Monday's Letters...Nurture, Destroy.

I have been thinking a lot about what matters in my life since my first post like this two weeks ago, if nothing else these posts have helped me in that capacity. Hopefully they have helped you too?! Hopefully you started a private personal blog and are uploading pictures you take of your family and writing down your memories and thoughts. It's okay if you haven't yet, hopefully you will soon :) It took me a long while to commit to keeping a family journal. If it didn't include pictures I wouldn't do it, pictures are worth a thousand words each so I really don't do a ton of writing. I upload pictures and then come back later and write in each post. I will say the one thing I want to improve is throwing in posts without pictures. Posts that are just my thoughts on life and learning like these posts here. We may not realize all we are learning and going through until we put our fingers to the keyboard and let it out. To go back and read from a post from a month ( or year etc.) ago may just be the advice you were looking for. What seems profound one week may be a lost to you a month later, not that it has lost profundity (spell check didn't say this word is wrong so I am going with it) we just can't keep it all in the fore front of our minds, there is only so much space there.

What I have noticed about life...we learn by Repetition for a reason, we can't absorb all that we need to know about a subject in one instance thus the need for repetition. I like you have known this a long while, but on occasion get a good reminder why that is. This happened to me a few weeks ago, and had a huge impact on me as I am still thinking about it. It was a moment when things clicked into place in my mind and heart at the same time. It left me with a greater understanding, one which surpasses what I thought I knew. I was sitting on the couch my husbands head in my lap as I pulled his hair and rubbed his head, the good kind of hair pulling! (try it sometime, grab a handful of hair as close to the roots as you can and gently pull = heaven) As I pull his hair I swear I can see the stress evaporating, I am glad he's not a stress eater or we would be in trouble! As he lay there telling me his troubles, I was also holding in my heart my kids and there different needs and it suddenly hit me, yes, like a ton of bricks. I know these moments where things coalesce in my heart and mind are by the power of the Holy Ghost. It's a sudden knowledge and understanding of something we have heard about or thought about a hundred million times and now "get it' in a new way. In one instance I realized the role of wife and mother, we are the keeper of the flame, without us things deteriorate and fall into chaos. Without a caring and nurturing touch to keep a pulse on how everyone is doing things fall apart.

The emotion of the mother sums up the joy of motherhood.

I don't want to be so busy with what I have going on that I pull my focus away from my family. Using an example from this last week...like not taking the time to offer up a sincere prayer in my husbands behalf. My testimony of prayer was strengthened as I truly prayed for my husband as he has a lot of stress at work and he came home that night and said he started feeling much better around noon, I had prayed for him in the late morning.  He tells me to pray for him often and I usually utter a few words for him, but sadly not often enough do I pray for him with real intent. In all my quick prayers for him he has never come home saying anything close to "my whole outlook and feeling changed". He leaves weary and usually comes home that way (during trial, regular work stuff is usually not near as rough). Though I may not be able to take the stress from him myself, I can't go to work with him and help him, but the Lord can. I can serve him by praying for him which creates real tangible results. Lesson learned, until I need another reminder that is, oh repetition, whenever will I keep this stuff in my thick skull?!

Don't even think for a minute however that I think taking care of the family is solely my job, he has his role and he does a good job. He works hard to provide for our family, he listens to me, he's good tempered, he supports me in my endeavors and is never domineering. I didn't plan on writing a book on this matter, heck I didn't know what was going to come out as I sat down to write I just wanted to be open and honest like I would be if I were writing in my private journal.

I have two kids I know many families with more and I feel like I can barely keep up with two kids needs. A year or so before I started The SIP project I felt like I really needed to focus on serving my family and naturally the circle of serving would grow outwards from there. Makes perfect sense right?! Me being the big idea person that I am I didn't fully do this, I wanted to do something bigger. It made perfect sense, but I didn't fully embrace it. Now I am in the throws of The SIP project and Service Beans and many other good things ,but if I had fully embraced those promptings I would have an easier time always putting my family first. I know I  have some room to grow here, I want my husband to feel loved, cherished and supported. I want my kids to be ready for life when they leave our home. I don't want them to go out into the world at 18 and spend 10 years "finding themselves" I want them to leave knowing exactly who they are and feeling such confidence that they step right into making a positive impact in the world. For our family I know this will require me staying home with my kids,  manning the back door so to speak with my husband at the front door. We won't keep our kids and marriage safe if were both consumed only with ourselves. I have thought about finding a job, after weighing it all out in my mind I think I will just work on getting paying photography gigs. Not everyone is willing to do service for pictures I may as well let them pay me if they won't do a service project. All of this has started rolling around in my heart because my son will be in school in a year and I never thought I would find myself in this position so early. My daughter will be 7 next month, I don't know where time has gone! If life keeps speeding up from here then it would stand to reason the next 7 years will go by even faster. We really don't have much time to raise our kids. This life is all about choosing our priorities, we can't do it all, we weren't meant to, so choose wisely and prayerfully.

one more note...

Recently it's been a great joy to take these two beautiful women's maternity photos at such a pivotal time in their lives. I have known one for about 9 years and the other about 5 years. I had my daughter when I was 23 and I am sure people looked at me with this tiny baby and thought "she's so young!" Now I am 30 and see mothers in their early 20's and think "she's so young." I know I'm not much older then them but it's amazing how much you can learn in 7 years, and how much my eyes have been opened to how much more I need to grow. I dedicate this letter to all moms and moms to be :) There is no greater job on earth then being a mom. It can be hard to let go of what we want to do in this life and focus on our kids, but here again when we lose ourselves find ourselves, I am still working on the losing part ha ha!

 Now go write your letter...

Guess I'll just spill my guts to you?!

I have to admit sometimes I don't know how much of me I should share on here. My focus is service and pictures of course, but sometimes I don't know if what I post about is what people want to see generated from The SIP project. What do you want me to post about/work on? I guess I have never really asked that, know why?! Cause I am really good at assuming!

I am thinking it could be fun to do a weekly post that's really more of a letter called Monday Reflections, (what else should I call it? I'm not sold on Monday Reflections.) One that you could use as a weekly prompt to write a letter along with me. You could go as far as starting a private personal blog that you use for journaling, using this writing prompt and print it out once a year. I would also encourage you to create other posts for your journaling blog and add pictures to go along with them. I have really been into my private family blog and I guess that type of journaling is spilling into The SIP project.

What I've Noticed About My Life...I was talking to my SIL Carla about this as I was packing up her pantry for her. I recently organized a Self-Reliance Fair for our community for the second year in a row. It takes 5 months of planning start to finish. Here is what I noticed; If I have cereal in my cupboard I am stressed, think Golden Grahms, Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Marshmallow Mattie's. It may seem silly to put this on here, but when I recognize these type of things it can better help me plan and snap out of it.  We do things like buy cereal and don't make the connection that stress is affecting our health. It's not like I am unconsciously buying cereal, but the next time I am at the store and have the urge to buy cereal I can step back and see what is stressing me enough to make me want to buy comfort food. Then hopefully it won't make it into my cart.

So the fair was two weeks ago and I have been trying to catch up on everything else I was putting off to work on the fair. I wanted to just get away, but I can't, such is life, right?! So my SIL and her family of 7 (well in Sept. they will be) have to move suddenly and so I of course want to help them, but I also just want to get away. I have had the kids stay the night a few nights and went over another day and helped pack all day long. What I noticed is even though I feel like I have a ton I need to catch up on, I didn't feel like helping put me behind. It was a busy week last week and as I reflect on it, I was the happiest when I was willing to lay aside what I wanted to do and help someone else instead. It's kinda seems like an oxymoron to lose yourself to find yourself, but it works, try it.

Summer Time...Last summer I started SIP Summer Camp as a way to do service with my kids over summer break it ended up being 9 weeks total. It was a lot to do, I had to organize the service project, document it and then blog about it in a week time frame. It just felt a little rushed, though we had a great time and included friends and family I felt like I couldn't spend the time to focus on the 'why' because I had to hurry on to next weeks plans. I am sure my kids learned and grew from last years experiences I just think it will be good to change this years approach. This year I would like to focus on doing service just with my kids. I am hoping it will give me more time to talk to them about what we are doing and why. I still haven't figured it all out and the summer is flying by. I wish I could be more like Sheila from Pennies of Time, she's so on top of it!

What inspires me...My SIL Keri watching my SIL Carla's [Carla: a women with one of the most tender hearts known to man.] kids for 5 hours in the house across the street (her mom's house) so Carla could get some packing done.

The picture is from a post I did a while back.

My SIL Keri who I sat down with last week to go over my idea for the large collection container for Service Beans. A program I came up with and will be heading up on the PTO in August. It's a way to raise money for local needs through the kids at the school doing service, more on that later. We drew up the plans and when I mean we, I drew up what I was thinking and I saw the look on her face, it didn't help her understand what I wanted at all Lol. Luckily she is awesome and we got it all figured out and she drew up the plans. We loaded up 6 kids and headed to Hobby Lobby and then to Lowe's. Then back to her house to start building it. We, (again her, I just assisted when I could, since I know next to nothing about wood working) worked in the HOT garage for about 3 hours. I know just like any of us she has a list of things she could have been doing instead of helping me with a program that won't even effect her kids...well maybe next year when she starts Service Beans at her kids school :)

My sister Amy was telling me about her cousin Misty and how one of her 3 little boys had to be in the hospital for heart problems. While she was at the hospital she heard about 150 women and children most of which have AIDS. They're coming here from Congo I believe to live in Berkeley and get the medical care they need. Well of course they are moving into unfurnished apartments and have like 2 pairs of clothes each. Misty heard this and while she had plenty of reason to dismiss it and focus solely on her little boy she immediately wanted to organize a way to help them get the basics, furniture, clothes, toys etc. I am sure they are just glad to be in the states, but wouldn't it be grand to have people welcome you into a foreign country by loving kindness. I will keep you posted on how we can help. I was telling Zaya about  these people and I think it really had an impact on her, she even wanted to send them some of her toys. I know it impacted me!
Until I wrote this out I hadn't realized those who inspired me so much this past week are all women in my family. I am blessed to be influenced by these giving women and I know their biggest influence is the Savior.

This is inspirational to the hilt! It's one thing to stick your toes into the waters of service, but it's a whole other thing to jump in 100%! If this isn't jumping in I don't know what is. Listen to Marcus Mitchell's interview. He gives away half of his income! I was interviewed on the Pay It Forward Radio show last year, if you need a pick-me-up listen to one of these interviews especially his!

Like I said at the beginning of the post I haven't really asked what kind of posts you would like me to generate for The SIP project. Please take a minute and tell me the one type of post that would interest you the most. For example, serving with kids, creating a service project from scratch, using your talents, see these are the lines I think along so I really need your input, I want to post about what interests you. Thank You! :)