Blog Review

I just have to tell you all about this wonderful LDS woman I have met through the blogs. Her name is Marie and she lives in England. Each day her blog brings me such an uplift and I just know that many of you would enjoy her too.

I love reading Marie's blog because it reminds me that we are of one mind and one spirit with so many all over the world. As we all strive to be more like Christ we become more like each other. Marie blogs daily and she is such a talented writer and artist. Here is one of her sketches that she sells from her Etsy store online.


Just about every one of her posts includes a delicious recipe if you are loving that sort of thing. And who isn't? She did a post on Hot Cross Buns just in time for Easter.


You should drop over to Oak Cottage and get to know this lovely lady! You'll be glad you did!

A Simple Woman's Day Book~April 6, 2009

To join in focusing on the simple things and pleasures of your daily life or to read other people's entries, click here.

So, For Today...Monday, April 6, 2009

Outside my window...It is bright and sunny with a gentle breeze blowing. I am much later in doing my entry today than usual. We have out of state company and they are now off sightseeing for the day so I can get to my fun blogging activities.

I am thinking...how wonderful it has been to have our young friends, The Higleys visiting with their five sweet children.
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From the learning rooms...comes a sure knowledge that I had forgotten that big groups of people eat a lot and drink a lot of milk. I was at the grocery store this morning at 5:00 am to buy milk for the little kids so they could get a good breakfast in their little tummies before they went off on their adventures.

I am thankful for...knowing that our children and grandchildren that live in Italy are safe and sound after the devastating earthquake near Rome. I am praying for the survivors of the quake and for the families that have lost loved ones so suddenly and painfully and without warning. It makes me want to hold our family close today and everyday!

From the kitchen...more activity than we have seen in ages. Tonight we will be barbecuing some burgers and eating outside. That should be fun. We have been enjoying the energy and laughter and politeness of these children, well-raised. It is making us very eager to see some of our own grandkids next week!

I am wearing...Dark jeans, a white tee and lime green hoodie. I do love hoodies!

I am reading...Ciao America. It is a very funny book about an Italian guy who lived in Georgetown for a year and how he found the customs of Americans to be from an Italian perspective. My daughter, Laura, says she should write the counter part when she leaves Italy!

I am hoping...that our economy takes an up turn soon for all the people that are struggling so much to make ends meet.

I am creating...a plan for some fun activities for our kids arriving next week, menu selections, sights to see, ordering tickets online for the Academy of Science in San Francisco that has just recently been renovated.

I am hearing...absolutely nothing and it is wonderful. Oh there is the hum of the refrigerator now that I am paying closer attention.

I am going...to run an errand for my husband to a parts store to pick up some gadget for our irrigation system. I loathe parts stores (since I never know what I am buying and they always seen gray and colorless and totally boring) and I usually come home with the wrong thing. But he has called ahead so I have a better than average chance of getting it right.

My spiritual thoughts include..being thankful for faith and hope in Christ and the celebration of Easter this week. I am grateful for the greatest gift of the Savior's atonement and the promise this gives us of eternal life and the opportunity to be with loved ones again that have gone on before us.

Around the house... I see tulips and birds and new bright green leaves on everything and a gigantic family size tent on our patio where our house guest are camping! The kids are loving it!

One of my favorite things...clean windows that just make the earth and everything in it sparkle!

A few plans for the rest of the week...recoup, reorganize, rest up and get ready for Easter and next week!

Here is a picture and a thought I am sharing with you...

Two of our little granddaughters, Chloe and Hazel just relaxing together. The minute I saw this picture I felt the yearning in my heart for the sister I never had. I have two wonderful brothers but I always wanted a sister. This photo captures that feeling for me so beautifully and poignantly. I have always thought it would be so wonderful to have that sister, your own special person who just totally gets you and vice versa. That person who knows you like no other because of all the shared experiences of a life time. That person you just can't remember life without~that person that is your person!

Now I know that not all sisterly relationships are like that but I just know if I had been blessed to have a sister it would be like that because I would work at it and make it so.

Blissfully Domestic Articles

Recently I have finally found the time to start writing for Blissfully Domestic Magazine in their Blissful Home Department again. You can see my recently published articles if you are so inclined at the following 2 links.

Hanging Art Work

Let There Be Light


Thanks for Visiting!

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Easter!

Just kidding! Actually I don't have too many Easter decorations to begin with and I have very little out this year. But something really weird happened ...a tiny wave of craftiness hit me. I am not into crafts and I rarely like anything I make in that department but... I did decide to create...or I should say, embellish a couple of things I picked up for a song this year.
I found this little critter cage for $5.99 at TJ Maxx...it was empty. I thought it was cute so decided to add some lime green moss, a little peep I had and a few eggs. That is about the extent of my craftiness...impressive, huh?

Yesterday I went to this very cool shop with some business associates. You are all gonna want my job when I tell you that we met to go shopping (for the businesses of course) and then we toured a home one of the ladies had just beautifully staged and then found ourselves having lunch. It was a rough day at work but I managed! While shopping I found this cute bird cage for $19.99. It was empty so since I had some moss left and a cute little nest and some eggs I did this. Wouldn't "The Nester" just be green with envy?

I told you I am not much of a crafter, but I can put things together and this was fun, fast, and finished in a flash! My kind of craftiness. The eggs below are some that I have made and or purchased over the years. I love the little chicken wire basket that holds them.

Wouldn't it be fun if you could save eggs your kids decorate when they are little that aren't hand blown and so fragile? Wouldn't it be neater if your little kids could even hold and decorate a blown out egg without cracking it?

Once while decorating eggs with my friend, Lee, I discovered that you can. Did you know that you can hard boil and decorate eggs that will last forever a long long time? If they don't have any cracks they will be just fine for years to come. I always thought they would start smelling rotten, but nope. All that happens is that the egg inside dehydrates and shrinks and they are like a little rattle over time. Think plastic egg with a small chocolate egg in it. The first few years I would leave them out but hidden for a few months to make sure they were not rotten before storing them away. I have never had a problem and neither has Lee and she still has some that her mother painted for her when she was a little girl. Try it, it is eggciting.

The eggs that you see with the patterns on them are done with hard boiled eggs and spring tissue papers. You just tear some pieces dip them in liquid starch (or maybe Modge Podge) and press them on the egg and dry. Our daughter, Jen, taught me this little trick ten years ago when we were in Scotland she made them for Piper's first Easter. I fell in love with them but they were the blown eggs so would not transport easily. Finally I just made some of my own. Again, my kinda thing. They really are pretty cute for the effort that goes into them.

Well, I hate to put all my eggs in one basket but this is probably the only crafting post you will ever see from this chick!

Happy Easter!
I gotta go feed my carrot!

A Different Take on the Economy: The Real Cause

The Eyres

Yesterday I shared part one of this topic. In that post I gave full attribution to Richard Eyre, a brilliant author well-known not only through out the LDS community, but also internationally for his work regarding families. Richard also had done a TV series with his wife Linda, and is now entering into the political arena where I can see him doing much good.



Part 2

"New York Times #1 Bestselling Author Richard Eyre takes a unique look at our crumbling economy and suggests that it's not just an economic problem.

A Bermuda Triangle of Cause

I am getting increasingly frustrated with the way we try to measure everything and explain everything in economic terms. We are in trouble, everyone tells us, because of bad loans and excessive speculation and poorly managed banks and corporations and insufficient regulation.

Well, what if all of these economic factors are just the symptoms of more basic problems? What if they are the results rather than the causes? What if our society has some flaws that are deeper and more personal than economics?

I think that today's burgeoning problems are swirling up from a kind of Bermuda triangle of causes. One of the triangle's corners certainly could be labeled “economics” and is founded in the excessive borrowing and spending and greed discussed in yesterday's article.

But there are two more corners to the causal triangle. One can be called “demographics” and the other can be called “morality.”

Demographics

As hard as it is for America to pay its bills today, forecasters will tell us that our current woes are nothing compared to what we will face in a decade or so when our biggest entitlement programs—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—are scheduled to go broke.

And the root problem is demographics. As people live to be older and older, and as families have fewer and fewer children we end up with a huge aging population and a woefully small workforce to support them. The old model of lots of young workers at the base of the population pyramid supporting the small peak of elderly people at the top has been inverted and now stands precariously on the tiny pointed base of less children/workers and a wide top of more retired/oldsters. The whole theory of entitlements and generational responsibility goes topsy turvy.

Most advanced “western” countries, including basically all of Europe as well as this country when immigration is factored out, have declining populations and birth rates that are below replacement levels. So the younger, producing side of population is getting smaller, as the older, consuming side of population is getting larger.

Two thirds of American households have no children in them. Nearly 40% of births are to single or unwed moms. Without family responsibility, much of our new population can become a burden on economic society rather than part of the workforce solution.

Even without the current banking and housing crises, we would be heading into economic disaster by virtue of our demographics and the failure of families to bring into the world and raise enough responsible kids to keep everything afloat.

Morality

The word “morality” is often used with sexual connotations, but it is much broader than that. Besides sexual indiscretion and irresponsibility, immorality means self-centeredness, greed, dishonesty, disrespect, and lack of self-discipline.

It is these traits that undermine our society and our economy.

We live in a world where we measure those around us (and ourselves) by how much they own, how much they control, and how powerful or autonomous they seem to be. We pay lip service to service and we admire philanthropy and altruism, but our guiding motives seem to be self-survival and self-elevation in competition to those around us.

Our society emphasizes individual rights above family commitments and group responsibility.

Economics is more a system of measurement and numerical results than it is an explanation of root cause. We get into economic difficulty not so much because we don't follow the right economic formulas as because we don't follow the right moral principles.

Families

As one who has been writing and speaking and thinking about families and parenting and child rearing for decades, I often get accused of oversimplifying everything and cramming it into the box that says “everything starts and ends with families.”

“To someone with a hammer in his hand,” the old saying goes, “everything looks like a nail.”

But I do believe that the whole Bermuda triangle of cause, and all three of its economic, demographic and moral corners rests firmly on the decline of families.

When families fail to teach correct principles and morals, that omission constitutes a cause which erupts in disastrous economic and societal effects. When families have the illness of irresponsibility, it produces wide spread economic symptoms. When families fail in their stewardships of the welfare and justice of their children, those stewardships leak out into the welfare and justice systems of the broader society where they become impossibly expensive and expensively impossible to deal with. And when couples decide not to have children at all, the resulting demographics lead to the inevitable destruction of the future of any economy.

People everywhere are fond of saying “The family is the basic unit of society.”

What we have to realize is that the family is also the basic unit of our economy, of our morality, and of our demographics.

Note: For additional information on Richard Eyre's thoughts on the deception and lack of discipline in our society and personal lives go to www.thethreedeceivers.com and to www.drbridell.com. Both are now meridian books, available on line to Meridian readers. Click here to order.

flickr photos

A Treat For You

If you didn't see Jen's blog yesterday, click here for a little treat.

A Different Take On The Economy

Richard Eyre

I have been a big fan of Richard Eyre for over 25 years. I discovered this author when our children were small and think his parenting advice is unparalleled. He wrote Teaching Children Joy, Teaching Children Responsibility, Teaching Children Values, The Secret of the Sabbath, etc. I found this article on Meridian Magazine and wanted to share it. I have just learned he is interested in running for the Governor of Utah. The man is brilliant, honest, and full of integrity. I'd vote for him in a heart beat!

If you want to learn some amazing things about families, Google ( Richard Eyre ~ Author) and read his books. One thing that makes a good author brilliant is their ability to make the solutions to difficult things seem so logical and workable. One time I met Richard Eyre in a bookstore and told him I had read every book he had written.

He said," No way, what about...??" "Yep, read it!" Then he asked me about another one that I had also read. His response... "Wow! You might be the only person I have ever met that really has read them all!" I seriously doubt that. His books are very compelling. (I told you I was was a big fan!)

“Bad Parenting”

The “bail outs” and “rescue plans” we see springing up and expanding every day remind me of bad parenting. It's like mom and dad have a kid who keeps screwing up, and they keep bailing him out, getting him off the hook, paying for his mistakes.

The boy is acting irresponsibly, but the parents are not willing to let him suffer the consequences. “We can't let him fail” they say, “if he goes down it will affect our whole family. He just needs a little boost and he will start doing the right thing.”

But he doesn't, in fact he takes what they give him and uses it to get further into trouble, and for even more selfish pursuits.

The other kids in the family, the responsible ones, resent what is happening, realizing that they are essentially paying for their brother's mistakes and that he is pulling them down with him.

Bad Parental Example

And once we start using the family metaphor, with the bail-out parents representing the government, we have to look at the example those parents are setting for the kids. They are spending irresponsibly. They want to be popular with their kids so they are buying them all kinds of “earmarks.” They are borrowing like crazy and getting further and further into debt. No example of delayed gratification or of saving or of surplus. They keep buying things they can't afford and taking on more projects and obligations than they can handle.

These parents are piling up debts they will never be able to pay. Their kids will inherit them.

When things start going badly, instead of hunkering down and trying to get along with less or to start saving a little, they just borrow more and spend more, saying “We've just got to jump start this family and spend ourselves back to how happy and rich and over the top we used to be!”

Never Underestimate Greed

One thing that good parents do, even while loving and believing in their kids, is to recognize that with all their hormones and passions and self-centeredness, those kids need boundaries, rules, regulations. You can't just let them do whatever they want.

Even those of us who believe passionately in the free market system with its incomparable motivation and its invisible hand and the its regulating elements of prices and of supply and demand—even we who believe in all that—must never underestimate the power of greed. We must understand that people, given the chance, and given the cloak of complexity or anonymity, will rationalize a way to take a disproportionately large piece of the pie.

So there is need for regulation. The lack of it created the robber barons of the early part of the last century, and the Wall Street robbers of the early part of this one. But, as in a family, if the regulation is excessive, it will stifle initiative and dim motivation.

Good parents respect the agency of their children and understand that they need a lot of freedom and a lot of access to find their best and truest selves. They respect their inherent goodness and altruism, but they also recognize their capacities for rationalization and greed, and they set up rules accordingly.

Markets are more Rational than People

While the bail outs and stimulus plans stir hope in a lot of us, and make us want to get back to our own personal borrowing and spending ways, the markets seem to be more critical.

More government and more socialism and more people eating at the public trough troubles the subtle inherent intuition of markets, and stocks tumble every time a new and artificial government initiative is supposed to boost them.

Like the kid who is supposed to respond positively to a gift but instead gets more spoiled and self-indulgent because of it, the markets keep biting the hand that is trying to feed them.

The “Vodka Solution”

Does it drive you a little crazy when the talking heads of politics and media keep saying that the need is to start spending more and borrowing more? We've got to free up credit they say, so that people can buy more cars and clothes and stuff. Then afterward they say Oh dear, we gave people money but they were feeling so insecure that they saved it instead of spending it—that will never do! We can't have this saving, we've got to get back to spending and borrowing to get this economy going!

What if the problem all along has been too much spending and too much borrowing and not enough saving or sacrificing or delayed gratification? What if it is the debt and the over-extending on the micro level (us) and the macro level (government) that got us into all this trouble in the first place.

Aren't all the efforts to get borrowing and spending going again a little like treating a hangover by giving someone a bottle of vodka?

The scariest part of the family metaphor is that it makes it easier to predict where the whole thing will end. Parents who borrow and spend in wild excess and who neither teach nor demand responsibility from their kids will eventually go bankrupt and leave a mountain of debt that their kids will inherit and cannot hope to pay. Does that parent/kid micro predict and foretell what will happen in the government/citizen macro?

But what if we were to take a little wider view? Perhaps one reason our solutions are not working is that we do not understand the problem. Are we sure that what we are experiencing can even be explained with economics? Are we sure that we don't just have economic symptoms and that the real root-cause of the problem does not lie elsewhere?

Tomorrow he will be sharing what he thinks the root cause really is. I cannot wait to read it!