Archive | March 2024

What I am now

Mar28

When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?

When I was 5 years old, my dream was to go to college. Harvard was my pick, but that was mainly because I couldn’t think of any other colleges. I wanted to get married the day after I graduated, and then have a baby right away. I wanted to be a wife and mom.

Essentially, that’s what I became. I did not go to Harvard. I went to a different college. And my timeline was off. I got married one year after I graduated and had my baby one year, one month, and one day later. But I’m pretty much living the life I dreamed at 5 years old.

Some things didn’t work out as I expected. I thought I would have several children. And that proved to not be feasible. I don’t live where I wanted to live. But I am happily married and the mother of a wonderful girl.

There were parts of my childhood where I wanted to be other things. In second grade, I really wanted to become a doctor, and my uncle gave me a stethoscope for my birthday. In first grade I wanted to be a spy and do human intelligence for the government. Later I wanted to be a writer, a lawyer, and a professor at various times. But I always felt confused because I understood that being a stay at home mother was important and my family wanted me to do that. But they also wanted me to have some big career. I didn’t want to make my kids go to daycare (I had gone to daycare myself for a time and didn’t like it), and I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to be there for my family and also work. Work life balance was an issue for me at a young age. I could foresee the problems that many grown women of my generation would have. We expect women to work like they are not mothers and mother like they don’t have to work.  But eventually I learned that the better choice is to stay home.

Moving, Angel, Vacation

Mar28

This week I found out we will be moving sooner than I expected. I will really miss this house by the ocean, our cute neighborhood, and my friend C. Moving is never easy. It’s especially hard on children. I know my daughter will miss all her friends here.

Yesterday there was an awards ceremony at her school. She got honor roll, but she also won the Christian character award for her class. I’m so proud of my angel. She tries really hard to be a good little person. She’s such a gift. My husband got to go to the ceremony.

I am thinking I may start photographing people again, particularly with my instax wide and instax mini. Side note. Instax is way better than Polaroid, and I will die on that hill! Anyways, I might ask in local mom groups if anybody would pose for me. And this might sound weird, but I love photographing indoor spaces sometimes, and beautiful homes would be nice to photograph. I do my best to get creative with photography in my own home, but a change of scenery would be nice.

I am now on Easter Break. My daughter is home from school, so I don’t have to do pick up and drop off. Beyond that, my days will pretty much be business as usual until we leave for vacation. Our vacation starts on Easter Sunday. My husband rented us a cottage, and we’re going to the theme park, the aquarium, an alligator rescue etc. I’m so excited just to get out of town for a week and experience new things. I’ve bought a ton of film for my instant cameras, and I can’t wait to photograph new things!

Dreary, Colorsplash, Homeschooling

Mar22

Today has been dark and dreary. The weather brought my mood down a lot. I can enjoy an afternoon downpour laced with lightning, but a day so dark from the start that you don’t know the sun has risen until well after dawn is another thing. Days like this suck. I adore the Pacific Northwest, but I wonder how well I would cope with living there year round. They say Colorado has a hard winter, but in truth, although there’s a lot of snow and it’s very cold, most days are sunny even in January. I still want to settle in Colorado. One day maybe.

I digress. This weather sucks the life out of me. But I’m doing my best to be creative. I’ve been looking through my Lomography Colorsplash book. I have the Colorsplash camera, but I don’t really enjoy using it. The effects of all the different colored flash gels are beautiful, but something about the camera is just unpleasant to work with and hold. So I’ve been adding color layers and doing color tuning to mimic the effects of the camera. It’s fun and doesn’t take too much energy on a day like this.

I’ve cooked so much recently that the fridge is filled with leftovers, so I don’t have to cook tonight. My daughter has been home with me this afternoon because she had a half day at school today. It’s so nice to have her around. Homeschooling next year can’t come soon enough. I’m really excited about embarking on a journey of discovery with my daughter. I look forward to guiding her as she discovers the world and learns about herself, too. Hopefully, she will find her passion. Maybe she’ll have many passions, as I do. But right now, she’s excited about space and genetics. I’ve been researching good books to use to teach these subjects – both textbook sort of books and creative nonfiction on the topics. Punnett squares are my thing. This is going to be an exciting year.

I used 1998 cam for this. When I can’t use real film, it’s fun to play with film filters.

My Wheelchair Is Here!

Mar21

My wheelchair and some of the accessories have arrived. We are going on vacation soon, and the wheelchair will allow me to enjoy theme parks, the aquarium, big museums, and more.

If you are wondering why I need a wheelchair, it is because I needed surgery on my right ankle several years ago, and the surgery went wrong, and I received poor post op care. That all added up to me being on IV antibiotics for a bone infection for 6 weeks, and ending up with an ankle that doesn’t allow me to walk very far and gives me a hard time on stairs.

I lost the ability to go on walks like I used to love to do. I used to adore sprinting too. Losing the ability to take walks made me sad for a long time, and it also contributed to weight gain strongly. I used to walk miles every day. After the nightmare with the bad operation, I had trouble making it from one end of a store to the other.

A wheelchair really wasn’t a thought, though, until the last time my husband and I flew together. We had to traverse a large airport and I ended up stuck in the middle of it, unable to go any farther and fighting back tears because my ankle was killing me and I’d lost my full range of motion. Luckily he was able to find a nice staff member who got us a wheelchair for me to use. He pushed me the rest of the way. I felt bad about it but I needed the help. After that, we began seriously discussing purchasing a wheelchair to use in situations like that. And now that we’re looking at a vacation to a theme park, it seemed like a good time to buy one.

My husband very sweetly ordered cool stuff to go with it, like a cupholder for our drinks, and storage pouches for phones and cameras. I look forward to seeing it all put together.

Submission is Beautiful

Mar20

So many people are against submission because feminism and rebelling against the Bible are so popular. Many women who find my Instagram assume I am dumb and abused.

When I first married my husband, submission was not a part of my life. My husband even told me he wanted to leave “obey” out of our otherwise traditional wedding vows. He did not want me to obey him.

The beauty of submission came to me in a flash from the Holy Spirit when God convicted me to wear a headcover. I had been married a few years at that point. My daughter was a toddler. God had highlighted the verses on wives submitting to their husbands and laid those verses on my heart. But I wrestled with them. Equality is everything right? I didn’t want to give up my will or concede any power. These verses made me angry at God. I didn’t understand how God could love women as much as men and yet tell us that our will must be subordinate to theirs.

In a flash, in my car at my inlaw’s house, the Holy Spirit showed me the beauty of submission. I wept. I sat in my car and wept. I felt safe, free, feminine. Everything made sense. Rapturous wonder filled my spirit. Submission, isn’t bondage. It is protection. The Bible does not instruct husbands to micromanage their wives. Submitting to your husband doesn’t mean giving up everything that you love to do and have. Presumably you married a man who loves you, so you shouldn’t worry about that. What submission meant was that for the first time in my life I could let go of worry. God was in control through my husband. The big decisions didn’t fall on my shoulders.

It fell awkward, but when I spoke to my husband that night, I told him about the conviction. I received from the Holy Spirit and brought up submission. My husband never pushed the issue, though he was receptive to being the head of the house. He just didn’t want to force me, and he grew up in a house with an egalitarian marriage, so that was what he was used to. But as he read the scriptures and I told him about headcovering and my conviction on submission from the Holy Spirit, he decided to try it. We are both happy with it and haven’t looked back since. I don’t think we will ever be egalitarian again.

Why Should She Die for Not Being Popular?

Mar17

Caitlin, age two, is in my front yard surrounding Agatha. Agatha is a beautiful ornamental grass in front of my pink beach house that the lawn crew put there to make my yard lovely. Caitlin, for her part, isn’t a bad girl. Not to me, but she is misunderstood. Caitin is a weed.

As a resident of middle class suburbia, I supposedly have an ethical obligation to tear her roots from the ground or burn her with herbicide. Weeds cannot be allowed to thrive. But Caitlin isn’t poisonous, not to my knowledge anyway. She isn’t burning our crops or tearing down democracy. Humanity just decided that she wasn’t pretty emough. Her tenacity and verdant vivacity do not impress the yard police. But they tug at my heart strings.

When I buy my forever home, I don’t want a well manicured lawn. I want a moss garden or a biologically diverse group of grasses and wildflowers born to thrive in whatever climate we have settled in. I will not need a lawn mower. I want a wild yard that’s good for bees and butterflies and pollinators in general. Not a green wasteland. A golf course yard.

So for now, I leave Caitlin alone. I can’t be guarantee maintenance won’t dig her up when we leave, but I hope she gets to live a long life.

Glass, Competition, Earth

Mar16

What movies or TV series have you watched more than 5 times?

“Blown Away,” the glass blowing competition on Netflix, is a favorite of mine. My husband and I have already watched the new season. I have also watched competition shows several times, especially “Alone.” I love wilderness and survival shows, so “Alone,” a competition where people have to live alone in the wild, is one of my all time favorite shows.

I have also seen every episode of South Park numerous times! Crass but funny, Parker and Stone’s commentary on society is always interesting and the writing is always hilarious.

I’ve seen Walking With Dinosaurs many times. I adore that show and show’s like it. I also love the BBC nature documentaries like “Frozen Planet.”

The Netflix natural history documentary titled “Life on Our Planet” is currently my favorite show. I love imagining prehistoric Earth. Definitely one to watch many times.

Gentle Parenting Sucks

Mar12

Hear me out. Teaching kids to articulate their feelings is wonderful. But not all feelings deserve validation, and if you really want to prepare your children for the world, you must teach them when their feelings are or are not relevant. Recently I watched a video in which a mother of several children talks about how her youngest boy is her favorite and when he hits his sisters she just thinks he’s having a bad day. If my son were hitting girls, I would sincerely not give a damn what kind of day he was having. If he wasn’t having a bad day before he would be when I was done.

Teachers are quitting in droves, and it is because gen alpha is so horrid. Gen alpha are the children myself and my peers in the millennial generation are raising. Supporters of the parenting philosophy argue that it teaches children to be in touch with their feelings and validates their experiences. But only a narcissist thinks the world revolves around their feelings. I never became a teacher because I knew I didn’t want to take the kind of crap that goes on in the school system.

If little Timmy doesn’t want to play nice or do his homework, he should be met with punishment and teaching. Yes, punishment. He must learn that there are boundaries and where those boundaries are. Teachers aren’t there to coddle your children and tell them they’re special all day. They get paid to teach math and reading etc. And many of them can’t do that because the behavior of their students is so bad.

I have seen parents reasoning with tantrum throwing 2-year-olds. First of all, nobody in the middle of a tantrum can be reasoned with, regardless of their age. Secondly, the tantrum just needs to stop and it doesn’t really matter how little Timmy feels. Maybe being told to leave the toy store makes him angry, but you know what? Tough. No one cares, and the rest of us are sick of listening to sniveling brats tear apart stores and schools. If I’m Timmy’s mom, I don’t care either. I don’t ask my daughter to do things. I tell her to do them. And she learned from a young age that when I tell her it’s time to leave the store or do her homework or put something down or whatever, that it’s not optional. Hence why my daughter is a well behaved little lady. She was raised to respect authority.

Stop treating your children like they are the center of the universe. They are and should be the center of your universe, but they are not the center of the universe. Teachers don’t have time to work through the feelings of a class of 20 plus kids. They need to do what they’re told.

If you think gentle parenting is working for you, then carry on, but I would ask my child’s teachers. Because if your kid isn’t behaving in school, then your parenting isn’t working.

Big Cleaning Day

Mar12

Although I was still sick, I was doing a little better, and I cleaned the house like crazy. Dusting, laundry, organizing, dishes, picking up, cleaning bathrooms etc. Disinfecting things felt good. I want to chase the sick out of the house.

I got 150 zink photo paper stickers recently, and I have been printing my photos on them with my Canon Ivy Printer. The journaling and scrapbooking possibilities are endless. Some of my photos I am sticking in my 12×12 scrapbook. The paper is plain, brown, and thick. I put photos, poems, and washi tape in it. I add glitter as well.

Today I have more to do. Unfortunately I am depressed, so things are slow going. Right now I’m trying to start the day with a little art therapy to improve my mood and lessen my anxiety. Collage and painting are both good for that, but I have decided to focus on collage this morning. I’m cutting and pasting away (digitally).

As you can see, I reorganized a small section of the library. It’s hard to keep the books in order because we have so many, and we add more all the time.

Books!

Mar9

So right now I’m enjoying a couple of books. My husband is napping, and my daughter is at the bowling alley with a friend. The first book I’m reading is about great women artists. The second book is about hermit crab essays. Hermit crab essays are quickly becoming my obsession. If you haven’t heard the term before, a hermit crab essay is one written in the style of another text. Recipe as essay, medical pamphlet as essay. Essay written as a Christmas carol. You can be as creative with it as you want.

Phaidon publishes such good books.

I like drawing inspiration from a variety of artists and art forms. This book features 400 female artists from a 500 year time span to present day. I’m encountering artists I don’t know, and I’m enjoying it.