The stomach flu, that most unwelcome of visitors, has made a pit stop at our house. I shouldn’t complain. We haven’t met up with the the stomach bug in years. He was bound to stop by at some point.
Landon is down for the count, though I’m hoping the worst of it is behind him. And I’m going to be busy disinfecting, and praying that somehow the rest of us are miraculously spared.
Really, is there anything worse than waiting for the stomach bug to make it’s rounds?
So no new words from me today. But I am over at Extraordinary Mommy this week talking resolutions, and giving a few tips on how to get your kids on board with your goal setting as you plan out your year.
So why don’t you join me over there. It’s for the better, really. You probably don’t want to linger here in germville anyway.
Happy weekending, everyone! May your days be puke-free!
It’s that time of year again.
The time of year when we write down a list of ambiguous, unrealistic resolutions for ourselves – goals that we more than likely won’t accomplish because what does “Eat Healthier” really mean, amiright? Does it mean one spoonful of Nutella instead of two, or should I start Pinning fancy recipes for Kale and Brussel Sprouts now?
In recent years, the idea of making New Year’s Resolutions has become less popular. I think we’ve all come to realize that we set ourselves up for failure using the traditional resolution model of the past.
There is something invigorating about the first of the year, though. It teems with possibility and in many ways it feels very much like a fresh start. Setting plans for the coming year doesn’t have to be stressful, as long as we do it the right way.
In recent years, I’ve enjoyed bringing my kids in on this little goal setting tradition. It’s fun to sit down together as a family and discuss where we’d like to be as a unit in a year.
Kids love to set goals. It makes them feel safe when life is predictable.
How children set their goals, though, will depend almost entirely on their personalities and, to a lesser degree, their birth order. Most (not all, of course) Type A first borns will want to set very high, lofty goals (get all A’s on my report card), while feisty second borns will set the bar much lower (eat ice cream every day).
Setting goals as a family is a fun way to tap into your children as unique individuals, and it gives you shared direction as a unit heading into the New Year. Here are a few tips to get you started.
It’s been two and a half years since I boarded a plane to Tanzania. Two and a half years since I walked through the red dirt and cried, the images of abject poverty almost too much for my heart to comprehend.
Two and a half years ago, I learned that Hope is Slow, and that is, perhaps, the most valuable lesson the Lord has taught me. I’m still grasping hold of what that means even today. Hope is so very slow, and I get weary in the waiting, but God in His Mercy is not bound by my impatient timeframe.
Hope may be slow, but it is alive.
The work that Compassion International does worldwide is humbling. I’ve seen firsthand the impact this ministry has on communities, the hope they are bringing to families living in poverty, and I have wept.
Hope is Slow.
Today, Compassion is participating in #GivingTuesday, and together you and I can help spread Hope. In this season of giving, when our hearts are soft and pliable, let’s join together and make a difference.
Over 2 million children under the age of 5 die each year in India. In the small community of Gujarat, where many of the mothers are teenagers, most do not have the resources needed to provide for their children.
Today we can change the lives of an entire community. We can reverse the trend of hopelessness, of illness, and of childhood death. Opening a Child Survival Program in Gujarat means:
– training and preparation for young moms to help care for their babies
– helping mothers learn to read and write
– giving children a safe place to learn and grow
– ensuring lifesaving medical care for babies and moms
– proclaiming the hope of God to families living in poverty
Today, as we step away from the blessing of Thanksgiving, and move into the beauty of Christmas, we have the chance to bind together and offer Hope. We can wrap it in love, and breath new life into a community that wonders if Hope is real.
It is real, friends, and it is actively moving through willing hearts across the ocean, and into the arms of young mothers who are more accustomed with fear than they are of Hope.
Will you join with us today? Your donation, no matter the amount, will change a life. Together, in just one day, we can make a huge difference.
Changing the world is entirely possible. Like Hope, Change is Slow. It takes time and patience, and a lot of faith.
Won’t you be a part today? Will you give back according to the abundance of your riches? Will you place your stake in the sand today and declare that there is no place for hopelessness in this world?
To donate to Compassion International’s #GivingTuesday campaign to build a Child Survival Program in Gujart, India, click this link.
After you’ve donated, take a moment to share this on your social media channels. Help us spread the word so that we can link arms with others, and together we can make a huge impact.
Thank you, my friends, for being a part of a movement of Hope. You made a difference today. A big one.
I sat on the bench and marveled at the birds splashing in the puddle in front of me. Sitting high on a hill overlooking Kiev, Ukraine, I reveled in the warmth of the midday sun. Winter was fast approaching, but one last Indian Summer (or Baba Leta as it’s known in Russian) pushed off the impending cold, filling the sky with that warm fall glow that sits nicely inside your soul.
It was the fall of 1998, and I had been in Kiev for just a few weeks. I’d finally learned my way around the city enough that I felt confident exploring on my own, and I’d stumbled upon a lovely little grassy area on the hill overlooking the Dnieper River. On this particular day, I struggled with a serious bout of homesickness, and I just needed to sit in the warm sun and remember why I’d chosen to take this adventure.
This was back before Twitter and Facebook let you remain active in the lives of your loved ones far away. I had just learned how to use email, but I had to track down a smokey internet cafe to sign on, and even then the connection was slow and unstable. Calling internationally was expensive, so I had to rely on once a week phone calls to my parents that were short and sweet.
Basically I was living in the dark ages. HOW DID WE EVEN SURVIVE BACK THEN?!
No one knew who I was during those four months in Kiev. I didn’t have a “platform” on which to share my adventures, or my stupidity depending on who you ask.
(It truly is a miracle that I survived some of the situations I put myself in. God’s grace is real, my friends, and it is sufficient even for a 20 year old who chooses to traverse the world on her own without fear of consequence.)
I lived that semester in relative anonymity, choosing to relish life not for the stories that I could chronicle, but simply because life is short and we must live while we’re here.
Blogging and social media have changed the way we live our lives. In some ways this is a good change. We can see one another and remain connected like never before. My parents are living abroad now, and yet I can still send daily texts through an app on my phone, which kind of weirds me out a little bit.
I hit send on a text and the words float through the air, ACROSS THE OCEAN and land on their phone in a split second. WHAT?!
We are officially living in the future.
In other ways, however, this social media thing has had a negative impact. Instead of simply living for the sake of the adventure, we get caught up in living for the sake of the next great post.
We don’t share the messy as much as we should, but instead life has become a perfectly edited, overly filtered Instagram shot. We share the happy moments, which can almost make it seem as though our lives are filled with rainbows and puppies and all things nice.
I don’t have a problem with this, by the way. There is a lot of talk about “honest blogging,” and “being real” online. I agree with those sentiments, but I think we should be careful that our honesty isn’t at the expense of the ones closest to us.
The platform building aspect of social media has become a bit of a rat race to the top. It’s a necessary evil for those of us who are working toward publication, and who are making a career out of our creative pursuits. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t exhausting.
There are days when I long for the anonymity of that Ukrainian hilltop. I want to do a better job of living to live, rather than living to be seen. There was nothing significant about that moment in the sun. No one around knew who I was, nor did they really care. It was just a moment of peace that I didn’t share with anyone but a few birds splashing in a puddle.
May we all strive for those quiet moments whenever we can.
Do any of you get exhausted with the perceived need to build a platform? For those of you who, like me, need to have platform in order to best do your job, do you seek out quiet moments that are yours alone, not to be shared with the online world? How do you strike this balance?
Motherhood and creativity go hand in hand. Even a mathematically/scientifically minded mother will find herself tapping into an inner creativity when her children are born.
You have to be creative to survive those small people, amen?
As we see the boom in blogging, (particularly in niche blogging), it’s a good idea to observe those mothers who have a specific bent toward creativity, and who are boldly living out their art and life in this online explosion of creativity.
The 5 Habits of Successfully Creative Mothers
1.) Joyful Dedication: Creative mothers are dedicated to their creative pursuits. They not only set time aside to accomplish their creative goals, but they actually find joy in this time spent on their crafts. Whether it be sewing, baking, decorating, writing, speaking, acting, photography, or any other creative endeavor, the creative mother finds great joy in the dedicated time spent on her art.
2.) Love of Craft: Creative mothers love what they do as much as they love their children. They live out their art boldly, and confidently share it with the world, not as a means to brag, but because what’s the point in creating something beautiful if you’re not willing to share it?
3.) Embracing a Life of Imbalance: There’s a lot of talk about a little word called “balance.” This word is often directed at mothers as a means to encourage them to remember their number one priorities (the children), and to find a proper amount of time “balance” life and art.
Successful creatives realize that there is no such thing as balance.
You cannot effectively pour yourself into your art and keep the house clean, the laundry done, dinner on the table, and everyone happy. Worthy goals will always require sacrifice, and creative mothers know this too well.
Sometimes, time spent on the art will need to be sacrificed in order to focus on your family.
Other times, you may need to make a different kind of sacrifice (either through hiring child care, ordering take out, ignoring dirty floors and clothes, staying up late or waking up early, etc…) so that you can focus on your art.
The balance is in knowing that your days will not be fully balanced. It’s give and take – ebb and flow. The mothers who are successfully pursuing their creative endeavors understand and embrace this imbalance.
4.) Refusing to Take On Guilt: Motherhood comes with a side of guilt included. Whether or not we choose to ingest this guilt, or push it away, is entirely up to us. The creative mother who decides to spend a little more time one weekend devoting herself to her craft can quickly get derailed and sidetracked if she bows down to guilt.
Guilt tells us we should be more focused on our family than our art.
Guilt tells us our family is suffering because we are being selfish.
Guilt is wrong.
Creative mothers living in successful pursuit of their craft know that it’s just as important for them to focus on their art as it is to focus on their families. Your creativity is a gift, and it’s part of who you are. To deny it would leave you lost and frustrated. This is a building block to embracing the imbalance.
5.) Confidence: Successful, creative mothers are confident in their abilities. This is not a haughty, proud confidence, but a belief that their skills are necessary and worthy to be pursued. They don’t cower in the shadow of comparison, or bow to the altar of sacrificing dreams. They believe in themselves, embrace how they were made, and share their gifts always to the benefit of others (including their families).
Creative friend, you are worthy and you’re good at what you do. As you can see, each of these habits builds on the other, and stacked together, they form a pyramid on which to steady yourself. Above all else, however, it is imperative that you remember that you are a good mother, and you have a creative bent. The two do not have to be mutually exclusive. You can live life creatively with your little ones at your feet, and you can still prioritize your title as mother above your title of creative.
Because I am so near the end of this pregnancy, I am what you might call…um…large. Great with child? My eleven year old says I’m HUGE. He’s learning tact.
Most nights are, to put it bluntly, completely miserable. I fall asleep quickly, and I sleep well until somewhere between 2:00 and 3:30, at which point I might as well just start getting out of bed and calling it day. Instead, I toss and turn, and mumble about the wicked heat, despite the air being turned as low as my husband will allow it, and a fan pointed directly at my face.
When morning finally rolls around, I try to pull myself out of bed with a good attitude, but generally my first thought is, “Well thank God that’s over.”
Then I suck it up, act like a big girl, drink a little coffee, and move on with my day.
Such is life. We don’t always get what we want, and sleep is overrated anyway, really. Who needs it?
(I do. I really do.)
I’ve also got a To-Do list that’s a half mile long, with two-thirds of it probably residing somewhere on the unrealistic side. Nesting is no joke, you guys. Last week, I took out the strongest cleaner I could find and washed my front door.
I WASHED my FRONT DOOR.
Add that to the list of ridiculous things I feel like I need to finish before baby arrives and you get a small picture of the crazy that is surrounding most of my days. Feel free to pray for my family as they deal with me.
The cherry on top of all of it is my desire to keep creating. I was in a creativity groove this summer, and I love it. I poured myself into my creative pursuits, writing and dreaming up ideas. I started new projects, and continued to push forward on completed projects. I published an ebook, sent out countless queries for my novel, started the proposal for a new book, and wrote blog posts for several different sites.
It was so much fun! My writer heart felt very fulfilled.
Now, however, the time to create has begun to taper, and I know that when the baby arrives there will be a period of time when it stops altogether. Fatigue plays a role in this lack of creativity, as do all those other tasks I want to accomplish. I’m still setting aside some time to write, but not as much as before.
And that is okay.
Living this life as a creative is a constant balance of knowing what I need to do and what I want to do. We creatives tend to be our own worst critics, never feeling like what we do is enough, but in the pursuing of our art, we can so quickly forget to live.
A couple of weeks ago, the kids and I watched the movie Hook and I was struck by the last line of the film. Granny Wendy looks gently at Peter after he returns from the grand adventure in Neverland.
“So,” she says. “Your adventures are over.”
“Oh no,” he replies. “To live – to live would be an awfully big adventure.”
In the quest to accomplish and finish and do, it’s really easy to forget to live. Stepping away from the To-Do list long enough to swim with my children is not a waste of time – it’s living.
Putting aside the writing for today so that I can focus on preparing for the arrival of my daughter is not a waste – it’s living.
Enjoying a game night with my family instead of folding and putting away that laundry is not a poor use of time – it’s living. (And let’s face it – who wants to do laundry anyway, Amirite?!)
It’s all part of the adventure.
So this one is for all the creatives who feel like there just isn’t enough time to create. Don’t be afraid to set it all aside for a little while. Don’t be afraid to live, because to live is the grandest adventure of them all.
We are in massive preparation mode around here, and I am on a mission of epic proportions to get my house under control. It is a bit of an exercise in futility given that school has been out, and I’ve had roughly 8 children on average inside my home all summer long, but it makes me feel like I’m moving forward.
The kids head back to school tomorrow. Big launch!
The baby is coming in one month. Huge launch!
My e-book releases next Monday. Big, huge, massive launch!
That’s right – my first e-book, 30 Days to Becoming a Writer, releases on Amazon next Monday and I am so excited to share this with everyone. I’m really proud of the way this book has come together, and I’ve worked hard at making it the best I could possibly offer to the world.
If you’re interested in being a part of my launch team, please leave me a comment with your email address, and I’ll send you more information. In the meantime, I will continue all the preparations for launch.
Look for more information in the coming days, and for me to return to blogging with more fervor now that I have a little time to stretch together a few thoughts.
