| The Gift of Giving Life

Stunning, Spiritual Poems about a Girls First Period

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about preparing my oldest daughter for menstruation and puberty. She will be turning ten next month, so I know these milestones are quickly approaching us. This past week I started compiling a book I intend to give her for her birthday in September. Included in her book will be some poetry. I’d like to share some of those poems with you.

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4 Tips to Help a Friend who has Miscarried

6 Comments / Lani A.

Guest post from Liz Johnson… When people ask me how many children I have, I don’t really know how to answer. The proper response is “four,” because that’s how many I tuck in at night – three beautiful boys and a darling baby girl. But in my heart, I want to answer “five.” And then I guiltily admit that I feel like I should want to answer “seven.” . . .

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Channing’s Milk-Sharing Story

Lani A.

My experience with milk donation is that an ounce given is received back one hundred times over in the the joy of selfless service. For both donor and recipient, an exchange of freely given breast milk is about so much more than filling bellies. It is about finding healing and bringing peace to the hearts that long for love, and that is a treasure that cannot be measured in ounces.

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Birth Symbolism and the Temple: a Visual Journey

2 Comments / Robyn A.

As I sat in the creation room of the Idaho Falls temple a few weeks ago, my mind turned to birth. I pondered upon the different symbols within the accounts of the Creation, The Fall, and Plan of Salvation and how they relate to childbearing. Heather’s essay, “The Two Veils,” (The Gift of Giving Life,

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Bearing Burdens

1 Comment / Lani A.

When I start feeling sorry for myself or overwhelmed by all the day-to-day problems and concerns in my life as a wife and mother, it often helps me to think about my great-grandmother, Cassie. Cassie was born in 1890 in a two-room log cabin in Mapleton, UT, “one mile west of one of the most beautiful mts. in the world,” as she described it. Cassie wrote, “Well you know that the years from 1907 to 1918 were the happiest and grandest years of this mortal life to me.” 1907 was the year she met and married her sweetheart, Edmund, and the autumn of 1918 was the start of several years I can’t even fathom enduring.

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The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow

2 Comments / Lani A.

If you find yourself weighed-down by dark clouds of despair, take heart. The sun will come out again. It will. And you may even be grateful for the clouds that made the sunshine all the more welcomed and cherished. Hang on, my friend.

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My life is a birth canal

6 Comments / Lani A.

As I look back over my nearly-32 years on this earth, I can see that my whole life was a series of wombs and birth canals. Comfortable lulls followed by strait and narrow (frequently uncomfortable) squeezes into my next phase of growth and development.

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Sacrifice and Childbearing

2 Comments / Robyn A.

Can a woman FAIL at childbirth? My answer is NO. What if they carefully prepared to have their birth be one way but circumstances dictated another direction? Was that a FAIL? Again, I say NO. I feel that childbirth is more about the offering and sacrifice made on the part of the mother. What path did

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