two people to type an answer into the chatbox in Zoom got to have their answers used. Then I announced the two answers. Everybody then voted for which answer they liked better. We had just the right amount of people that I could see in Zoom who was was voting for what, by a raise of hands, but if we had more people, and more screens to look at, I would have them vote in the chatbox #1 or #2 answer. I then awarded the person who wrote the answer who got the most votes as the winner of that round and give them a point. We played first to ten points. We had some really funny moments with this game!

A great time was had by all! We will be doing this again!

Are you looking for more games to play online? Check out this online distance game-playing guide here, courteous of the fun folks from the Board Game Geek Forum. Disclaimer: I have not reviewed all the games. Promotion of this gaming guide does not indicate endorsement of any of the games mentioned in the guide. Use at your own discretion. Especially the Cards Against Humanity Family Edition. Please preview that before playing and take out any cards you want. This guide does include links to several free print and play games that I’m interested in checking out, like Love Letter: Sender, a sequel to Love Letter, which my older kiddos all love. Happy remote game playing everyone!

Image credits above and below: boardgamegeek.com

Image credit: website for Secret Ingredients Documentary

Here’s a documentary showing for free this weekend. It’s called Secret Ingredients. I’m watching it this weekend and would love to have a discussion about it in the comments below. I’m not sure if it’s a commercial for a certain diet (veganism? juicing? paleo?) but let’s find out together and discuss if we agree or disagree and why! Actually, after a bit of investigation, it looks like it’s a call to buy food that doesn’t involve Roundup.

Go here to get access to watch it. (Looks like it’s also free on YouTube right now.) You have to sign up with your email if you go to the site I just linked. You will probably get more emails later but can always unsubscribe.

Hey, before I review this game, here’s a quick shout-out to Buffalo Games. That company is the maker of the amazing Chickapig board game and the new Mr. Rogers Neighborhood Game. We here at this home absolutely love Chickapig so I was excited to see that the same company makes the Mr. Rogers game. (If you want to read about Chickapig, go here and scroll to the bottom of the post where I give a brief review of it.)

I bought the Mr. Rogers game on sale for $10 at Target the Friday before the wave of sheltering in place, last month. After the second time of playing it, I noticed that a complete suit of cards was missing, the “X the Owl” cards. So I contacted the website and asked if the company would send out cards. In less than a week, the cards arrived! Thank you Buffalo Games for such prompt customer service! You guys are awesome!

This game is a wonderful family game. No reading is required so it’s a great game to play with non and emergent readers. All ages can play. It’s also a great chill game, especially for evenings when you just want to relax and not think too hard. If you want to play hardball, you can, and strategize and remember who has what cards and use the trolley card to get them. It has luck, however, involved as well, involved in getting the trolley. The anticipation of pulling cards from your neighbor’s deck and perhaps getting a red light card, to stop your turn immediately, or the card you really want so that you can win, makes the game a ton of fun.

It’s basically a rummy game where you attempting to collect suits of cards. The first one to collect three suits of four cards wins. The illustrations are super darling. For once, Lady Elaine Fairchild looks remotely attractive! (Her bright red bulbous nose, harsh black eyebrows, and abrupt ways always scared me as a kid. Mr. Rogers clearly didn’t know anything about Rudolf Steiner’s Waldorf philosophical recommendations of gentle natural art for children.)

Some of the cards are action cards which, along with the red light card, spices up the game. For example, if you draw the Mr. Rogers card you have to share something with your neighbor, like give a compliment or do an act of service. So cute! If you get the Daniel Striped Tiger card you get to peek at your neighbor’s hand. The game left all of us smiling, laughing, or having sparkly eyes at least once. Even the sometimes surly 15 year old, who won the first time we played.  I give it five out of five stars! I think I will ask the kiddos to help me collaborate and assign special actions to each card.

For ambience during the game, put on this chill Mr. Rogers swing music here, or play the fun videos below to enhance your Mr. Rogers’ evening. After all, as he says in the video just below, music was very important to Mr. Rogers.

If you really want to get into it, read the picture book

or watch the Tom Hanks Mr. Rogers movie before the game, and have a beautiful day in your neighborhood!

I snagged this beautiful Easter book at my public library right before its closure. I’m so glad I did. A gorgeous Easter book!

This one was for my Hero class. I read it 19 years ago when pregnant with my 18-year-old. It’s always a great one to revisit, as it is so full of gems. I’ve written about Corrie here and a related book about her, here, (In My Father’s House).

Here are the books we’ve been enjoying for March and April of 2020, most of which was spent social distancing.

Connor Boyack probably didn’t know that his newest book, pictured just above, published in 2020, would be so prophetic so soon, what with government shutting down “nonessential businesses” in March 2020. We are reading one of the Tuttle Twins books a day and then we will play the Tuttle Twins card game at the end of our Tuttle Twins marathon. If you don’t anything about the Tuttle Twins books, go here to learn more. They are books for children to teach principles of liberty. Each on is based on a classic book on liberty for adults, written by liberty lovers like F.A. Hayek, John Taylor Gatto, or C. Edward Griffin.

Remember when I said that when we read all of the picture books I got from the public library right before the lockdown that I had a stash of picture books in deep storage to fall back on with Bugsy? Well, the one pictured just above is one of them. I have the whole series of ValueTales, sitting on a shelf, that seems like it’s in deep storage because my ten-year-old ignores it whenever he goes by, likes it part of the furniture. So now we are diving in, having read the one above and the one below so far this month.

I accessed this picture book above from this site, storylineonline.com. It features celebrities reading books aloud. A fun source when you can’t find any fresh-to-you picture books in your house. This was before I remembered the ValueTales collection on my shelf in our schoolroom. The one below I found in Scribd. I just adore the author, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, and all her works.

We finally finished this one below in Scribd, on audio. We listened to it on the way to Utah when we took one of my sons to the MTC for his mission to Argentina. That was fall of 2016. Now that two of my kiddos have been taking the Georgics scholar project for LEMI I felt it was time for them to listen to it again, with its central message of farming self-reliance. I just love Cherry Jones’ narrations she did for HarperAudio for all of the Little House books, along with Paul Woodiel’s fiddle music. The Scribd platform uses all of those HarperAudio editions. Get a 60 day free trial here. It’s so cool that I can access all the Little House book on my phone, anytime I want, for a flat fee of $8.99 a month. No need to buy the CDs and remember to move them from the home to the car, and then car back to the home.

The one below is also on audio in Scribd, to replace what we finished above, to be played while the kiddos do dishes when I’m not available to read aloud to them. I first heard about this book on the readaloudrevival.com podcast.

We finished the one below with our homeschool friends after listening to a chapter each weekday morning (sans Thursdays) for what seemed like ages (February and March). Another great “Georgics” book! It has such a wonderful theme of community interdependence.

Now we are listening to the one below to replace the one above that we finished. My sister raves about it over here on her blog (scroll down to Title #6 in her list). A completely original story! Even Kate DiCamillo is talking about it!

Two of my kiddos finished the one below for their Georgics class. Definitely a winner! I remember listening to it on audio with my older kiddos. Caddie is just so delightful! I love that the book is based on the author’s ancestor.

We read a chapter or two of this day when the kids do lunch kitchen clean-up. It’s a great collection of stories about mathematicians. I love that it includes women mathematicians. I loved math in junior high and high school and hope to pass on the love of it to all my children.

I’ll never forget the Saturday night I finished the one below, listening to the audiobook version in Scribd as I decorated my dining and living rooms for spring. A completely fascinating view of Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The dialogue is fictionalized. I really don’t know how much of the passive-aggressive picture that’s painted of Laura in this book that I believe. Nevertheless, it’s so interesting to learn from this book that without Rose mentoring her mother in the writing process, we would not have the Little House books.

My friend Olivia told me about this book below. Another audiobook I’m enjoying in scribd. 

This next one I’m listening for my Hero Project class. It’s about the resistance movement against Nazi Germany in Denmark. It’s also in Scribd.

Then, at night, when I need something gentle and soothing, I turn to Audible and listen to the one below. It’s taken me awhile because I just listen to it a little at a time. It’s a memoir of motherhood. Slow and easy-going, great for my perimenopausal mother self as I approach the season the author talks about in about 8 years (complete empty nesterhood. My youngest is 10 so it’s a ways off.) It does have a few swear words so listen with earbuds.

After I get in bed and need something really peaceful and religious, I use my phone’s light to read the following. Also in the morning after I read my scriptures. It was a hand-me-down book tucked in a huge box from my husband’s cousin years ago. A total treasure of a book! It teaches you how to build your faith in miracles and how to pray to bring miracles in your life. I am getting many epiphanies from it.

What are you reading/listening to? I’d love to hear! Please comment in the comments below.

We had a great, although imperfect Easter weekend. I definitely caught up on my sleep! Post coming soon! I love this video above for this week’s Come, Follow Me reading of Mosiah 1-3 because of the way the presenters, David and Emily, draw parallels between King Benjamin’s time and General Conference of today. I also love that they filmed it before General Conference April 2020, and talked about how King Benjamin basically issued a proclamation, and then we had President Nelson issue a proclamation during Conference.

I also love the mention of Mother Teresa, with her statement that we are to look for the sad and the lonely, even in our own homes, instead of searching for some grand and great thing to do afar.

If any of you missed General Conference, please partake! It is delicious! Sessions are below.

I read from this book as I always do everyday on Sunday April 5, 2020. Since it was Sunday, Palm Sunday, at that, I’m putting it front and center for that day. We are using the Come, Follow Me Study Guide to study it this year as a family.

Usually we don’t gameschool on Sunday, unless it’s “Sunday School” games (“Sunday gameschooling”) like Seek, or the Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites Board Game. (Sometimes the boys will play the Game of Life while I take a nap or do family history research and their sister reads or draws. I’d like to get them doing family history games on familysearch.org.) We did work on this puzzle during General Conference. (You can see more about our General Conference Weekend here.)

I had bought a copy of the Global Puzzle years ago brand new. After we moved out of state, I discovered a few pieces missing. Imagine my delight when I found the same puzzle while thrifting for only 75 cents! With all the pieces! Balance restored!

Then that night after General Conference, we played my Gospel Restoration Timeline Game. You can get instructions for assembling it here.

Here are some pictures of the cards I made for the game.

I thought it was cool that one of the cards featured a story in the March 2020 Friend, about an African man in the 1960s who had a dream about the Salt Lake Temple. That led him to find the Church and get baptized.

We will be playing this game more on Sundays! I love that it has church history dates plus non-church stuff, like the invention of the computer and the cell phone. These technological advances are all part of the Restoration.

Every day I play a chapter of this book on audio using my Scribd app for the kiddos to listen to while doing dishes. The kids always balk at first but I think they eventually get into the satisfying tales of homesteading, gardening, farming and cooking. I think they secretly like it. There’s just something about hearing of a self-reliant life that makes us feel peace and joy.

That night I played games with some girlfriends, online with video conferencing. Here’s what we played, with me showing some of the cards with the webcam and texting some of the cards. I thoroughly enjoyed myself! We did General Conference Trivia and General Conference Double Ditto as well. Great fun!

Disclosure: the link to Scribd is my affiliate link. If you sign up for Scribd, you can get two free months. The cost is the same for you and I get another free month. If you are a bibliophile like I am, you will love it! It gives you unlimited access to thousands of audiobooks and books in text format, more so than Audible. I have Audible too and love both platforms. Often I can find a lot more of what my children are reading for their homeschool subjects/classes in scribd than in Audible. I can also get sheet music, documents, magazines, newspapers, and picture books in Scribd. I can also get all the Little House books in audio and text, and many other read aloud chapter books for the kiddos, that I see recommended on readaloudrevival.com, on Scribd. I hope you sign up and enjoy it!

Bugsy asked me to read this one again. A cute story about a real person, Amelia Simmons, who made the first American cookbook, calling for local ingredients like squash and cornmeal. She made a “birthday cake” for each of the 13 colonies/states for George Washington’s inauguration.

I also played Stratego and learned some new strategies for next time!