There’s a movement apparently, emerging in the blogging community that I quite unintentionally have wholeheartedly embraced the values of. It’s called slow blogging and I only heard of it the other week when reading a post Jodi had written about the topic. As I was setting out with the intention of giving Another Day a little make-over, these were exactly my thoughts about this new space. I didn’t want to be a slave to a digital online family journal – to feel I had to write every day and keep a ‘complete’ story going. I just wanted to come to this space when I had the time to sit and write, inspiration to write on a particular topic and something of value to say or share.
::Watching the sunrise on Easter Sunday::
My recent silence however, has been longer than anticipated. We’ve been preserving of course; apples, pears, more quinces and chutney’s. We’ve been admiring the changing colours of the turning seasons and we’ve been collecting gorgeous Autumn leaves for a variety of crafty endeavours, today – leaf crowns. Our quiet Easter somehow seemed busy, as Festivals tend to and after four days of celebrations we’ve enjoyed some quiet time – knitting, reading and playing. As the colours of Summer flowers start to fade, we’ve been taking a last few photo’s of the children enjoying time in the Fairy Garden for submission into The Magic Onions Contest. Although not our first year of building a Fairy Garden, it’s our first year of entering The Magic Onions competition so Chilli is very excited. That’ll be a post all of it’s own coming up shortly. I debated uploading the archives of the old site to this space but then I thought – how far do I go back, and what a huge barrel of work that I honestly don’t have the time to undertake, aside from the fact that this new space has it’s own energy, which I’d like to let grow into it’s own little story. I must admit, it was fun though to take a scroll back through all our journal entries, re-living the memorable moments as well as the everyday happenings. Goodness how our two little cherubs have grown and blossomed, it makes me such a proud little Mumma.
::Leaf crowns – a simple, yet fun and effective, Autumn activity::
I’m currently working on a submission for the next Sakura Bloom Sling Diary – Chilli is super excited and has made sure that I’m entering both of us in the casting, as she too would love to share her Sakura Sling stories and pictures! Bubbling away in my mind periodically as I wash the dishes or prepare meals is a free little downloadable book that I’d like to put together shortly. I won’t give away too much – only to say that you’ll be able to use it for helping children learn a wonderfully precious handwork skill. Can you guess what it will be? Anyone who’s seen my instagram feed will most likely be able to guess. And if a seemingly lost package every emerges from the depths of the USPS, I might be able to share an organic living post with you that might be of interest if you have a budding young ballerina in your family, but don’t want to compromise on organic and natural fibre clothing for their uniform. In the meantime, I’ve put together a little downloadable resource with a story I wrote, about a tiny little spark of light. This story is good to use with an older Kindergarten child when exploring the colour yellow – either with crayons or paint. In this instance we had used the two Stockmar yellow watercolour paints. Exploring yellow is a lovely early Autumn activity as we head into the golden season and the theme of the story – a tiny spark of light finding her inner glow – is very appropriate as we journey into our darker time of the year. I actually wrote this story for our Candlemas celebration at the beginning of Spring last year. The story also has a therapeutic thread woven through it that is supportive to the 6/7 year change. You can download that resource here.
::Apple Stars – one of my favourite stories all year to tell the children – ‘The Little Round House’. We traditionally tell this story leading up to Easter and there is a little Easter Hare surprise at the end of the story::
In the meantime, please do visit both my instagram and pinterest pages. I find instagram a wonderful social media platform. To share a simple little photo of something through our day with a few creative or explanatory words is a handy little tool. When one may have in previous years made a blog post to share something simple from their day, now an easy upload of an image to instagram serves the same purpose in a much more convenient way – leaving blogs free to be deeper places, for more meaningful pieces of well thought out creative writing. I know many are opposed to the expanding myriad of social media outlets – and to be honest I can’t even get my head around the explosion of just how many different platforms exist, but I do find a few of them quite useful. Pinterest, I always say, is a total answer to my prayers. I was privately doing what pinterest offers in a much more time consuming way – saving links on my computer in text files, sorted in folders – archaic I know. Why didn’t I think of inventing pinterest?
::Hunting for Easter Eggs::
What do you think about the changing face of the social media world? Do you write a blog – if so, what’s your mindfulness about how and what you write in that space?