A Reflection of Beauty

Last night my husband drew a bath and invited me in. It's our favorite nightly ritual, we scarcely miss an evening. We turn on music, turn off the lights and let the warm water melt us together.

Our oldest asleep in his bed our newborn swinging in his swing just outside the door where we could watch him. Usually he sleeps too, but tonight he fussed and cried wanting a moment in my arms.

So I climbed out of the tub and scooped him up for a snuggle. Standing there in front of the mirror the floor soaking where I stood, I caught a glimpse of my bare body in the mirror. I watched myself for a moment while I rocked and swayed my little one.

I saw my arms holding the most wonderful creature I've ever beheld, how can arms holding such wonder not be wonderful too?

 I saw his perfect little head nestled on my shoulder. How can shoulders supporting such perfection not be perfect too?

I saw breasts that hung much lower than they did when I was twenty four, before I had my first baby. But how could breasts that give life and nourishment to this miracle not be a miracle too?

I saw a belly still swollen slightly, the skin stretched from accommodating this lovely boy inside my body for nine months and I thought how can a belly that carried such a lovely babe, not be lovely too?

And I looked over at my husband gazing at us both and he smiled at me, "You are so beautiful..." He said.

And my heart agreed, Yes, I am beautiful.
For by the beauty alone I have brought into this world,
How could I not be beautiful too?


This stunning photo taken by EllCee Photography

Create your own romance

Romance is beauty, it's art, it's music, it is the creative expression of the soul. I crave romance, with an appetite that can never be satisfied. Once I taste it, I only get hungry for more. Romance awakens my senses to the life in every moment, it is the ultimate feeling of my existence.

Our courtship was a delicious feast of the romantic. Oh how he listened to me. Gazed into my eyes over a candle lit dinner, he spoke excitedly of the future, he brought me flowers. He wrote me poetry. His romantic inclinations were a window into my own heart. Or so I thought. What I perceived to be a window was really a mirror. Showing me how much I needed romance. During this time of courtship he had the time and biological drive to swoon me off my feet. It was his goal to win my heart. I was his greatest focus, I had his full attention and it felt incredible. I wanted it to last forever. So I married him.

Then I noticed a shift. His focus included school and career, and soon there was a little one to provide for. His very own son. There was more to his life than finding ways to satisfy my longing for the romantic. But my longing for the romantic did not diminish, it intensified. Exponentially.

It was impossible for him to give me all I needed to be happy. I learned to feed my own hungry soul with the romantic. I took romance into my own hands. And I was satisfied! More than satisfied, I was thriving and  living a happy joyous marriage! I scrap-booked, I hung hearts from our ceiling, I decorated, I sang, I planned date nights, I took bubble baths, I went on long beautiful walks. And soon he was eager to join in the fun! It was not his obligation to romance me, I simply invited him into my world of romance where he became the guest of honor! I was already content, and joyful, anything Josh gave me in addition ran me over till I was overflowing with happiness. Every "I love you" every "You are so beautiful" every surprise bouquet of flowers, or walk along the pier, was the cherry on my Sunday. He was free to love me just as he chose, because I wasn't telling him I needed him to be more romantic. Or resenting him for not fulfilling my need for romance. And he loved me beautifully.

We are born to fly amid the skies of creative expression, and romance is the ultimate creative expression. It sings, it paints, it soaks in candle lit bubble baths, it dances, it bakes brownies, it designs, it is a fashionista, it composes magnificent sonnets, it kisses, it snuggles, it bonds, our heart beats, our lungs breathe, our eyes see, and our souls create romance.

When we spread our own wings and take flight among those clouds he will marvel at your grace and beauty in the sky. You can lift him from the drudgery and weight of the world, when you create the romance and invite him to join you, he will most readily respond. Now he is free from the impossible task of flying for you. He is free of your disappointment, he is free from not being enough. He is free from failing you. Now, anything he gives you is wind beneath your wings, always more than you could have dreamed of, he can never fail. When a man knows he cannot fail, watch him do the extraordinary! You have taken your happiness into your own hands, and now he is free to simply love you. 

Welcome to the glorious world, of true love.

These fabulous photos taken by EllCee Photography

Counting

I don't count sheep lately.

I count late night nursings
And early morning burpings.

I count the monsters I scared away from my five year old's room
And the coins the tooth fairy left for his lost teeth.
I count ten little piggies and "one more bedtime story please..."

I count how fast we can get our shoes on before kindergarten starts.

I count loads of laundry and stacks of dishes
I count out change at the grocery store
And sometimes I count to ten
And take really deep breaths.

But most of all
I count my blessings.

A husband I can always count on,
And two little boys who call me mom.

You see, the way I figure it
everything adds up.

I see the sum of my life
In a million little moments
That seem so insignificant
But are actually the bits and pieces
That make sense of everything

Because at the end of the day
What counts most is always
And forever
Love.


This beautiful photo was taken by EllCee Photography

How do you fly?

Tonight as I was tucking my four year old son into bed, we had a very sweet conversation.

"Mom, thank you for my superman costume, it makes me so happy."

"You're welcome, Scotty."

"Mom, I thought it would make me fly. But I can't fly. And I don't have any super powers."

"Oh, sweetie" I said, giving him a big hug, "Every super hero has very different super powers, you may not fly like superman, but you have a superpower of friendship and kindness, you make friends so easily! And you have a superpower of happiness, just by smiling and being you, you make others around you happy! And you have a superpower of brilliance, you are very smart and love to learn, that's what makes you Super Scott!"

"Mom, tell me a story about Super Scott."

So I told him a story about making a new friend with someone who was shy. This precious conversation touched me on so many levels, and really made me contemplate my own perspective in life. How innocently my son believed that putting on a costume would turn him into the hero he most admires, but he is already a hero in my eyes and in the eyes of everyone who loves him. As his mother, it is my heart's dearest hope, to be the mirror that can show him to see that greatness in himself.

What costumes am I wearing hoping they will give me super powers? That my house is always clean? That I know just what to do all the time? That I always have it together? That I am always a perfect, engaged mom teaching my 4 year old everything he needs to know to get into college? That my heart doesn't sometimes break? That everything is fine? That I don't need help? I am just as human as you, and in that fallible, imperfect, humanity there is my truest superpower-compassion, sympathy and love.

Because I know how it feels to wish I could fly into the sky of perfection, and then realize I can't fly. I don't have any superpowers...But I am me. I am alive. And I am walking through this life choosing to love, create, and build a family that with God's blessing, will go on and on for generations. That, is superpower enough for me.

Music and the Mind, Book Review

I just finished listening to one of my all time favorite books on tape (for probably the 50th time) "Music and the Mind" by Michael Ballam. I love this book, it inspires and reminds me of the invaluable importance of the arts. Ballam has incredible information and research compiled into this treasure of a book that will compel you to go out and buy your very own copy of Handel's Water Music! There are stories that truly testify of the power and influence of music, the accounts he shares will speak to your heart and remind you of this incredible tool we have to bless the lives of others, wake up the mind and uplift our souls through good music. 

My grandpa always told me that music has to have "the three m's" in order to pass the test of time, it has to have melody, it has to have a message, and it has to have majesty. Ballam's entire book has all three. It is written like a song, it is filled with music and it will change your life. Music is a divine language, a way to convey love in such a powerful and personal way, it is nothing short of magic.

Turn on some Mozart, Brahms or Handel today, sit down with your little one and paint, draw, dance, sing, wake up your mind, wake up your heart, wake up your creativity. All of the answers are there, waiting to be unlocked, music and art will set them free.

What do you do to unlock your creativity?

-DD

Letting go

Life is constantly coming and going. Autumn shows us this principle in a very vibrant and exciting way. All the leaves are changing and falling from the trees, preparing for winter. The long sleep before spring.

Imagine a tree that couldn't let go of it's leaves! Season after season fearfully clinging to every leaf it grew. "I might need this leaf later." It cries. "I just grew this leaf it's brand new!" "I wouldn't look as pretty as that ever green without my foliage!" "I'm just not a tree without all my leaves!" Eventually the tree would topple under it's own weight, and with no room for new growth the old would just sit there decaying. It would not be a pleasant sight. But the tree let's go, and never worries that new leaves won't come. 

With every breath you take in you instantly let go again. You release the old breath to allow in the new. Your body is in a constant rhythm of giving and taking, releasing and restoring. If it were not so, we wouldn't last long. The nature of living is to let things come as we need them and go as we don't. It's as if everything in this life is reminding us that our walk here is just a moment. We will come and we will go. And it is okay. Nothing in this world ceases to exist because it lets go, the letting go simply allows for the process to begin again anew.

Photo copyright Heidi Nickerson

When it's not REALLY yours, renting. Part 3 of 3

After a year of decorating with wild, passionate abandon, and a year of ultra conservative "I'm just going to have such a spotless house all the cockroaches will starve" home, I learned a few things.

Design is a process. Don't be afraid to start the process, just because you won't be in the same house five years from now. Chances are, even if you were in the same house your style, skill level, and resources would change so much in five years you'd have a "new" house anyway. Don't deprive yourself of joy today for fear of leaving tomorrow. If that joy is simply cutting out paper hearts and taping them to the door, so be it! But let yourself create!

Design has seasons. Sometimes it's time to design, and sometimes it's not. It's that simple. Money is short, or stress is high, it's just not time. Let that be okay. I do recommend always keeping things tidy and organized and maintaining your dream notebook.

True passion can not be stopped. Keep your dream alive, if you don't have money for a headboard find pictures of the headboard of your dreams and get a mason jar to fill with left over grocery money till you can buy it. If you don't have left over grocery money, paint a headboard on your wall, pin the picture of the headboard above your bed, start a dream notebook, don't let anything stop you. You can always create on some level, even if it's not the grand level of putting the actual room together, just yet.

If it's not yours, tend it, don't mend it. Everyone warned me not to put money into that condo we rented, but I couldn't hear them yet. That's life, sometimes we have to get burned to know the stove is hot. While I do think it is important to be an honest and respectful tenant of the landlord's property, it is ultimately their property and it is not your job to put any money into repairs or improvements unless you really want to. I recommend saving that money for your own house. I wish I could go back in time and tell myself that now, but I probably wouldn't have listened. Oh well. Life goes on!

Create a vision and dream notebook. I have an entire blog entry about this here. Keep it updated, keep working on it, keep the dream alive. You will feel like you are moving forward even if you aren't making any physical changes to your space yet.

Plan to take it with you. Invest in things you can take with you. As you get clear in your dream notebook you will create a vision for your dream home, so when you make purchases you know you are moving in the right direction. My favorite investment in something I can take with me, is my beautiful headboard and custom bedding. My bed will never change where ever I live. Curtains and even furniture might depending on window sizes and house layouts. But knowing I have a beautiful bed to set up wherever we go is always a comfort to me.

I hope that my stories and insights are helpful to you as you find that balance as a tenant and home maker, while you rent. Just don't give up! That is my best counsel, don't get discouraged, even now you are building your dream home and as you create and hone your talents and vision you are preparing to make that home into something truly wonderful for you and your family.

When it's not REALLY yours, renting. Part 2 of 3

Not only am I a renter, I am a Navy wife. So we move. A lot. A year after I poured my heart, soul, time, energy and money into that beautiful little Monterey Condo, we left. We handed our keys over to a VERY happy landlord and we said goodbye forever. That was heart breaking.

When we got to Goose Creek, South Carolina things were different then our honeymoon year in Monterey. Again we were renting, an old, stinky, oddly designed, cold, military house on base. I had a brand new baby. And Josh was going to Nuclear Power School. You should feel happy to know that the United States military has the most difficult Nuclear power program to get through, in the WORLD. To say my husband was stressed this year is kind of an understatement, but he got through it. I think some of that stress translated into my design work though....

This was our master bedroom.

It looked like that the entire year we lived there. I didn't even buy a bedspread. This was the quilt from my bedroom while I lived at home before I got married. I kept the house very clean, and I did my best to make it pretty. Okay, not my BEST. Sometimes I just settled for "functional". These were the only curtains we had in the house.

This too, was in the master bedroom. Here's me being real, sometimes the best you can muster are towels to block the light in your bedroom because your husband has to sleep all day so he can work all night. Sometimes, it is simply enough to keep your house clean and functional. To make dinner every night and be there with open arms when your husband is going through something tough. We quickly realized that unless we wanted to acquire some serious debt, we needed to stop the frivolous budget free ways of spending we lived in Monterey. So we really hunkered down this year and saved. I didn't spend any money on decorating. I bought a few things we needed, used, and my amazing mother in law bought us a king sized bed, but other than that this was a simple year for us. And it was okay that way. I did things like, cover our bedroom door with paper flowers and hung scrapbook pages on the wall to brighten my craft room!

If you really want to create, nothing can stop you but yourself. This is where I came up with the Dream Design Notebook idea and started working on it! Ultimately, I learned a few things from these wonderful homes and life experiences. 

Which you can read about in part three of this series tomorrow!

When it's not REALLY yours, renting. Part 1 of 3

When I got married, I was over the moon ecstatic! Anyone who knew me could tell you I lived on cloud 9, Heck, I OWNED cloud 9! I was marrying my best friend and love of my life. He was everything and more than I'd ever dreamed of in a man. We were moving to not only, sunny California, but Monterey California,  the most wonderful place to live in the world. My life was a fairy tale come true in every way. We rented a ridiculously overpriced condo, that needed some work, and I got right to it. To me, improving the space even though it wasn't mine made complete sense in my newly married brain filled with cloud nine cotton candy goodness. Every person that came to visit our one bedroom 1960's love nest, said the same thing, "Wow! This does NOT look like a newly wed apartment! This is gorgeous!"

That's right I thought. That's just how I roll.

I repainted....The walls. The ceiling. The doors. The trim. I replaced all the hardware on the doors and lighting. We even helped pay to have the kitchen redone because I couldn't stand not having any drawers that opened. I bought furniture and bedding and curtains....and the rather impressive nest egg my husband brought into our marriage got fried up and served for dinner at our new kitchen table. We inhaled that delicious little egg.

Oh, but look how blissful I am! Painting my landlord's door...(To add to the absolute bliss I got pregnant a month after we got married so now we can throw some oxytocin into the mix along with sleeping every night with prince charming, so who WOULD'T smile because they were painting. (With non-voc paint of course. We can't blame fumes on anything here!)

The reason I am sharing this is that a lot of time, when people rent they feel restrained. The property is not theirs and so they hold back, thinking making improvements is not going to help their pocket book and they have to leave anyway, so what's the point?

The point is, you have to live there. I'm a firm believer in creating a beautiful home wherever you are, whoever owns the home. The immediate blessing is the joy of creating and nurturing your creativity. You will also gain important skills and experience that will be a benefit to you when you DO have a home of your own. It will also help you form very solid ideas of what you like. Life really is too short to deprive yourself of beautiful surroundings just because someone else owns it, and remember you are the steward. Just as God put us on this earth and made us the stewards of it, we are also stewards of the dwellings we inhabit. While I  believe and strive to live this, I think there is a balance. 

There is a part two, to my high in the sky eating love pie story, and it is well worth the read in our quest to understand where we stand as renters. See you tomorrow!

Create A Dream Design Notebook

Design is a process and requires clear vision. We are bombarded with options and styles, this is both wonderful and overwhelming. If you don't have a clear vision of what you want you will not be happy with your efforts. I suggest beginning your journey with a dream design notebook, to hold all of your inspiration.

I use a beautiful 12X12 scrapbook. The pages are bigger and give me more room to spread out. My book started with a journal entry that simply talked about how my dream house felt. I didn't even mention color, fabric or style. I wanted to understand the mood. I thought I would start with an entire dream house but this quickly became too big and overwhelming. As I worked the book naturally narrowed down to my dream master bedroom. This allowed me to really focus. Consider these elements when assembling your own book.

• Start with a single room you are passionate about, master bedroom and bath, or a kitchen or family room. You will be able to fill a book dreaming up one room.

• Find a fabric you love and work within the colors of that material, if you struggle to find a fabric you start gathering samples of fabrics you like. As you gather many of these one may soon stand out as a very favorite.

• Journal out the mood you are trying to create, consider the activities that will take place in that room. Mood and Function are always the first things to determine when creating a space.

• Be sure and include poetry or lines from your favorite song, scriptures or favorite quotes, anything that reflects the mood you are seeking to create. 

• Gather tangible pictures you can cut and paste into your book. Pintrest is lovely, but there is nothing like scouring through magazines and cutting out pictures then pasting them into a book you can hold in your hands as you sit on your couch and turn each lovingly made page. It's also fun to share with good friends.

• Include descriptions and pictures of as many aspects of the room as possible, including accessories and even the type of music you would play or scents wafting through the air. 

• Be ready for your ideas to change, the beauty of this notebook is that your ideas will evolve, and you get to make mistakes and find out what works on paper first, without busting the bank!

Have fun and take your time, this is a project to enjoy! My dream master bedroom notebook has expanded into two books and I've been working on them for the last four years! It has been a delight for me to create these books and has helped me develop my style immensely. I hope your book will give the same to you!

Symbolic Clutter

The more you read this blog the more you will realize my complete and utter gratitude and admiration for the author Karen Kingston. Her book "Clear Your Clutter With Feng Shui" truly changed my perspective about clutter and how to think about it. One perspective she offers is to think of the symbolic nature of clutter. She has some wonderful stories and insights about this in her wonderful book, and it got me thinking about the messages my clutter was sending out into the world.

When I was a young girl I collected frogs. Especially stuffed animal frogs. I loved the phrase "You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you meet your prince". I had a decorative tree in my room and started piling these stuffed frogs on the tree. People caught on to the habit and started adding frogs of their own. Boys I dated, especially wanted a frog on my tree and so many of those frogs were from young men I knew.

About a year before my boyfriend (now husband) graduated from The Naval Academy, I knew he wanted to marry me, and I knew that when he asked my answer would be a resounding yes! Suddenly, my frog tree seemed very out of place in my life. One day, I gathered all the little girls in my neighborhood, who I'd babysat for over the years, and invited them over to my house to pick frogs from off my famous frog tree. These girls were delighted, and squealed with delight as they carted home arm fulls of  toy frogs. It felt wonderful. I kept one frog, the one Josh gave me, just a few months later he proposed. Today that little frog belongs to our son.

What do the items in your house say about you and your life, is it reflective of you are and who you want to be? Is it time to ditch your frogs and make room for your prince?

Domestic Diva

When I was newly married I was given an apron with the title "Domestic Diva" embroidered on the front. I spent most of my young life singing in recitals, church, school choirs and competitions. The giver of this special apron, was one of my beloved music teachers. As you can imagine, I hold a special affinity toward this apron and the title it bears.

There is music in everything. I am always singing, my four year old sings Brahm's lullaby in German with me, but I sing in more ways than just my voice. When a beautiful meal is laid out for dinner, it's music, when a home is organized and running well it's music, when I’m painting a wall, it’s music when I'm holding a baby, it's music, when I'm kissing my husband, ahh...music. All of life is a song, and when there is harmony in the things we do, everything feels right. It's like our soul is singing for joy!

Just like all other beautiful music, when it is shared it inspires and uplifts the hearts of many. I have been inspired by so many passionate people in my life singing their songs with full gusto! I want to sing like that for you! I want to inspire you to create harmony and music in your own home. Create, organize, decorate, clean! And find joy in the beauty of the process. I want to help you create a home that uplifts you, inspires you and comforts you.  You can create a home that reflects the melody in your heart so when others walk through your front door they are inspired by your song.

I hope this blog helps you find that song, and gives you the inspiration you need to sing it.