Introverted and Calm

Dear 25 year old self, I’m 40 this year, and it’s not as old as you thought it would be… I have a fuzzy memory about lots of things due to something you will find out when you are around 33... Despite your current anxiety, you will meet a kind man with gentle strength who is the opposite of a playboy, and get married… not as early as your parents had hoped, but you will get married before you are 30. And yes, he is actually the man you saw in your dreams, but you won’t realize it until he gets a really short haircut one day, and the lights are dimmed while you guys were watching Battlestar Galactica at a friend’s house. You will also get to have your lifelong dream of becoming a mother, but it isn’t as soon as you had hoped, and you to hit a near death bump along the way, but the point is, you do become a mother of a daughter (who will keep you on your mental toes, so don’t skimp on your sleep now), and a son who melts your heart everyday. I know, I know, you...

The other day, I had one of my worst anger blow up at my youngest child. As most days, by the end of the evening, patience are running low, body feels tired, and kids are more cranky.  But when my 4 year old complained about the lovingly prepared dinner without even trying a bite, and then proceeded to be rigid over how his sister wanted to orient the nugget-comfort tumbling station, I lost it. If my usual angry mommy volume is a 5, this time, it was a 9.5.  I could feel my lungs clearing cobwebs, is how loud I was yelling.  Part of me knew I should tone it down, and move on, but another part of me wanted to instil the fear in my child that mommy is mad, and don't mess with mommy.  There is also this insane irritation over a child's whiny voice... it shrieks into my inner peace, and places cracks in my bucket.  It's surely related to PTSD!  Sometimes when I fear a child misbehaving at a store, I have to quickly remove myself from that aisle/section/stor...

Although I am not for setting new year resolutions, I love browsing through new wall calendar possibilities, as if buying the right one will set some sort of a tone for my year.  Wall calendars are more of a wall decoration really, so much of my life and my family's schedule is really on my google calendar, synced with my husband's devices, and my devices. Ken Browar & Deborah Ory,  Christine Shevchenko Dye sublimation print on aluminum, 50 x 42 in At the end of last year, I attended a gallery showing for " The Style of Movement: Fashion & Dance" by Ken Browar & Deborah Ory .  It was a wonderful experience, to marvel at photography of dancers in amazing fashion, in a beautiful airy, white space, I wished I could have owned a piece of the exhibit and have the space to display such works.  The artists had just published their second beautiful coffee table book: The Style of Movement , but I knew I wasn't quite ready to splurge on a book I didn...

I turned 40 last year, and had an early mid life crisis.  I hear it's common to have a lot of nostalgia once you turn 40, and I had so much to process.  I shared with my inner circle of friends and my Facebook connections my hopes/intentions for the next half of my life: "... If I estimate that I've lived half of my earthly life, I'd like to live the next half of life more simply, and more joyfully... I've been blessed with much, but I've also had difficulty processing much. I thought becoming a mother would be a destination... Even though I am my little one's whole world, there are inner voices that tell me I'm not enough unless I get xyz done. I'm working on turning those voices off... Here's hoping for taking care of things that DO matter, empowering myself to be an adult and listening to God and my important people. At 40, I enjoy introvert time, beauty in nature, quiet and calmness, and mild weathers. I've been married 10 y...

A new decade... and a new blog? I have big plans for this year... a shopping ban of sorts... It started with the intention of making a sacrifice...  Our church community is in a large financial campaign to restore an old historic building while merging two churches of two different cultures into a new entity.  I am a full time stay-at-home-mother.  While I'm saving my family plenty of childcare expenses and insourcing as much as possible to operate this household, I am working very little on my own 'professional work' while my children are so young.  So then when we were called to make sacrifices as a family for this financial campaign, my thoughts were intimidated by the prospect.  We are careful as is, since we are on one income in a high cost of living area near Boston, and money was tight in my family for the later half of childhood, so I wasn't a stranger to the concept of cutting back. The thought processing cycled through: cutting back on vac...