One Woman’s World

Between the endless ringing of my phone, the endless hours of work on my professional photography website, and the arrival of my flashing slaves… Nope, no reference to my would-be naked client… I’ve had no time, NO TIME for blogging. I’ve missed you all, and I swear that I’m coming back, so don’t go too far away. If I get on the ball enough by tomorrow, we’ll even have the Name That… competition.

It’s like photography equipment Christmas at our house this week. Every couple of days there’s a new knock at the door and my condo becomes a studio one large heavy cardboard box at a time. Oh the giddy joy of spending your life pursuing your passions.

Motherhood, photography, music, housework…. oh wait… Not housework. Maybe I got just a little carried away there.

I’ll just say this:

My younger sister who is also a photographer told me today that she is so grateful to have the opportunity to seek to glorify God through her work. Every time I take portraits, I’m doing essentially that. Showing the beauty of one of his amazing creations or children.

So… that to explain that I’ve been busy… and loving it.

!!

It is Brooke, of ABC Momma! Hooray Brooke! Our friend from G.L.H.M. came closest first, but failed to provide us with all required information.

These eyes indeed do belong to our lovely Mr. Colin Firth, cast as Mr. Darcy in BBC’s Pride and Prejudice. Oh what lovely eyes they are, as well. I know, it was mean of me to pick such a difficult moment to recognize those eyes. This particular Name That was taking a page out of Queen Beth’s book and pulling something small out of context.

And speaking of pride and prejudice… both vices–

I haven’t posted a weight-loss update for two weeks because… I hang my head in shame… because in those two weeks I have gained back all 4 pounds I had lost in the previous two.

Here’s putting back on my weight-loss cap, and preparing for another Monday check-in. We are not stopping. We are not defeated.

And for all you Galaxy Quest fans out there, Never Give UP! Never Surrender!

I know, I know. It’s Friday, and the Name That… feature is for Wednesday.

I also know, you had no earthly clue what day Name That was… and you forgot that the contest existed.

To win this one, you must tell me the actor’s name, the movie character, and the movie correctly.

Name that… pair of eyes!

You’ve gotta… I made you something pretty.

“My mama says some days are like that, even in Australia,” is from one of my favorites, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst. I had to get something good out of a late frost that killed all our tulips, didn’t I?

Sign that you’re in the right bathroom…

Sign that you shouldn’t drink this…

Sign that you’ve given birth to the Easter princess of the world…

Sign that the Easter princess has gone a little too long between naps…

I have a confession to make.

I love free stuff. Oh how I love it. If it is free, you must want it, right?

If you’re thinking I’m weird, think back about 20 seconds to your increase in heartrate when you read the title of this post, “Free Stuff.” You thought for a second that there might be something free for you in reading… and you were anxious to read on.

Sometimes you could be using the same thing, and if it was free, or if you got it on a really good sale, you like it more. Just because of the sweet way it was obtained.

I started thinking of this the other day when I ran out of conditioner and pulled out 1/4 of a bottle that my sister-in-law gave me when she was moving. It turns out that this is the best conditioner I’ve used in quite awhile. I loved it. So much, in fact, that I might even want to use it even if I had to throw down the coin for it myself.

Looking around my house, many of our favorite posessions were inheritances from other people. Free.

Take for example my living room couch. The same couch I’ve been lounging on since I was 14 years old. I love it. It came to live with me when my parents decided it was too old to go live with them in Venezuela. I don’t know when if ever we’ll feel like throwing down the coin to replace this beauty with actual store-bought-by-us living room furniture.

Or my dining table centerpiece. My bean bottles were given to me by a lady I was helping to move. I love them. I know I love them more than I would if I had had to pay for them.

And my mirror. I love large elegant mirrors, but it’s not the type of thing I’d actually buy for myself. This beauty was left hanging on the wall of our first married apartment by the previous tenant. We’ll love it and hang it until it breaks. It’s one of the classier things I have hanging on my wall.

But the greatest free find of all time, I came by a few weeks ago helping another friend move. It pays to help people when they’re in the “getting-rid-of-everything” mode. It’s our beautiful, like-new, sage-green, micro-suede-covered, generic-brand Love Sac. Siesta Sac to be specific. A $400 value for the right price. This baby sits in the corner of our living room and can fit our whole family comfortably to watch a movie. It is my triumph of free-stuff-getting…

Bringing me to the “Getting to Know You” part of this post. Show me your free stuff. Gifts don’t count. This has to be genuinely free stuff that you scored. Let me know what, and how you got it. Just share in the comments, or direct us to your post, if you’re posting pictures about it.

:) Peace!

Hey there, it’s me. Your friendly neighborhood blogger who has fallen in love with her camera today.

Have you ever had been in physical pain and torment, followed by a relief so intense that the absence of pain is perceived as physical pleasure or euphoria. I can guarantee that any woman who has experienced childbirth has been through this.

The relief of having it over, or if you chose my more medically invasive route, the miraculous wonderful beautiful epidural. After 7 hours of severe labor, there it was, the wonderful peaceful absence of pain that felt akin to the greatest physical rush ever. We watched Sneakers on the hospital’s TV.

Today, I got an epidural for my eyes.

Spring has sprung in Utah. The trees are blossoming, flowers are flowering. Every living thing has conspired to make the insides of my eyelids feel like they are made of sandpaper.

Every time I look around me I literally get an eyefull of spring. I love the blossoms. I love the green. I love the warm but not too warm ambiance that allows me to take leisurely walks to the park and lounge on the lawn.

The sandpaper eyes, I am not so fond of.

It was getting worse and worse until I hit my breaking point as my girlfriend stood on the front porch with an Easter treat for my daughter and I stood there with a dumb expression on my face and my hand over my eye to hold it closed. I couldn’t stand the feeling of any movement in the whole general eye-region.

But then… Oh then, the joy: An epidural for my eyes:

Eye Allergy Relief drops from our local grocery store. Off-brand they may be, but work, they do.

My life has been transformed. All my senses are focused on my eye. It has become a pleasure center for my body. I blink, I open my eye, I close it. All unhampered by the overwhelming desire to claw it from my face.

I love modern medicine. Oh how grateful I am not to have been born in the time of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The “Little House on the Prairie” life seems oh so charming except when you remember that if you had allergies you would just have to splash water on your face and move on. If you had chemical depression, you were crazy or cranky, and childbirth had to be agony, no matter who you were.

So let’s all clap our hands for antihistimines, and medical miracles, and go outside and enjoy the blossoms!

And let’s also clap for this special surprise prize which arrived for me in the mail a couple of weeks ago!

And, when you have the cutest kid on the planet, and she happens to look like Einstein for a few minutes, you must indulge in random photo postage:

!!

It is Lauren, of Defying Labels, Gravity, and Sleep Deprivation.

The Easter Parade it is. Name of song. Name of film. Bien!

That said, isn’t Easter Parade a delightful little film. If you haven’t seen it, run out to Blockbuster. It’s perfectly appropriate for this time of year!

Judy Garland at her finest. Fred Astaire at his smoothest. It’s just about lovely.

Anyway, féliciatations Lauren!

The rest of you, better luck next week!

:) See you!

It’s not name that tune, name that movie quote, name that Jane Austen Heroine…

It’s all three, and much more. From now on, come on Wednesday mornings for the Wednesday Name that… competition.

Today’s is a snippet from a song. And that song is in a movie.

That’s my only hint:
“Never saw you look quite so pretty before
Never saw you dressed quite so lovely what’s more”

To the first person to correctly tell me the name of the song and the movie it comes from, a banner on my sidebar until next Wednesday. Yes, I am sort-of stealing a VERY cool idea from our good friend, her majesty, Beth! So thanks, Queen girl. I thought a weekly competition would be just the thing.

Oh, and I BEG you not to cheat. It just occurred to me how easily in this modern age, you could just google the lyrics, quote, whatever. PLEASE don’t. It would make it utterly and completely no fun!

And speaking of weekly things that should be mentioned here,
My Monday morning check-in was most definitely delayed. But I did check in, and here’s the stats…

I lost 2 pounds last week on the new hunger/fulness plan. I loved it. I felt relaxed, and I am now down a total of 4 pounds in two weeks, but the best is….. I lost 3 inches in the waist. How is this possible. I do not know. My tape measure tells me it is so, though… so… Hooray!

Have a great day, people. I know I am!

Because it is Sunday, and my mind is on God, I was thinking how ironic that I was asked to speak in church a few months ago about trusting the Lord. Right before I went through a great trial of my faith, and my ability to trust. And I went back and looked at my talk. In it, I found the basic principles which have sustained me through this time.

And I wanted to say a little something, looking back only a short distance, about how the experience of miscarrying my last pregnancy has changed my life. I am not trying to preach my beliefs, but I wanted to share with you my testimony after a difficult time. It is a priceless and sacred thing to me. Worth the loss or sacrifice that came with it.

I feel like my relationship with God is a little bit like a marriage relationship. It is, at least, in the sense that it is not always easy. It is not always blissful. It is not always entirely comprehensible, but it is immeasurably rewarding, and worth every moment of effort I put into it.

I also think that the two relationships are similar in the sense that cultivating the relationship requires the active choice to remain faithful– in word, thought, action, and feeling.

Despite misunderstanding, occasional hurt feelings, and fear, I choose every day of my life to love and remain faithful emotionally, mentally, spiritually and physically to my spouse. It is that choice that makes me feel safe in my marriage. I did not get married because I thought, “Ahah! There he is–the one true soul-mate in the universe who I would be compatible with.

We did not get married because we were tricked into thinking that there was no one more talented, beautiful, intelligent, wealthy, etc. in the world. We got married because we loved each other, and because we chose to commit to loving and caring for each other forever. For this reason, I don’t live in fear that Cody or I will suddenly realize that, darn it all, we just saw someone more beautiful, or more compatible, and decide that we must have picked the wrong one. We are with the only one there is, because we chose, and still choose every day to love and serve and be faithful to one another. Knowing that we stay in this relationship by a conscious and wise choice, makes me feel even happier about the joy of being married to my husband.

How does this relate to my relationship with God? Well, let me tell you. When I became pregnant this last time, I felt like it was a miracle. I believed it to be the answer to numerous sincere prayers, and a beautiful gift from heaven that God was entrusting me to take care of another of his children. I was overwhelmed. I felt sure that this baby was promised to me, and that I had waited long enough.

Then came a time of fear and waiting, blood tests and ultrasounds and deep-in-the-heart feelings that all pointed to the worst. This pregnancy was not going to continue. This baby that I had already come to love and care for in my heart was being taken away. And I waited for the miracle that I hoped would come. I waited, and I hoped. And I prayed.

You see, the scriptures are full of miraculous stories. And I know that God is all-powerful. I know that he can do anything, and I waited for him to make the miracle for me. But in my mind all that time were the three little words from the Bible, “but if not.”

In the Bible, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego were about to be cast into the fiery furnace for refusing to worship the golden image which the king had established. And they said to the king, “our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king.” And then they finished their bold statement with the following, “But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.”

But if not, they would remain faithful to their God.

We hope and pray for the miracle, but if not… we know in whom we have trusted, and we continue faithful to our God. It is a choice.

(There is an awesome talk that first drew my attention to this aspect of the Bible story. If you’d like an emailed copy of this talk, or my talk on trusting in God, email me at onewomansworld (at) gmail.com)

Sometimes the answers to our prayers are disappointing. Sometimes we can’t understand. God promises us that if we are faithful, he will prosper us. He also promises us that this life will be a time of testing. Given the two choices, I’d rather be prospered. But the two statements must exist together. Sometimes in order for God to prosper us, we have to endure hard things.

And in the end, we choose. We choose to be faithful. We choose to trust in God, and he will sustain us as we choose in difficult times to rely upon him.

I know this. And I choose today, and sometimes I stumble, and then I choose again tomorrow when the way looks dark and frightening, to be faithful to God, and to wait.

But here’s the amazing empowering, baffling thing. I have been carried as I’ve made this choice. I have felt the power of God with me through the past weeks in ways that I’ve never felt it before. I have felt the peace that Jesus Christ offers that is “not as the world giveth.” The peace that passes understanding. As I have tried to give my heart to God, I have felt him give my heart back to me, stronger, and more whole.

And I am grateful. And I feel like singing again.