Preppy Girl in Pink is such a fun blog to visit! Kristen loves being a mom and you can read that in her wonderful posts about her family. I so enjoy visiting to see what her family has been up to and Kristen’s wonderful insights on motherhood.
Kristen is also an amazing commenter. I love getting to read what she has thought about one of my posts. We are blessed with the opportunity today to get to comment on one of her posts today on Pause Life for a Moment.
I have to tell all of you that I was honored when JDaniel4’s Mom invited me to participate in “Pause Life for a Moment”. I wish I would’ve known about blogs when my girls were younger because a blog like this one, makes it easy to pause life for a moment with your children. There are so many fun ideas on this blog that I always try to make them a bit older for my own girls or I make notes for when I have younger kids over to our home.
My New Year’s resolution was to actually slow down, show patience and focus on my family more. So many times we let life get in the way of fully living. I looked up one day and my girls were older than I knew and needed me less. My heart reminded me that our time together doesn’t have to be about need, it can also be about want.
I started thinking about a family project. I knew that if we could come up with something that we all loved doing that we would reap the benefits for years to come and that it would always give us reason to pause life for a moment.
I wanted us to do something big…something that would take a lot of effort for us to make happen. I wanted something that would bring us together and keep us close…close in our hearts and close in our thoughts. I wanted it to be something that we all didn’t need but would want.
We talked a bit about a few different ideas but the one that came first and the one that kept coming back to us in our discussion was a very large butterfly garden. We will begin to break ground in just a few weeks and we decided on an island that we have in the middle of our driveway that has never truly shown its full potential.
When we talked about what we could do as a special family project, a butterfly garden just made sense. My girls have always loved butterflies because their Great Grandmother (whom they called GG) loved them. She had them in every room of her home, wore them on her necklaces, and always pointed them out to my girls when we were out and about. When their GG passed away, there was a butterfly that seemed to watch over the burial service from a headstone close by. My girls (and I, truthfully) believe that it was GG’s spirit. Since then, butterflies are a connection that they hold close to the fun memories and love that they shared with their GG.
We plan to not only pause life for a moment when spending time with our girls planning out and planting our new butterfly garden but also when it is completed. We want them to see the beauty that can come from the soil. We want them to smell the fragrance that can come from a budding flower. We want them to hear the music of the butterflies flapping their wings. We want them to pause life for a moment and not only be reminded of their GG but their life right there at that moment. We want them to give thanks for the time that they are allowed for true reflection and peace as a family.
We want them to learn how to pause life for a moment when they are young so that when they are older it will become a natural thing, not something they have to put on their calendar like a dental appointment. We want them to know that with just a short amount of time in a place that is surrounded not only with beauty but created with love that there is always a safe place to land…just like this garden will be for a butterfly.
