Christmas School, Volcano Candles, Chocolate, and More

Hello! I hope you are having a good November. Here are some things I have been loving lately.

I'm so excited to do Christmas School this year!! We have done Christmas school a few years now. It's a relaxed, bookish homeschool curriculum for the month of December (we don't homeschool but sometimes I pretend to). Basically, it guides you through a fantastic read-aloud and gives ideas for recipes and crafts that go along with the story. I look forward to it every day in the month of December. The book it's based on is this year is a lovely adaptation of The Christmas Carol, called Little Christmas Carol. I can't wait to start!

I have been wanting to buy one of those volcano candles at Anthropology (I love how it smells when I walk in the store!) but I think they are way too expensive. So I googled and found this version from Target that smells the same to me and it is way less spendy!

I have also really been loving these brownies from Fiber One. I pretty much can't survive without chocolate every day and these help me to not to eat chocolate chips by the handful, which has been a lifelong problem. :) I put one of these on a plate, put it in the microwave for 10 sec, and sit down and savor it with a fork.

We switched out our big farmhouse table . . . 

 . . . for a smaller round one. We did this because I feel like it is really important to have sight-lines to each person's eyes at dinnertime. It's the only 20 minutes of the day when we are all together, looking at each other. I love our new table so much!! I can't wait for the chairs and to "style" it.

On a totally different note, I have been thinking a lot about a talk I heard last month from the President of my Church called The Lord Jesus Christ Will Come Again. In it he said to make discipleship of Jesus Christ our highest priority.  This helps me as I make decisions on what to do with my time. One of the things I have done is take a long break from Instagram. I basically only get on to share a blog post every two weeks. It has really helped me to not feel the tug of my phone every 3 minutes and that makes me really happy.

Something else I have been thinking about is this podcast episode:  Captain Moroni: A New Perspective on War and Peace. In it, the guest Elray Henriksen, who is a peace scholar, speaks of going to a war-torn area where genocide had occurred. To get the accurate story listen to the episode, but I'll paraphrase: He spoke with a local man who had survived the genocide. He asked the man what we can do to prevent such warring and hate from happening between groups of people. He thought the man would say something really complicated or difficult. But man said, "never underestimate the power of a small act of kindness."