Tree of Life Mothering

Here’s another online board game playing guide, to follow up with the one I shared a few weeks ago. Go here to get this new one. I love that it’s a one-page at-a-glance PDF.  Thank you Board Game Geek for hosting this! I downloaded it, then promptly texted it to close friends and family. So now I’m currently drooling over this page on my phone in odd moments and fantasizing!

It has all types of games:

• word games
• social deduction games like Mafia
• card games like Uno
• trivia games
• other games

I envision even better game nights, and days, coming up! It mentions a place to play Code Names, where you can’t see the key card. Apparently it’s not finished yet, but you can see what’s happening so far with this version of Code Names online here.  Currently we use horsepaste.com for Code Names online for distance gaming, although it does have a big drawback in that you an easily peek at the key card. So play with people you trust. Anyway, this awesome guide shows you a ton of online game options, like Bananagrams, Scattergories, Just One, Wavelength, and so many, many more, all online that you can share with distant friends and play through video chat. Most are free, a few cost.

I love that this guide answers some burning questions I’ve had lately but haven’t had the time to research, like:

-Can Taboo be played online besides sharing cards via text which would be slow and awkward?

-What about Dixit, Love Letter, or Set?

-How do you do drawing games online? I can envision simple ones like Pictionary done through Zoom but what about A Fake Artist Goes to New York?

-Is there such a thing as a Boggle grid generator?

I think you will love, LOVE this guide too! Happy board gaming!

I stumbled across this series of lovely videos this past week. I love it so much that I’m sharing the series with you here. I just love the colorful flowers in each one of them. I just love how flowers immediately cheer us. These videos are all about the power of family history. Just as flowers cheer us, family history research heals us.

During this time of uncertainty about the future, it’s time more than ever to discover the power of family history to help us bring down the powers of heaven.

This series is called “Lightkeepers Online.” It started as a series of classes at the RootsTech family history conference two years ago. This year the RootsTech organizers decided to bring it online. Watch the intro video above and then watch all the videos below, answer questions in the PDF worksheets linked below, and you will find a power from family history research you’ve never known before!

If you’ve been hesitant or wondering how to start doing family history research, this is the perfect place to start. 

President Nelson said,“While temple and family history work has the power to bless those beyond the veil, it has an equal power to bless the living. It has a refining influence on those who are engaged in it. They are literally helping to exalt their families.”

Learning about our family history heals us. Family history research brings more light into our lives. Family history research heals us by doing the following things that each of the videos below shows us:

1. Connect
2. Discover
3. Strengthen
4. Gather

These powers can help all of us, whether we come from “normal” families, dysfunctional, or abusive families. We all are broken in some way, individually, and as families. We all need healing and hearts turned towards each other.

Here’s the video for “Connect” with Rhonna Farrer. The RootsTech site says,

Rhonna Farrer discusses the importance of connecting with your ancestors and will show you how that connection is not as difficult as you may think. She’ll explain why you shouldn’t be afraid to write down the hard parts of your own story and how you can begin doing your family history a little bit every day in the Family Tree app.

Here’s the PDF worksheet to go with “Connect.”

Here’s the video for “Discover” with Kirsten Wright. RootsTech introduces the video with this description:

Kirsten will share how you can discover treasures as you get to know your ancestors, who surround and support you. She’ll teach you how to find and preserve your memories and your ancestors’ memories in the Family Tree app.

Here’s the PDF worksheet for “Connect,”

Kirsten wrote a song about family history called, “All Because of Love.”

The above video is “Strengthen” by Wendy Miles. I love that she shows that “family history research” is not just researching the past, but creating stories of our family right now, to cast a vision for the future. She talks about being ill with cancer and bedridden for the past year. She tells of how talking with her children and making a story of what’s happening has helped bring hope and healing.

Here’s the description from the RootsTech page below of Wendy’s video:

Amy will teach you how to find strength and healing, not just from your ancestors’ stories, but from the telling of your own story. She’ll show you how you can find strength in traits and experiences that you share with your ancestors, and you can learn how to preserve the parts of your story that can be found on social media within the Family Tree app.

Here’s the PDF for “Strengthen.”

Finally, we have the video about “Gather” from Maria Eckersley.

Maria will guide you through the process of gathering your family in both directions—bringing together your ancestors and your posterity to knit hearts across generations. Learn about “Intergenerational Party Planning,” and remember that you’ve got backup—promised blessings will come as you gather your family on both sides of the veil.

If you’ve read my blog for a while, you’ve known I’m into baking with natural yeast. You can read about that here, where I got to see the Bread Geek in action. You can see some of my recipes here as well:

-sourdough breadmachine bread, same link as above, here

–sourdough crusted pizza

–natural yeast chocolate chip cookies

Lately with the shortage of commercial yeast, my friend Olivia has revived the art of baking with natural yeast. She’s gung-ho about spreading the word about how amazing natural yeast is by making videos. You can see her channel here. Some of her videos are below.

I tried her pancake and waffle recipe. It was great, although using the metric units, was oy, hard! I’m not used to that. You’ll have to get a kitchen scale and measure in grams to use her recipe.

Here’s another resource, as well for learning about sourdough. My friend Kimberly Simmerman and her sister Charlotte Bjarnson have created a website, blessthisbread.com. They also do free zoom classes on baking with natural yeasted dough every Wednesday. They’ve done sourdough pita bread (see video below), sourdough cornbread, sourdough donuts, and bagels. Join their group, Sour Sisters, on Facebook, to get the recipes, as well as more info on signing up for the classes.

My friend and I at a recent homeschool retreat for moms, in a meme created by another homeschool mom friend.

Note: If you want to see the checklist of how to find your zen as a homeschool mom, during lock down or not, skip to the bottom of this post to the numbered list. If you want to read the backstory of how I came to write the post, read on.

I had to laugh when one of my homeschool mom friends shared a statement via social media that was something like: “When your quarantine life is the same as your normal life.” I laughed a lot at that! I hear people talk about quarantine life, like how they now have to homeschool, they can’t go out to a restaurant for date night, they can’t go to concerts or the theater, they have to cook from scratch, and they have to use Zoom, etc. I thought, umm, wow, that already is my normal life, LOL! Yeah, my regular pre-COVID-19 life was pretty boring to most people. As a budget-conscious, homeschooling, stay-at-home, middle-aged mom, I don’t have anything in my life that most people probably would see as exciting, or even remotely close to their normal, everyday life.

First of all, we’ve been on a pretty tight budget, working the Ramsey Baby Step #3 so eating out, concerts and theater outings are rare events, unless they are free. (We got debt-free/finished Baby Step #2 last summer, so yay!) Second of all, I haven’t had any kind of long-term job outside of the home in over two decades. I homeschool because I got a vision for it at age 14. So ever since I quit my job as a research technician at a med school laboratory in 1993 when I was 38 weeks pregnant with Baby #1, I’ve been home. I’ve had decades of practice at finding discipline, purposeful joy, and meaning from unpaid mundane work at home, surrounded by little people, helping them to do the same thing. Yeah it does sound boring, I admit! Sometimes the biggest highlight of the day is what comes in the mail, LOL.

I do have a rich life, if you look below the surface. It’s full of homemaking, homeschooling. and creating. It involves some cleaning, some cooking and baking, teaching, mentoring, learning from podcasts, books, videos, talking to people, blogging, writing, studying, interacting with my children, and learning about human nature from them and through my homeschool group. I’ve been connecting with people beyond my own church group and neighborhood for years. It has been chiefly through homeschool groups, in person and online. I have also connected using Zoom for years as a mentor or just to reach out to people because I moved far away into the boonies from long-time friends. Not to mention finding joy in marriage.

Dh surprised me with flowers recently, twice in one week!

So yeah, my regular life is a lot like quarantine life. So, despite that funny statement by my friend, I do acknowledge that things have changed a bit since the pandemic erupted. The biggest changes are:

-I save almost two hours a day because I don’t have to drive into town twice a day for seminary class (religious instruction) for my two teens in the AM and track practice in the PM.

-we can’t go to the public library, sob! 😦 I love this post by a fellow homeschool mommy blogger, because it sums up my feelings pretty much 100%! I just blogged about two alternatives to the public library during this lockdown, and beyond, here.)

-we can’t go to our weekly homeschooling co-op 90 minutes away, instead, we’ve been meeting online

-we haven’t been gameschooling with our regular gameschool friends in person, instead we’ve met online but it hasn’t been daily. We have been gameschooling as a family on almost a daily basis to make up for it.

-the flip side of the above is that I have been playing games with our extended family and friends as they have been forced to navigate Zoom and learn how to use it for work. I’m no longer the strange one who is the only one wanting to connect via Zoom.

Not “ecret Hitler” but “Secret Hitler” which we played over zoom, using this site here.

Also, I’ve been able to get more sleep. I do have days where I wake up and it takes a bit of time for me to register what day it is.  I also confess that as I have had to get up early on some days, like 4 AM to pack a lunch for my husband while he showers and gets ready to go off to his job, with an erratic schedule, I then go back to sleep and sometimes sleep until 11 or noon. OK that was only one day I think. Other days I’ve slept until 8 of 9. It is nice not to have to get up at 6 AM every day to get to seminary at 7:30. I’ve definitely been getting more sleep.

Anyway, when the lock down first started, the days had been blurring into each other because the normal landmarks for the days of week of going to church, church youth night, homeschool co-op, book club, and other church meetings all disappeared. I know, It’s so tempting during this time to just stay in PJs all day, not paying attention to hygiene, and binge watch my favorite shows. I hear from other homeschool moms that motivation is really low right now because the end of the year events that are typically looked forward to and worked towards are gone.

A few weeks ago I realized that I didn’t want our family watching a movie every night. This quarantine wasn’t going to turn into a however-weeks-or-months-long-sleepover party. It feels better to get dressed every day as if we were going out in public and do some intentional work that looks towards the future. I am intent on thriving, not just surviving this time. We do still have a future beyond the pandemic. We have been assured by our prophet President Nelson that the temples will open again. To me, that means other things are going to open as well. President Ballard also stated that we will win the war against COVID-19. With those messages of hope I feel encouraged that life in lock down isn’t going to last forever.

So if you are looking for some structure, even zen or joy, as a homeschooling mom during this strange time I offer these suggestions of things to do each day. These will work after the restrictions for the pandemic lift as well. This in no way a “must-do” or “have-to” list. Just take what works for you and leave the rest, as they say in La Leche League. This is what is working for me. I’m ok with some bingeing during this time, of food and movies, but I’m fully treating this crisis mostly as a metamorphic, chrysalis time of domestic work, to emerge transformed for the better, and not letting myself go, with no structure whatsoever.

1. Morning Devotional

You can read about this hereand watch here to get ideas. I do it first thing in the morning, no matter what time I get up, as my “first things first” habit.

2. Schoolwork (the three Rs)

My kids do mathusee for math, Getty-Dubay handwriting for handwriting, and then read from their current assigned books for our co-op school or books they have chosen on their own to read. That’s what we’ve been doing for years, lock down or not. The teens have their scholar project work as well for writing and more reading and creating. This past year these three youngest have had some other online resources to use as well.

3. Chores/Family Work

We believe in kids doing work! They do all the dishes, putting groceries away, laundry, bathroom cleaning, dusting, and vacuuming around here. They also help with most of the meal prep, especially dinner.

4. Read Alouds

I have a set of books I read aloud for certain times of the day. These times are: dishes clean up and bedtime. Right now we are reading The Tuttle Twins, Mathematicians are People Too, a new book to defend creationism, called The Days of Darwin Truthseekers book, the ValueTales series my mom gave me years ago, and picture books I find digitally on Libby and Scribd. Those are my two online substitutes for the public library during lockdown.

I also have audiobooks on Scribd, Audible, and YouTube for when I can’t be reading aloud or want to rest my voice. For those right now we are doing The Van Der Beekers, and Under the Egg. On Sundays I have them listen to gospel-based talks by Hank, John, and Meg at Our Turtle House, during kitchen cleanup.

5. #abookandgameaday

Playing a board/card game a day and reading at least one picture book really turns an ordinary day into an extraordinary day. This is all part of my commitment to reading aloud and gameschooling.

They are such easy, low-investment energy things that bring a lot of joy to me.

We’ve branched out to playing games online with different groups of people beyond the older kiddos who live out of the nest (who we’ve played General Conference Jeopardy! with a few times): homeschool friends, cousins, me with my sibs and parents, some family friends, and my husband and I with other couples for date nights.

If you want to try some online games over video chat, here are some suggestions.

My dad introduced me to Scattergories online. Find it in the link above this photo.

6. Kids Free Time (and Mine too!) to explore their (and my) own interests

7. Get sunshine/nature/grounding (siting or walking outside with your bare feet touching the earth).

8. Exercise

I currently use the Trim Healthy Mama Workins kit.  Twenty minutes a day, four days a week, and boom, that’s a great workout, without leaving the house.

9. Read on your own and encourage “sustained silent reading,” (SSR)/ family chill and read time, away form screens. That means cozying up on the couches with blankets and books, digging into some great reads.

10. Create time to connect with others outside the home using video chat or phone

a. for your kids

b. for yourself as a mom

I get together once a week over zoom or phone to connect with two dear girlfriends I have known for 24+ years, for at least an hour. This connection is so refreshing for me. During regular life it was nice, but now, during the lockdown, it is vital!

From Toy Story 4, which we watched recently after I remembered that two of us hadn’t seen it when the rest of us saw it last summer.

11. Night-time themes. This is what I came up with after realizing I didn’t want every night to be movie night. 

1. 1.  Monday: Family Home Evening
   2. Tuesday: watch some online course as a family, like Kent and Amy Bowler’s Revolutionary Youth webinar class or the webinar Constitution Classes at Patriot Academy, from the Rick Green family.
   3. Wednesday: Family Chill-in Reading Night, Family Game Night or Parent Mentor Date Night.
   4. Thursday: Parents’ Webinar Night watching the Bowlers’ Revolutionary Parents’ class, or some other online course, such as: Dave Ramsey’s finance courses.
   5. Friday: Parents’ Date Night (game or movie) or Family Movie Night
   6. Saturday: We do either a parent mentor date afternoon or night, depending on what happened on Wednesday night, or an Extended Family Game Night, a Family Movie Night or Parents’ Date Night depending on what happened on Friday.
   7. Sunday: family phone calls/video chats with extended family, or inspirational, faith in God promoting, family movie night.

We’ve been doing this for over a month now and I love it! It has some anchor points as well as flexibility to move things around as other opportunities come up. One week we played the Cashflow board game three nights in a row. Another week the kids’ youth group from church met online so we didn’t do a Revolutionary Hero class that night.  If the boys get too restless during the webinar nights I have them bake cookies. My daughter is happy to just draw and listen. They aren’t allowed to go do their own screen time during the webinars. I also bribe them to listen to the webinars by saying we will watch some Dry Bar Comedy afterwards if they listen to the webinar while doing crafts, drawing, or baking cookies. They can eat the cookies during Dry Bar and then we have leftover cookies for the next Family Game Night.

OK, so before you turn away from this post because you can see the above photo is obviously kale, and you are disgusted, please hear me out.

Yes, kale eaten raw, or cooked until it is wet and slimy and then eaten cold, yeah, that tastes gross. I agree with Jim Gaffigan, in the video below, that kale can taste like bug spray, IF it’s eaten those ways.

Funny story: one time one of my teen sons was asked to bring a salad to a party. He forgot to tell me about this so I could get some fresh lettuce leaves. When it was time to go, I wasn’t home to give any sort of direction. He raided the fridge for some salad fixings. All he could find that was green and leafy was kale, so he grabbed that and took it. It’s no surprise that it remained untouched the whole night, haha. He finally realized that yeah, raw kale is usually used for decorations on the table or buffet line in restaurants, not for actually eating. It tastes like bug spray when raw because it’s not supposed to be eaten raw.  All kinds of problems come from eating it raw, even if you eat it as a “healthy” kale smoothie.

But…if you eat kale that is butter pan-fried to a crisp, lightly sprinkled with sea salt and nutritional yeast, it is divine! So absolutely deliciously yummy! (I’ve been eating a keto again, after dropping it a few years ago, and this time it is working. I’m not having the problems I had before. A post is coming up about that in the next awhile.)

This is my newest, improved version of my previous crispy kale recipe I used years ago. I like this recipe better because it doesn’t involve getting my fingers covered in butter, or using a ziploc bag for the buttery coating. I also don’t have to heat up my whole oven.

Crispy Kale Chips

1. Put 1 Tbsp of butter in a big frying pan. Let it melt on the lowest heat setting. Be patient and let it melt on low heat. Trust me on this. I’ve burned plenty of butter when I do this on high. 🙂 Do something else in the kitchen while waiting for the butter to melt.
2. After the butter is melted, spread it evenly all over the pan with a pancake turner, what some people call a “spatula.”
3. Put in a big handful of kale leaves, stripped from the stalks, if you bought the kale leaves on the stalks, or grew the kale yourself. If you bought the kale leaves shredded and bagged, just throw it all in, enough to fill the pan.
4. Stir the kale around and/or flip it over with the pancake turner so that the kale gets evenly coated as much as possible. It’s a bit hard to do this if the pan is so full of kale without spilling it over the edge of the pan. Just be careful and slow and don’t get impatient about getting the butter spread over all at once. Keep the heat on low.
5. Sprinkle on sea salt and nutritional yeast to taste.
6. Keep the pan on low, and stir every few minutes, until all the leaves are toasted to a crisp. Turn off the heat.

Put the kale chips in a bowl and gobble them up while the family gorges on popcorn and watches a movie. I love popcorn, but when I eat this, I feel satisfied by the light, buttery crisp goodness of the delicate leaves. I don’t even feel tempted to snitch the popcorn, which is a no-no on the keto diet.

I actually love this so much I eat it every night as part of my dinner, whether the fam is having popcorn or not! I wish I had know about eating kale this way in my childbearing years. It’s such a great way to get leafy greens in! But you do want to be careful about kale if you have any type of thryoid disorder, as the Healthy Home Economist post I linked to suggests.

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. 🙂