Legacy

Legacies...
We all love the idea of a legacy, something that gets passed down from generation to generation. It could be a family name. Or a 'tradition' we start, or an attribute, like being faithful...Legacies are wonderful and can be a source of strength and comfort. After all, it is through legacies of others faith that we have the restored gospel today. Powerful thing, a legacy is.
So, many of you know, I am, for all intents and purposes, self-educating myself, with regard to nutrition/health. My husband, is being educated (at a high cost$$$) on disease and cures(where applicable). So after I learn something, I pass it on his way. After all, he is NOT being taught how to keep people in health or educate others on nutrition. If anything, almost all I pass on to him goes directly against (en contra) to what he has been taught. We have accepted this and continue to self-educate ourselves, even if it pits us against common thinking.
I have always been known as a little 'out there' (okay, so maybe alot out there)...Jacob knows this (gosh, by now he should!)
We chat alot about health when we are together because of all the sickness (physical/mental, etc) he sees daily. We both want to help others restore health. We cannot go out in public without being surrounded by chronic health problems that we as a country have just learned to live with and accept. IT makes us sad (and mad sometimes) Why is this?
We are a nation that has been given/accepted a false legacy.
We have been told that bodies are for pleasure, instead of the truth, which is that our bodies are a temple, the home of our spirit. our bodies are created in the image of our Father (we look like him!!!). We have been told that we can do unto our body and it will not affect our spirit. I disagree. Our spirit can only grow, in so much as our physical bodies allow growth. For instance, if we are so unwell that we take numerous meds that either knock us out all day, or make us drowsy all day, then how can we possibly grow spiritually. Or even still, if we are so deprived that we have no food/drink for long periods of time, then how can we even grow spiritually when we are barley alive? There is an inseparable connection between our spirits/bodies. Both are alive!
We have been asked by the designer of our bodies to care for them and He purposely invented a body for us that we would need to constantly feed/nourish, in order for life to continue here on earth. Why give us such a responsibility with something so precious? How can we be expected to care for millions of others in eternity if we are unable to care for our body, the house of our own spirt?
This is where legacies come in.
Here is an excerpt from the Word of Wisdom,
"Given for a principle with a promise, adapted to the capacity of the weak and the weakest of all saints...behold...thus saith the Lord unto YOU (all of us); In consequence of evils and designs which DO and WILL exist in the hearts of conspiring men in the last days, I have warned you, and forwarn you, by giving unto you this word of wisdom by revelation..."

Our bodies have been ravished by faulty traditions/legacies...
We learn how/what/when.etcc...to eat at home and how we learn tends to be what we pass on. So we like to think that diabetes just runs in our blood, rather, we should think about how recipes/life styles get repeated all over again (hence the same result of diabetes)...What are we passing unto our children?
Jacob and I are consumed with this. Do our children know what 'real' food is? Can they escape the well funded propaganda that tells them they 'deserve' some item of industrial food made by those who only care about profit (conspiring men/women). We were given a revelation to keep us on guard. Have we let our guard down and given into comfort? People who make food (industrial food as I call it), either make food that mimics 'real 'food(like margarine instead of butter), or make food that is totally fake ('Twinkies' anyone?) but that is palatable, hence, our body will betray us and say, 'YES! I want that twinkie (insert another food item). This pits our bodies against our spirits in a way that is so darn convientat for the adversary, not to mention profitable for those in the food industry.
As members of the church we tend to see the obvious things that we need to to mindful of, like entertainment, or media, or clothing, etc...we overlook how food drags us down, and can, eternally.
I am not a believer in the idea that our loving Father in heaven gives us, on purpose, health problems (disease's, chronic, like diabetes, cancer, etc, or one timers, like the flu) in order to try us. I believe that it is a result of living on a planet that is alive (with loads of living bacteria/viruses, etc) as well as a result of others choices (like smoking around us, or toxic spills, or selling products that are harmful for our living cells), and then as a result of our choices. Unfortunately, many of us make choices based on what we were taught, sometimes, this is a good thing, and sometimes, as we can see, based on our countries current health status, it is a bad thing.
We (jacob/I) want our children to know about growing/storing/preparing all their food needs. Once you realize that you are growing something that is alive then it becomes easier to know which food to choose to eat. How far removed is the food item from being alive? When we are encouraged to eat whole grains, it does not count when one eats a cracker that has a 'whole grain' stamp on the box. It is no longer a useful, alive, whole grain for your body to use. It is not longer real.
But I do have a few crackers in my house right now. Why.???...legacies...that is why....bad traditions of my growing up, habits my stomach is used to. We are always kicking something out of our 'tradition' habit and starting new ones...We kinda know where we are headed:
a 90/10 diet (where we eat what we know we should 90% of the time (which means everything within the walls of our home/car, is right on) and 10% for when we have no choice but to eat what is before us (other homes, or time of scarcity, or for when we have the occasional treat, for which we have no emotional guilt about). Our diet will flow with the seasons, so that we eat the freshest things, the things most alive at that time. This helps our bodies in many ways. We eat things in their most natural state, cooking lightly (steaming, or lightly sauteing when in need of cooking at all, raw is wonderful, esp in the summer) We use herbs to flavor instead of salt/pepper, which offer no nutrition to our diet (unless using alittle unrefined sea salt, which is nutritional). Drinking loads of water, so that we never mistake a sign of thirst, for that of hunger. We just have loads of nutritional things we are working on here at the homestead, but mostly, we are trying to change some legacies passed down to us. We are engaged in the same kind of work that is required of one when you are changing an attribute of your character (like if you are attempting to become a patient person, or one who bridles his/her body with regard to the opposite sex).
Hard work, changing legacies/traditions....much easier to learn the right way first...

Garden Update

So, here is an update on our garden.  (For a reminder of what our garden looked like a month and a half ago, click here).We have held the slugs at bay for the moment, though with the wet rainy weather, they've started coming back out, and our garden is flourishing.   As you can see from our pictures, the squash and zucchini are doing wonderfully.  We've harvested some small yellow squash and zucchinis (we like them small so they don't have very many seeds).  We've just started to get string beans last week, but we've had sugar snap peas for a few weeks now - they are just about done now.  The girls absolutely love the sugar snaps, especially Liliana.  She would go outside to help Heather pick some for dinner and would eat more than she would pick.  

The cucumbers are just starting to produce and have just gotten tall enough to put the netting up so that they will climb.  The cucumbers and squash just love to climb (as evident in our first picture.  The last picture shows our tomato plants, which have taken off!  We have loads of green tomatoes - we planted 4 different types - cherry, and then two other kinds that I don't remember the names of, but Heather could tell you.  The green peppers, which are just in front of the tomatoes, have little tiny buds that are the beginnings of peppers.  The neat thing is that we started all of these from seeds ourselves.  We do have a couple of seedlings that Heather bought at a farmer's market in town that have a head start on our plants (I didn't include pictures of these).  We've already picked a ripe tomato and there are several small peppers on the pepper plant.  Just a note, one the last picture, the front box is just about empty because we just moved and replanted it with lettuce, carrots, and onions.

Our one failure is our potato patch.  The spot where we put the potatoes is much too shaded and potatoes (as we later read and witnessed ourselves) really need full sunlight.  We'll see if we get any potatoes from them, but we're not holding our breaths and will probably chalk this one up to a learning experience, and thankfully a fairly inexpensive one at that.

So, that's where we are about a month and a half after our first garden post.  The nice thing about our raised beds is that there is very little tending/weeding, mostly because we used fresh compost.  We do have to pull out the occasional maple shoot, thanks to several large maples nearby.  We definitely recommend this type of gardening to others, especially those with limited space.  The only thing that we would do differently is to put mulch around the boxes to help keep the slugs away, which was what one farmer at the farmer's market suggested.

Monkey in the Tree

So, I think I have officially become the worst doctor-parent ever.  My colleagues are appalled by my actions, although they are polite enough to hide most of their shock, but the look in their eyes say it all as I tell them that I let, helped, and encouraged our 3 and a half year old daughter climb a tree.  

Let me explain a little bit.  Liliana has always been our climber.  When she was a year and a half, we put here in the bottom bunk of a bunk-bed.  Even though we put things in front of the ladder (which is at the end of the bed), she would figure out how to climb up things to get to the top bunk.  And then there's the playground near our house, where there is a slide that has a climbing wall (pretty close to vertical) as one of the ways to get up.  Liliana has been using this climbing wall for about a year now.  

Recently, she's been bugging me about planting a little tree for her.  When I asked her why, she told me that she wanted to have a tree to climb, but that it had to be a small one.  So, last Sunday, we were out in the front yard swinging Mattie and, having a small maple there, I placed her on the lowest branch.  She quickly figured out how to stand up and climb up the first few branches, loving every moment.  

loose the stink and save your money...

So we are endorsing a product....(no we are not getting paid) We just know there are others out there who care about health and saving money...http://www.thecrystal.com/crystal_story.cfm

Check it out, we love it...and you only have to put it on after taking your bath or shower. We have learned the hard way not to put it on any other time (by then you have bacteria on your skin and it will get on your stick and make it stink)
Seriously who doesn't want to only have to buy deodorant once a year (if that) and know that no chemicals are getting into their skin. Nor do we have to worry about staining our shirts...
Anyway..we love it