Category Archive: Blogging
Under the headline “Why getting messy can be good for children,” The Macomb Daily newspaper printed my photo in their Sunday, July 18 newspaper.
It was pretty cool. Here’s the photo:
If you Google muddy child, (and if you ignore the horror show shot of one particular small child, eek!) then Livia’s image will immediately pop up and that shot will lead you to this blog post. I believe that’s how a journalist from the Macomb Daily found me. We conversed back and forth via email and I submitted several images for consideration. I also gave a small email interview and was then quoted in the article.
Like most other papers, the Macomb Daily doesn’t publish every last article online, but I wish I could link to this one so you all could read it! I think I come off sounding much smarter and more professional than I really am. [wink, wink]
“We’ve always known that kids and play are just a natural combo,” [Dr. Michele] Borba said. “But new research also shows that letting kids engage in self-directed play has immense value for their social, emotional, cognitive and physical growth.”
Rebecca Tredway, 32, would agree.
The former middle school teacher and freelance photographer—whose blog, View From the Prairie Box—provides readers with a daily dose of images and stories about life in America’s Heartland—said, as a mom, she tries to value childish fun and exploration over cleanliness and easy parenting.
The article goes on, with a little more quotage by yours truly, to detail the benefits of messy, independent play for young children. If you’d like to read it in its entirety, you’ll have to stop by for a cup of coffee sometime. I have exactly one hard copy in my possession.
You can see the rest of the mud photo series on my Flickr account. My favorite shot is this one.
Who: Moi.
What: A month-ish of photos sans words.
Where: On the blog, of course.
Why: I want to be a better housekeeper (seriously!) and I want to see if blogging less will equal more focus on organization and general cleanliness. I have some projects—you could call them “trouble areas”—that I’d like to get cleaned up soon. So I’m going to flex my photography muscles, let the writing ones atrophy a bit, and build my true biceps by throwing away lots of crap. Wish me luck!
I rarely link to blogs from folks I don’t know.
But this post is so good, I can’t help but share it here:
I don’t want my children to be happy from It’s Almost Naptime!!
[HT: my buddy Haley, pregnant and blogging and hopefully getting a good night's rest tonight, from Missing Mississippi]
Bath time around here is an Event. (And when it can’t be an Event, it becomes a difficult task for everyone involved.) Sometimes there are bubbles and sometimes there is a new, special bath toy, but always there is one little girl, tons of mismatched and somewhat random toys to play with, soap and water.
And by the time the little girl gets out of the tub, she’s usually quite relaxed. She rolls up in a towel and takes a breather. All that fun in the hot water is hard work!
Challenge for the day: take your camera somewhere new. Let me know if you blog about it.
Livia is becoming surprisingly efficient at applying face paint. I’m trying not to plan her future career based on the whims of Liv-at-five, but still. Wouldn’t it be cool if she worked in the movies someday? She could get her mom onto the set to watch the action. She might win an Oscar for makeup. You never know.
These are the ramblings of a tired woman on a Friday night. I can hear car doors slamming for a movie and game night next door (no, not there, a tired woman lives at that house too). I feel very unhip and old and boring at the moment. Blogging on a Friday night. BLOGGING. Oh well. Hope these shots entertain you on a Friday as well.
I present: The Many Faces of Livia.
Oooo. Scary.
And sweet.
Super silly.
And serious.
Then find a piece of stationery, lined paper, graphing paper, recycled paper, back of a receipt, whatever you can find…
And write someone a letter. A love letter. An I’m sorry letter. A letter of thanks. A note to say how missed they are. A tale of your day, the weather or what your Great Aunt Bertha or coworker or creepy dude on the playground actually said to you last week. A rhymed couplet, scripture verse or haiku would be lovely as well.
I’m not posting again until ten people have commented that they’ve written and mailed a real, honest-to-goodness letter.
God bless you. Long live snail mail.
The garden produced a radish. I was pretty excited and then surprised myself by how much I enjoyed photographing the sole veggie the garden has produced (so far). Jeremy and I split the radish. It was spicy.
Shiloh visited the vet’s office for some vaccinations. During some sort of fecal, er, retrieval, I was reminded why I didn’t want to be a veterinarian: Shiloh’s pathetic puppy cries from the backroom were hard for me to hear.
Mom took Liv for the afternoon and gave me some delightful rest.
While Mom had Liv, Jeremy had a kidney stone. Still has it, as far as we know. A visited to LincCare confirmed the little bugger and at the moment, Jeremy is managing the pain. We appreciate prayers for the stone to pass quickly.
We’re moving on to watch a little Deadliest Catch now that Livia is asleep. ‘Night, y’all.
Shiloh is fun and sweet. Livia is fun and sweet. Baby birds and springtime are fun and sweet.
But Shiloh also requires extra work on our parts.
Mostly he requires extra work because Livia isn’t handling the new addition quite so well. Our sensitive kid, while fun and sweet, has been a pistol of naughtiness recently.
I’m freaking wiped out by her bad behavior.
I post pics and brief descriptions because I like the subject matter, but life isn’t always fun and sweet. Sometimes life is stressful and ugly.
My world doesn’t look the way I want it to. I never planned on having my child turn five without having a brother or sister to share life with. I never figured Jeremy and I would have just one child. And when people ask if I have other kids, my mind flits to the baby I lost over two years ago before I say in a fake cheerful voice, “Nope, she’s our only one!”
Many beloved friends are pregnant right now. It’s an incredible challenge for me to express excitement for them while still grieving the fact that I’m not pregnant. I’ve realized it’s okay to both hope and mourn at the same time, yet it’s hard to do both in a practical sense.
I’m not always sad about infertility. And I’m not always hopeless. But today I’m feeling the sadness while I wonder about the future. Will I be pregnant again some time soon? Will we adopt more children? Only my sovereign God knows.
(Quick, someone post of a picture of something fun and sweet.)
Not blog-surfing is better for me than blog surfing.
That’s what I discovered during the season of Lent. Well, that and the fact that announcing my plan for a spiritual journey might have actually stunted the journey before the first step was even taken.
I had great hopes for Lent. I wanted to pair the denial-of-self notion with forward steps in my understanding of God and my knowledge of Scriptures. Now, on the other side of 40+ days, I can’t say I increased my knowledge. I pretty much marched in one spot during that spiritual journey. Like many of my aspirations, it started out with a bang and ended with a whimper.
As to the avoidance of blogs, news, and Facebook (FB deserves a category of its own, doesn’t it?), it was an interesting undertaking. I’m a blogger and an avid student of All Things Pop Culture, so I actually did feel denied during the Lenten season. By the first Sunday—my respite day as a reminder of the future celebration of Resurrection Sunday—I was absolutely craving the Internet. In that one day I had to work hard to not completely ignore my family as I made an attempt to eat up all the blog posts I had missed in the previous four days. But something changed as the days passed. I began to miss other blogs less and less. I don’t say that flippantly, as though I’m not part of a valuable community, but it’s true that I didn’t really miss what I wasn’t aware existed. (Very similar to our experience of disconnecting from cable TV actually.)
Still, the no-blog-surfing rule wasn’t easy. There were a small number of times I missed out on important joys or heartaches of friends, and I felt a bit left out by learning of events days later. By Wednesday every week I felt highly annoyed by the whole exercise, and then by Sunday, when I could finally feast!, I didn’t really want to. Lent brought up the concept of you-always-want-what-you-can’t-have and as a result I saw myself as fairly spoiled. I’m so used to getting what I want, at least in little ways, that it was a very strange thing to deny myself of anything! In post-Lent days, I’ve realized that it’s common for me to want what I don’t have. In truth, self-denial and long-suffering are two practices I’m not well-acquainted with. It was the moments where denial was hard, where clicking on that one link would’ve been so simple, where I was reminded to turn to God for the power to push through.
In general, I live my life on my own, sometimes forgetting that I am a child of God, the Creator of the universe, Alpha and Omega, you get the picture. I seem to ignore the amazement of Christ’s sacrifical death for my sins and plug on through my days on my own strength. I don’t need to live that way. The Bible is pretty clear that God gives grace and wisdom and strength to us when we need it. Giving up blog-surfing for Lent wasn’t the biggest challenge I’ve ever faced, but it was a worthy reminder that 1) I need God a whole lot more than I think I do, and 2) I am a wuss when it comes to giving up my creature comforts.
There was one huge side benefit to this year’s Lent observance: I felt free to be more creative. By turning off the voices of other bloggers, I found my own again. I felt free to write, free to take photos, free to share those thoughts and pictures with the world. I also read A LOT more.
So, while I don’t plan on giving up blog land quite so drastically as I did during Lent, I think I may limit my time online in a big way. I cringe at making a grand announcement here (“No more Internet from 8:00am to 8:00pm!”) but I wonder if I’ll actually enact a change without an announcement. Hm. It’s something to think about.
If I had the stamina to do so, I would write something about Lent—why I’m doing it, why anyone should do it for that matter, and how it prepares us to celebrate Good Friday and Easter Sunday. But the past few days have been rough family-wise and frankly I don’t want to explain much to anyone at this point in the evening.
Livia is sick. Again. As in viral illness, vomiting, fever and constipation. Tuesday night was incredibly rough and Jeremy and I ended up with around 2 hours of sleep apiece. Last night was better, but still involved a child waking in the middle of the night—a child who then didn’t exactly embrace sleep at that point. Now both Jeremy and I are feeling run down. This is a serious issue for prayer, friends. We’ve had various illnesses in our household for the past 3-4 weeks and it is really wearing on us now. Blah.
For Lent I’m taking a break from blog-surfing. I’m skipping Facebook and ignoring my Google reader in order to do some spiritual focusing over the next 40+ days. I’m excited about spending more time reading the Bible, reflecting on Truth and doing what God asks of me. So forgive me for not commenting on your blogs; it’s nothing personal, I’m just not reading them. When the opportunity arises or when I feel creatively compelled, I’ll continue to post here. I’ll also continue to check my email on a regular basis.