Gratitude Bags

This is a month of being thankful for all of life's blessings, of which I have so many.  Part of showing my gratitude is giving what I can.  This was SO EASY too!  I hope this encourages other people to give what they can as well.

I don't do this enough, but I want to turn a new leaf in this department.  Especially now that I have kids who can learn how to be giving, caring citizens from such an early age.

We found this activity on Pinterest.  They called them Blessings Bags, but for some reason I called them Gratitude Bags and the name instantly stuck.  I don't want it to seem like I think the recipients of these bags need to be grateful to me, but the opposite.  In being able to give to others I feel grateful for all that I have.

We went to Target the other day and loaded our cart with things that we thought people would need if they didn't have a home.  Snacks, toiletries, socks.

This is what we bought for our Gratitude Bags:

Soap
Emergen-c
Deodorant
Kleenex
Bandaids
Gum
Mouthwash
Socks
Crackers
Applesauce (and spoon!)
Comb
And we also added a dollar bill

We dumped it all on the table and started a (sort of) assembly line.  Toddlers make any sort of assembly line a little like Lucy and Ethel, but it was a fun activity.  We even listened to Christmas carols while we worked.

I added a card with a note of encouragement in each bag too.  This summer I went yard-saling a ton and one of the treasures I found was a huge box of greeting cards.  I got to finally use some of them which was inordinately thrilling to me.  (I'm weird that way).

This is what the bag looks like when it's filled up with goodies.

We loaded the 12 bags into a box to keep in the car.  My plan is that when I see someone in need, I can just pull over and give them one.  Or if there is a homeless person at a freeway entrance I can hand them a bag out the window, instead of loose change.

Maybe it'll brighten someone's day.

I know that this is such a small gesture.  I know that the problems of the world are overwhelming and this is such a tiny bandaid.  But I hope it helps.

Happy Birthday Mom!

Happy Birthday Mom!

Today would have been my mom’s 66^th birthday.   I started this blog with a post about the pain of losing her to cancer a year and a half ago, but today I want to honor her awesomeness on the occasion of her birthday. 

Easier said than done.  A few days ago I started to go through my photo library for pictures for this post and suddenly plummeted into a deep and gloomy funk.  I miss my mom!  Seeing these beautiful, vibrant photos of her—so full of life, so full of vivacity—happy and alive, well it was hard.  I totally broke down. 

When I get super sad about losing my mom, I also instantly tune into her.  What she said to me as I was crying and carrying on, was that she didn’t lose any of that vitality, but she only gained more of it when she passed, unencumbered by a human body.  She didn’t become any less warm, loving, or funny, she became more of that person.  She is right here with me all of the time, completely still the same awesome mom, but only more.  I am immeasurably comforted by that. 

I want to honor her wonderful life and the amazing person she was.  I wish I had more and better access to photos of her as a child or of her from when I was a child.  I will get a hold of these some day and do another mom post, but for now let's look at some of the cool things about my mom Janette Dean.

This is where she and my dad lived for years before moving to Washington near the end of her life.  They built their dream house on this gorgeous Colorado property.  Brennan and I spent many Christmas vacations up there in the snow and nose-bleed altitudes (nearly 10,000 feet and close to Pike's Peak--my mom was made of hearty mountain-woman stuff).  

This was the used bookstore that my mom and sister Sherri owned in Woodland Park.  It was called Blue Heron Books and was fairly thriving for about 9 years.  It was awesome!  She and Sherri really followed their passion on this one.  I wiled away many an hour perusing the used books while visiting the family in Colorado.  It was also the halfway pit stop from the airport in Colorado Springs up the hill to nose-bleed Victor, so it was always the first place we'd stop when we visited.  Happy memories!

This is a typical Christmas shot of my parents Janette and Bill.  My mom loved her dogs too!  

Here is mom with her mom--my Grandma Mabel, my sister Sherri, and I having lunch on Alki in West Seattle during one of her visits up here.

This is one of my favorite photos of me and my mom.  We're in Hawaii a few days before my wedding and we are so healthy and tanned and relaxed.  This was a really special time for me and having my mom with me made it all so much better.

This is one of my favorite pictures of mom and Megan.  They both had such a funny sense of humor!

I feel very blessed to have spent 37 years with my mom.  She was an amazing woman and today, and every day I celebrate her.  I love you mom!

My year in Redmond

This last week marked the one year anniversary of moving to the suburb of Seattle that we call Redmond.

We lived in a little, adorable house on Beacon Hill for about seven years.  We had lovely neighbors, an almost view of downtown, and loads of history and culture at our doorstep.  But with the birth of our second child we were running out of room, and Brennan's commute was usually an hour each way.  If we wanted a short commute and a bigger house for our dollar we would have to move across Lake Washington to the 'burbs.

Wasn't it cute?

Brennan and I both lived in Seattle for many years; I moved there when I was 17.  I had a few stints of living in Bellevue or Lake Forest Park, but for the major part of the last 21 year I have considered myself a Seattleite.  It was weird to even consider moving to the Eastside.

We put our house on the market in August and a millisecond later it sold.  We were thrilled to have sold so quickly in a shaky housing market, but knew that we'd have to find a new house fast.  Our realtor Ben Carr was fabulous and showed us a ton of houses in Bellevue, Kirkland, and Redmond.  Two houses really stood out for us, and one was a truly viable option.  We made an offer and it was accepted!

Homeowners again!

Things I have learned from our year in Redmond:

I really like our new, bigger house.
I like having an open floor plan with the kitchen, play area, and family room all rolling into each other.
I really like our bigger yard and deck.
I definitely feel more pressure to keep our yard looking nice.
In Redmond, they collect recycling once a week!  It's awesome!
I love having a bunch of stores (and their big parking lots!) nearby.
There are some great parks on the Eastside.
I LOVE that Brennan's commute is cut in half.
Redmond is super cute and has a lovely little main street/small town feel.
I like the quiet cul-de-sac we live on.

I completely miss Seattle.
I miss the liberals.
I miss the arts, culture, diversity, ragtag-ness, even dirt and garbage of Seattle
I miss our old neighbors.
I miss the smell of coffee roasting from the Tully's coffee plant.
I miss the constant noise of the ships, trains, planes, and cars of nearby I5.
I miss the independent coffee shops.
I miss knowing the city like the back of my hand.
I miss being close to the aquarium, zoo, downtown, Seattle Center, Capitol Hill, West Seattle, Wallingford, Columbia City, the arboretum, Seattle friends, our old park, the Jefferson Community Center...and about a million other little things.

I don't miss the traffic on I5 or the West Seattle bridge.  At all.

I think that when it comes down to it, it's a wash.  The benefits of the new don't necessarily outweigh the old.  There are lots of good things about living in Redmond, and there were lots of good things about living in Seattle.

Will we ever return to Seattle?  Maybe someday.  But for now, my focus for this next year of living in Redmond will be on enjoying every new day.

My Mom's Last Birthday Present

Today is my birthday and I am SO fortunate for all of the loved ones surrounding me today.  That includes my mom, whose presence I feel very strongly right now.  My mom died a year and a half ago, but she is here with me now more than ever.  Two years ago on my 37th birthday she bought me a gift card to Eastwest Bookshop, a new age bookstore in Seattle, and I never used it.  Today I felt a deep calling to go there today and use the money to buy myself a gift.  I think she wanted to give me one last present.

This stood out to me the second I saw it.  It's a sticker decal for your car window, and if a single picture could embody a person, then this picture is my mom.  If you look closely on the bottom it says "Rainbow Mountain".  She loved and lived in the mountains, and she felt a huge connection to rainbows.  I love this sticker.

    

I also bought the most beautiful little statue of Kuan Yin.  She is a bodhisattva associated with compassion and my mom really loved her.  I remember she had a lovely white statue like this that she kept in her sanctuary, and this purple one (my mom's color) reminds me of her.  When I saw this I knew I had to have it.

Even though this is the last gift my mom will ever "buy" me, I know that the gifts she continues to give me...her love, her positive energy, her support, are constantly felt and appreciated.

My Best Birthday Intentions

As I sit here in a coffee shop by myself, (I KNOW!  What’s next?  Human sacrifice? Dogs and cats living together…mass hysteria!), on my 39^th birthday, I want to not just think about what I wish for, but what my intentions are for the last year of my thirties.   After all, intentions are the building blocks to the reality you create. 

I have had a great decade.  My thirties have been a time of growth and prosperity.  I went to college and graduated with a degree in art, I got married to the man of my dreams, I had two awesome kids, we bought two wonderful houses, I traveled.  Sure I had some major losses, the death of my mom is the biggest, but I have had many, many more incredible gains.  I want to round out my thirties with a running momentum-filled leap of prosperity into my forties. 

Right now I’m in a coffee shop called the Wayward Cafe in Seattle.  I love this place, not only because it is the only place I know with a Firefly theme (I KNOW RIGHT?!), but it also has some lovely art on the walls right now.  And that inspires me to make the intention to do more art this year.  I love doing art, but I have barely eeked out so much as a teensy little drawing since graduating from UW with a degree in Interdisciplinary Visual Art.  I think it’s partly because, even though IVA should have been a super fun and creative major, the building block classes that I was required to take were quite mundane and dry.  I think I could only take so much in the still life/figural drawings with charcoal-type practice art, and had to take a long break.  I also think that it’s not that easy to have messy non-kid-friendly art supplies lying around, so I don’t usually bother.  But PISH I say!  I am going to find a way to make art happen this year, and it doesn’t have to be painting if that’s too hard right now, it can be sewing, it can be paper art, it can be more refurbishing of cool furniture.  I just want to be creative.

I want to write more.  It has been so wonderful starting this blog!  I love to write, and I have a lot to say.  I have also been “writing” a book for a while now.  It’s a young adult book that I started writing right before my mom died.  I stopped writing it for the most part because I had the excuse of babies and grief, but I don’t want excuses anymore!  It’s started and I want to continue it (if now finish it).  I think that writing this blog is a great outlet to get me writing more, and I look forward to continuing this as well. 

I want to continue my healing.  I think I’ve done a good job healing from grief after my mom passed, and this happened, which was a major shift for me, but I feel like there is so much to do.  I want to continue to heal any lingering crap that I deal with on a daily basis.  Sometimes it feels like a tornado of crap, sometimes it feels like a light dusting of crap.  But, I think I’m done having crap in my life.  No more!

I want to be a more patient person.  And I am thinking about my kids when I write this.  I am tested a gazillion times a day.  Bajillion, really.  And sometimes I pass with flying colors and do a little happy dance, but a lot of times I look and feel like a tired zombie-meanie-mom who just wants to snap at them for climbing on the counter for the hundredth time or for having a temper tantrum for no actual visible reason.  I think I need the patience of Mother Theresa and have not illusions that that’s how I’ll actually be, but a little more patience for now with suffice. 

I want to continue to have a great relationship with Brennan.  I think that in the last 3 ½ years (hey, isn’t that the same amount of time we’ve had children?  Huh, go figure), we’ve struggled to maintain smoothness in our relating with one another.  It’s been more of a “let’s survive this day of pandemonium so we can get to the next day of pandemonium” thing with us.  I do not want to have the energy of survival in my family and my marriage, I want the uplifting energy of THRIVING.  I want to take a breath, bring some peace to our house, and more connection with us. 

Finally, I want to just learn to BE.  I actually really struggle with that.  I tend to let my internal voice get me down, or let the external (ie: internet, facebook, the latest episode of Who Cares tv), influence me and divert my attention.  I want to stay in the moment, be present, and just be who I am.  That would be lovely. 

SO.  Here’s the list of my birthday intentions (in no particular order):

1   .     Art

2   .     Writing

3   .     Healing

4   .     Patience

5   .     Relationship

6   .     Being

I’m going to do it people!  Happy birthday to me!

More ebay oddities

More goodies came in the mail!  I said it before, but I LOVE weird stuff found on ebay, and this latest lot doesn't disappoint.

I adore antiques.  Even if I don't know its complete history, just appreciating that something is super old and was made by people whose world was so completely different than it is now is thrilling to me.

These beads are 3000 years old from Egypt!  Imagine who made them, who wore them.

The next item is something I was so excited to get because it has to do with my favorite thing on the planet: Disneyland.  I can't count the number of times I've been to Disneyland.  My grandparents lived in South Pasadena near Anaheim and whenever we visited them, we went to the happiest place on earth.  I have incredible memories from the 70s, and 80s of old school Disneyland, during the era of ticket books.  I'd love to get my hands on a completed book, or even an elusive E ticket, but they are surprisingly pricey. I did get ahold of some fun C tickets from the 60s though.

Anyone up for a ride on the Mike Fink Keel Boats?  Maybe after some Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.  

Moving on, we have a lot of very random postage stamps.  I know, I know.  This buy is really silly.  It actually looked a lot cooler on ebay than when I opened up the tiny envelope they came in.  I doubt they're worth anything, but I didn't pay much and I like having more stamps for my collection.

I really love this next one.  I'm not sure what year this is from but it's a vintage packet of black and white photos from Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland.  When I was twenty I went on a two month backpacking trip around Europe and found this place to be one of my favorites.  This coastal area is filled with over 40,000 hexagonal basalt columns.  The effect is amazing and beautiful.

I still have more birthday bucks to spend and more fun stuff coming in the mail.  Can't wait to share!

My BIG, wonderful boy

I have two kids.  My first is a sassy, gorgeous, smart as a whip little three year old girl named Megan.  She is loud, creative, opinionated...wonderful.

My second child Finn tends to be overshadowed sometimes by his big sister.  He is quiet, and doesn't talk much.  He follows Megan around and mimics her every move.  He isn't half as mischievous as Megan and I think because of our constantly "correcting" her behavior, he gets a little left behind.

But he is TERRIFIC.  He is the best, snuggliest, sweetest, little 19 month old boy you can ever imagine.  Megan never really hugged and snuggled much (sooo independent that girl!), but Finn just melts into you.  He'll hang out in your lap, just chilling, or bury his face into your shoulder with a huge smile.

Like I said, he doesn't talk much.  I think I counted 9 words at his one year old birthday and right now I think he's still at about 9 words.  This is okay with me because he communicates so well in other ways. He points, nods, shakes his head, signs and gestures, and we can always understand what he's saying.  He is so smart...and playful, and pure of heart.  What a kid!

Finn is my big boy.  And I do mean BIG boy.  He was 12 pounds 2 ounces at birth.  Someday I want to write about his birth story, because yes it was natural, and difficult and scary, and if we lived in an earlier century, we might have both actually died.  It's quite a story!  But for now, let me just say that he was and has always been very big for his age.  He wears 3T clothes at 19 months.  Yesterday we were at the park and he didn't fit into the baby swing anymore.

ok, so the swing next to this fit him fine, but he outgrew this model...

Finn is big yes, 99th percentile for height and weight (this means he's bigger than 99% of other kids his age), and he'll certainly be tall all of his life.  My dad is 6'7", and I'm 5'10".  I don't think he'll ever be a jockey as a career.

But what I want for my dear Finn to know is that he is loved just the way he is, because of who he is.  It does not now, nor will it ever matter how big he is, how tall he is, how much he loves basketball (because that kid already breathes basketball), what size clothes he wears, what he fits or doesn't fit--because he is always loved for just being Finn.  Our special, wonderful boy.