to hudson, on his first birthday

"Some days are diamonds, some days are stones."

That lyric has turned over in my mind quite a bit this past year. The day you arrived in this world was most certainly a diamond. 

But after that, the diamonds and the stones get all mixed up. 


When I look back at this year, when I hold it out in my hand, what glitters most are ordinary moments, moments that I thought were just stones at the time. 

Your round little newborn head bobbing up off my shoulder. 
You in your high chair at breakfast this morning, your soft white hair puffed and matted, your mouth smeared with blueberry juice. 
Tiny hands and fingernails on my skin while you nurse. 
You bundled in Isaac's black winter coat, snug and warm against his chest as we walk through the snow. 
Sweaty, milk drunk naps on my lap. 
The days when you lied still on the change table, when looking at my face was enough. 
The time you excitedly squatted down beside a woman's wheelchair at Giant Tiger, touching the rim of the wheels and saying, "Vroom! Vroom!"
Your little foot turning as you fall asleep, or flopping onto my leg so that you know I'm there. 
Your Dr. Seuss body in brightly patterned sleepers.
That smile and look on your face when we share a joke, something I didn't realize I would be able to do with a baby so early. 
Your fat stage.
That time you were sitting in the bath, belly and arms shiny, clapping two plastic cups together, and I realized -- you are irreplaceable, I couldn't make another Hudson, and so my heart is a new level of breakable.
 Hearing a happy "Pah! Ba-ba-ba-ba ..." beside me as you suddenly wake up in the morning. 
Your swipe of long hair at the front that you've had since you were born. 
Sloppy, open mouthed "kissies." 
Waving good-bye to Daddy out of the window, watching him walk to work. 
You at my feet removing Tupperware from the bottom drawer, piece by piece, while I do dishes. 
The stunning realization that I am the mom in this situation. It doesn't matter what the book says, what the advice is, what works for someone else -- it's my job to sift through all of this and make the judgement call. The freedom in that thought, and the weight of that thought. 
Big toothless smiles -- and then toothy smiles -- from the baby swing at the park. 
Your penchant for eating toilet paper. 
The way you wave good-bye, a few beats too late and with your arm stiff and making circles, like you're tossing pizza dough. 
Your small voice saying "Ma-ma" and "Da-da" -- redefining us in more ways than you realize.


A million little diamonds, flecks of something precious in ordinary dull stones.


We love you, Hudson Stephen Shelley. Thank you for making every stone sparkle, and making me think that maybe I should have looked at life this way all along. 

To listen to the song with the lyric -- admittedly, nothing having to do with babies, click here.

love warrior - quotes from the book

Quotes from the book Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle. Don't agree with Glennon on everything, but she is a beautiful writer and gives a lot of truth to chew on. A very thought-provoking book!

Chapter 1 

[in high school, in the cafeteria at lunch]
"Before I take a step forward I wish vehemently that we had assigned seats. I look out at the sea of faces and understand that we are all drowning in freedom. Where are the adults? We need them here."

[in the hospital being treated for bulimia]
"One day a girl with sliced-up arms says, 'My mom sent me here because she says no one can believe a word I say.' I look at her and I want to say: Does she see that you tell the truth on your arms? Like I tell the truth in the toilet? By the time we landed in the hospital, most of our families considered us insensitive liars, but we didn't start out that way. We started out as ultrasensitive truth tellers. We saw everyone around us smiling and repeating 'I'm fine! I'm fine! I'm fine!' and we found ourselves unable to join them in all the pretending. We had to tell the truth, which was: 'Actually, I'm not fine.' But no one knew how to handle hearing that truth, so we found other ways to tell it. We used whatever else we could -- drugs, booze, food, money, our arms, other bodies. We acted out our truth instead of speaking it and everything became a godforsaken mess. But we were just trying to be honest."

"The hidden, truest rules about how to matter as a girl are: Be Thin. Be Pretty. Be Quiet."

Chapter 4 

[on the bathroom floor, facing an unexpected positive pregnancy test]
 "...I get stuck on that phrase as it runs through my mind. Free for all. Maybe grace is free. Free for the taking. Maybe it's even free for me. This free-for-all overwhelms me, fill me, covers me, convinces me. I decide to believe. Something in me says yes to the idea that there is a God and that  this God is trying to speak to me, trying to love me, trying to invite me back to life. I decide to believe in a God who believes in a girl like me.
"The God I decide to believe in is the God of the bathroom floor. A God of scandalously low expectations. A God who smiles down at a drunk on the floor, wasted and afraid, and says, There you are. I've been waiting. Are you ready to make something beautiful with me?"

[realizing the difficulty of getting sober]
"This is the difference between God and booze. God requires something of us. The booze numbs the pain but God insists on nothing short of healing. God deals only with truth and the truth will set you free, but it will hurt so badly at first."

Chapter 6
[holding her baby for the first time]
"I am this baby's mother. He is mine. I am his. He is the key I've been waiting for my entire life. I am unlocked. Chase and I belong to each other."

Chapter 7 
[reading people's responses to her honest Facebook post]
"I marvel at the honesty and pain. Many messages are from people I've known for years, but I'm discovering that I never really knew them. We've spent our time together talking about everything but what matters. We've never brought to each other the heavy things we were meant to help each other carry. We've only introduced each other to our representatives, while our real selves tried to live life alone. We thought that was safer. We thought that this way our real selves wouldn't get hurt. But as I read these messages, it becomes clear that we are all hurting anyway. And we think we are alone. At our cores, we are our tender selves peeking out at a world of shiny representatives, so shame has been layered on top of our pain. We're suffocating underneath all the layers."

Chapter 9
Types of listeners to the news of her marriage -- the Shover, the Comparer, the Reporter, the God Reps, the Victims, etc.

Chapter 10 
"The surf continues to hit the sand rhythmically and dependably and I trust it will continue. The sun is setting but I know it will rise again tomorrow. There is a pattern to things. This makes me wonder if I can also trust that there is a pattern, a rhythm, a beauty, a natural rise and fall to my life as well. I wonder if the one holding together this sky might also be capable of holding together my heart. I wonder if the one making this sky so achingly beautiful might also be working to make my life beautiful, too."

"I don't know how to fix my marriage. All I know is that I need to tear down my own walls and face what's underneath . . . I look out at the sea, up at the sky, and down at the sand. I think, I can be brave enough to tear myself down -- because the One holding all of this together will hold me, too."

Chapter 13
"It strikes me that it's always the most religious people who are most surprised by grace . . . We sweep up our mess and hide our doubts, contradictions, anger and fear before showing ourselves to God, which like putting on a fancy dress and makeup to prepare for an X-ray."

"We are all desperate for reunion and we are trying to find it in all the wrong places. We use bodies and drugs and food to end our loneliness, because we don't understand that we're lonely down here because we are supposed to be lonely. Because we're in pieces. To be human is to be incomplete and constantly yearning for reunion."

"Fear doesn't make perfect love untrue any more than passing clouds make the stars untrue. I know how to find my way back to truth, to love, to peace, to God again. All I have to do is be still and breathe and wait for the clouds and fear to pass."

Chapter 15
"But what the hell does sexy even mean? I wonder if the word sexy is everything that made sex a lie to me . . . Sexy was one type of body and one color of hair and spending an entire life looking into the mirror instead of out at the world . . . I'd been trying to be that kind of sexy for twenty years, and I realize that's going to have to change. That definition of sexy is what poisoned my husband and me and it's never going to work for us again . . . Maybe I can find my own sexy."

"Women who are concerned with being pretty think about what they look like, but women who are concerned with being beautiful think about what they are looking at. They are taking it all in. They are taking in the whole beautiful world and making all that beauty theirs to give away to others."

"I consider the possibility that I've been right and wrong my whole life. I was right to want to be beautiful and sexy; I was just wrong to have accepted someone else's idea of what those words mean. It strikes me that I need to throw out the dictionary the world gave me about what it means to be a mother, a wife, a person of faith, an artist, and a woman and write my own."


Unsure which chapter ...

"Be brave because you are a child of God. Be kind because everyone else is, too." 

People Like Us - Quotes

I just finished reading People Like Us by Joris Luyendijk, a former Dutch news correspondent to the Middle East. While the style of the book is easy to read, the concepts are thought-provoking. Luyendijk reveals the inner workings of the international news machine, and reflects on how the Middle East in particular is often misrepresented and misunderstood in Western media. Note to self: read his other book, Hello Everybody! 

Some quotes ...

"I had always thought that the 'news' was a compilation of the most important things in the world. But after six months as a correspondent, reality set in. News is only what is different from the everyday -- the exception to the rule. With an unknown world like the Arab one, this has a distorting effect. When someone is shot on Dam Square in Amsterdam, it's news, but Dutch people know that people aren't normally shot there. They've been there themselves, or they know someone who went there and returned safely. But how much do Dutch people know about daily life in the Middle East? . . . If you are told only about the exceptions, you'll think they are the rule." (37)

"Dictatorship itself is the most important thing to report about in the Arab world . . . Writing 'around' this was like reporting on France or the Netherlands in 1943 without mentioning the occupation."

"Did the hundreds of thousands of anti-war demonstrators in Europe know what Saddam did to his subjects? I was not aware that many of the demonstrators thought anything other than: 'Of course dictators are bad, but war is really horrible, so we're against it under any circumstances --- Peace, man!' I'd say dictatorship is war, too; a regime's war on its own people." (214)

"The borders of the Middle East had been drawn by foreign, largely European, powers at the end of the First World War in order to facilitate their domination of the area." (quoting Henry Kissinger in Diplomacy)