Where have all the pictures gone?

If you have been reading my blog and wondering where are all the random pictures Poppy posts, never fear they will be back soon.

See I’m not cool like some kids. I don’t have a fancy camera that does all kinds of crazy stuff. Frankly I would end up breaking it. I cannot be trusted with technology! Which is why there have not been pictures for a while. My phone decided that the camera would no longer work. It is what I use for all my pictures and since I only post my own pics…well I am waiting for my replacement. After talking to 4 very nice service people I am assured the new one will be here next week.

Till then all you get are words 🙂

a more through explanation of what I attempted to say in today’s Friday Five

Adventures and Musings of an Arch Druidess

I think I’m about to commit heresy but to a pagan of Celtic leanings I’m afraid getting excited about a made astronomical non-event does not excite me. Why is it a non-event? Because the year used to consist of 13 lunar months until the Church and Rome decided 12 was better for everyone else. So if you are on a lunar calendar there are no blue moons unless of course, there is a volcanic eruption and the moon really does turn blue

So in reality it’s a modern Christian thing to get all worked up celebrating and I for one am not buying into it. It’s just another full moon in the calendar. And one if you read the articles I posted was a mistake on top of it. So I hate to burst your bubble but it’s just another full moon sabbat and the one before a bright orange…

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Friday Five (8/31) Blue Moon

Before my Friday five I have a story to share that relates to yesterdays post on words. Little and I were watching Mrs. Spiders Sunny Patch Friends, and one of the little bugs said someone cast a spell on him and he lost his smile. Eventually they figured out that he lost his smile when his older brother teased him for being a baby.  Mrs. Spider said “sometimes a careless word is like casting a spell”   ah the power of words. Be careful and thoughtful when choosing them. OK moving on to the five.

1. A Blue moon is the second full moon that happens within the same month. This is interesting to us, but no so interesting to our ancestors who used the moons to mark their months.
2. In fact what I think I like most about a blue moon is that it reminds me of how things change and how they stay the same. We as people are still pulled to the moon (yes pun intended) We watch for the changes in it and even none witchy folk pay attention. And yet our modern life has changed and our calender has changed so that it doesn’t quite fit the natural cycle of time (leap year?) but is more linear.
3. I have a book that I sing to little every night. It is Hush Little Baby by Sylvia Long. On of the last lines is “Mama’s gonna search for the Harvest moon” I always change the lyrics to represent what moon we are actually in so I have been singing “Mama’s gonna search for the blue moon”  .
4. Feel free to celebrate by doing something out of the ordinary. Do something you would only do once in a blue moon 🙂

magic in words (secret names, rituals and spells)

There are so many ways words are magic. Words have power to communicate a feeling, to influence others feelings. They can be sung or spoken or written or shouted or whispered and each way they carry a little different power. Words can open or close doors for you and words are a large part of any relationship.

Whats more your words have value. Yes yours!  Your voice is what maters. I am going somewhere with this I promise. What I am trying to get to is two things that I have seen floating around the net lately. The first is the magic name of Goddess/God. Like if you’re a real witch and you read the right book or talk to the right teacher they will give you the magic name and all your dreams and wishes will come true because you have the right name to ask for them.

The second is similar in that we are looking for someone else to fulfill our needs and it is what is the “right” way to do a full moon ritual or Sabbat or healing or what have you. We need to know the spell or sometimes it is even less noticeable and we want to know if there is a spell that does x.

My overall rant is centered around the following idea. The power is in you. You do not need others to tell you how to act or what to say. You need to stop, think and feel. You will come up with the right answer. This is sometimes hard for us as we are used to being told how to do things. That is the blessing and the complicated part of a pagan path. There is no one book or one way. It is up to each to follow their heart and mind to the correct path for them.

Clearly we can still learn from each other. I am a huge fan of learning from others. If I wasn’t I would not of come up with a blog party that is all about learning from others. I have had, and do have, many teachers. I love to read books and honestly it’s not like I’m going to teach myself quantum physics, I need someone else to help teach me. That said at the end of the day I take what I have learned and think about it, meditate and see how I feel about things. It is a combination of learning and of critical thinking, feeling or gut instinct that guides me. I do not read a book and say ah ha this is the only way I must be like this person to be a real witch. You are you and you are powerful just as you are.

So lets talk about those specific examples from above. The real name thing. You may or may not have a patron Deity. Should you have one they will let you know what name they want you to call them. They will let you know a myriad of things and you can choose to follow the requests or not. The way you find this out is not by seeking out the name they told someone else but by strengthening your relationship with the Divine.

The second thing was the right words for a ritual. There are some great published rituals out there. There are some really bad ones too. You must sift through this and use what feels right to you. Or forego it altogether and write you own. Most rituals follow a set pattern or as I call it a recipe. I wrote about the one I follow here. What I really want to stress is that it must be your own in someway. For example myself. I am a rather casual person. When people are trying to talk in old English it makes me thing I’m at a Ren fair instead of a circle. I prefer plain speak and the voice I use in my rituals is pretty much the same voice I use for everything else including this blog. straight forward to the point and not too much flowery. That doesn’t mean that your rituals should be like that. If you are a poetic person then your rituals should reflect that. It should be in your voice

last but not least spells. In short yes there is a spell for that. What ever that is. Should you do magic for it is the question. I answer that question by asking myself What else can I/ should I do for this issue? Is it for me or someone else? Do I have their permission? Will it harm none?  If I can or should do something else about my issue I do that first. If I still think a spell could help I do it along with the other mundane items. Say I want a spell for a new job. I may do a spell for it, but I am also going to work on polishing up my resume. Spells are not an excuse for lazy. You cannot say I did a spell so I don’t have to do the work. If the spell is not for me say it is a healing spell do I have said parties permission? If not theirs because they are unable to due to say coma do I have next of kin permission?  If not don’t do it. Will it harm none? well this one is debated over and over, though I am unsure why. People say i’m not Wiccan I don’t have to live by that law. guess what you do. Natural laws are not some thing you can choose to abide by or not. Some people have tried to skirt the issue by saying I am just wishing on them what they did to me or my friend. no dice my friend. To do harm to someone is to break a natural law and you will be taking the negative energy in yourself in order to put it out on someone else. You can think you are as big and bad and dark as you want but you will inevitably be unhappy with the situation you choose to create if you are choosing to harm someone else. No matter what you want to say to explain it away or make it ok it will come back to bite you, and you wont like it.

OK lecture over. So we have answered our questions and decided yes a spell would be good here. Again use your voice and your skills, and write a spell. Remember, speaking from the heart will always work.

found this really funny

just a beautiful poem

Art for me Art for Little

I have all things art on my mind. I guess it is because I am getting in to the back to school mood. Speaking of if you haven’t signed up for the Back to school for Witches too blog party you should! and you can right here.

I am tying to gather my art materials I will need (want) for Little and for myself too. I am not what you would call artistic, but I do enjoy the process. As for little well she likes to play with all things. My question is what things do you really need? so that is my morning post that I am throwing out to all of you.

What are you must have materials for creating art? (yours, your kids, your cats?) What do you like to do to create?

 

screen time

Ah technology. I love it and hate it all at once. It gives us so many options to learn so much and be “connected” to so many people. It exposes us to new ideas and lets me share my 5 gillion look-how-cute-little-is-now pictures with most of the family with very little effort. On the other hand it is a time suck and probably melts my brain. Not to mention it seems to hate me and so I am constantly fighting with it.

Really the problem (for me) with technology though is that it is always there. No matter what time of day, or at this point thanks to my phone, where I am I can always be connected. I can always be multi tasking. Doing this while doing that. The thing is though I am really terrible at multi tasking. I don’t like to do it. I know that one thing will be neglected and yet I still try. Or its 9pm and I think I will just check Pinterest out real quick. HA! 2 hours later I blink and release myself from the glow of the screen take myself to bed. The next morning I wonder why I feel so tired and why didn’t anything get done last night.

I have heard several people talk about unplugging for a time or “going dark” and while I don’t desire to do that last night I did come to the understanding (acceptance) that something needed to change. I was looking on Pinterest for ideas for Little’s birthday party which I think I am going to document for the Bewitching home blog party, texting with my bff and ignoring the show that my hubby was watching on TV. (ok just in case you’re wondering Little was in bed)  I was feeling cranky and tired but not sleepy. Oh gee I wonder why I had 3 screens flickering at me, and yet I wasn’t really doing anything. I wasn’t having tea with the bff. I wasn’t spending quality time with the hubs and I wasn’t working on a project or cleaning the house. I thought yeah this is not going to work. On top of that I have been realizing how cross I get when I try to do more than one thing at a time. Like check my email/ Facebook/ blog real quick while Little is playing.

So I made the decision to make myself a rule. No screen time while Little is awake. What a lofty and nobel goal. Guess how long it lasted?  I woke up this morning and got Little dressed and at the table and eating and sat down to check my Facebook. Oops! a few moments later I woke up more remembered my goal and shut it down. Hid my phone in my purse and tried to ignore it. Our morning routine went so much smoother.  She didn’t act out as much because of all the extra attention she was getting. I feel good because if you read my post on my Homemakers Binder you know how important and hard I think the job of being a mom is so really she deserves my full attention and not to share it with a screen.

No I haven’t figure it out yet because I have my phone with me all the time. I am on call for a lot of things and it is what I use to take 99% of my photos. I also don’t want to neglect my blog so I did sneak peaks at it this morning while she was playing with her friend. I am working on it. I am not perfect for I don’t believe in perfection anyways only progress.

What are your tips for managing screen time both yours and your families? I could sure use the help 🙂

Made it Monday love notes

pined it

and our version

Yes you could go for pretty and coordinating with your house decor. Our house decor seems to be early childhood so this actually does work. Anyway what could be prettier than a drawing done with love from your child. So Little drew this picture. and we just used a frame from the dollar store. I had to fold the paper on the sides to make it fit. then we took a dry erase pen and wrote a little message for the Hubs and put it on his bed side table.

Day Planner/ Homemakers binder

The thing about being a house wife and stay at home mom ( which I pretend to still be even though I am working out of the home part-time these days) is that it is complicated. For one thing we don’t get a lot of respect as a profession because I think people figure anyone can do these tasks and if anyone can do them they must not have value. This is just a guess I don’t know but I do know they tend to not get respect. What is amusing about this is that these two jobs are really hard!

Anyone that is a mother knows motherhood is no joke, and it’s not like you can call in sick. You are there all the time 24/7 rain or shine through good times and bad times and sick and cranky. You are in charge of oh so much and for some crazy reason people (especially those without kid experience) think you sit at home and watch your stories while your child does who knows what. Maybe plays quietly by themselves or peacefully with siblings and teaches themselves how to read and have manners. In short they don’t think of it as a job.

Trust me folks it is a job. True I don’t get paid for it and it is a labor of love but it is hard work and should be treated that way. When I clock in at my other job I am expected to be present and focused on my work. When I am home with Little it is the same thing. I need to be in the now and focused on her. I happen to also be in charge of about a zillion other things and so I have a home makers binder that I use to get my work done and stay one step ahead of the game. Because running out of food when you need to cook dinner or clean underwear when you need to get dressed is just not ok!

I do love trees. The quote on the bottom is from Gretchen Ruben’s book “The Happiness project” it says “the days are long, but the years are short” good for perspective. The binder itself is about an inch thick and I use the Martha Stewart tab dividers.

next up the back of my binder.

my weekly plan. I color when Little colors. besides it is so much prettier to look at. Anyway I keep it on the see through on the back so I can see it easily. The first column I just have the days of the week and my dinner theme of that day. The next column has my to do list that I fill in. And the last has my activities that are assigned a particular day. The bottom footer shall we call it has my daily task that I do every day and sometimes need to look at pre coffee to remember what it is I am doing. I included my version as a PDF here week at a glance

When opened the first section is called Calendar. Now for my actual Calendar I use the flylady wall calendar so what I have in here is my important dates page.

Followed by a print out of this month

and its back

at this point I should say no one sees this for me so I don’t care about my messy writing or that I can’t spell 🙂  As you can tell I use the back of the month to write out ideas both for Little’s education and for our family holidays or really anything else pertaining to this month. I will probably go find the right place in my Book of days (peak here or here) to write it in or write it up and put it in.

This is followed by the current months section from my Book of days. So this month I have August in and at the end of the month I will take it out and put in September.

My Next section is called Rhythm with as you guess various rhythms

This was taken from a pin I saw on pinterest and you can see the blog post here.

These are the themes I use for Little’s education. I made them up myself 🙂 it Gives each month a nice focus and is something that you can use at any age of a child.

After rhythm is my menu planning section.

This is my menu plan and shopping list for the week. Mi casa es su casa so her is my menu plan for you to use as you like. behind this I might have recipes that I plan to use for the week.

I think have another food section with a print out of typical harvest availability dates for my area( I think I got it from upick.org), several pages with lists of food ideas one page for each day of the week. I also keep pinterest boards by category. So I have a food love pasta  board, because Monday is pasta night. Hopefully in the near future I will be reorganizing my ginormas Cook Book binder and so this might change but for now it works.

and I have this 

Which tells you how to store what, and you can find it here.

Next section is Little’s section. I have her lesson plan.

I have our Simplified Lesson Plan followed by some different articles that I find meaningful for us during whatever stage we happen to be in. They may be on sleep or on developing the habit of yes or really what ever we are going through right then.

Next up is my blog section which I have shared about before but basically I have my   weekly blog sheet followed by paper for other ideas that come to me.

I then have a clean section with papers like this

which is a copy from I think a 2009 real simple but really any recipe you want to keep on hand for cleaning solutions or cleaning tricks.  I also have the detailed cleaning  list from flylady like this one

The next sections my emergency section which no doesn’t have chocolate in it though an envelope with a stashed bar is not a bad idea…I digress. I am working on this section and am using this post that I found via pinterest of course.

As with everything this is a work in progress for me. If you want to follow along with my crazy please feel free to follow my pinterest board