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The Artist’s Way

A Book Review of The Artist’s Way
by Julia Cameron

During a season of my life when I was deep in the weeds of mothering, I picked up this book, recommended to me by a friend. Little did I realize that I had an artist hiding inside me that needed to come out. Julia Cameron believes that everyone is born creative, but most neglect their artistic leanings as they get older and are told that making art doesn’t matter or should not be made a priority.


This book is unique in that it starts with a contract. The contract says “I ______________ understand that I am undertaking an intense guided encounter with my own creativity. I commit to weekly reading, daily morning pages and an artist date every week for the next 12 weeks. I ______________ commit to excellent self care, adequate sleep, diet, and exercise during the duration of the course.”

I signed the contract and decided to give it a try.

The Morning Pages. I was familiar with journaling, but never every single day, and never with the assurance that nobody else would read what I wrote. The pages were to be destroyed upon writing. There was a freedom in knowing that my thoughts didn’t need editing and didn’t need to pass through a people pleasing filter.

The Artist Date Cameron describes artist dates as a 2 hour chunk of time once a week spent pleasing your “inner artist child”. My artist dates included hiking, going to museums, thrift shopping, and cooking. The first few times, 2 hours seemed like a long time and felt extravagant and selfish. I was tempted to shorten my time and do something more “productive” like grocery shopping or errands. With time and practice, I realized that 2 hours is the perfect amount of time and occasionally a whole day is more fitting, depending on the activity.

Taking a drive to see wide open spaces and sky

I highly recommend the Artists Way. If you want to get the most out of it, try going through it with a group or asking one person to keep you accountable to the contract of morning pages and artist dates. It is harder than it sounds. I only did the morning pages about half the days and an artist date every 2-3 weeks, but the message of the book changed me, and I will be forever grateful to Julia Cameron for writing it.

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Memories of Appleton Christmas

When I was a child, Christmas did not involve gifts or Santa Claus. We didn’t even have a tree. We hung ornaments from the curtains. At the time, I didn’t think much of it except for when The nice cashier trying to make conversation at the store asked “What did Santa bring you this year?” While my classmates were getting Nintendos and giant LEGO sets, my siblings and I got tootsie roll banks and socks. Before you start feeling sorry for me, I will assure you that Christmas was THE best day of my year.

My most vivid memory was traveling to small town Appleton, MN. My Dad comes from a family of 11 children and Christmas was the one time that they all got together.

My Dad is on the top right.

Before any gifts were opened, everyone took turns performing a talent.
The talents were anything from playing Silent Night by blowing in pop bottles to flexibility tricks using a broom stick. I remember one of my uncles pretending to be an astronaut, lying upside down on a folding chair, making sound effects of a space ship.

There was always a lot of singing, guitar playing , and if we were lucky…Uncle Glen brought the banjo. Everyone always made a big deal of Grandma Evelyn’s harmonica solos. It was like someone famous entered the room when Grandma pulled out her harmonica.

My contribution to Christmas other than my attempt to play the violin was introducing a game called “Mrs Mumble”. The one rule was you couldn’t show your teeth and you couldn’t laugh or you were out of the game. The first person in the circle would say, “Have you seen Mrs. Mumble?” and then the person next to them would say “I don’t know? Let me ask my neighbor”. The game just got better and better as the question worked it’s way around the circle and the aunts and uncles tried to out do each other in comedic improve.

My aunts Barb and Mona

After all the talents were shared, it was time for gifts. With so many siblings, the gift exchange seemed to take a very long time. When I turned 13, I was finally old enough to be entered in the name drawing. I remember feeling really grown up and proud to be in the circle of adults. My gift that first year was a set of hand painted ceramic turtles from my aunt Mona. I still have them almost 30 years later. I know I must have received Christmas gifts as a child, but this is the only one I really remember.

One thing I do remember well was the food. We ate rosettes, lefse, tea ring, lasagne, shrimp, pickled herring, olives, and deviled eggs. The adults enjoyed playing scrabble and putting together puzzles.

The kids loved hide and seek in all the upstairs bedrooms of “the big house” which now that I think about it, wasn’t very big at all. We fit a lot of people into that big-little house in Appleton, MN. It’s been many years now since we have had Christmas there, but the memories play in my mind like a movie. Thanks to my uncle Art, there is lots of video footage of the talent shows, singing, and dancing that I go back and watch when I’m feeling nostalgic.

Without trying, my parents have re-created a similar atmosphere of excitement for their own children. My 6 siblings and I gather with our families at my sister Gina’s house on Christmas. The kids usually treat the adults to a performance or costume parade . There are lots of board games, puzzles, a photo scavenger hunt, and a similar spread of food. My kids are soaking up every moment of memory making, and so am I.



Photo scavenger hunt organized by Katie.
I loved driving around looking
at lights as a kid and still do.

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Christmas in the Real World

Do you have an image of your perfect Christmas morning? From all my Hallmark Channel viewing and Internet scrolling I imagine this:

A family in matching PJs unwrapping a mountain of beautifully wrapped presents. Cinnamon rolls, bacon, orange juice, and Reindeer Blend coffee being poured into Christmas mugs. A kiss under the mistletoe near a crackling fire with Harry Connick Jr singing in the background. It’s the picture perfect white, middle class, American life!

Oh wait! My life isn’t a movie. It plays out more like this: “I’m tired, why is everyone already awake? We don’t open presents until after breakfast. Oh, you don’t like the breakfast? We got the wrong syrup? Why is the wi-fi not working? Why is she crying? When can we open the presents? Why doesn’t my present work? Can you put it together? Where are the batteries?

Our real life house. No mountain of presents or crackling fireplace. Just my beautiful girls.

This week I made a list of all the things I do to prepare for Christmas. It was a long list. I didn’t really feel strongly about anything on the list. I didn’t look forward to doing anything on the list. I do love Christmas, but mostly I love the idea of Christmas, not really the actual work that the month of December brings.

I’ve been thinking a lot about some wise words that Santa shared with me.

Let Go

Say no

Go slow

What if I put this into practice in the month of December.

What can I let go of? Fear, self doubt, and the opinions of others,

What can I say no to? The things I do out of guilt or obligation

How can I go slow? By building margin into each day, taking walks, turning off my phone, and lighting candles.

Take a moment to savor your real life in the real world. It’s all you’ve got. Find the little things…or big things… you have to celebrate, and give a hoot and a holler (or a small grin).

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The Year of the Mice

2016…The year of the mice. The first mouse siting was during a sleepover in a room full of teenage girls. My daughter and her group of friends were settling in to watch a movie when a mouse emerged from beneath the couch and raced across the hard wood floor, through the maze of pillows, blankets and couch cushions. That was the end of sleeping on the floor.

After that night, my kids were constantly on the look out for mice. Their eyes and ears were on alert day and night. We began finding mouse droppings around the kitchen and behind the couch. The mice multiplied quickly and we started seeing them in every room of the house. One night we had an unexpected guest who needed a place to spend the night. As I brought them to their bed, a mouse ran across the floor. After that, I stopped inviting people over.

We tried every kind of trap imaginable, deep cleaning the house, and two different pest control companies. The mice completely ignored the traps. I began to feel a bit crazy. I had trouble sleeping and jumped at the chance to leave the house on weekends.

We went on vacation in the summer of 2016 for a week and gladly left the mice behind. When we returned, there were mouse droppings in our beds. That was the last straw!

I started dreading the night. The sun setting meant the mice would come out to play. I turned on loud music and entered empty rooms with my eyes closed yelling, “get out of here, mice!”

We started to recognize the paths that the mice traveled. The majority of activity was in and around the living room couch. As a last resort, we decided to get rid of the couch. Mark brought it out into the country and my brother in-law and father in-law joined in a couch burning party.

After the couch was gone, the mice slowly disappeared. They were gone for about a year, but then came back in 2018.

One night, I opened the bedroom door to come downstairs during the early morning hours and saw two baby mice about an inch long toppling down the stairs. Seeing babies made me think, “Oh no, they’re multiplying!” Pest control came right away and told us that when you see babies, usually it means the adult mice are dead. The babies only leave the nest as a last resort. Those babies were the last mice I have seen.

The only evidence of the mice that remains is a piece of black tape covering the door to the upstairs attic. I convinced myself that the baby mice had come from the attic and taping the door was my desperate attempt of keeping the mice in.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how this image parallels many areas of life. How often do I close the door to certain areas of my heart and emotions that I don’t want to deal with? “I’ll take care of it later,” I think to myself.

Unfortunately, a conflict or painful memory can only be avoided for so long. Last week, I finally took the tape off the door. There was no sign of mice. Just old papers, musty blankets, suitcases, and trash.

The mice are gone now, but the life lessons they taught me still remain. Our thoughts are trained to run in the same patterns, just like mice do. We can look the other way and hope that our hidden thoughts will somehow go away, but usually they need some gentle, yet firm attention. The pest control company we called didn’t seem to be helping for many months. Sometimes, the friend or therapist that we choose doesn’t end up being helpful or it takes longer than we expected. We had mice for over a year and there were days when I just wanted to move out and quit trying.

I am working hard to move toward the hard conversations with others instead of avoiding them. Facing fears and recognizing unhelpful beliefs that I have allowed to rule my life is hard, but important work. I hope you will have courage to face your fears as well. You are stronger than you know.

And now, one last thing, dear reader: If you currently have mice running wild throughout your house, tell me your mice stories and my empathy will abound!

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Snow Day!

There’s nothing quite like a snow day. Especially when the storm falls on a weekday. I remember as a child of the 80’s, sitting in front of the radio listening to the list of school cancellations being read in alphabetical order. When Marshall was called, we would jump up and down and run around the house screaming “School’s cancelled! School’s cancelled!”

Tonight we got word that St Paul schools would be cancelled tomorrow due to a pre-Thanksgiving snow storm. There was no waiting by the radio, but I did receive a text message, email, and voicemail.

A snow day for the kids means staying up a little later, sitting by the window and watching the snow fall by candle light. During the day off, there will be movies, board games, blanket forts in the living room, freshly baked cookies, family time, playing in the snow, and shoveling. Lots and lots of shoveling.

During a rare April snow day in 2018, the kids made an epic snow fort. The fort was modeled after a similar fort that my brothers and sisters and I made growing up. I am still in search of a photograph of the original. The fort was made from bricks of snow stacked in rows about 6-8 high with the word “HONK” written on the front with food coloring.

The kids had a blast jumping out from
behind the wall and cheering when cars would honk

Whether you are dreading the coming winter or as excited as my kids, I hope you will find something to savor in this first snow day.

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My Top 3 Kid Birthday Parties

With four kids ranging from age 5 to 17, I have thrown my share of birthday parties. If you count one party a year for each of my kids, I have currently thrown 47 birthday parties. Can I say that again? 47 Parties!!

Here are my top 3 most memorable

Around the World Party We packed a dozen 1st graders into our basement laundry room in Minneapolis. Rows of folding chairs transformed the space into an airplane.

I was the stewardess who helped the guests board the plane and gave them a boxed snack to eat mid-flight. Mark was the pilot that guided us through the take off and landing, complete with sound effects.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire Party

when Ellie turned 9, one of our favorite TV shows to watch as a family was Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Mark set up speakers in the basement and played host of the popular game show. All the prepared questions had to do with American Girl dolls. The volume of the theme song pouring out of the speakers seemed to shake the whole house. The kids each soaked up their moment of fame as a contestant in the hot seat.

Paint Fight Party

When Tabby turned 15, she asked for a paint fight party. I bought 12 large bottles of washable tempera paint and the kids all wore white. We walked to a grassy field near our house and the teenagers ran around and threw paint on each other for about 10 wild minutes. That’s as long as the paint lasted.

After the paint attack, back at the house, everyone attempted to wash off using the garden hose. It was SUCH a mess. An insane mess. The kids went home and told their parents that it was the best birthday party EVER! I still cannot believe that I allowed it.

Most of the other parties have been fairly tame compared to those three. We have went bowling, ate frozen yogurt, had a doll tea party, decorated cookies, solved secret codes, watched a movie, and smashed lots of piñatas.

The thing that makes parties worth giving is the excitement leading up to the big day. There’s nothing like hearing my kids’ squeals of delight as each guest walks from their car up to our front door with present in hand.

The kids talk about it for weeks beforehand and count the days and hours and minutes until the first friend arrives. It brings me great joy to see them grow with each year. I wonder how many more birthday parties there will be? I think I’ll just enjoy a few months off until the next one.

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A Brush with Self Care

As a nurturing mother, oldest child, and natural born helper, I didn’t give self care much thought until about 5 years ago. I didn’t have a clear understanding of the word.

I thought Self care = Selfish and I had been taught clearly from childhood that being selfish was bad. I still remember clearly the Sunday School song:

“Put Jesus first and Others second and put Yourself at the end of the line, And you will find true Joy in your life through J-O-Y. I loved that song. I lived it with great pride.

Then, I spent 12 years as a full-time stay at home mom with no time to myself. Add a few major life challenges and finding out I was pregnant with baby #4, and I reached major burn-out.

Over time, the realization came that I was not feeling the least bit joyful. I resented never speaking up for myself and always giving up my needs for everyone else. Through some therapy, I realized that I had lived my life treating everyone else kindly, but not being kind to myself – At All.

I have begun thinking of this topic of self care as Self Kindness

Love is Kind. I cannot truly love the people in my life unless I love myself. I began giving myself permission to rest from always caring for the needs of others. I had to figure out what was restful and then make time for it”

As a young mom, I remember coming to the end of a day after the kids had finally fallen asleep and the house was quiet, and thinking “Now, I can FINALLY rest” . I’ve earned it!!” I defined rest as a small compartment reserved for when the work was done.

Life can be hard. Really hard. There were days and weeks and years when the urgent drowned out the important in my life, and the only break I got was 5 minutes in the bathroom with the door closed. Self care for me started with a decision. I would make a daily choice to be kind to myself and at times that would mean saying no to the demands of others.

I have been gradually adding daily practices that have helped me find rest. *Candle light *Journaling *Drinking coffee *Walking *Going outside in nature *Turning off my phone *Time with friends *Reading *Smiling and making funny faces at myself in the mirror.

After intentionally trying to be more kind to myself for the past 5 years, I have noticed something. I call it a Brush with Self Care. Imagine a paint with water picture. The brush dipped in the water symbolizes self care. When you take the time to dip your brush and apply it to the pages of your life, you will begin to see colors emerge. The colors are the hidden talents, the things you never knew you loved, and the gifts that have been hiding in plain sight.

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Creative Hospitality

Hospitality: The friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers.

When I was a child, one of my earliest memories was going to my Grandma Shirley’s house where she always had a full cookie jar ready. There was also ice cream in the cold room, served with chocolate syrup and peanuts. If there was no ice cream in the house, Grandpa would say, “Shirley, we need to go to Dairy Queen and get some “gook” That was the code word for a pint of soft serve chocolate ice cream. We didn’t have a formal invite to go to Grandma’s house, we just always knew that if we rode our bikes over to their house, they would be home with treats ready.

My childhood home in Marshall, MN

The number of guests, visitors, and strangers my parents welcomed into my childhood home was many. One memory that stands out in my mind is when Dad brought some hitch-hikers home for supper. They were an older couple traveling through town and down on their luck. They joined us around the table for a meal. Afterwards, my siblings and I retreated upstairs to discuss the possibility that the hitch-hikers might have been kidnappers on the run. When we came back downstairs, my dad had invited the couple to spend the night on our pull out couch. I never saw them again after that night, but the way my parents welcomed the strangers with a meal and a place to sleep made an impression on me.

This photo was taken on move-in day in St Paul.

I have found hospitality as a practice. The more I invite people into my home, the better I get at it and the more natural it becomes. In my early years of marriage, I had a lot of negative self-talk that prevented me from inviting people over. These are some of the things I would say to myself.

What if people don’t like my house?

What if I don’t have the right food?

Where would everyone sit?

What if people don’t know what to talk about?

I still have these thoughts from time to time, but I have learned that most people don’t care what my house looks like or if my furniture matches. They are just happy to be invited.

My Motivation for Hospitality:

I want to create a place of belonging and a place to connect people who don’t yet know each other. I want my home to be full of laughter, learning, and listening to stories.

Neighborhood bonfire in the front yard.
Party in the garage.
How many teenagers can you fit in one room?

Whether it is planned in advance or spontaneous, the key is saying “YES!” to hospitality. Your way of showing hospitality will be different than mine. Be you! Join me in the friendly and generous reception of guests, visitors, and strangers.

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New Food November

In my last post I shared about the importance of waking up to our five senses. Today, I want to focus on one of these senses that we use every time we put something into our mouth…taste! Sometimes even looking at a picture of a particular food or smelling it cooking can cause our mouth to begin to water. Hot apple pie straight from the oven, soup that has been simmering all afternoon, freshly baked bread, sizzling bacon. Ok, you get the idea.

Are we hungry yet?

When I got engaged, my roommates threw me a bridal shower and gave me a jar of spaghetti sauce and some frozen pizzas as a joke gift. In my early years of marriage, my lack of knowledge in the kitchen was quite embarrassing. My husband, Mark, knew even less than I did, and was used to a steady diet of turkey sandwiches and apple juice. I worked at Burger King and Mark worked at Pizza Hut. Between fast food, cold sandwiches, and microwavable food, we survived.

Fast forward to having kids, I don’t think things improved all that much. I had some mom friends that passed along their recipes and gave me a few tips (thanks Brooke and Christa), but we were still in survival mode, eating to live, not living to eat. Our regular rotation was tacos, pasta, pizza, waffles, and chicken. Somewhere along the line, I started paying attention when I was around people who were cooking and asking them questions.

We graduated from beef tacos to other kinds of tacos!

My lack of confidence in cooking had nothing to do with a lack of interest in food. It had to do with my fear of failure. I didn’t want to work hard to preparing a special meal, and then have it end up in the garbage.

A few years ago, I realized that I really do enjoy cooking. I decided to make something that I wanted to make for myself one day a week. Once I got past my need for approval, I found myself really enjoying the time in the kitchen.

I can tell when my confidence in cooking started to grow because that’s when I started taking pictures of meals I made

I am still a pretty “safe eater” that gets into a rut when it comes to grocery shopping and cooking. I decided to challenge myself this month with a simple idea, and I hope you will join me.

The challenge is this:

Eat at least one thing you have never tasted each week during the month of November.

For the adventurous eaters, you may need to try a new combination of foods or a new spice mix. For me, it will be no problem to find new foods. I could probably fill a whole cart in every aisle with the things I have not tried.

Grab a friend and try a new food together. If you are already having a get together in November, tell everyone its “New Food November”

I would love to see what’s in your grocery cart. Hopefully, we will all find some delicious new flavors this month and our taste buds will thank us!

Mashed potato martini.
A beautiful plate prepared by my friend, Lynn Benson

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Thank Your Senses!

Have you thought about what it would be like to live without vision, hearing, touch, smell, or taste buds?  I picture a life without senses as a paint with water picture without the water and brush.  There would be no way for the colors and details to appear in our picture without our senses that bring the world to life.  

What if we built a little more margin into our days so we could intentionally practice using our senses?  In music, the places of stopping are called ‘rests’.   Taking moments to pause in the middle of our days help us notice things that we are usually too busy to see.  

Here are a few ideas of how to engage with your senses.  

Stand next to a tree and notice its leaves, its bark, and the shape of its branches.   What can the tree teach you?  What has it been through?  How old do you think it is?

Lay on your back and look up at the sky.  What do you notice about the clouds?  Can you feel the wind on your face?  What do you hear around you?

Deliberately take another route on your daily drive or walk.  Notice things you have not seen before.  Take a little more time getting to where you are going (or end up in a new place that you didn’t intend to go).  How did taking a new path make you feel?

Deliberately change one of your routines.  Order something different at the coffee shop, add a new ingredient to your sandwich, use cloth napkins instead of paper ones, light a candle, listen to a new type of music.   

None of this comes naturally to me.  I really like familiar and rarely step out and deliberately find new ways of doing, thinking, or feeling.   It is a discipline for me to make time and space to activate my senses.   It is a discipline to care for myself and enjoy all the things around me that are waiting to be enjoyed.  

Think about the word enJOY.  

There are a lot of things that I have realized bring me joy.  Fireplaces, the ocean, warm socks, a pretty place setting, conversation with friends, and walks in the woods to name a few.  I  know my list will grow and change as I get older and as I experience new things.  

Make a list of things you enJOY and  hang it up somewhere where you can see it.   Decide which of your 5 senses are used in experiencing your favorite things.  Then, make time for one thing on your list each day.