Book Recommendations, Dinosaur Day
Did you know that National Dinosaur Day is celebrated twice annually, on May 15 and June 1? I guess that’s just how important the dinosaurs are (were?)! So in celebration of this important day, I am recommending some of our favorite dinosaur children’s books.
All the Dinotrux books, by Chris Gall
How to Catch a Dinosaur, by Adam Wallace
Bang! Boom! Roar! A Busy Crew of Dinosaurs (not pictured), by Nate Evans
These are just a few of the great children’s books on dinosaurs. Do you have any to recommend?
Amy's New Puppy
I self-published my first book, Amy’s New Puppy, in 2015 and just scribbled together some illustrations. I decided to update a few of the illustrations to see how different they would be if I published the book now and below are the results. If you’d like to see process videos of the updated illustrations, I saved them to my highlights on my Instagram account.
pink hair, don't care
These are some of my recent illustrations. I am playing around with movement and body shapes. And of course pink hair.
I found it interesting while drawing these that my adult women have small heads and big legs, but in order to draw children, you do the opposite!
Book Recommendations, Mother's Day
Because I love children’s books so much, I thought I’d add a weekly feature to my blog on book recommendations for kids and parents, while trying to keep the books relevant to the times and season as well!
This week, I’m featuring one of my favorites to buy for new moms:
I Love you, Stinky Face by Lisa McCourt and Illustrated by Cyd Moore.
Now it’s your turn, what are your favorite books featuring a mother’s love?
This book is one of my son’s favorites (and mine!) because it is so silly and so heartfelt. What could be more normal (and more beautiful) than a son dreaming up all kinds of scary creatures and a mother’s reassurance of unconditional love?
Wallpapers
I have been having fun creating “repeating patterns” that I make into free brush downloads for the Procreate app. I’ve also realized that these make fun coloring pages and iPhone wallpapers as well! Here are a few of my favorites, of which you are free to use. Simply click the picture to get to the larger-scale image, then right click and save to your photos. Hope you enjoy them!
Follow me on Instagram for more!
Formational Books
My friend and writer Tamara Murphy recently posted a very comprehensive list of books she’s read, and also indicated which ones she felt were formational as part of her journey. So this blog post is dedicated to her.
This got me thinking about books that I would consider formational in my own journey. And by formational, I mean they stand out in my memory as having a significant impact on developing the person I am today, including my interests, my beliefs, and my passions.
Have you ever thought about this? What are your formational books? If you don’t have any books that you would consider formational, what about movies? Trips? Other experiences? What memories stand out that have formed you into the person you are today?
These are my Top 9 Formational Books, with some honorable mentions at the bottom.
Jane Erye by Charlotte Bronte. This is the first book I remember reading all through the night and having an extreme emotional reaction. I cried and cried all the way through it and felt like my heart was going to explode. This is before I knew much about the kind of person I am but looking back now, I realize this book spoke right to my heart. (Enneagram 4 anyone?).
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. To be honest I don’t even remember this book very much. What I remember is sobbing on a plane as I finished the end (and being very embarrassed) as I realized that “someone had to die”, but the person that died was not the person who deserved it. It was a beautiful, tragic, poignant picture of the Cross. (Someday I want to re-read this and see if I have the same reaction.)
The Sacred Romance by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge. This is the first book I read that introduced me to the idea of “beauty” and something awoke inside of me as I discovered my passion.
The Jesus I Never Knew by Phillip Yancey. Again, I don’t remember much of this book. All I remember was at the end of one chapter, it hit me hard, in a way that it never had before: Jesus is GOD. I can’t explain it, but it made me fall in love with Jesus in a deeper way than ever.
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. My love of fantasy began with The Hobbit. Before reading this book, I didn’t know anything about fantasy literature. This book changed the entire course of my reading journey.
The Lineage of Grace series (by Francine Rivers). These books opened my eyes to the fact that God has loved and looked out for women through all of time.
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. An all-time favorite. This is one that feels very “mainstream” to me (I mean, come on, it was the focus of an episode of Friends!), and I keep wanting to not like it as much as I do. But then I read it and fall in love with it again and again.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. See Jane Eyre above.
One-Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp. I credit this book with moving me out of a life of fear and into a life of gratitude. There are still many, many moments of fear. But somehow the change in perspective was completely life-altering for me.
Honorable Mentions
The entire James Herriot series
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Some Favorite Fiction
(just a few books that will always stand-out in my memory, not formational just fun/engaging/excellent in their own way):
The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton
The entire Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
A Cry in the Night by Mary Higgins Clark
I'm trying to be brave.
Today I did something brave. It’s probably not going to sound brave to a lot of you, but if you know me, then you know it was brave. I took a step out of my comfort zone and signed up for the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) New England Conference! I have decided to make this children’s book writing real and really make a go of it. Then I was super inspired, so I sat down and wrote three more children’s books that I actually really love and am excited about. I don’t want to say too much about them yet, but over the next few weeks and months, I plan to share snippets of the books and sketches for the illustrations. So I hope you’ll join me on this journey!
But it got me thinking back to being brave and things that scare us. In this case, sitting down and writing those stories had been on my heart for a while, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. When I examined the why of this, I realized it was fear. I was too scared to sit down and work on something I cared so much about for fear of failure, for fear of rejection, for fear of not being good enough. So I asked myself that age old question: what is the worst that could happen? I answered with all the usual replies: I might never be traditionally published. I could be rejected over and over again. I might not be good enough.
But those actually weren’t the worst that could happen. The worst thing that could happen would be that I never sat down to do something that I loved.
I am reminding myself over and over again that what really matters is the work: the doing, the practicing, the writing, the drawing. I love these stories. I love to illustrate. The real tragedy would be to never finish these stories, or worse, to never work on them at all. Yes, I want to get them published and it may take some rejection and feeling like I’m not good enough - and those are real fears! But at least I will have finished.
These are a few of my recent character illustrations,
done after taking an art class on drawing full figures (instead of just faces).
you are beautiful with God's beauty
From now on, I think we should greet each other every morning with how Gabriel greeted Mary in Luke 1:28 (The Message):
Good morning!
You're beautiful with God's beauty,
Beautiful inside and out!
God be with you.
Reflections on Lament
“You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand there are pleasures forevermore.” Psalm 16:11
During Lent this year, our church* has been gathering together (via Zoom) to “practice lament”. This is an intimidating idea to most people: gathering with others with the sole purpose of being sad together. (Letting ourselves be sad when we’re alone is scary enough!) It sounds completely outside our comfort zones and honestly, maybe, rather pointless. Why should we just take time to be sad? And why magnify the sadness by hearing about everyone else’s?
But surprisingly that’s not what happens. The sadness doesn’t feel magnified. And suddenly we don’t feel so alone.
I am not a pastor or a leader of these groups. I am a participant, and in speaking to other participants I’ve heard things like “I feel so heard”, “I feel so connected to the community”, “I feel hopeful and safe here.” To hear these statements, a year after the world fell apart, and during/after a gathering on lament, is absolutely profound.
Our pastor often talks about lament being God’s good gift to us in our healing journey. “Lament”, as opposed to just “sadness”, is offering up our sadness to God. And I would add we offer up our sadness to God in expectation - we want to know what He is going to do about it! Sometimes we get an answer, sometimes we don’t. But it is the process, not the answer, that is important.
I can’t help but think of the Pixar movie, Inside Out.** Joy spends the whole movie trying to keep Sadness away from the control board of Riley’s mind. Riley is even commended for her positive outlook, even when things are hard. But in the end, it isn’t Joy who saves the day. Joy finally realizes that the only path to healing Riley is by letting Sadness do her job and take control for a little while. Only when Riley is finally able to express her Sadness, Joy can reenter the picture. And at the end, there is a beautiful picture of Joy and Sadness, hand-in-hand on the control board of Riley’s mind, as Riley snuggles her parents.
What a stunning picture of Sadness and Joy, co-mingling in healing. The two often have to work together. There is no life without sadness because our world is broken. Unless we know how to find joy in and through sadness, we will have no hope.
We have to learn how to find the joy in the sadness.
I am constantly reminded of this scene when I “practice lament” with others at my church.
But what’s even better is that we as Christians are not alone with our sadness. Not only do we have each other, we have a God who weeps with us. And as we lift our sadness up to God in lament, He meets us right where we are.
So I am saying this to you and I am saying this to myself: please, please stop fearing sadness. It is scary to just let ourselves be sad, because what if it breaks us? What if we can’t ever be happy again? But offer your sadness to God and He will meet you in it.
He came down to earth and experienced suffering first-hand. This is the week we remember Jesus’ journey to the cross, the ultimate in suffering and sacrifice. Meet Him in this suffering. Let yourselves be sad, offer it up as lament, and He will set you on the path of healing to acceptance, to abundance, to joy, and ultimately, the path to Life.
*Church of the Apostles, Bridgeport, CT. Most of what is written here is what I’ve learned there. Except with less Pixar.
**Why do Pixar movies always make it into my blog posts? Let’s pretend it’s because I work with children - but it’s actually just because I think they are phenomenal! And full of good, deep lessons on life!
happy spring!
happy spring from me to you! this is a little portrait of my amazing and beautiful cousin Suzanne. Feel free to contact me for commissions!
I love walking in cemeteries.*
There are the days when you need to shut off the noise, and nothing does that like a walk in a cemetery. There is a reason for the expression “silent as the grave.”
Today in particular I need silence, so I leave my phone at home and walk to the nearby cemetery.
The first thing I notice is the sound of my footsteps. (If I had my phone, I wouldn’t have even noticed them.) The sound is a reminder that I am alive. And I will be alive until the moment I take my last breath. This sounds obvious, but sometimes I need this reminder. Amidst the anxiety of life and the treading water of purpose, I need to remember that whatever my surroundings, I am still alive. And because I am still alive, I am still called by God to live.
I glance at the names on each stone. I say the names in my head and hope in some small way this keeps their memory alive and honors them. I take note of the dates. I even find my eyes moistening when my brief calculations prove a child is buried here. I grieve for them. Sometimes I even pray for their souls, which I am not sure is theologically correct, but I still think it’s OK to do.
I like to think that even though I love the silence of a cemetery, it’s OK to bring my children once in a while and let them play among the stones. I imagine that every person buried there would love to hear children laughing and running and using every second to just live their precious lives. Children are good at teaching us how to do that. And there is no more profound example for me than children running in a cemetery.
Today I am thankful for my walk in the cemetery and the lessons I glean from it. I like to think the people buried there would be happy to know their bodily presence nestled in the ground can still play a part in instructing the living.
*This was written earlier in the pandemic. Reading it now, months later, I realize it sounds pretty morbid. I don’t mean it to be. I think we always need to be reminded to move forward and live abundantly, even if we aren’t depressed (but let’s be honest - the pandemic has brought many of us to varying levels of depression!).
The Cost of Beauty
In part 1 in my series on Beauty, I talked about how beauty needs a broader definition. I related it to finding beauty in myself, but also that it can apply to so many things in this world. Today, in part 2, I examine the cost of looking for (and finding!) that beauty.
I saw a picture on Instagram (@earthfocus) which led me to a conversation with my husband that jokingly started like this “I want to go to there”. It wasn’t too too far off, and going there actually became a distinct possibility. But the catch was, I wanted to go when the Christmas lights were still up, because I wanted it to look just like the picture. So we planned a trip to Quebec City in early January. The resulting trip and subsequent pictures were some of the most magical in my entire life. Even my dearly-loved husband, very much a non-romantic, told me the streets were “almost magical”. (Did my husband just say something was magical?? But he did, and it was.)
Whether we are visiting a uniquely beautiful place, staring at a beautiful painting, looking into the peaceful face of a sleeping child, hiking through a colorful woods, or even experiencing a lovely smell, emotions buried deep can come to the surface in an instant. Some things are universally considered beautiful. Some things are only beautiful to us. But either way, it doesn’t change the force of our reaction when we face something we find truly beautiful: something raw and real wells up inside. It shakes us and awakens us. It can be so evocative that we can feel things we haven’t felt before or feel them more deeply and richly than ever.
Sometimes our reaction can even feel painful. Sometimes tears come to our eyes and we want to cry. Our soul is crying out that this is what life is about, this is abundance, this is real and everything else is just a sad imitation.
But the moment doesn’t last.
My favorite quote by C.S. Lewis (in The Weight of Glory) sums it up so well:
“We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”
Our beautiful moment of raw and real emotion is gone all too soon. We can’t put it in our back pocket and pull it out whenever we want a piece. It is happenstance and ephemeral. It is that very fleeting nature of a beautiful moment that makes it so precious, but also so painful. We want to hold on to it forever.
There was a moment in the Pixar movie Soul when #22 (in Joe’s body) sat down and watched a seed fall to the ground. It wasn’t a big, dramatic moment. It wasn’t profoundly beautiful in the classic definition of the word. In fact, it was rather ordinary: a seed fell from a tree onto a city sidewalk. Someone else could have sat in the exact same spot and caught the exact same seed and felt nothing.
But to #22, it changed everything. It was just a moment, but it was the moment her soul came alive and she decided she wanted to really live.
My example of old Quebec City in January is a bit silly, but my point is that in order to catch that fleeting once-a-year beauty, we had to endure some of the coldest days we have every experienced. We had to hunt down something we knew to be beautiful, but the cost was frozen fingers and toes!
Sometimes the cost is just being cold. Sometimes it’s just taking a little time out of our day. Sometimes it’s that we look a little silly. But sometimes it’s allowing ourselves feel something real that may scare us, to allow ourselves to be changed, and to really live.
Beauty is all around us if we really take the time to look (especially if we remember to broaden its definition). Opening ourselves to its evocative nature may feel very vulnerable or make us feel exposed but it is the path of abundance.
And that is beautiful.
Beauty Needs a Broader Definition
Part 1 of a short blog series on Beauty
We have a very narrow definition of beauty.
Go ahead, take some time to think of things that are classically considered beautiful.
I bet your list looks something like:
Rainbows
Flowers
Sunsets
Colorful fall leaves
A mom and her baby
A handsome man or a beautiful woman
No doubt these are all beautiful things. But is there not also beauty in the rain before the rainbow?
My quest to find beauty everywhere has been lifelong, even before I knew how to express it. But never has the journey been harder than when I realized I had to look for it in myself, especially my physical self, though I had to apply this to my personality as well. It took a force of will and deep conviction to stop hating my body, to stop cursing my personality, and to start loving it.
And when I started loving who I am more, I realized that beauty for women is too narrowly defined. Isn’t it beautiful to have laugh lines? To have stretch marks? To have wrinkles?
Laugh lines show a life full of smiles and laughter; stretch marks show a body that grew and changed in different seasons, whether from great joy or sorrow or just normal everyday life; wrinkles can tell story after story of a life well lived. For me, and in particular, my weight gain, showed a happiness and contentment I have never experienced before. And isn’t that what is beautiful?
And if beauty for women is too narrowly defined, then maybe all beauty is too narrowly defined.
Rain
Weeds
Clouds
Naked trees
Grief
Imperfect bodies of all kinds
Nature and its ever changing and yet always the same cycle is beautiful. Change, dying in winter and rebirth in spring represent to us newness and excitement with each day and season, while also reassuring us with its consistency.
The tears of a grieving son, mother, friend are beautiful. They show the depth of emotion, of love, that is so raw and real - emotions that we so easily take for granted in our every day lives. It is the pain of grief that we have all felt, the pain that connects us together.
Humanity as real people, not as sex symbols or icons to idolize, is beautiful. Real people who have lived real lives, who have touched others, and their bodies that reflect the journey. Humanity in every form, not just one color, race, and shape, is part of the richness of who we are as people!
That is the broader definition of beauty that we need. That is beauty. And it can be found everywhere.
What if all the boring parts matter to God?
“Yet God made us to spend our days in rest, work, and play, taking care of our bodies, our families, our neighborhoods, our homes. What if all these boring parts matter to God? What if days passed in ways that feel small and insignificant to us are weighty with meaning and part of the abundant life that God has for us?…
“I like big ideas. I can get drunk on talk of justification, ecclesiology, pneumatology, Christology, and eschatology. But these big ideas are borne out - lived believed, and enfleshed - in the small moments of our day, in the places, seasons, homes, and communities that compose our lives.”
-Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life
I cannot recommend this book enough.
What's on the Book Pile? Moving Edition
We are in the process of a move and it’s made me realize something… we own a lot of books! Many of them have been read and loved and kept for that reason. But there are also many that have just been kept.
There is nothing I love more than a used bookstore with a huge “cozy mystery” section. I could browse there for hours! But usually I don’t have hours to make my selections, so I grab a few that look interesting and add them to my pile.
Hence the book pile, moving edition…
These are books randomly selected from the cozy mystery section of our favorite used bookstore. My guess is that these books will entertain me enough, but I won’t feel any need to keep them. The goal was to read this stack of books before moving.
So far I’ve only finished one. We move next week.
But I will finish the pile, even if it means moving the books with me! Find me on Goodreads to follow my progress.
Oh, and that one I’ve read is “Death in the Air” by Kate Kingsbury. I enjoyed it enough to add the rest of the series to my “Want to Read” shelf on Goodreads. Read my review here.
Valentine Victorian
Valentine Victorian.
I love Victorian houses and this one is all decked out for Valentine's Day! With the snow falling outside and the warm lights shining in all the windows, this house is inviting you in for some hot chocolate and cookies.
Shop my holiday collection.
Ash Wednesday in the Nursery*
Today for my church’s Ash Wednesday service, I sat in the nursery with four little faces looking up at me, asking me to read the pile of books they had chosen. Book by book, the pile lessened, and yet they still sat at my feet and listened. Afterwards, several people said “thank you” or “I’m sorry” that I had to miss the actual service to be in the nursery. And I murmured back the appropriate response. But in my heart I knew God was in the nursery this morning.
I’ll be honest with you. Sometimes children’s ministry doesn’t feel exciting. I’ve been there, sweating and exhausted, wondering if I’m making any sort of headway or planting any seed in these children’s lives. I tell myself at least I’m here for the parents, so they can be in “big church” and their children are safe and cared for. And I sort of trust God that this is good work, after all, we know Jesus loved children and cared for them deeply. But it’s all just words, because sometimes it feels like a chore.
But God is in the nursery.
God’s economy is different than ours. The first shall be last; the last shall be made first. Seek first God’s kingdom, not money, not power. The widow’s offering of almost nothing was more valuable than a fortune. God himself came to earth, not as a king, but as a baby. God’s economy is different than ours.
Children’s ministry might feel small, it might even feel pointless, it might even feel boring. But it matters to God. God’s economy is different than ours.
So if you spend your morning caring for even one small child... that is what brings God glory. And I know God was in our nursery this morning.
*originally written February 26, 2020