Mama Renew

Yesterday I boldly declared:    This week we’re going to find the time, create the time, make the time… Will you join us?

But I don’t have time.

You don’t know how busy I am.

There are so many things on my to do list.

I don’t have childcare.

But I just had a baby.

Not this week but maybe next?

Sound familiar?  Ah, yes…. the challenge of finding, creating, making the time to care for ourselves.  While core needs such as food, sleep and water get met on a basic level, the elements of self-care that nurture our spirit are lower on the list.

All of the above statements are real.   We are indeed busy mamas.

What if, instead of talking about how “busy” we are, we transformed that word to “full”???

“Full” is an apt description of our roles & responsibilities, but also opens the way for a different understanding of how we live.  The feeling of the word “full” reminds me that this is indeed my goal.  I want a full life, one that is fulfilling and alive & full of things that nurture me, my family & my community.

Your challenge today:

Consider one small thing you can do to help you have a more fulfilling day & nurture your mama spirit.

Love to dance?  Have a dance party with your kids.

Longing for the spa? Mix up a homemade facial mask and wear it around the house.

Feeling lonely?  Call a friend now.

Love to Cook?  Call a friend and spend the afternoon cooking together & share the bounty.

Craving mama time?  Watch for tomorrow’s post on spending time alone!

We’re one week into the Back to Self 30 day Challenge! If you’re just joining us now, it’s not too late – simply “Like” our facebook page and join in the fun.

Daydream, by Chantey Dayal

While I hadn’t planned on doing theme weeks, our first week of the challenge seemed to focus on physical self-care. This emerged in part due to my need to care for myself during a miserable cold. It also, however, is the aspect of self-care that is the most obvious. Articles & websites & experts abound telling us about good nutrition, exercise, water and sleep as the path to wellness. But wait, there’s more!!!

We’ve taken steps forward in caring for our Bodies, now it’s time for Spirit as our theme for week #2:

What activities nurture your spirit?

For me, these include creativity, dance, spiritual practice, yoga, alone time…

Here’s the catch: For many busy mamas I know, these are the very activities that too often get set aside in favour of family and household responsibilities. “I just don’t have time” is the mantra I hear over and over again.

This week we’re going to find the time, create the time, make the time… Will you join us?

Much gratitude to brilliant painter Chantey Dayal for the use of her painting for this blog. You can learn more about Chantey on her website & facebook page. Watch for more of her paintings in future postings.

I’ve been sick.   Sick enough that I stumbled over to my neighbors door 2 days ago wearing a full balaclava over my head, a big scarf around my neck, and a sign with the following words scrawled in red ink:

Please Call School – Need Rick Home – Doctor Now

This, after a 5 minute episode in which I enjoyed (not) a croup-like episode alone in the house gasping for breath & certain I was going to die.   Lucky for me my husband showed up from school drop-off just moments later and whisked me off, not to the doctor but to the Emergency Room.   Apparently they don’t like making patients who can’t breathe waiting for an appointment at the clinic.

Official diagnosis?  Acute Upper Respiratory Infection with Laryngitis. Origin?  Viral.  I liked this part – no tough antibiotic decision.  Lovely doctor told me to keep on doing what I was doing – lemon honey garlic ginger tea (she even approved of my addition of homemade rhubarb cinnamon vodka).  And reassured me that when another croup-like episode occured, it would pass, and I would be able to breathe again.

Home again, I settled into two full days of life as a sick mama.  Nestled on the couch with my hot vodka tea, unable to utter even a word to my children as my voice is completely gone.    I’m doing a bit better today, made it to yoga (part of my personal 30 day challenge), and am actually able to sit here at the computer with something resembling focus.  No voice yet, but I’m trying to take that as a blessing.  I’m not all that good at being quiet…

What about the challenge?

I felt horrible announcing the Back to Self Challenge and then disappearing!   My personal challenge for these few days was to simply let go.  No guilt about not working, not caring for children, not cooking meals, not doing yoga.  All my body needed to do was rest in silence.   Thankfully my dear husband works from home as well, and we’ve had two volunteers here to help on the farm, so I’ve had plenty of support and been able to fully let go.

So just a bit late, here is your challenge for days #3 & 4 & 5:

Listen to your Body!

If you need water, drink it.

If you need to pee, go.

If you feel sore, do something about it (yoga, massage, 5 minute stretch…).

If you are craving sex, intimacy, touch… create it.

If you’re full, stop eating!

If you need to go to bed at 7 p.m., do it.

Take Care, Mamas!

Follow our Mama Renew facebook page to join the challenge!

Day #1 was a success!  We heard from women around North America making a commitment to:

stretch, read, study, drink water, hike, drink less wine, go to the salon, clear clutter, tweeze eyebrows, pray…

Sounds like a good day to me!

Interestingly, the #1 self-care intention y’all shared was to drink more water. It’s so simple, isn’t it?   You know the feeling.  You’re thirsty, but you’ve pushed the sensation aside in favour of making school lunches or getting out the door on time. 

We’ve been working with mothers long enough to know that moms are really, really good at delaying that metaphorical sip of water. We’re good at talking about our desire for self-care, our longing for balance, and the challenges we’re facing, and not always so good at taking steps towards change. The busy nature of family life too often takes precedence, and our needs are set aside.

In a breakthrough moment in a Mama Renew group last summer one woman declared water, sleep, and daily exercise to be the absolute core of self-care.  If these are in place, she pondered, perhaps the deeper levels of self-care such as asking for help and knowing when to say no will come more easily.   Let’s find out, shall we?

So for day #2 of the Back to Self Challenge, let’s start with Water.   Lots and lots of water.  Like 8 – 10 glasses today.  & tomorrow.  & the next day!

Follow our Mama Renew facebook page to join the challenge!

Did you know we have a weekly Mama Renew post on Mothering.com?  Here is this weeks’ offering:

How often do you wish for just one more pair of willing hands in your household – as so perfectly demonstrated by Jessica in her Mothering blog post this week?  Someone else to help with dishes, garden, a good kitchen sweep, and occasional childcare.  You know – someone to drain the pasta while you hold a crying child.

There was a time in our life when we had a maid.  Two maids, actually – they came together every other week and scrubbed my home spotless.  It was amazing.  This is no longer within our budget, sadly, and I have really really missed them.

This summer our family has taken on a new realm of household support – WWOOFers (Willing Workers on Organic Farms, an international movement of generally young people wanting to travel, spend time on a farm, learn english, and enjoy family life.  We offer room and board in exchange for time working in the home and garden, and they stay for 1 – 3 weeks at a time.

Click Here to Read the rest at Mothering.com – the good, the challenging – all about asking for help, letting go of control, and working through the guilt!

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Thank you all for your votes for us

as the 2010 SavvyMom Top Mom Entrepreneur.

I believe we have a good chance, but won’t know anything more until mid-October.  For now I feel such gratitude for all your support and the messages sharing what our programs have meant to you.  

Winning this award would mean so much to me – many long hours and much sacrifice for my family have gone into bringing Dancing Star Birth and Mama Renew to life.

At the same time, I recognize that these contests are inevitably skewed – those of us with a larger email list of past and current clients have a much better chance of winning.  Being involved in the mom entrepreneur community has shown me time and time again the depth of commitment and sacrifice needed, and each of you out there doing your best to build a healthy business and nurture your family has my utmost respect.

Thank you again to all of you for your support, not just in this competition, but also for sharing with us your sense of “belonging” to the community of Dancing Star Birth & Mama Renew. It has been an absolute privilege to support each of you in the growth and care of your family.

Thank you all for your support over the years, as clients & colleagues. We promise – you will hear us howling with glee if we win.  And if we don’t, you will see us continuing to do this work that we love, always seeking new ways to support our community.

Blessings,

Sarah & all the wonderful women of Dancing Star Birth & Mama Renew.

The wise women at Nummies.com asked moms if they could go back to before their first baby, what would they tell themselves. These are their answers. Everyone in the video is a mom, and I find myself wishing I had met every one of them nine years ago when I was pregnant with my first…

Enjoy!

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Comment here…

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It’s a cloudy Friday late afternoon in late August and that means one thing:

1.  We have to pick all those perfectly ripe blackberries before the rain comes.

2.  It’s jam time!

We’ve already braved the blackberry bramble and emerged with an abundance of both berries and scratches.  This afternoon I will don my cutest apron and enter the glorious realm of making jam.

Jam making skipped a generation in my family – my maternal grandmother was raised on a rural homestead where food preservation was a way of life.  In later years she was known especially for her pomegranate jelly, and I savoured each and every spoon-full.  I was raised in the suburbs – our jam came from the grocery store, and I never stopped to ponder the possibility of making our own.

I began to make jam in my first years of motherhood.  Somehow it emerged as something that simply made sense – I’m not sure why, really.  I have very clear memories of feeling completely overwhelmed by piles of fruit needing to be processed and a baby needing to be breastfed. How on earth did we find the time? 

The more we made though, the more it simply became a necessity, a strangely essential part of who we are as a family.  Blueberry Spice, Rhubarb Saskatoon, Strawberry, Blackberry Lime, Oregon Grape…these are just a few of my favourites.  Jam, of course, serves somewhat like a ‘gateway drug’ – once you discover the wonders and ease of jam, it’s only a matter of time before you start pickling, freezing, and drying.

For me, food preservation has been a source of wonderful reconnection & renewal, nurturing both my creativity and sense of adventure.  These long hours of canning, drying, freezing, and pickling have become a time that nourishes me, and each step I take “backwards” to our old food ways is actually bringing me one step closer to myself.

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Favourite jam recipes?  How does making jam make you feel?

Comment Here…

I leave you with the lyrics to the most wonderful tune from Michelle Shocked – Strawberry Jam, sadly I couldn’t find a video of it anywhere.  Picture some fiddles with kind of a spoken word country vibe with a blues edge.

Saturday morning found me itching – To get on over to my grandma’s kitchen
The sweetest little berries was cooking up right –

And then we’d put them in a canning jar and seal them up tight
We were making jam – Strawberry jam, that’s what kind
Yeah, if you want the best jam – You gotta make your own

We have Smucker’s, Welches, Knotts Berry Farm
But a little homemade jam never did a body no harm
A little local motion is all we need – To close down these corporate jam factories
We’ll be making jam – Strawberry jam, mmmm-mm
If you want the best jam – You gotta make your own

Yeah, we have a little revolution sweeping the land – Now once more everybody’s making homemade jam
So won’t you call your friends up on the telephone
You invite ‘em on over, you make some jam of your own
You’ll be making jam – Strawberry jam
If you want the best jam
You gotta make your own

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Inspired? Visit our guest post on the All About Mothering blog to find out just how much time I’ve had on my own this summer…and what I’ve done with it all.

Read More at Mothering.com

This quote arrived in my inbox last night from Meghan Rathwell (who also inspired this great post on new motherhood and donated a fabulous prize for our Virtual Retreat this Spring).   Perfect Timing.

One of the things I love about the experience of a Mama Renew group is the way we have room to explore our assumptions about what our lives are “supposed” to look like.  Often we see women asking daring questions, revealing seldom declared life dreams, and feeling a healthy dose of optimism and creativity.

Reaching clear discernment is not a simple task.  Most of us enjoy many, many long discussions full of questions and worries and that wonderful query “What if…?” In a post last May we wrote:

And yet every once in a while, we ourselves, or someone we love, takes the leap and says Yes, somehow moving beyond the world of being sensible.

What is it that allows us to move from “what if…” to “I can”?  As mothers I suspect that the patience for clarity is sometimes harder.  We cannot separate our own life decisions from those of our life as a family, and this can create some considerably thick mud to wade through!

Eventually, however, there is indeed a moment of clarity, and it is very much this feeling of the mud and the muck and the questions and worries and doubts all settling to the ground (even if for only a few moments) and everything is crystal clear.  It is not a moment we can create or plan for.  Clarity simply arrives, often in a profoundly understated and simple way. And then we take the first new and exciting steps forward

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We’d love to hear from some of you – How do you know when something is right?  Where do you feel it in your body?  What would you like to say Yes to?

click here to comment!

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Many thanks to Martha of Laughing Volcano Art for the use of her beautiful Blue Girl Leap of Faith image.



Did you know we have a weekly Mama Renew post on Mothering.com?  Here is this weeks’ offering:

In honour of World Breastfeeding Week I want to explore a bit the emotional landscape of breastfeeding challenges.

In a story I have seen repeated all too often, my early months of breastfeeding featured an achingly low milk supply, conflicting professional advice, and well-meaning but deeply hurtful commentary.  This blessed time in my life also included a not-so-nice dose of postpartum depression, a rented scale to measure intake, a supplementary nursing system, formula, goats milk, a variety of herbs and medications, and the requisite hospital grade pump that became a good friend.

It was hard.  Hard,yes, to wake up every 2- 3 hours for a pre-feed-weigh-in, breastfeed, supplemental feed, pump, post-weigh-in, and diaper change.  That was hard.  I ached for the simplicity of putting my babe to breast and simply knowing that he was being amply nourished.

Harder, however, was the emotional journey of acceptance that this was my reality…

Click Here to Read the rest at Mothering.com

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Having just completed a 3 day intensive workshop on Regenerative Nutrition with the wondrous Nadine Ijaz, Clinical Nutritionist and Registered Herbalist, I am going through our kitchen with all the fervor of a convert.  Testing grains and oils for rancidity, reading ingredient labels, checking for grain moths, questioning the role of Peanut Butter in our family life…

Seven women, one experimental kitchen, and three full days of talking about food – good food, bad food, and good food gone bad.  All the things I kind of understood, I now know with a new depth of comprehension and commitment.  Fats and oils, sugars, grains, dairy… each element of our family diet has been deconstructed and examined.

I admit to feeling an odd mix of excitement and terror going to this workshop.  Sometimes it’s easier just not knowing.  Still, for every moment of resistance there were two more of revelation and integration. I’m ridiculously excited to be soaking grains, baking sourdough bread, and making beet kvass.

I am, of course, in the midst of the classic transition from “retreat” back to “real life”, and am not entirely sure how to make these grandiose plans work within our busy life as a family.  I also am a firm believer in the 80/20 principle, and have in no way said a permanent goodbye to white sugar.  Time will tell what form these new ideas and practices will take within our life as a family.

Still, I feel like I have taken some significant steps towards a new way of eating, and my primary motivation right now is one of pure discovery.   I figure as long as I’m having fun and feeling creative in the kitchen, I’m on the right path!  Here’s a recipe to get you started:

Toasted Nuts

Soak 2 C raw nuts in water with 1/2 tsp sea salt for 7 – 12 hours.  Drain and place in warm oven (no more than 150 degrees) on a cookie tray until dry & crispy (12-24 hours).

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Yesterday on our Mama Renew facebook page we posted the query:

What’s YOUR favourite phrase or mantra to keep you going? C’mon, share the encouragement!!

I don’t want your responses to be lost in facebook land so here are just a few of your wonderful mantras:

Live Strong

Good is Good Enough

There is enough time, and every moment counts…

I had a baby…I’m pretty sure I can do this.

Let it Go.

Bedtime and wine time always comes….

“I think I can, I think I can, I think I can”

If it’s not a good time, it’s a good story.

& one of my favourites….

Everything is going to be alright.

Many (many) years ago I had the joy of playing Mary Magdalene in a production of Jesus Christ Superstar in Lusaka, Zambia (!!)  Mary’s opening song “Everything’s Alright” has become a source of great soothing to me.  My husband sings it when I’m sick,  I sing it to our boys,  I sing it to myself…

I think in the end this is what it is all about. At the core, we know that we have what we need to move through this. “Alright” may look very very different from our ideal world, but it is indeed alright, and we can be fully present and responsive to what the moment demands of us (sounds a lot like birth, yes?).

Here’s a clip from the 1973 movie – enjoy!

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Have you seen our articles about asking for help?

Now it’s our turn! 

Voting Now Closed – Thank you for your support.

The 2010 SavvyMom Top Mom Entrepreneur Award – winner TBA mid-October

From my beginning as a stay-at-home mom teaching the occasional class, to our present team of 14 fabulous women & seven locations, I am in awe of what the past seven years of growth have brought us, and the potential for what lays ahead.

In recent years we have witnessed dramatic changes to the landscape of childbirth and family support.  The advent of social media has transformed how we as a business are able to interact with our wider community.  We have big dreams for Mama Renew & Dancing Star Birth – and this award will allow us to take big steps forward in the realm of online education and support.

If each and every one of you casts just one vote, we have a very real chance of winning.  If you have a friend or partner who could vote as well, invite them to join you!   So please, take just a few minutes to cast a vote for us, and on behalf of all the families we dream of supporting in the years to come.

THANK YOU!

click on the image above, or here to cast your vote.

To vote you will be asked to join SavvyMom.  They have great resources for you to enjoy, or you can easily unsubscribe after voting.

www.dancingstarbirth.ca & www.mamarenew.ca

Keep a list of everything that interests and excites you, no matter how insignificant.

Remind yourself that these are indicators or clues

that both the talent & the necessary Spirit assistance exist to bring them into your reality.

- Wayne Dyer

What sparks you?  We all have a mental list, some high priority and some all but forgotten.  On any given ordinary day we may come across something new for our list, catching us by surprise.

I, for example, have recently grown very intrigued by the idea of growing & wild harvesting mushrooms.  I know this is likely not high on most of your lists, but I really really want to learn.  I haven’t yet truly made the space to learn, and it may be a few more years before it happens, but it’s on my list.  Each time I hear about it I get these ridiculous flutters of excitement – about fungus!   I know the day will come.

At the retreat we did a fun sharing of all the things that interest or excite us that are not yet part of our reality. We went around the circle maybe 5 times, a marvelous discovery of the diversity of women in the room. Turns out we are interested and excited by some very cool things – and somehow just saying them out loud helped each of us feel that they are indeed possible.

Turns out we are interested and excited by some very cool things – and somehow just saying them out loud helped each of us feel that they are indeed possible.  There’s a reason that mushrooms excite me, along with quilting, weaving, sourdough, silversmithing, and a few more that I won’t mention in this very public venue

While part of what holds me back is certainly time, there is also a threshold or line that needs to be intentionally stepped over for each. Sourdough is my newest love to enter my daily life, and now that I have begun & gained confidence in it there is an ease to baking our family bread & the beautiful sourdough pancakes I made this morning.  There is real truth in the slogan “Just do it,”  and once we’re on the other side of that threshold the way seems to open.

What’s on your list?

This is no bucket list, friends, this is a list for Now.  What do you crave?