(Hint: I'm in Utah!  Now fund me.  :0)

As you may have guessed from my last post, I'm heavily involved in planning a birthing conference for a movement which we call Empowering Fearless Birth.  It's a funny name that really means we are all about giving mothers the education, opportunities, and power to have the kinds of births they want--from birthing in a watering trough in their kitchen to scheduling a C-section, being as medicated as she chooses and having the medical care she wants.  We want all mamas to know their choices and be confident in what they want, because so many times what people do and say during a birth can impact a birthing mama for the rest of her life (for better or worse.)

This past weekend, I sat down with my two cohorts and we hammered out the class schedule.  We have a whopping 45+ hours of amazing women and men teaching classes on everything from "Vaccines: Know the Facts" by a medical doctor, to "The Benefits of Placenta Encapsulation", to "Healing Birth Trauma" by a midwife who is also a CPM.

We have incredible and intelligent people coming from far and wide to help spread knowledge out to anyone who is willing to attend their classes!  I wish I could go to every single one of them.

That's the problem.

We don't want all of this time and effort to go to waste.  We NEED the classes to be filmed, and to be available to anyone who needs information about all of these subjects.  Wouldn't it be amazing for a first-time mother, with no real support, to do a simple Google search on how to prepare for a hospital birth or how to protect her perineum during birth, and find an hour long discourse she can watch online and learn about what questions to ask and where to go for more information?

I think so, don't you?  We barely have enough money in the budget to pay for the event, so we need help finding funds to film every single class.  If you think this is even half as important as I do, please help us out by donating to our Go Fund Me!  I will personally send you cookies (even vegan and/or paleo ones if you so choose it!) if you donate more than $50.  Leave me a comment and what kind of cookies you like, and I'll be in touch.  :0)

(all images of William courtesy of my fabulous sister-from-another-mister, April DeLaMare of DeLaMare Photography.  And Debbie of Silver Maple Media turned ALL of these images into memes!  Isn't she brilliant?)

Empowering Fearless Birth Event Promo Film from thetouchoflife on Vimeo.

After contributing for a 25-lb. box of Roma tomatoes in my Bountiful Basket this week and wanting to put up some pasta sauce, I decided I would buy the pressure canner that I'd been eyeing online for a while.  It cans 22 quarts at a time and is $100, a super good deal, and will hopefully see our family through many a summer produce surplus.

ANYWAY.  All of this canning talk urged me to peek at the canning supplies at the grocery store tonight, and I was enthusiastic to see that Ball put out a low- or no-sugar pectin that does flexible batches!  Finally!  I'm not sure but I think it's a better deal than the boxed pectin used to be, too...but I don't have any of my old receipts or anything to see.  You can get 22 half-pints from this $5 bottle, and I thought that was pretty nifty.  The only negative thing that I see about this new pectin is that it still contains dextrose as its first ingredient, so even if you choose to not add sugar to your recipe there will still be added sugar with this pectin, even if it is a miniscule amount.  It's more readily available than Pomona's Pectin, which you really CAN make sugar-free jams with.

So, if you're into all that preserving whatnot, check it out.  It was $5 at my grocery store (not on sale) or on Ball's website, but on the web you gots to pay shipping, so getting it at the store is naturally the better deal.

P.S. I'm really not trying to sell any of you on stuff with all my links and whoodlyhaa.  I just liked this stuff and felt the need to share!  ;D