We are former working moms blogging about faith, family, friends and food! In between writing about our hopes, prayers and adventures, we hope to bridge the gap between working moms and stay at home moms by providing recipes and resources everyone can use to make their family healthier.
Thank goodness we have moved beyond the studio portrait, where everyone looks still and plastic. But it’s hard to find a good candid photographer. Which is why I want to introduce you to ours: Taylor. She is a lovely, energetic and accommodating lady from Long Beach. Fear not, Inland Empire and points South: she came to Temecula to shoot us. She’s fabulously mobile.
We booked a Saturday in October, which is a weather crapshoot out here. The temperatures can swing between 50 degrees and 100 degrees in October. I gambled and went with wintery clothes—jeans and jewel tones. It was a gorgeous day at the farm—blue skies and pretty flowers. But it was 86 degrees.
Grumpy kids, sweaty husband and a dusty farm packed with folks two weeks before Halloween.
No problem! Within three minutes of meeting my kids, Taylor had them under her spell. Even Gabe, who is beginning to think he is too cool to smile. We got it all done in 30 minutes. For an outside shoot, that’s amazing.
And our pictures came three days later, in a zip file that we are free to print and use as we see fit. No hassle with packages, sizing, extra cost, etc.
Check these out…
But wait, there’s more: Taylor has generously offered a 20% discount to our readers! All you have to do is “Like” our Facebook page and mention Full of Graces when you book! Woohoo!
Wedding pictures? Family pictures? Christmas pictures? Multi-generational pictures? She’s got you. Just mention us and she’ll hook you up.
It was Gabe’s first championship game. And his team lost 2-1 in overtime.
I’m a mom so I’m only going to say we might have been robbed, and I’m only going to say it to you. The ref did a horrible job of keeping time, and a full minute past when our timers said the game should have ended, the other team scored to tie the game. Then we lost in OT on a direct kick after a dodgy handball call, and had a tying goal called back on a dodgy offsides call.
Instead of the Lessons In Winning post that I wanted to write, I get to write this.
So here goes. In my career as an athlete, I lost way more than I won. I lost a championship soccer game, just a few years after I played on a team that only won one game. I watched from the bench with a cast on my ankle while my team threw away a CIF championship game in high school. I’m the one who got roofed for the final point in a 5 game match against Notre Dame to lose a tournament in college.
Shea remembers losing. Dana remembers losing, usually loudly whenever someone says “Stanford”. My brothers can remember games they lost. I think the moments we failed are imprinted on our hearts even more than the moments we succeeded. Now at age 7, Gabe has one really big hurtful loss under his belt.
I can hear the helicopter moms wailing in the blogosphere: “RIGHT! WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO DO THAT TO THEIR BAAAAABYYYY???!!!”
This is why: failure keeps us humble and humility is the key to a successful life as an adult. Sometimes you do your best and it isn’t enough. That’s truth. The boys learned that lesson yesterday without anyone humiliating them, which is how it often happens to kids who have been protected from failure by their parents.
Gabe cried at the end of the game and I’m glad he did. He won’t forget what that felt like, and hopefully it will feed his intrinsic drive to improve. He’ll handle life better if he learns that sometimes you climb to the top of the mountain and find out someone got there first—it doesn’t change that you climbed the mountain. Before they went to shake hands, coach grabbed his shoulder and said “Hey, we don’t show them that”. I’m glad for this too. Gabe needs to know there’s pride in leaving it all out on the field, even if you lose.
As for the refs—the kids need to learn that refs are part of the game. I thank God for the assistant coach in college who told me that and I taught my teams the same thing. Refs don’t always get it right and sometimes that feels unfair. In adult life there are people like refs, who don’t always get it right either. I want Gabe to learn that we can either get stuck on the things we can’t control and be angry and bitter, or control the things we can with confidence and faith.
Yesterday was hard for all of us. Gabe shook it off faster than we did, with the happy go lucky resilience of a 7 year old wearing a shiny medal. Shea and I got a taste of what it’s like to hug the sweaty, sobbing, disappointed loser.
I didn’t like it.
But Shea and I weren’t going to take that hurt away with empty words like “It doesn’t matter who wins” or “It was the ref’s fault”. It was a big deal to him that they lost, so we stood in that space with him and felt it too.
We can’t save him from learning what it feels like to lose—we can only deflect it for another day. Which we aren’t going to do because the lessons are far too important for later in life.
One of my favorite homemade products that I use on a daily basis is homemade dish soap. But it’s also one of the hardest things that I’ve had to get used to on my all-natural path. It has only 3 ingredients, making it super easy to throw together, but as is the case with most natural soaps, it doesn’t suds up very well. And by very well, I mean at all. We have been conditioned to think that more suds means more clean, but that isn’t the case. More suds really just means more chemicals.
Two of the most potentially harmful ingredients in most dish soaps are Triclosan, which is a known hormone disrupter, and Quaternium-15, which releases formaldehyde. Hormone disrupters interfere with the body’s natural hormone messages by either blocking them or mimicking the hormones themselves. This can lead to a host of problems, including decreased sperm count and a higher occurrence of certain types of cancer. Yikes, right? So I really don’t mind fewer suds and an extra 5 minutes to make my own.
There are lots of different scents of liquid castile soap. I’ve used the citrus, lavender, and peppermint, but I have been using the almond scent lately because it smells like amaretto, and that makes me happy. But you could choose any scent that makes doing the dishes a little more pleasant.
I really, really believe in the idea that it takes a village to raise a child. Super believe, as Dana would say. I can’t do any of it without help–not raise my kids, tend my marriage or grow my faith. I need help! All the time!
It occurred to me this weekend, as I was reading the hopefully fake story of the Mean Lady in Fargo who was going to hand out shaming letters instead of candy to roly-poly princesses and Pokemons on Halloween, that maybe we need to be more specific in what we mean by village. After all, that lady said in her letter that she was just doing her job as a member of the village.
So here it is: it takes a village, yes. But not Salem village.
In Salem, people parading as good, decent folk used the accusation of witchcraft to punish their neighbors, and make themselves look better. Classic case of deflection: If everyone’s looking at the poor drunk woman in town, no one will notice that I am greedy and mean, even though I sit in the first pew every Sunday and paid for half the church to be built. Nineteen innocent men and women were hanged.
It’s true the devil was afoot in Salem; also that they hung the wrong folks. I wonder what the Mean Lady in Fargo is trying to deflect? Anyone in my village should make me feel better and supported as a mom, not worse and like a failure.
I want Walnut Grove, where Reverend Alden was gentle with his flock and the truth always won. They had their issues there in the Grove, but the issues were always settled with everyone’s dignity intact. Even Nellie’s.
Or how about Avonlea? Anne of Green Gables seemed happy there. Or Concord, MA, where Little Women learned their life lessons. Yes, these are fictional and idyllic. But admirably fictional and idyllic.
In my village, I need god-fearing folk who will live and speak what they believe so that my kids are steeped in the love of God. I need to know that on the day I can’t read that freakin’ Dora book one more time, someone else will do it for me. And if a friendly villager knocks on my door before the 4 pm clean-up, they will judge me by the smile on my face and not the toys on the floor. Or at least believe my story about the 4 pm clean-up.
The neighbors who brought our puppy back when we left her outside? The mom who gently let me know there was more to the story than ours sons were telling us? The friend who reads the Dora book one more time? The couple who offer to watch our kids so we can have a date? Those are my Village People. We have God and we have love and we have each other.
And Mean Lady in Fargo needs to remember that. I have a whole entire village. If my kids ever get a fat letter in their trick or treat bag, we’re going to come for you and love you right out of town.
We know the devil when we see him and we’re not having that Here.
My phone turned everyone on the edge of the lake into a ghost at dusk a few months ago. Weird.
Growing up, we had a ghost in the house. I’ll put that on my mom. And if my mom was writing this, she’d tell you the same.
We’d lived in the house probably ten years before we put it all together. We sat down as a family and told each other all the weird things that had happened that we thought were just weird coincidence or the creakings and squeakings of a 40 year old house. That night, I named her Dorothy.
Dorothy was the source of the knocking on my bedroom wall, the reason that the dog sat up and begged from no one. She whispered in everyone’s ear, waking us up in the dark of night. Up to that point, none of it was scary. Just weird.
But that dinner was like her coming out party. Once we acknowledged her presence, she got busy.
One night Teresa was playing with my mom’s music box, a masquerade clown that played “Music of the Night” from Phantom. As if that in itself was not creepy enough, two hours after she left, I was watching TV by myself when I heard the box play about six slow notes in the dining room. It did that sometimes, like it hadn’t quite wound all the way down.
Thirty seconds later though, that thing started playing loud and fast like someone had wound it all the way up.
I screamed for my brother, who yelled back “I’m not coming out there!” My mom came running up the hallway and grabbed the box, which had indeed been wound all the way up.
Dorothy.
My dad hired a painter to paint the family room. After six hours they wanted out. The paint fell over, the brushes moved from where they had been left, the TV switched on and off. “You got a ghost, boss” the painter told my dad.
Dorothy.
At Christmas, the stockings my mom made when we were all babies, that hung on the mantle every year, and were packed away in the same place, were gone. My mom turned the house upside down. Nothing.
When we dragged the decorations out for the next Christmas, there they were, right on top.
Dorothy.
I lost a pair of jean shorts, my favorites. I looked for them everywhere, even in my brothers’ drawers. Then I forgot about them. One day in the middle of winter, I pulled a load of whites out of the dryer and mixed up among them—my blue jean shorts.
Dorothy.
My brother used to surf early in the morning. The kid never remembered his house key. He’d tap on my bedroom window so I could get up and let him in the back door. One Saturday morning, he called my name and tapped, and I got up and opened the back door. Which set off the house alarm. Which brought everyone running, including my brother who’d been asleep in his bed.
Dorothy.
It got to be a thing. My mom, standing over the tv, turning it off only to have it turn right back on. “Dorothy, cut it out!” she yelled finally, and that time the tv stayed off.
One night I was doing the dishes. It was just my brother and me in the house. He came into the kitchen to get a drink, but then he bolted for the back door and locked it. “I just saw someone outside!” he said.
“Blond hair?” I asked him.
“Yes!”
“I’ve seen that. I think it’s Dorothy” I told him.
And then this night. I was doing the dishes. It was dark. The rest of the family was watching tv in the other room. I looked up from the sink, into the window, which was like a giant mirror, reflecting the room behind me. And I saw a woman with blond hair, in a long black dress, walk into the room towards me. I froze, and watched as she turned and walked out.
When I ran out into the family room to tell my parents, my brother said “I thought I saw someone walk into the dining room just a second ago”.
Dorothy.
The mystery was solved one afternoon at my grandparent’s home. I was telling Dorothy stories and my grandmother, a few Canadian Clubs into the afternoon, said “We had a ghost here too. Bessie.” She then launched into a list of Bessie stories that sounded a lot like Dorothy. My grandmother thought she haunted a painting they used to have.
“Is she gone?” my dad asked.
“Oh sure, since we got rid of the painting” my grandmother said.
“Where did it go?” he asked.
“We gave it to you years ago! The one in the living room.”
And I knew exactly the painting she was talking about. A delicate, Romantic style portrait of a young girl, her face glowing against the background, even in the dark.
The girl in the painting was not a blond. And she was not dressed the way that Dorothy was dressed the night I saw her. But since the day my dad took that painting off the wall and sent it to Goodwill, there has never been another Dorothy incident in the house.
Full Of Graces 