What I got for Christmas! (and a Giveaway!)

Hello Everyone!

So there is a huge trend on YouTube of making videos about what we get for Christmas. This trend is so popular that many YouTubers upload their videos early on Christmas morning, making us wonder if they actually hijacked Santa's sled on Christmas Eve to get their presents early!

Obviously, I wasn't one of those people. I upload my video a good ten days after Christmas! I totally understand why people love these videos, because I have fun watching them. Not only does it give me ideas of things to ask for for my birthday (in February) but it also gives me great gift ideas for others in the future!

That being said, I also understand why some people are bothered by these videos and see it as bragging. I think in a way this video is bragging, in the sense that I am happy and excited about what I got and I want to show it to you guys, in hope that you will find it entertaining and enjoyable. But in no way to I ever want my happiness to make others feel bad. Which is why I wanted to take a minute to focus on one of the most special parts of the holidays: being grateful. There are so many amazing things that happen around the holidays, and I think above all it is important to recognize the special people and moments, and not just the "things."

So I wanted to share my "What I Got For Christmas" video with you guys, and I also wanted to let my blog readers who aren't subscribed to my YouTube channel know that I am doing a little giveaway, which you can find the details of if you watch the video.
But I also wanted to tell you guys three things that I am super thankful for lately. So here goes:

As I was typing this, I realized something. All of these things I have viewed in a negative aspect at one time; Lila being too attention seeking, Mike and I quipping at each other/not much time to myself, traveling too much/not being home enough - it really all boils down to me not having my usual required time to myself. But when I try, I can turn each negative though into a piece of gratitude. And once I started typing, I realized I really have a TON of things to be grateful for. 

1) Lila is finally at an age where we can sit down together and do activities. For Christmas she received a lot of board games, card games, crafts and art projects. It is amazing to see her creativity shine through when she does these projects on her own, but it is even more special to do them with her, because I feel an indescribable connection with her, and just seeing that joy in her face at the fact that I want to play with her is priceless.

2) Mike and I got a lot of time together in the last few weeks. We definitely got super frustrated with each other. Like he reeeeaaally gets on my nerves and I'm sure I really get on his too! But there were also some amazing moments we had together, like shopping and wrapping gifts for our family together, watching lots of movies, and rearranging Lila's room all come to mind. We also have fun playing board games with Lila for as long as all of our attention spans can last!

3) I am marrying into an amazing family. Mike's Mom is the most selfless, generous, and hard working person who keeps a smile on her face and her sense of humor no matter what. Mike's sisters have shown so much love and care to me since I met them. They have made me feel like a welcome part of the family and I truly feel like I can be myself around them, and not be judged. Mike's Dad is literally Mike in 20some years. He is exactly like Mike, down to the nervous habits, jokes, and selective hearing. It is so sweet to see him turn into a giant teddy bear around Lila. And I can't wait to watch Lila grow up with my future nephews!

If you want to enter the giveaway, just watch this video and leave a comment on my YouTube channel with something you are grateful for.

Do you celebrate Christmas where you live? 

Positive Thinking: Your Inner Child

 Inner Child by Nicholas Duffaunt

As a creative person trying to make a living with my creativity, I like to think that what drives me most days is my inner child coming out. That feeling is put perfectly in the following letter (the following text is from Letters of Note)(I know its a lot of words but it is worth it I promise!):

 In 1986, 23 years after the death of Sylvia Plath, celebrated poet Ted Hughes wrote the following letter to their 24-year-old son, Nicholas, and, quite beautifully, advised him to embrace his "childish self" so as to experience life to its fullest.

Tragically, during a period of depression in 2009, Nicholas took his own life. He was 47.

(Source: Letters of Ted Hughes; Image: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes & Nicholas Hughes in 1962, via.)

Dear Nick,

I hope things are clearing. It did cross my mind, last summer, that you were under strains of an odd sort. I expect, like many another, you'll spend your life oscillating between fierce relationships that become tunnel traps, and sudden escapes into wide freedom when the whole world seems to be just there for the taking. Nobody's solved it. You solve it as you get older, when you reach the point where you've tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice certain things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things like possessiveness (your own) and a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses. I came to America, when I was 27, and lived there three years as if I were living inside a damart sock—I lived in there with your mother. We made hardly any friends, no close ones, and neither of us ever did anything the other didn't want wholeheartedly to do. (It meant, Nicholas, that meeting any female between 17 and 39 was out. Your mother banished all her old friends, girl friends, in case one of them set eyes on me—presumably. And if she saw me talking with a girl student, I was in court. Foolish of her, and foolish of me to encourage her to think her laws were reasonable. But most people are the same. I was quite happy to live like that, for some years.) Since the only thing we both wanted to do was write, our lives disappeared into the blank page. My three years in America disappeared like a Rip Van Winkle snooze. Why didn't I explore America then? I wanted to. I knew it was there. Ten years later we could have done it, because by then we would have learned, maybe, that one person cannot live within another's magic circle, as an enchanted prisoner.

So take this new opportunity to look about and fill your lungs with that fantastic land, while it and you are still there. That was a most curious and interesting remark you made about feeling, occasionally, very childish, in certain situations. Nicholas, don't you know about people this first and most crucial fact: every single one is, and is painfully every moment aware of it, still a child. To get beyond the age of about eight is not permitted to this primate—except in a very special way, which I'll try to explain. When I came to Lake Victoria, it was quite obvious to me that in some of the most important ways you are much more mature than I am. And your self-reliance, your Independence, your general boldness in exposing yourself to new and to-most-people-very-alarming situations, and your phenomenal ability to carry through your plans to the last practical detail (I know it probably doesn't feel like that to you, but that's how it looks to the rest of us, who simply look on in envy), is the sort of real maturity that not one in a thousand ever come near. As you know. But in many other ways obviously you are still childish—how could you not be, you alone among mankind? It's something people don't discuss, because it's something most people are aware of only as a general crisis of sense of inadequacy, or helpless dependence, or pointless loneliness, or a sense of not having a strong enough ego to meet and master inner storms that come from an unexpected angle. But not many people realise that it is, in fact, the suffering of the child inside them. Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it. So everybody develops a whole armour of secondary self, the artificially constructed being that deals with the outer world, and the crush of circumstances. And when we meet people this is what we usually meet. And if this is the only part of them we meet we're likely to get a rough time, and to end up making 'no contact'. But when you develop a strong divining sense for the child behind that armour, and you make your dealings and negotiations only with that child, you find that everybody becomes, in a way, like your own child. It's an intangible thing. But they too sense when that is what you are appealing to, and they respond with an impulse of real life, you get a little flash of the essential person, which is the child. Usually, that child is a wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being. It's been protected by the efficient armour, it's never participated in life, it's never been exposed to living and to managing the person's affairs, it's never been given responsibility for taking the brunt. And it's never properly lived. That's how it is in almost everybody. And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits. And in its own self, it is still unprotected, incapable, inexperienced. Every single person is vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self. At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person's childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It's their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can't understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That's the carrier of all the living qualities. It's the centre of all the possible magic and revelation. What doesn't come out of that creature isn't worth having, or it's worth having only as a tool—for that creature to use and turn to account and make meaningful. So there it is. And the sense of itself, in that little being, at its core, is what it always was. But since that artificial secondary self took over the control of life around the age of eight, and relegated the real, vulnerable, supersensitive, suffering self back into its nursery, it has lacked training, this inner prisoner. And so, wherever life takes it by surprise, and suddenly the artificial self of adaptations proves inadequate, and fails to ward off the invasion of raw experience, that inner self is thrown into the front line—unprepared, with all its childhood terrors round its ears. And yet that's the moment it wants. That's where it comes alive—even if only to be overwhelmed and bewildered and hurt. And that's where it calls up its own resources—not artificial aids, picked up outside, but real inner resources, real biological ability to cope, and to turn to account, and to enjoy. That's the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they're suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That's why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realise you've gone a few weeks and haven't felt that awful struggle of your childish self—struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence—you'll know you've gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you've gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself. The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all. It was a saying about noble figures in old Irish poems—he would give his hawk to any man that asked for it, yet he loved his hawk better than men nowadays love their bride of tomorrow. He would mourn a dog with more grief than men nowadays mourn their fathers.

And that's how we measure out our real respect for people—by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate—and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you.

4 Simple Goals from A Beautiful Mess

For the third year in a row, A Beautiful Mess is hosting a "goal-setting-party." For me, this time of year can be stressful and hard, so I am taking this challenge as a chance to remember to take care of myself, and keep my long-term goals in mind. Click here for the official rules on A Beautiful Mess.The most important rule to me is that these are not supposed to be result-oriented goals, but activity oriented goals. Here are my goals:

1. Pack my lunch for work everyday.
2. Stock my shop with at least 360 items by the end of the year.
3. Network more in the blogosphere.
4. Spend at least 10 minutes every night cleaning up my apartment before bed.

Surprisingly, it wasn't hard at all for me to come up with four simple goals. I just thought about the areas of my life that I am most unhappy with currently, the things that cause me the most stress, and how I could do something small everyday to help fix the problems in those areas. What are some goals you might set to accomplish before 2014?

Positive Thinking: Choosing Your Thoughts

Your thoughts are the architects of your destiny.

-David O. McKay

Have you ever watched a cow eat? I mean, really watched them through the whole process? Well I may be a city girl but there are enough cows here in Wisconsin that I have seen my fair share of the cow eating process. Mostly it is standing and chewing. After grazing on some grass, cows stop eating and regurgitate all the grass back up in the form of cud. Then they keep chewing. For hours, until it is ground down enough to properly digest. 

 (Pardon Me by TDixonPhotography)

This digestive process is known as rumination (derived from the word rumen- the part of a cow's stomach where cud is formed) and this is the perfect metaphor for what we humans tend to do with our deepest thoughts. Sometimes we just need to chew things over for hours before we can "digest" them:

Rumination appears to be an instinctive human response when something goes wrong. It's as if we're hardwired to replay our recent trials and tribulations over and over again in the mind's eye- to mull things over for a while before we're ready to move on. And a little such dwelling can be helpful, since it often leads to valuable insights- providing greater clarity about what just went wrong, what can be done to correct things, and what might help us prevent similar negative outcomes in the future.

But after a brief period of intense pondering, we've usually extracted all the useful bits of meaning from the situation that we're ever likely to find. We soon hit the point of diminishing returns, when any more dwelling is simply a waste of time. But some people stay at it long past the point when enough is enough. And, unfortunately, extended rumination can have damaging effects.

-Stephen S. Ilardi, PhD excerpt from The Depression Cure

(Black and White Mental Illness Photograph by Emma in Wonderland)

As someone who has personally struggled with depression for over 10 years, I know that too much rumination is an unhealthy and unproductive habit that can lead to a dangerous downward spiral. Simply put, if you think about sad, scary, or stressful things, you will eventually start to feel sad, scared, or stressed. You will probably withdraw socially and avoid the things that may help you feel better. Therefore it is a self-defeating habit that we need to break!

The best anti-rumination activity that I have found is positive thinking. Sounds simple, right? Just think a happy thought! But its not always simple. When times are tough, sometimes it is hard to see the bright side, and it may seem like it just doesn't exist. But one thing I know for sure is that feeling will pass. Because right now, in this moment, I am not feeling sad. Therefore that is proof that all the other times I have been depressed have passed.

Positive thinking and overcoming depression are topics that I am very passionate about so I will be getting into more detail on these topics in my blog. But I am going to end today by sharing one of my favorite quotes, and inviting you to share some positive thoughts of your own!

(flower photograph by Bree Madden)

 There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under my jurisdiction. There are certain lottery tickets I can buy, thereby increasing my odds of finding contentment. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body with, whom I share my life and energy with. I can select what I eat and read and study. I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life- whether I will see them as curses or opportunities (and on the occasions when I can't rise to the most optimistic viewpoint, because I'm feeling too damn sorry for myself, I can choose to keep trying to change my outlook.). I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.

-Elizabeth Gilbert, excerpt from Eat, Pray, Love. 

Do you have any positive thoughts you would like to share?

Weekend Wishlist No. 2

mm

Trio design by limoceramics

Original Illustration Hand Painted T Shirt by Shebbo Design

Statement Necklace by White Bear Accessories

Good Morning, Sunshine - Matte Archival Print by Swallow Field

Hot Air Balloon Kit by CraftShmaft

Orange Hammock by Hamanica

Dream Big!

Lots of color this weekend! The weekend sure flew by for me... and I have a long week ahead of me. But I have been getting lots done and here's to another productive week! Hope you have a great one!