Finding joy in the everyday

Red jug by Stuart Slind C is for COLOUR Back in December I was reading Mara Mayflower's blog ( link ) and her lovely story on COLOUR .  One reason why I liked her story was because I love colour. Colour is important to me.  I am drawn to things of colour.  I have a house full of bright colour. I love to wear strong colours. I planted sunflowers in my garden to add colour. I even buy kitchen appliances that are bright and colourful. Colour makes me happy and I surround myself with colour to keep me cheerful.  If I am sad or lonely, I wear red or pink and I feel so much better. I couldn't live without colour. God made our planet to burst with colour, no matter where you look, there is colour everywhere.  Just witness a sunset . . . a rainbow . . . a rose . . . peacock's tail . . . a butterfly . . . colour is everywhere.   Sunflowers and lavender by Jean Marc Jaciaczyk A world with no colour would be a very sad world indeed. My favourite colours are r...

A child wakes up in his Disney character pajamas, rolls out of his Barney sheets, his toothbrush, toothpaste and perhaps even his soap covered in cute licensed characters. Gathering up his Pokemon cards and strapping on his Rugrats backpack, he heads off to school. ( from a paper called Marketing to Children, 2007) In recent weeks I have been shopping for a baby boy and for a young man of six.  Its been a while since I have shopped for young children as my sons are now 19 and almost 24.  Whilst in both the clothing section and toy section of Target something stuck me that wasn't as noticeable when my sons were little - the overwhelming influence of movies and TV on childrens products.   Knowing that neither parent would want Ben Ten, Star Wars or Dora Explorer on their child's clothing or toy I really did have to search around to find things that were not covered in "advertising".   I even found much of the Lego were "scenes" from movies such as Star ...

I read an interesting blog the other day and it got me thinking . . . mostly due to the comments that were received (including those on Facebook). June from " A Wise Woman Builds her Home " blog wrote about a news article where a mother of a young boy put pink nail polish on his toes. Junes question was "what did her readers think of this?". Not surprisingly, almost all said NO, many found this very disturbing, sad and angry at the mother. Reasons given included: causing confusion to the boy, the feminization of boys, leading homosexuality, blurring genders etc.. I thought about this all day and these are my views. I would be interested in yours. When my sons were little (aged around 2-5), they asked from time to time if they could wear my nail polish . . . I saw nothing wrong in putting it on their nails. It wasn't any different to when they tried on my high heeled shoes, carried my handbags around or wore my necklaces during dress-ups (as in the photo ...

I have two sons and no daughters.  I am an only daughter with three brothers.  My mother taught all my brothers to cook, clean and to knit (not sure why the later was necessary, but they all learnt to make a mean bath mat, but I doubt they have used this skill in their adult lives??!!). I have been reading a number of blogs recently regarding the teaching of daughters to become homemakers and not much (nothing to be honest) on bringing up boys to also contribute to the home.  I think it is very important to teach boys the basics, you never know when they might need these skills. Cooking :  Both my sons have been taught to cook, not just boil an egg but to make a full meal including trying different recipes and test out ideas – Tristan loves making fish soups and casseroles whilst Caius is great with pasta.   They can both read recipes and I noticed that Tristan cut a recipe from the newspaper the other day as he wanted to make it.  They can bake (Tri...