Summer is over....

Today:
Changing my balcony painting studio into an indoors winter studio. :-( summer is definitely over :-(
Taking care of a child with cold
Picking new and loads of elderberries
Cleaning elderberries
Sorting elderberries (which takes ages)
Freezing elderberries
Making vegetable soup and baking french fries :-)
Finding beautiful words on my timeline, (thanks Pixie Campbell)


Sky of blackness and sorrow 
Sky of love, sky of tears 
Sky of glory and sadness 
Sky of mercy, sky of fear 
Sky of memory and shadow 
Your burnin' wind fills my arms tonight
Sky of longing and emptiness
Sky of fullness, sky of blessed life

~ bruce springsteen

Now tired and content and ready to go to bed...how about your day?

Goddess Kali 

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Getting old(er)...

Today i stumbled across a pair of cheap reading glasses. It turns out my headaches while reading can be easily fixed. I feel like now i really turned a corner. Beacuse they say your sight gets weaker from 40 up, so now i am officially one of them, and i am 'only' 41!!!

:-0

I am getting older!!! And as a friend so elequantly pointed out when i said this, next stop is meno pauze... But this i actually look forward to, except for the hot fashes that come with it.

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Things i'm afraid to tell you

Hi, today I will do something else.

Inspired by some great women who wrote revealing and philosophical blog posts about how we present ourselves to our readers  on our blogs in this day and age. Here a few wonderful examples that triggered my urge to do the same. 

Creature Comfort/Alison Citron/ LittleBrown Pen/ Make Under My Life/ Sweet Fine Day/ Creative Thursday....and so many more, here is a list of bloggers who did the same.

Wanting to contribute to this refreshing flow of honesty,  I feel like writing my humble list of ‘things I am afraid to tell you’. (They are not listed in order of importance.) 

So here it goes..it’s terrifying me to press the send button I can tell you!

1.I am often afraid in the night thinking there are ghosts spying on me.  So I find it very difficult and confronting when my kids tell me they are scared in the dark, did I plant that in their souls? So I feel very ashamed and it makes me feel very as an inadequate mother when I  try to reassure them by  literally acting as though there is nothing to be scared of, even when I feel scared at the same time they do.

2.I am hesitant to tell this but I will any way. This year I found myself asking my father to come over before Christmas , to at least be here already on the 20^th of December to hold my hand because of my overwhelming fear that the Maya’s might be right about the end of the World this year.

3.I feel very ashamed being too lazy to do my dishes any other way then with the tab running with water the whole time, in spite of knowing water is very scarce for some people and might be one day for us and my children as well.

4.I feel jealous of women who are in a relationship with a man who supplements their income so they can devote their efforts easily to their creative businesses. 

5.I am not proud of myself, but I make sure to never show pictures in here that show my true (over)weight..

6.I ones dreamt big, of being a worlds known artist but I slowly begin to realize if that did not happened yet at 40 it never will. And that is something I still can’t accept and makes me feel jealous of people who have seemed to reach their ‘art goals’ and even reached them at a way younger age than me(so they have still time to reach the sky).

7.Sometimes I doubt my abilities as a mom. I feel scared they will not grow up as confident as I wish for them to become because of my inabilities to make them feel centered and secure.

8.Divorcing my husband a little over a year ago because I could not change the situation and feel happy with him is one of the main reasons for feelings of deep guilt towards my children.

9.I feel sometimes I lose my patience with my kids too easily and  I shout much too loud at my kids...i feel very very ashamed about this.

10.I feel jealousy lots of the time, for example when I hear people talk about what they do in their professional lives and telling it with that special spark in their voices. Jealous of the fact they feel confident reaching their goals without seeing  any boundaries on the road they decided to go. I always see the boundaries and worst case scenario’s first and let myself be paralyzed by them.


11.I throw away food too often and too easily. I'm so sorry!


So here is my list, it's not near as long as i can make it :)) But for now i feel i will stop here because of feeling a bit awkward about it...

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A very nice Sunday breakfast

This weekend past weekend we have had a very nice Sunday breakfast. My dad came over from abroad and two dear friends we hadn't seen for a loooong time were there as well. Such a  lovely and soothing day it was because of the people that were there. We needed you! Thank you :)) 

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Having fun with Jotter

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Midsommer and 41

The 21st, mid-sommer-night was my 41st birthday..times is really flying way tooo fast.

The flowers i gave myself for my birthday are so beautiful :))

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This Morning :))

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A single mom's cry

Sometimes it’s just mega hard to be a single mom. Yesterday the ‘disaster-day’  started out with me suddenly falling ill with a fever, I barely could drag my groceries in the door without falling over. I then went to bed for an hour. I had just one hour to sleep it off because I had to get my kids out from daycare and school. When I woke up after that hour I could really not see how to get out of my bed on my bike in that hostile feeling cold windy and rainy outside world.  I am so lucky I could call the person that takes care of my daughter and she picked up my son and brought them both to my doorstep. Thank god for you Mimi!!!!

In the evening the disaster day went forth when my daughter took a sip of detergent that’s put in a children’s they can blow bubbles with, (I have no idea how that’s called in English I’m sorry).  I had to give her something greasy (butter in her milk) and call the doctor what to do next. Luckily she did not throw up so there was no risk for an chemical pneumonia, (until she would throw up that was). She slept well after that and the next day she was fine.

Today we went to a lovely Christmas dinner organized by the lovely Mimi and my friend who has three young children. The kids had a really nice time. When we came home, (me still feeling groggy from the fever night before), they had to off course unpack some of their gifts and one of them were these little starts we call them in the Netherlands, that you light with Christmas or new years eve. After i lit it one of the stars to show them how it looked, my son wanted to hold it after the burning was done. And in a blink of an eye he touched the upper part very briefly, it was still very hot! So he burned his finger. I could kick myself in the head for allowing him to hold it!  Luckily there wasn’t any real damage to his skin besides redness, but off course it hurts soooo much. It took him about one hour and a half to calm down and fall asleep.  

So now it’s my turn to go to bed. But first I needed to get this chain of unfortunate events off my chest...

....hope everything will be calm and peaceful tomorrow...

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Daily life, no words

*Smock pattern on tree

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Breakfast with diving glasses :))

Sometimes I just can't believe what these two come up with :)) When I came into the living room this morning they were having their oatmeal with their diving glasses on. I quickly grabbed my camera but I was too late to make a shot of both of them wearing them. By the time I came back into the room with my camera my daughter had already took her neon yellow pair down... But that didn't matter because  I thought this is a nice enough shot of  'the having a quick breakfast before going diving couple' as well :))))))

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