What do you know about Sarajevo? I remember a number of current events from my childhood, the space shuttle Challenger, Operation Dessert Storm, the Rwandan Genocide. I remembered the name Sarajevo, but I didn’t know much about what had happened there.
I found Flowers for Sarajevo, by John McCutcheon, illustrated by Kristy Caldwell, at our library. I don’t even think I opened it, but the cover art was so arresting I was sure I would like it.
Weeks passed as it floated around our house. I couldn’t seem to sit down long enough to read it to everyone. We already read aloud for school each day and I have been flirting with homeschool burnout; adding more books didn’t feel doable.
My mom finally read the book to the kids one weekend when she was here for a visit. She reported it made her cry, along with my youngest daughter.
Finally, I read it. To myself. The kids were in bed as I paged through the story. The illustrations were as amazing as the cover. They reminded me of graphic novel art, and the colors and lines communicate such beauty. I finished it at 1:30 a.m. on a night when my own home felt like a war zone.
I’ve found tremendous relief in the fact that it is no longer considered scientifically sound to lump men and women into one muddy pot where everyone is human, but just barely. There were two problems with that for me. One, men and women ARE different. And two, when we generalize, men usually win. And when women lose, everyone loses.
So today I want to talk about two of the many books I’ve picked up recently as I have made improving my marriage my job. The Female Brain, and The Male Brain, both by Louann Brizendine, M.D. I didn’t expect to learn so much about relating to other human beings, or that it would change the way I think about my kids.
Hard to believe we met in our 20’s and are now staring down 40. Well, one of us is. I still have a couple of years left. 😉
This has been the hardest year of our married lives, and one of the hardest of our whole lives – it feels unfair at times because at our age, it seems like we should have started to figure things out.
I hope this period of growth is something we can look back on as the start of something even better than what we already knew.
So many of the photos I found were of Cylon in Dad mode:
helping kids,
holding kids, carrying them where they needed to go. 
And smiling with them.
Happy 40th Birthday to the precious soul I am privileged to do life with.
One of my favorite projects I’ve done with the kids was our watercolor silhouettes.
We started out in a dark room with white 8×11″ card stock, a pencil, and a flashlight.
The person whose profile I was tracing stood in front of blank wall (or in our case, a door) while the other person was about ten feet back from them holding the flashlight. You can use painter’s tape to hold the paper up while you trace.
I had my six year old at the time hold the flashlight. If I had it to do over again, I might have rigged some kind of tripod up to hold the flashlight, as there were a lot of moving parts between the flashlight and the subject! A benefit to having an actual person hold the flashlight is that they can move forward or back to help get the outline on the paper to be crisp, and the right size. I recognize that this is super low tech, but it was part of the fun of the project for us.
(Photo Credit: P. Furniss)
One could argue that as a mostly SAHM with a part-time job that I wear scrubs for, my personal style doesn’t matter. And really, it doesn’t.
I leave my house to go grocery shopping and take my kids to activities or to the library. I go out on dates with my husband or leave the house by myself about twice a month. And when I say go out by myself, I usually mean, solo grocery shopping. I go to church on Sunday. Otherwise, I’m almost never Out In Public.
A lot of life feels like a struggle right now. Home school burnout has been bubbling up for a couple of years now. There are a lot of littles in our house. I get overstimulated. I’m struggling internally because I have everything I need and almost everything I want, and I’m still anxious and depressed.
Life feels hard, and no matter what I wear.
