General Conference has come and gone, and the holidays are fast approaching, reminding me of family traditions. Our traditions are pretty low key. We go to church together. The night before General Conference, the boys sleep in a tent in our living room, making sure that the door of the tent is facing the nearest temple. We have Family Home Evening on Mondays. We eat blue pancakes for breakfast on BYU's opening game day for football.  We read Luke 2 on Christmas Eve. And every summer, my husband … [Read more...]

I gave birth to a beautiful 7 lb girl two weeks ago. I wanted a natural delivery, and my midwife suggested the “hypnobirthing” method of dealing with pain. The method is all about breathing. One is supposed to be able to put oneself into a state of deep relaxation though breathing exercises. My hypnobirthing book said that, with practice, many hypnobirthing mothers can put themselves quickly into such a state of relaxation that contractions feel like nothing more than “tightening” and that th … [Read more...]

There was a recent bout of stomach flu at my house. In a period of 4 hours, my three children vomited 11 times. I was grateful to be living in a house with a washer and dryer, since we moved fairly recently out of an apartment with only public, coin-operated laundry facilities. I considered what it might have been like living in an earlier time and trying to cope with such an illness: chopping wood to make a fire to boil water to do laundry or perhaps going down to the rocks by the river to … [Read more...]