Beyond the Garden Gate

Sunday was Mother's Day, oh what a complicated day.  So many women experience an incredible amount of emotions on that one day... the loss of a child, infertility, loss of a mother, oh so many things and triggers that can come up in this one day. My prayers go out to all women on this day, I've known the pain of infertility, of miscarriage, and of not having my own mother on this day. It can also bring up the attack society places on moms. The feeling of not enough, of seing motherhood as a waste of your talents, time, and the saddest one it being a burden.  But it is not, How magnificent it is that as women we get the gift to work hand in hand with God in creating and raising inmortal souls! As a mother your body has at some point held two souls inside of it at one time (or 3 if you had twins!) What a gift! Knowing that and how God gave you those little souls because He thinks you are the best person to raise them, with your shortcomings and flaws, with your gifts, and how we...

I don't know about you but I love the smell of Lilacs. They are a welcomed sight because it's the first signs of Summer. Living in the gray rainy cold Pacific North West the bright blooms and the sweet floral smell are like a little piece of Heaven reminding me dreary winter will not last forever. Although I have made peace with winter and now look forward to all the cozy it brings but more on that another day. This year with all the emotional Rollercoaster I've been in I decided it's better to put my little flower shop on pause until my brain catches up. Yet as most, if not all, people know I cannot live without flowers. I find flowers to be very healing, we are made for beauty and we crave beauty, there is something about the beauty of flowers that speak to our souls. If you don't beleive me get some even if it is at the grocery store and set them where you will see them often and you will see what I mean. Needless to say I may not be arranging flowers...

Oh May... for me, the month of roses... After the craziness of April ending with the loss of my mom in quite an unexpected way, I have found myself not only facing Mother's day this weekend but also getting over the most horrible stomach bug that hit our family in years, it took us all out for almost a week. So, I found myself trying to keep my rose colored sunglasses, to look for the beauty in every day, the wimsical, the lovely. And when I can't find it, I make it my challenge to create it, because life is too short to live in survival mode, blah, and frankly there is so much yuck out in the world now. We need a reprieve, we need beauty, little pockets of whimsy, to be able to take a deep restful mental and emotional breath... it is so needed for our souls. I firmly beleive as humans we were made for beauty, we crave beauty, it speaks to our souls!  So that's what I did this week... when I felt like life was just missery and we were all fiscally and emotionally down I pul...

Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks. Dr. Seuss Well, it is safe to say Dr Seuss would be proud of us...  We literally have books in every nook and cranny of our house. Maybe it is understandable given the size of our cute house in which books have no real home of their own. Although, Is it because there is no more space to fit bookcases? Or if we had a bigger place would we run into the same problem?  Hmmm I wonder, I wonder…  given the amount of books we have and the ones that seem to sneak into our house in the middle of the night while no one is looking, it might be a safe assumption that maybe the size of the house is not the issue. Maybe if we had a bigger house it would just mean more books? although I am not quite sure about that theory, seeing that the size of the home and the number of books seem to be in no way correlated to one another.  One thing is safe to say, this situation grew exponentially with the decision to...

As I walked amongst the "plumpy" blackberries (like we like to call them) taking deep breaths of their sweet smell mixed with the recently watered garden dirt. While I filled my mouth with the black honey of summer straight from the sun kissed branches,I watched my little girl happily humming to herself beside me with grandmas colander overflowing and trying to figure out how she could cram just a few more without them rolling off. Just then couldn't help but think of how romance doesn't just die, we let it, oh and how easy that can happen when we are not intentional in finding the beauty and wonder in the simple, monotonous, and humdrum rutine moments in our everyday life that seem meaningless and ordinary but are actually the opposite, those are the moments that we will look back to some day, those are what memories are made of. We are a tad spoiled, I have to admit, by thornless blackberry bushes! What a joy to pick berries without bleeding ...

Yep, it's me, once more popping in this little corner of the internet after a few years since using this blog.  Why am I back? Well in a nutshell I decided a while ago to take a break from Instagram, it's been a few months now since my last post there. I used that platform as a mini blog mainly because I enjoyed posting beautiful pictures and it also gave me the chance to write recipes, fun tips, life musings, and shenanigans plus make friends. But I started to feel burned out with all the changes and I also noticed It started sucking me in more. I lost so much precious time in it instead of providing a place to express myself.  It has been quite interesting to see how social media has changed over the years. Mainly Instagram (but the same applies to facebook and youtube), where artists used to share beautiful pictures. My feed was a place of beauty and inspiration. And now it has morphed into a tiktock-ish mini facebook with video clips, "influencers" convincing us t...

Even though I am a work from home mom, I take pride in calling myself a homemaker. I think It doesn't matter whether we stay home or work outside of home in the end we are all Homemakers. We use our time, strengths, gifts, and service to make our house a home, and no matter what the culture says, being a homemaker is something to be proud of, You are more important than you realize!  Homemakers possess a lot of great qualities, they are thrifty, organized, reliable, flexible, and resourceful . The roles of a homemaker includes food planner, shopper, and preparer, housekeeper, budgeter, errand runner, child caretaker, empathetic listener, host, and many more. So, if you manage your home with care and pride, and you try hard to make your home a special, peaceful, and comfortable space for you and your loved ones, you are a homemaker 💕👑 Like C.S. Lewis said: "I think I can understand that feeling about a housewife's work being like that of Sisyphus (who was the stone rollin...