Sunday, March 24, 2024
Sunday Flowers
Monday, January 18, 2021
Artsy Mondays
Every Monday my sister-in-law and I get together and teach our boys a science & art block.
...I should rephrase that. Every Monday my sister-in-law teaches the children a well-prepared lesson in Marine Biology with thoughtful experiments while I scramble to think of an art project to occupy them, afterward. (Sorry Lu!)
All three of our boys are very artistic and creative and love drawing, creating and making music, so art is an easy thing to teach. Sometimes we are casual about it and just draw whatever's in our imaginations that day and sometimes we have a little more structure to things, like today.
Every year on this day we celebrate, read about and continue to be inspired by the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr.
This year, I thought I would entwine his legacy and story for the boys into a creative art project : a Mosaic style drawing of MLK Jr., representing all the many colours and differences in the people around us. A mosaic reminding us that we are all different, unique and yet part of one big picture, when we come together.
Colour is so beautiful and today, it really helped show the kids how different, but equal, we all are!
While we coloured, we listened to music, took turns reading about Dr.King and who he was, compared crayons to see their value despite being different colours & discussed our own family heritage.
Within our crazy little blended family, the places of origin stretch from Ireland to Italy to Denmark to the West Indies and many places in between! (Don't come at me for Geography, I'm sure I couldn't made that trip much smoother!).
As a family, we look a lot like this mosaic; mixed, blended, bright & colourful.
We coloured away and, as we put the pieces together, we read out some of Dr.King's famous "I Have a Dream" Speech.
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character." - MLK Jr.
Martin Luther King is a source of inspiration, for so many of us, and I am so thankful his legacy lives on to share with our children. In a world where things were black and white, and separated as such, he dared to dream of a more colourful world; a world where we are seen for more than being just one thing or the other. A world where love and compassion guide our actions, not race or status.
MLK Jr. reminds us that we don't have to all be the same to love each other. We don't have to look the same, live the same or even think the same, to love each other. He reminds us, as he famously said, that only love can drive out hate and only light can drive out darkness.
Thanks for the reminder, Dr.King
✌🏽
Monday, August 3, 2020
Cold Toast
My grandpa always ate cold toast.
It is one of the most vivid memories I have of him.
Cold. Toast.
In our happy, busy home (the same one I live in now, actually) we lived in true Full-House-style, complete with my mom, brother, aunt, two Irish grandparents & myself...all under one roof. We got along beautifully, said 'I Love You' every time someone walked out a door and all had our little quirks. My sweet little grandma, who grew up in Dublin during the Great Depression, regularly fed us things like porridge, fish-sticks & mushy peas, which we would choke down to get to her unbelievably delicious oatmeal cookies. My mom would paint late at night in her workshop, had crazy nicknames for all our pets and my grandpa loved to play table-top hockey, using coffee creamers & a rolled-up paper ball, with my brother when we went out for meals. The adults in my life worked hard during the week and my brother and I spent most of our free-time riding bikes with our neighbours out on the street. I cherish my childhood memories.
And one of them will always be...Papa's cold toast.
I remember it most at breakfast time; we'd all be buzzing around getting ready for school or work and my grandma, always awake before everyone else, would faithfully place two slices of rye bread into the toaster, to get Papa's breakfast started. The toast would soon pop and my grandma would pull each piece out, slowly, with a paring knife (which always made me nervous, as we were taught never to put anything that wasn't toast in the toaster!). She, then, would carefully place each slice inside of a silver toast rack, bring it to the kitchen table and move on with preparing everyone else's meals.
"George! Toast is ready!", she'd holler down the hallway as he'd slowly saunter into the solarium (Papa was never in a hurry). He'd usually bend down to kiss one of us on the head to say good morning, give our big, furry cat, Patches, a scratch and then pull up his seat for breakfast, right at the head of the table.
I can still recall the sound of his bone-handled butter knife scraping the cold toast with the even-colder butter.
"Crunch!". He'd dig in. He'd always eat slowly, wipe his mouth politely, then thank Nanny for breakfast and go straight down to his study to read the Bible for the rest of the morning. A habit that modelled his deep commitment to the Lord.
It's a picture I could paint you clearly, every time you asked about it... Papa's cold toast.
This man who raised me from birth, as a father, when I had none. This man who was called a "giant of the faith" at his funeral by many a friend and comrade. This man who faithfully prayed for our family every single morning, without fail; whose life and dedication to the Lord was biography-worthy, and yet every time I think of him, I can't shake this memory of cold toast for breakfast.
...and today I wondered why.
Why does that memory stick out just as clear (clearer, actually) than many of the things he said to me or even things like him watching my baptism or other milestone-moments he was there for?
Perhaps it's because things like these -- regular, mundane, everyday things -- are the stuff of life. The things we repeat. The lives we live. What we do most regularly and without thinking — our habits. Maybe not the most notable but the most noticed? These things make up so much of who we are, especially in the eyes of our children.
Of course there are the big, unforgettable milestones in a life and the valleys we walk through —those are sure to stick with us. There are the jobs we do and the places we go, the faiths we profess and the opinions we carry; but, I have to say, those things about my precious grandparents are faint memories, compared to the little things that made up our lives, together. The cold toast, the mushy peas, the table-top hockey.
Those little, everyday things add up to big, lasting memories of who we were in the minds of our children — and their meaning may be more than we give them credit for. My grandma waking up so early to make us all breakfast showed me how much she loved us. My mom’s painting and crazy cat nicknames (seriously, ask me about them sometime) modelled her amazing creativity & joyful, free-spiritedness (which I admire and aspire to, today) and my grandpa’s hockey games with the coffee creamers at restaurants left a forever-memory, for me, of his understanding of and commitment to the role of “dad” for two small children who needed it so badly.
Naturally, it gets me thinking - what is my ‘cold toast’? What will my son remember about me when he is married and thinking back on the life we are living right now?
Of course we all hope to be remembered as the loving, hard-working, supportive parent/grandparent/friend, and that is very likely to happen - but what everyday things do we do that will also linger in the rear-view mirrors of their minds?
Will he remember how I liked to stay up late? My homemade mocha-brownies that he loves so much? How much I loved our picnic table card games? Will he remember how I always got so mad when I stubbed my toe?
— and what will it all mean to him?
It was a sobering realization for me, today, that my life is being monitored. If I didn't think it mattered, the little ways I live, I was reminded this morning, as I watched the butter melt on my son's toast, that it sure does.
Maybe it's putting your feet up on the coffee table, or how you knit during the evening news. How you always went for your morning walk, the way you answered the phone or always left cupboard doors open (hello!). Maybe it was how you gossiped about the neighbours or how you always yelled at the barking dog next door. I don't what it is for your children or what it will be for mine, but I know it matters. I know those everyday things that they are witnessing are a lot more memorable than they seem.
I know that I can't remember many of the conversations or convictions that my grandparents had but I'll always remember the bedtime stories, the family dinners & how they were 10 minutes early to pick us up from school, every single time — and the love that showed.
Like a path forged in my mind by the repetitive motion of their faithfulness, they etched themselves in my heart by the ways in which they chose to live, day-in, day-out. Cold toast and all.
Sunday, March 29, 2020
Tips for Home Learning
Thursday, March 26, 2020
Broken Together.
Do you like puzzles?
My mom has always loved them. When were kids, she would pull out 5 or 6 puzzles and excitedly declare a rainy Saturday "puzzle day!" - (an exclamation that was often met with whining and bored sighs -- sorry mom!).
Growing up, I never really cared for puzzles. As a chatty, busy child I thought they were 'too boring', as a young adult I couldn't be bothered to stay still long enough to complete one and as a young mom, it was hard to justify time in a day to not be doing housework or something else more productive!
With each new age, I am made more aware of how wise my mom is; God has gifted her with a strong sense of good discretion, and I have really learned from that. She has advised me in things like getting better sleep, having simple faith and not being too busy with my spare time. In each new season of life, I find myself thinking "man, mom was right about that, too!".
Turns out...she was also right about puzzles!
With a little more time spent at home right now, I'm currently working on a large, 1000 piece puzzle (start small, right?!); which, when finished will be a beautiful canvas painting of 2 yellow birds, sitting on a tree stump, filled with wildflowers of all sorts. It's a beautiful and challenging puzzle and I'm actually really enjoying it. I even view it as a source of relaxation and self-care. A time to sit, be still, even hear God's voice as I take in the quietness.
Last night, I was trying to fit together pieces of a large, brown, stump, finding myself getting more and more frustrated, losing sight of why I'd even started...then something struck me...
...It occurred to me that this beautiful puzzle would never come to be without 1000 broken pieces.
A thousand small, seemingly insignificant on their own, little puzzle pieces.
...And it made me think of us. Our countries, schools, churches, families - the communities we're a part of - we're one potentially beautiful picture that can never fully come together without each individual little piece.
When I look at a puzzle box, with all those broken, mixed up pieces, I see a challenge. I see a lot of work and sometimes, I just want to close the box and do something easier.
Meanwhile, God looks at those same broken pieces and sees potential. He already sees the clear, finished image. He looks at millions of broken people, every day and He loves them. He doesn't see broken, He sees useful.
So one piece has got jagged edges and one piece is loud and full of color and another piece may just be indistinct and plain...every single piece is needed.
And most importantly, like a puzzle, each piece is most valuable when connected to another piece.
Like Jack Johnson said, we're better together. When a plain piece of a brown stump, connects to a bright yellow piece, and then another, and another - and you start to see the image of a bird come to life - each individual piece starts to have more meaning. You suddenly put so much more value in that plain, brown piece that has no clear image. You start to remember that it's a little part of something bigger.
The really good news here is that, God knows the plan. The Maker has seen the original image and knows where each piece goes.
So let's take a lesson from the little puzzle piece. Let's trust the process of being built. Let's connect with each other, sync up and create something beautiful. Let's hop in the box, mix up with each other and trust the Hand that's putting it all together.
We may be broken, but let's be broken...together.