The Monday Music Shower....

starting a tradition here for the blog.

Not that I am working or anything...in fact, I am a Stay-at-home Mom...so the "dreaded" Monday or the "welcomed" Friday shouldn't really be a big difference in my world, should it? Oh but it so does! For when the weekend is over, it means that MY HUSBAND returns to work and I am FULL-TIME almost 24-7 Mom. During the weekend,it's the two of us with this energetic bundle of love. Well, actually to my husband's credit, that's not fully true. I have his help during the weekday mornings, so I can actually do human things, like brush teeth and shower...but it's just different during the weekend.

Anyhow, so there's a small part of me that does not look SO forward to Mondays and this is where the new tradition will come in.....

One refreshing thing for me and that can help with getting myself on the right foot for my day (or even being able to have my A-game on) are showers. Just feel energized, prepared and motivated. So, on this blog, Monday Music Showers...posting a song/video. The kind that you shamelessly belt out in the shower or when driving. The kind that keeps playing in your head that you find yourself strutting to throughout the day. The kind that gives you the pep for the day that's so needed to get the week on the right foot. The kind that defeats the purpose of Hump Wednesday. (who comes up with these titles...?)

Anyhow, here's the first one.

I love this song. I actually used it for one of the bridal fashion shows I coordinated last year. Don't remember how I came across it but here's an interesting fact. Ida Corr is of Danish and Gambian descent. Pretty girl, eh? And talented. And um, I'm not going to even go into the "dancewear" being used...but nonetheless, good song.

K, now go jump in the shower and strut throughout your day with "Let Me Think About It...."

Feel free to comment with your video/music ideas and it might just be posted for one of these Monday Showers.

One World One Heart 2011

*** Comments are now closed. Thanks for participating. I have posted the winner for today's post ***

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I am participating in the One World One Heart 2011 Event. It's a way of opening up our doors to all other bloggers....think of it as a major international housewarming! So on that note, welcome! You'll get to know me as a SAHM with a lot of energy, creativity and always with multiple projects going on at the same time. I'm married for about 5 years and have a little one, a 21 month old son, named Eliel.

Some of the things I love:

Ballroom dancing...I used to compete when I lived in the States and in fact, that is where I met my husband...he was my dance partner for oooh, one competition (3 months) before we decided to officially date. (Another secret, we were married 7 months later!)

Reading....I always have a yearly book list and a number of books on the go simultaneously.

Home Decorating....I could possibly be the Spanish Martha Stewart....always up for refurnishing, repurposing, redecorating...you get the point. It also helps that my next love is....

Crafting...nuff said, right? I think for the last 4 years of my New Year's Resolutions, it's been "Don't packrat.....you cannot keep that mere inch of that pretty ribbon because you THINK you are going to use it later on....."

And other things --- love love LOVE robin's egg blue color, hot chocolate, cheesecake (I make a killer one -- killer, to my thighs lol)...and recently have discovered that I have a secret fascination with birds --- whether art, figurines....don't know where that came from.

So come on in, get comfortable and enjoy looking around here at my little house on Blog Street.

And with any event or party, there is a door prize. To one lucky visitor, I am giving away a handcrafted headpiece, either to be used by that casually fabulous lady for a night on the town or for a bride who wants something different. This is an example of one, but I just got some new fabric that I would love to work with. The winner gets to choose from among the ones I will post on February 17th. The headpiece comes with a pin to attach to your lapel, blazer, hat or purse!

To enter: Just leave a comment below. And my door (and this event) is open starting January 30th until Feb 17th which I will then post the name of the winner and email the winner at the email address left in the comment box. (The winner will be chosen at random).

Come Take the Dare....

....to Live Fully (Right Where You Are)...

Join the (in)Courage Book Club where this book will be discussed both online and in video.

Here's an excerpt from Chapter 1:

A glowing sun-orb fills an August sky the day this story begins, the day that I am born,the day I begin to live.

And I fill my mother’s tearing ring of fire with my body emerging, virgin lungs searing with air of this earth. I unfold from the womb, from the diameter of her fullness, empty her out—and she bleeds. Vernix-creased and squalling, I am held to the light.

Then they name me.

Could a name be any shorter? Three letters without even the flourish of an e. Ann, a trio of curves and lines.
It means “full of grace.”

I haven’t been.

What does it mean to live full of grace? To live fully alive?

They wash my pasty skin and I breathe and I flail. I flail.

For decades, a life, I continue to flail and strive and come up so seemingly … empty. I haven’t lived up to my christening.

Maybe in those first few years my life curled like cupped hands, a receptacle open to the gifts God gives. But of those years, I have no memories. For they say memory jolts awake with trauma’s electricity. That would be the year I turned four. The year when blood pooled and my sister died and I, all of us, snapped shut to grace.


Standing at the side porch window, watching my parents’ stunned bending, I wonder if my mother had held me in those natal moments of naming like she held my sister in death.

In November light, I see my mother and father sitting on the back porch step rocking her swaddled body in their arms. I press my face to the kitchen window, the cold glass, and watch them, watch their lips move, not with sleep prayers, but with pleas for waking, whole and miraculous. It does not come.

The police do. They fill out reports. Blood seeps through that the blanket bound. I see that too, even now.

Memory’s surge burns deep.

That staining of her blood scorches me, but less than the blister of seeing her uncovered, lying there.

She had only toddled into the farm lane, wandering after a cat, and I can see the delivery truck driver sitting at the kitchen table, his head in his hands, and I remember how he sobbed that he had never seen her. But I still see her, and I cannot forget. Her body, fragile and small, crushed by a truck’s load in our farmyard, blood soaking into the thirsty, track-beaten earth. That’s the moment the cosmos shifted, shattering any cupping of hands.

I can still hear my mother’s witnessing-scream, see my father’s eyes shot white through.

My parents don’t press charges and they are farmers and they keep trying to breathe, keep the body moving to keep the soul from atrophying.

Mama cries when she strings out the laundry. She holds my youngest baby sister, a mere three weeks old, to the breast, and I can’t imagine how a woman only weeks fragile from the birth of her fourth child witnesses the blood-on-gravel death of her third child and she leaks milk for the babe and she leaks grief for the buried daughter.

Dad tells us a thousand times the story after dinner, how her eyes were water-clear and without shores, how she held his neck when she hugged him and held on for dear life. We accept the day of her death at day as an accident.

But an act allowed by God?

For years, my sister flashes through my nights, her body crumpled on gravel.

Sometimes in dreams, I cradle her in the quilt Mama made for her, pale green with the hand-embroidered Humpty Dumpty and Little Bo Peep, and she’s safely cocooned. I await her unfurling and the rebirth.

Instead the earth opens wide and swallows her up.

At the grave’s precipice, our feet scuff dirt, and chunks of the firmament fall away.

A clod of dirt hits the casket, shatters.

Shatters over my little sister with the white-blonde hair, the little sister who teased me and laughed; and the way she’d throw her head back and laugh, her milk-white cheeks dimpled right through with happiness, and I’d scoop close all her belly-giggling life.

They lay her gravestone flat into the earth, a black granite slab engraved with no dates, only the five letters of her name. Aimee. It means “loved one.” How she was. We had loved her. And with the laying of her gravestone, the closing up of her deathbed, so closed our lives.

Closed to any notion of grace.

Really, when you bury a child— or when you just simply get up every day and live life raw—you murmur the question soundlessly. No one hears.
Can there be a good God?

A God who graces with good gifts when a crib lies empty through long nights, and bugs burrow through coffins?

Where is God, really?

How can He be good when babies die, and marriages implode, and dreams blow away, dust in the wind?

Where is grace bestowed when cancer gnaws and loneliness aches and nameless places in us soundlessly die, break off without reason, erode away?

Where hides this joy of the Lord, this God who fills the earth with good things, and how do I fully live when life is full of hurt?

How do I wake up to joy and grace and beauty and all that is the fullest life when I must stay numb to losses and crushed dreams and all that empties me out?

…. How do we choose to allow the holes to become seeing-through-to-God places? To more-God places?

How do I give up resentment for gratitude, gnawing anger for spilling joy? Self-focus for God-communion.

To fully live—to live full of grace and joy and all that is beauty eternal. It is possible, wildly.

I now see and testify.

So this story— my story .
A dare to an emptier, fuller life.”


How to Join the Book Club? Just pick up a copy of the book and meet at the (in)Courage website every Sunday and Wednesday for videos and discussion.

Video Chapter 1 Sunday, February 06, 2011
Video Chapter 2 Wednesday, February 09, 2011
Video Chapter 3 Sunday, February 13, 2011
Video Chapter 4 Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Video Chapter 5 Sunday, February 20, 2011
Video Chapter 6 Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Video Chapter 7 Sunday, February 27, 2011
Video Chapter 8 Wednesday, March 02, 2011
Video Chapter 9 Sunday, March 06, 2011
Video Chapter 10 Wednesday, March 09, 2011
Video Chapter 11 Sunday, March 13, 2011
Video Chapter 12 Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Introducing One World One Heart 2011

Consider this a virtual appetizer of what's to come January 30th....be sure to visit my blog then for more details of this amazing event and to find out what my giveaway is........

I am participating in the One World One Heart 2011 Event.

It's a way of opening up our doors to all other bloggers....think of it as a major international housewarming! Enjoy the homes and creativity of over 1000 international bloggers -- from right here in Canada to the US, to China, to Australia and even as remote as a location as a friend I made in Mauritius!

And with any event or party, there are plenty of door prizes to be won. How exciting is that!?

Welcoming Reconstruction...

1 Corinthians 3:15
...but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.

Looking at the list of blog posts, it's interesting that I started blogging about a year ago (Dec 2009)......and from that time until now, it's been a Year of Fire for me and my family. Individually and collectively, we've been through some major ordeals.

But even with that fire, though there are some fragile and delicate parts of me that have been singed, scarred or even destroyed, I am still here. Here -- somewhat new, and yet now, even more of myself than I was to begin with. Refined yet still original.

This year, is a Year of being Refreshed, Renewed and filled with Purpose and Priority. (ha, and with that, it's 10:30pm and I am blogging instead of putting sleep as priority). But nonetheless, my family and I have made heartfelt promises to ourselves and each other, to change our pace of life, to refocus and to re-engage.

We welcome you on our journey.