My husband bought me a sewing machine! It’s one of the things on my short list of “need/wants” that I hadn’t been able to purchase since our wedding because of tuition. SO, how better to break in a new machine than to make up a new pattern and make an old dress new? I found a real beauty at the DI (a local second-hand store.)
I liked how it fit. I liked the material. I LOVED the ombre from dark purple to bright blue:
The only thing about the dress that I didn’t love was it’s lack of sleeves. I don’t wear sleeveless clothing. So, I found a tutorial on Pinterest for “flutter sleeves” which seemed like it could be altered to look quite at home on this dress. It required a pattern for bell-shaped sleeves that stack in layers, each layer one inch shorter than the last.
Our little family took our first big vacation together this past month. We journeyed from our home in Utah to the Boise airport and from there flew to Seattle and on to Hawaii. Kyle’s parents took us and Kyle’s sisters on the trip and made all the arrangements in our behalf, which made it a very easy vacation indeed.
I was very nervous for the flight, since I had no idea what to expect from my 10-month-old, but as my mother-in-law remarked, “He lived up to his middle name,” which has the meaning “golden”.
He slept almost the whole way, and when we were in between flights, we set up a luggage barricade and he played in the middle.
When we arrived I stepped out of the plane doors and found myself staring out at a lunar eclipse! It certainly felt epic to have my first glimpse of Hawaii in the erie moonlight of such a rare phenomenon.
We stayed in a condo near the beach, which was absolutely lovely.
And our stay was certainly packed full of adventures! We went to several farmers markets where we found souvenirs and a fruit that looked amazing but actually tasted like hairspray.
We hiked around waterfalls,
through jungles,
and through a lava tube near an active volcano. We went snorkeling, met some sea turtles,
And tried to convince William that the ocean isn’t altogether a bad thing.
We explored an ancient Hawaiian place of refuge.
And we definitely played on some beautiful beaches.
We also explored the southernmost point of the United States, which turned out to be a scary, rotting old platform hanging over a cliff.
In an attempt to salvage the afternoon we thought we’d check out a nearby, green-sand beach. However, the beach was even more ghetto than the cliff! We only made it to the parking lot infested with chickens before we turned back. On our way out we found a graffitied wall that read “Tell my people I tried.” It seemed like an appropriate subtitle for the experience.
It was a trip full of beautiful vistas, exploration, and more than one adventure. All the ingredients for spectacular memories.
Some of you may have seen this article circulating on Facebook: 10 ways to show love to someone with depression. I opened the link, looking for some good ideas to help me be more compassionate. I’ve never struggled with depression out of the ordinary way, but I know others who have. What surprised me is how many of the suggestions on the list echoed my own needs as a mom.
Don’t get me wrong, motherhood isn’t depression. Rather, I was surprised to discover that many items on the list have recently become hard for me, as a new mom. So I thought to myself, “If I feel this way, I’m sure other moms out there can relate.
1. Keep the clutter at bay:
Kyle and William “helping” with the laundry :]
Before my baby was born this wasn’t such a big deal. I took most of the responsibility for keeping our house clean and if things got messy for a few days I escaped to my office, regained my sanity, and found time to organize when I could. Now I’m working at home and taking care of my son. I can’t always get things done when he’s awake and I usually need to work when he’s asleep. If things get messy, I get depressed. I am swallowed up in it and distracted by it until it is taken care of. There have been occasions when my house finally gets cleaned and I literally feel a weight lifted off of my shoulders.
Mother’s Day Idea: Pitch in and clean some things you don’t normally clean. There is ALWAYS something that can be made brighter.
2. Fix a healthy meal:
Bread that Kyle made me two years ago (see, I still have the picture. Stuff like this can mean so much.)
My baby is at his worst in the early evening. Since I am typically the cook of our family, this makes dinner difficult. My husband comes home from work hungry, but the baby needs to be bounced, and I can’t hold him and slice vegetables at the same time. I often succumb to the temptation of cooking whatever is fastest and easiest, which usually isn’t the healthiest… On top of this, I’m home all day. If I get hungry I eat, and once again, it’s the fastest and easiest foods that usually make the cut.
Mother’s Day Idea: Make Mom some healthy freezer meals. The most unromantic gift on earth that might just make her swoon.
3. Get out!
A selfie in the Jungle
As a stay-at-home mom with a work-from-home job I spend A LOT of time at home. I can’t tell you what a simple run to the grocery store means some days.
Mother’s Day Idea: Give Mom a day off. Tell her that she can pick whatever she’d like to do and you’ll make arrangements for things to be cared for while she’s gone. Or, the less intense version: next time your at a social event, you take care of the kids so that she can have a little adult interaction.
4. Encourage personal hygiene.
We’ve all laughed at those crazy ladies in their mom jeans. I know before the birth of my son I would hear women say, “I just can’t seem to find time to do my hair anymore,” and roll my eyes inwardly a little bit. Then I had a baby and stopped doing my hair. Seriously, my baby is 10 months old and I just got my first hair cut since his birth yesterday morning. The fact is, this problem with mom’s failing to take care of themselves is no laughing matter. There is a difference between feeling loved and feeling lovable, and both are important. When a woman feels ugly all the time, she can mistake others love for her as a sign of their unattainable perfection instead of a strength both of them enjoy and rely on.
Mother’s Day gift idea: Give the special lady in your life something nice for her to use in her daily hygiene routine. A Mary Kay gift certificate, some high quality shampoo, a day at the spa, a manicure or pedicure, or even just a little protected time to get ready for the day, all give her something in her appearance to smile about.
5. Help her make something pretty
Upscaled Upholstery by Kyle and I
Motherhood has some fantastic rewards, however, most of those rewards are very long-term. A mom who’s energy is completely focused on her family can go a long time without feeling the joy of accomplishment, or the pride of a job well done. Encouraging craft time, scrap booking, blogging, photography, or some other creative hobby can help round her out.
Mother’s Day idea: buy something that supports her hobbies. All moms have them.
So, there you go. A couple easy ways to give the Mom in your life a little of the support she needs. Happy Mother’s day, and good luck on all your gift-giving ventures!
When Kyle and I purchased our first home, it wasn’t perfect. Of course it wasn’t. But there were plenty of lovely and charming things about it. Unfortunately, the kitchen was not one of those lovely enchantments. It was intended to be an eat-in, but the only place for a table of any significant size was right next to the railing guarding the stairs. In my mind’s eye I could just picture small children hurtling over the edge in the middle of dinner. Continue reading “My $1500 Kitchen Remodel (part 1)”
I had a new adventure this Thanksgiving holiday. I went with my in-laws to cut down our families’ Christmas trees. I hadn’t ever been Christmas tree hunting, and I was eager for the experience. Continue reading “Oh Christmas Tree!”
We’ve entered a picture of William into the local radio station’s Cute Kid Christmas photo contest. We’re in tenth place this morning and we have one week to reach first! Spread some Christmas love and help our holiday wish come true! You can vote every day until next Thursday at this link: http://bit.ly/1dqgre5 Merry Christmas!
Decorating has never been one of my strengths… That may seem strange to some because I’m a graphic designer, but trust me, decorating a room and decorating an interface are two vastly different things. Being addicted to Pinterest, however, and seeing a million clever nursery themes and DIY projects put me in a decorating mood.
As always, I knew I didn’t want to spend much money. I also knew I didn’t want to use a childish theme even though it was for a child. I wanted something inspiring and appealing for me, so trucks and dinosaurs were out. After all, the baby won’t care in the slightest what his nursery looks like. I’m the one who will be hanging out in there, changing diapers and whatnot. After thinking about it for a while I decided to decorate the nursery in maps.
One advantage to this plan was that we already had an enormous world map that my husband and I both love. I also found a cool dresser on Pinterest with maps mod podged to the drawers, and I thought I could pull off something simple like that.
So the first piece we tackled was the dresser. We found one for seven bucks at a salvage yard with my in-laws. It was DIRTY and even though it was made of pressboard, it had been stained instead of painted, so the sucker needed a lot of work. (who stains pressboard?) this is how it looked when we found it:
My husband, his dad, and his brother spray-painted it white and my mother-in-law and I touched it up with some craft paint. Then we somehow fit it into the backseat of our car to take the lovely lady home with us.
It probably sat around our apartment for a good month or two before I finally got around to the mod podge excursion and put on the new hardware, but once we had finished everything I was pretty happy with it. I decided I wanted a little lamp for the nursery as well, so I picked one up at DI for 4 bucks and mod podged maps on the shade so it would match the dresser. Not bad for less than 20 bucks, eh?
I wanted a chair for nursing in so Kyle and I looked in every furniture store we could find, but neither of us could bring ourselves to fork over 400 some odd dollars for a new one. Luckily, after a few days of watching KSL classifieds online I found a reclining, swiveling, rocking chair for $45. It needed to be cleaned and it had some very tiny threadbare patches, but after a thorough going over with baby wipes and permanent marker you’d never know.
Strangely, Our baby never actually used this room. Since he was on oxygen for the first month of his life, we were both tethered to the master bedroom, and we bought a house and moved out before kicking him out of our space. But, as an exercise in decorating, I’d say it was successful!
Kyle and I have a long history of trying to find good, productive hobbies to do together. They usually start off with Kyle getting an itch to try something out. Like the time he decided we ought to learn the art of calligraphy, or the time he decided to become a master artisan bread chef…
The tricky thing is, sometimes these spur of the moment hankerings my husband gets occasionally lead to life-changing talents, like the time he decided to learn Chinese, or the time he talked me into enrolling with him in Karate for the summer. And then sometimes they turn out to just cost us money and give us little in return, like the time he got his heart set on starting a business. So on one hand I do my best to temper his impulses if I feel they are too outrageous or expensive. On the other hand I hate to kill his enthusiasm. It’s one of my favorite traits of his.
Anyhow, this summer Kyle decided we should try our hand at upholstery, so we got some library books and looked up some DIY blogs to see what we could learn. After a few days of research we picked a project we thought we could handle and Kyle hit the classifieds, searching for our first furniture victims. After driving all over Salt Lake valley he came home with these lovely ladies:
Our newly acquired chairs, ready for a little lovin’
As you can see, they needed some help. They had some broken pieces, at least one was a little unsteady on its feet, and the colors could slap you in the face from a mile away. Plus, several had been upholstered in picnic tablecloth fabric. Yuck. They didn’t get finished right away. They did get sanded right away, though, and took up residence in our kitchen.
The dismantled and sanded chairs, residing in our garage/kitchen.
However, after a couple of weeks my man came through! Together we sanded, fixed, painted and reupholstered each one of the chairs and then we sold them again, for more than we spent to buy them and fixing them up! We only made, like, 16 bucks, but it was our FIRST ATTEMPT, after all. Plus I think they turned out pretty great:
The final product, at last!
And you can rest assured that this will be a hobby we plan to continue. Three bar stools have already taken their place in our workshop/kitchen, just begging to be made pretty again. Look out for our next project!
In my last interview I promised my mission president that I would write out a letter explaining why I’m glad I served a mission. I never did because the thought of explaining it was so overwhelming. However, five years ago today I entered the MTC and therefore embarked on this most wild of adventures. In honor of this anniversary I thought I’d finally fulfill my promise.
My last picture as a missionary with my Mission President and his wife.
I never wanted to serve a mission. I knew it would be hard work. I knew I’d have to give up naps and spontaneous shopping trips, my computer, my roommates, my car, and a lifestyle I liked. I knew I’d have to talk to every random stranger in my path about church, whether they wanted to hear me or not. I knew I’d get doors slammed in my face and cold-shoulders. I knew I’d have no time to do my hair and no chance to wear cute clothes for 18 months, and if I tried they would be ruined by weather and biking as soon as I stepped out the door. All in all, I knew I’d have to trade in everything I liked about my life to walk around looking like an idiot, and therefore I was not interested.
Luckily I didn’t let my lack of interest stop me.
Lucky because I would have never known what I’d missed.
The first hint that there was something to miss really struck me as I spoke to one of my roommates before I left. Her name was Carolina and she had served on Temple Square. I told her I was thinking about a mission and i expected her to get all excited and try to talk me into it. To my surprise she started to cry. “I wish I could go with you” she said. And from that moment on I knew I had to go. I had to know, despite all the unappealing aspects of a mission, why she felt that way.
So here it is… why it’s worth it:
1. THE THINGS I LEARNED:
There are a whole list of basic things I learned, like how to mount a bike in motion, how to speak Chinese, and how to really study and teach the gospel. Those are valuable things to me, but they are also things I expected to learn. The more valuable things I learned on my mission are the things I never anticipated:
I learned the joy of setting goals. I’ve always been a goal-oriented kind of girl, but serving a mission brought this to a whole new level. I had an awesome second companion to help me learn this. When she moved into the area our pool of investigators was stagnant to say the least. We had nobody to teach and people were relatively scarce in general due to the rural nature of our area. Despite this Sister McKinley was determined to break every personal record she had set on her mission so far. We probably only hit one or two of those goals, but we worked incredibly hard for two transfers and we had a lot of fun! By the time Sister McKinley left that area I believe she had successfully smashed all her previous records. I finally understood that good goals can make tasks you don’t care for much more enjoyable.
I learned the freedom of having nothing to loss. In my first transfer my apartment was ransacked. I remember walking through the door and my first reaction was to look for my computer. Then suddenly I realized, “I don’t have a computer.” It was surprisingly liberating to realize I had nothing anyone would want to take. I was free from stuff. I had nothing to loss. It may seem silly, but its significantly changed the way I see the things I own. I realized that virtually everything dies or gets lost at some point, but that’s okay. I don’t need it. And before I buy something I subconsciously consider, “is this worth the stress of taking care of it?”
Me contacting people on a scooter in the middle of the road. (basically the best way to meet people in Taiwan)
I learned how to talk to strangers. There is no better way to learn this than on a mission, because you talk to strangers every chance you get and half the time they don’t want to be talking to you. Before my mission simple things like setting doctors appointments and asking for help when I needed it really stressed me out. By the time I came home I felt confident approaching almost any topic, and I’d also learned how to provide a safe way out for myself and the person I’d approached, so that the conversation ended well, no matter what the outcome. This is a priceless skill.
I learned how much can actually get done when you put nothing off. I’m not a procrastinator, but I went on exchanges once with a sister that put me to shame. She literally did everything the second she thought about it, no excuses. The whole time we were together I’d go to do a task and find she’d already done it… I am still amazed just thinking about it. We were together all day long and somehow she managed to get everything done without me even knowing it half the time. By the end of the day we wrapped things up so quickly I didn’t know what to do with all my extra time. I realized that putting things off creates totally unnecessary stress in my life.
I learned that the world is really messed up, and the only way to fix it all is through the gospel. Before my mission I was a pretty adamant political debater among my friends. I often got really discouraged about how rude and unwieldy people get about politics… Unwilling to compromise to find a working solution because neither side wants to admit they are doing anything wrong, or even that there is a better way. One day on my mission it hit me, the gospel solves all those problems! If people truly become converted to the gospel the poor are cared for, families are strengthened and protected, and individuals learn to value independence and care for themselves as much as possible. I realized I don’t have to pull anyone out of politically idealogical ruts in order to get our country and the world to a better place, just live and preach the gospel the best I can.
2. THE THINGS I LOST:
I expected to loose a lot of things on my mission. Mostly, I was reluctant to put aside a lifestyle I enjoyed to do something I knew wouldn’t be so fun. What I didn’t realize is that I’d be getting an 18 month adventure in exchange for 18 months of the same old blah. That stuff I loved to do was still around when I got home, but the by-the-book missionary lifestyle I lived with it’s 87-hour work week, riding my bike to kingdom come, and seeing miracles at every turn of the road can only come once. Nothing else I will ever do could be like that.
Riding my bike through the McDonald’s drive through.
I also lost 20 pounds. I’d heard that missionaries tend to gain lots of weight, but in my mission that simply wasn’t true. An elder who served in most of the same areas I did had an odometer on his bike to keep track of how many miles he’d ridden… By the end of his mission he’d pedaled almost far enough to circle the globe. Riding so much so often made my thighs enormous but my waist line went down to nothing. Even after eating out 2 meals a day for a year, I lost weight.
I lost a lot of my biggest fears. Let’s face it, there are few people on earth who don’t fear rejection and looking totally foolish in public. Serving a mission comes with a double side of both. The funny thing is that looking foolish and being rejected are really easy to get used to. After a while its easy to get over them. I have also always had a fear of failure. That might be one reason why a mission didn’t appeal to me. I’d never done anything before that I didn’t already know I was good at and I knew I wouldn’t be the world’s most natural missionary. I faced a lot of embarrassing and disappointing failures, but I learned how to start as a failure and become a success. I remember thinking to myself “If I can do this, I can do anything.” Now I think to myself, “Hey, I did that, so I can do anything.”
3. THE THINGS I GAINED:
There are a whole list of superficial things I gained on my mission that seemed like incredible bonuses. For example, I got an awesome tan. I got to see some pretty remarkable sights. I made some life-long friends.
A gaggle of monkeys on a mountain path in ErShui. P.S. monkeys are mean!
There are a long list of non-superficials too, mainly happiness. I remember wondering after I came home, “Why didn’t anybody tell me a mission would make me so happy?” It seemed like every time I had a bad day I’d get a letter, a Facebook post or a phone call from someone on my mission. But it was more than that. Before my mission I lived under the assumption that it’s what you do in your life that determines whether or not you’re happy. I believed that in order to be happy I needed to be doing things that made me happy. Oddly enough, that is a lie. So long as I am happy with what I’m doing I can feel happy, even if I don’t really enjoy the tasks themselves. I figured out what things in my life REALLY made me unhappy and I learned the self-discipline I needed to get rid of them.
I gained an enormous amount of faith. I thought I had faith before I left. I mean, I had enough faith to leave behind everything I loved to travel to the other side of the world and preach the gospel in broken Chinese on a street corner. That seemed like a lot of faith at the time. But on my mission I gained a deeper level of faith, the kind that makes you confident that everything will be alright. Ever since my return I’ve felt the power of that kind of faith in my life, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. Because no matter what you do, stressful and frightening things will find you. Being able to dig down in the midst of those dark situations and remember, “No matter what happens this will all work out alright” and really believe it enough to find relief … well, you just can’t deny the importance of that.
The most valuable thing I gained was a deeper understanding of the Savior and the Atonement. Every once in a while, when I felt like I was really sacrificing something or doing something hard, or when I really felt I’d finally done something well, I would have these thoughts come to my mind about the Savior. And suddenly I’d see very clearly the vast gulf between my little sacrifices and the splendid grandeur of the atonement. And I’d realize just how incredible His sacrifice was in my behalf. I’d realize all the things I was doing for someone else, He had done things like that for me, and more, and perfectly. And I learned about the love he must feel, and the disappointment when I make mistakes. I gave up 18 months of Sunday naps, but He gave up his life. And He did it because He wants me to have the chance to be with Him and be like Him. I saw miracles roll out right and left, not just for the golden people, but for everyone I taught and some people I only met briefly. I saw the amazing signs and the wonders of heaven and I saw people change everything because of them. Who would have ever chosen to miss that?
One day my mission president, Michael Hoer, asked his wife, “Why is it that difficult trials happen to everybody else and not us?” Sister Hoer didn’t think that was quite true. She responded by listing a few trials she felt they had faced, proving that they had gone through their fair share of rough patches. President Hoer responded to each point, explaining why it didn’t count as a real trial. Sister Hoer later remarked that President Hoer doesn’t have trials, he just has new adventures.
When I heard Sister Hoer tell this story it struck a cord with me, which is probably why I found myself thinking about it in the NICU. My son William was 4 days old and had trouble breathing for no apparent reason his first three days of life. We had successfully weened him off of oxygen, antibiotics, and IV fluids, and he seemed to be holding his own. We were planning to take him home the next day, and the nurses had set up a series of standard tests to be sure he was ready for the wild world outside the NICU. To my shock, he totally bombed his car seat test, meaning that the poor kid couldn’t keep his oxygen saturation levels up while sitting in a car seat. This wouldn’t keep us from going home, but it did mean we had to bring an oxygen tank and respiration monitor with us.
Kyle and baby William in the NICU.
I was devastated. It might seem silly, since we were still homeward bound, but after days of beeping monitors, holding my baby’s hand while his stomach was pumped, sinuses flushed, lungs vacuumed, and IVs were placed in both hands and feet and eventually the side of his head, after crossing my fingers as they did an ultrasound on his murmuring heart, examined his possibly-clubbed foot, and deliberated about whether or not he really was deaf in his right ear, I had hoped to leave the monitors and breathing tubes behind. I thought we were going to make it scott free, finally driving our baby home like normal parents and I couldn’t help wondering, why my baby?
So there I sat in my rocker next to my baby’s NICU station, trying not to cry in front of my husband, 100 doctors and nurses, and the REALLY tough moms and dads whose babies had been in the NICU for weeks and months with no clear idea when they’d ever get to leave. And then this memory of my mission president flashed into my mind and I realized “This isn’t a trial, it’s an adventure.”
Suddenly, even though nothing had changed, I felt completely different. What’s so great about having the same newborn experience as everybody else, anyway. We didn’t have a baby to keep up with everybody else’s plain old vanilla lifestyle. We had a baby to bring some spicy and adventure into our lives, and if oxygen tanks and monitors were part of the deal, then I’d take it.
Baby William, home for the first time.
It was in that moment that I really decided I needed to start this blog. I’d been thinking about it for a little while as a way to get myself out of my own way. My husband had sparked the idea in me, actually. We were talking about parenting when he observed that all the unpleasant things about parenting are required and the fun stuff is optional. Parents have to deal with the crying, day and night. You can’t escape the poop, the spit, the demanding feeding schedule, and the nagging worry that comes with a baby. But the snuggles, the cheers every time he lifts his own head, the quiet moments singing lullabys… Those are completely optional. And it’s the same with life. Car batteries die, it snows on your spring wedding day, illness, bills, heartache, and loss invade everybody’s peace once in a while. But the beautiful summer sunsets, star-gazing hikes, and spontaneous forays into unknown environments are yours to miss.
I am occasionally so focused on the details of life that I miss the adventures that are there for the taking. So this is my way of fighting back. I want to live in the stream of life and enjoy it, whether rapid or still.
![Kyle and William "helping" with the laundry :]](http://blog.ashleybarney.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/20140511-095314.jpg)
