I’ve now been blogging consistently for 2 years. Two years ago I decided one of the things I would be writing about was motherhood. I never intended on actually sharing too much about my kids as I’m really serious about protecting their privacy, but, once in a while, I can’t help but document a small slice of their childhoods. Two years ago, my son was 3 and my daughter was about 8 months old. That means there’s actually quite a bit of their young childhoods that have been documented in some way. here While I don’t really talk about them much, I do talk a lot about how I’m raising…
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Finding Magic in Motherhood, Part 2: Remembering the Low Tech Childhood
My childhood couldn’t be more different than the one I’m giving my kids. It’s a combination of a different time and the people involved in raising the kids. On one hand, I’m sad I’m not giving my kids the same childhood I had, but, on the other, I’m oddly relieved. I wonder if my mom once said the same thing. This is What My Childhood Was Like I was fortunate to have what I had. I grew up in a big house with a big backyard, my own room, plenty of books and toys, and parents who bent over backwards to give my siblings and me what they didn’t have.…
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Finding Magic in Motherhood, Part 1: The Mother was a Kid, too
Every parent was once a child. Sometimes it feels so long ago, as though it couldn’t have happened. Other times, it’s like it was just yesterday. Today, I am a mother. But, once, I was a child, a child with a mother. Not every child has a mother, and not every child has a mother they love and adore. I was lucky. I am lucky. I still have the mother I absolutely adore. The mother who raised me to be the mother I am today. All because she let me be a child. She let me live my childhood to its fullest. She encouraged me to explore what childhood is so I…
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The Magic Garden
When I was a child, I had a garden. It was a beautiful, marvelous, glorious garden. It was carefully cultivated by my siblings and me. Every day, we would go out into the backyard and bask in the shade of the gigantic orange tree. We dug and planted and watered. We talked about what we hoped would grow and how wonderful it would be. We grew orange trees, primarily. But also some nut trees, but we couldn’t tell you which because, back then, a nut was a nut. We had some lovely flowers that grew tall and mighty with colorful blossoms that bloomed in all their glory all year round.…
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Motherhood is Magical: Redefining The Lily Cafe
Lately, I’ve been struggling with my motherhood posts. I’ve gotten caught in wanting to both fit in with other mom bloggers even though motherhood is only one focus of The Lily Cafe and with trying to talk about the kind of mom I am, which sometimes is at odds with what other mom bloggers write about. I adore reading mom blogs. I’ve found honesty, funny stories, encouragement, and a plethora of ideas. But the more and longer I read them, the more I feel out of place. After trying to fit in last year, I decided to focus on my mom truths and write about how I raise my kids,…
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The Books of My Childhood That I Wish I Had Kept
Last week I wrote about how I select the books my husband and I read to our toddler. The best part of blogging is getting to “meet” so many fantastic people all over the world. How do those sentences even go together?! Yes more blogs is a wonderful blog I’ve been following for at least a few weeks now. If you haven’t yet, you should definitely take a read and give a follow! Anyways, we had a lovely conversation about reading to our children and it sparked a memory of some childhood books that I absolutely adored. Ten years ago I thought I was never going to be a mom.…
