Mommy Time Craft

    Noah's afternoon nap is the time of the day that I relish. It is "mommy time". It is where I can sit down and do something that takes a little time and focus, such as write a blog. Well, I have not written in the blog for almost a week, and Noah has napped, so what did I do with my time?

  First, I have been brushing up on my Sparky verses!  Last weekend at the Awana training, our commander Kathy, asked me to be the Sparks director. After praying about it and talking to Anthony, I said yes. Needless to say some of my "mommy time" went in preparation for Awanas. I want this to be a wonderfully successful year for Sparks and previous experience tells me that things go alot more smoothly if you are well prepared.

    Secondly, I have been working on a craft project. Jillian told me about a simple toy you can make for your toddler. It involved placing a button on an end of a ribbon and making felt shapes for them to thread through. I loved the idea but wanted to go a step further. I wanted animals. So, I made six different animals with holes for the button "nose" to thread through. I placed a large black button on each end of my ribbon, so Noah could use either end. I made the faces out of scraps of felt. I glued the felt pieces together with craft glue and then used heatbond to apply a backing of felt to add more stability to the ears and tails. I think they turned out really cute and hope Noah likes them as well! And no that is not Mr. Sun, it is my lion, he looks better with his nose but the his glue was stil wet.

When at first you don't succeed, try again for the umpteenth time. Right?

Maybe I should get the hint. Or it could be that I am a little dense. Perhaps my plan is doomed from the beginning or has a fatal flaw. What, you might ask, is my nemesis, my troubling problem? It is my complete inability to make an online store work!

I have been trying for three years (at least) to find and maintain a online avenue for my handmade items. I tried Etsy first, way back when few people had ever heard about it. I sold a few items but traffic was slow and I found the fees annoying. So, I looked elsewhere. I then tried Artfire, a "new kid on the block" as far as online selling sites go. Artfire had a great look and had more extras than I knew what to do with, but I sure tried!  With starting the Artfire store I also added my brother Joe to my endeavor to break into the world of cyber consumerism. I figureda variety of items would mean more hits and more people looking at our items is always good. And while Artfire started off with a bang, over time the views got fewer and fewer, and the sales next to none. I am disheartened to say the least.

So, the pendulum has swung back to Etsy. Etsy has changed for the better since I last used their services. They modernized the site, with clean lines and more features for buyers and sellers. Listing an item is much easier than it was before. But probably the most important reason I switched back to Etsy is the fact I have heard people talking about items they bought on Etsy. People actually know what Etsy is. This time I am adding Micah on to boost the number of items in the "store", which is always fun.

The race is on now between Etsy and Artfire. I have both sites up and will end up keeping the one that does better in views and sales. I will then move all the stock to the "winning" cyber store. It did occur to me that they might both do nothing in which case, I am not sure what I will do... Perhaps, start my own site for incredibly stubborn business "losers" :)



If you want to see the competitors, they are:
http://www.woodenzebra.artfire.com/
http://www.thewoodenzebra.etsy.com/

The Berlin Wall

Yesterday, I saw that it was the 50th anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall.  The Berlin Wall has a special fascination for me, as it was part of the beginning of my interest in history. I never particularly liked history. History involved memorization of meaningless dates and events and had no room for the imagination. However, as the daughter of a soldier, history found me.

 My father was stationed in Germany when the Berlin Wall came down. I was 12 when the wall came down and was vaguely aware that something big had happened. I remember going to craft shows and seeing people buy the bits of graffiti covered concrete from the Wall. One of my more vivid memories of the time was of a refuge family that came to our church. They were from Romania, and they had two young children, a boy and a girl. Their car was strange, unlike anything I had seen driving on the autobahn, it honestly looked like it had been driven off of a movie set. I remember at a church picnic that the girl's mother had made a beautiful daisy chain for her (strange sometimes what you remember) and that the children were shy. I knew that we did not share the language but language was never really a barrier for children at play. (I was living in a foreign country, and did not speak German, so playing was a universal language.) It was not till much later that I began to realize what this family had going through. But all this happened when I was an oblivious 12 year old.

It was not until I was a senior that I realized what I had experienced. I was doing research for a paper on World War II, when I came across a picture of Hitler addressing a group of soldiers in a large stone amphitheater. I looked at the picture closely and realized I had been there! I had sat about 20 feet from where Hitler was in the picture and watched fireworks on the Fourth of July just 5 years earlier. It was at that moment that I realized how really, real history was and with that realness came an intense fascination. I had met and experienced a part of history. From that moment on I had a much deeper appreciation for what happened in the past.

So, every time I hear about the Berlin Wall, I think of that small Romanian family with their odd car and a beautiful daisy chain.

Through the Power of Your Love

I love when the words from a song I sang in church get stuck in my head. All to often I have some little ditty from one of Noah's toys echoing through my head. A calypso version of  "Do You Know the Muffin Man" is hard to dislodge after hearing it for the tenth time in a row.

But today I am blessed to have a song we sang in church to be reverberating through my mind and soul. Through the power of Your love. What a powerful statement! So much of who we are in Christ, the fact we can even have a relationship with Him is through His love! When I stop to think of all the Lord has done for me, what He brought to me and change me to be, I am amazed. God's love is powerful, it will change and transform.

When we think about love we often think of the love that soothes and makes us feel warm and fuzzy. While that is comforting and there are times in our lives we need that from the Lord, His love is also powerful. He is molding us and making us, much like a sculpture or painter. I am sure if I was a block of marble, the chisel would not be my idea of love, and yet it is with this tool that the master in love makes his masterpiece. God can see the treasure hiding in the hunk of marble, and lovingly chips away the excess to reveal beauty within.  He loves me enough to have plans for me, to change me, to use me!

So, here is a link to the song so you can have something uplifting stuck in your head too!


http://youtu.be/pQg6sk5B3qY

A small rant...

Today as I was checking out in a small shop, I made small talk with the clerk who is a friend of a friend, about trying to beat this incredible heat. The he totally agreed about this horrid heat. He then suggested one way to beat the heat was to go to the library, like he did, you know back in the 80's. It was one of those "there, there honey" comments like I had no idea what life was like before an Internet. What made it worse is I doubt the guy had five years on me.  I wanted to say "Hello, see those white hairs on my head, those aren't highlights, thems the real deal buddy" but I didn't. (I dislike the color gray, so I call them white hairs, it sounds more aesthetic.) And yes, I did gray a little early (okay, really early in my book) but nursing school will do that to you.

The whole incident starting me thinking, I was perplexed by my reaction to it. I should have  been flattered that he did not think I was old enough to have appreciated the 80's. Maybe it was also the old nurse I knew who bemoaned that fact that I was losing my skills staying home with Noah. I guess he was just one more person in a long line of people who have treated me like I lost every ounce of intelligence I ever had once I became a stay-at -home mom. (Please, no comments on how little I started with :) )

I have noticed this trend with other stay-at-home moms I know. It seems that the world thinks we must be unable to do any type of meaningful work, so therefore we decided to stay home. Nothing can be further from the truth. We are women who are called by God to raise and serve our families for His glory. We were called to and choose to stay with our little ones, not as a last resort but as a first choice. So, to each of my fellow moms, I hope that you will look at how God sees you and not as the world does. For we are precious, for our worth is not measured by our non-existent 401K's, but in our service to God, our families, and others. Our "401K" is just on the other side of heaven.

You and I are not alone

Recently I have really struggled with troubling thoughts as I am falling asleep. I have heard people call such disturbances "thought bombs", but as much havoc as these thoughts were having on my sleep, they were more like nuclear blasts! These thoughts would strike just as I was falling asleep, and usually involved someone I loved or myself being maimed, kidnapped, chased by a burglar, or even killed. Most of the time the situations were ludicrous, but sometimes they were way to close to reality. The worse part was as I tried to force my groggy self to not to continue a particular thought, my mind would rewind it, and then replay the sequence only the situation would be worse then before.

I really felt like I was being spiritually attacked, and I continued to struggle despite praying for these thoughts to go away. It helped if I woke Anthony and he prayed for me, but after a time you really hate to wake someone because you can't stop thinking they died from strychnine poisoning. Not to mention people start worrying if you keep "doing them in" in your dreams.

Unfortunately, I started listening to the small voice inside my head that these dreams or thoughts were my fault. There was something wrong with me, or I had done something wrong. So, not only could I not sleep well, but now my waking hours were plagued with thoughts of what I had done wrong to cause the attacks. Was I not studying in the Word enough (I don't know about you but I feel I could always do more)? Was I not praying or serving enough? Or worse was something physically wrong with me, was I going off the proverbial deep end? I felt shame for something I could not control and yet I thought I was responsible for. Quite honestly, I was overwhelmed.

Not quite sure what else to do, I finally admitted to someone my struggle with these thoughts. This dear, wise friend (who also happens to be my mother) listened and then told me I was not alone. She had know many women to struggle with these types of attacks, especially after allot of stress. Looking over the last two years of my life, I have had more than a little stress, most of it wonderful but stress none the less. We then talked about using praise songs and Scripture to combat these thoughts. However, I knew at that moment I had won, because the guilt and shame were gone.

 One of the biggest lies we can grab a hold of is that we are alone.  Satan loves to make us feel that we are alone in our struggles or shame us into seclusion. In our busy lives we rarely stop to develop the relationships with people to the point that we can be honest and open about our struggles. So, we run around believing and holding onto the lie that we are the only one to think or feel this way. The first chapter of Ecclesiastes describes how there is nothing new under the sun and what we see today occurred before. The same is true with the attacks Satan uses against believers. While it might be dressed a little differently, there is nothing new, it has happen to someone before. There is incredible release and relief in knowing you are not alone in a struggle.

So, dear sister or brother, remember you are not alone and let go of the lie.