Fun Day with Grammy

 The boys, my mom, and I took the day to explore a few downtown Cincinnati treasures. Old buildings are so inspiring to me. They're filled with textures and colors and layers that tell quiet stories of past inhabitants.

 Algin houses floor after floor of used office furniture. I love it. Put a cup of iced coffee in my hands and I could explore for hours.

Urban industrial beauty.

Restoration.

These chairs. I want these chairs.

That's Carew Tower through the window. The highest point in Cincinnati. We'll end up there in a bit!

Next up, Ohio Book Store! 5 Levels of beautiful, used books to explore!

Hudson is a cultured, sophisticated adult trapped in an 8-year old's body. His favorite things?--- old books, fine leather, fancy shoes, herbal teas, handcrafted pipes (just to hold, not to smoke...though he would if we let him), wood working, and dressing up. Yesterday he waited on the front porch for thirty minutes for the mailman to deliver the shoe polish he ordered from Amazon. He needed it to complete his homemade shoe polishing kit. This kid.

From there we headed to Carew Tower, a wealth of art deco design. We rode the tiny elevators up 49 floors to the very top to enjoy the view on a beautifully sunny day.

 The top!

 Ohio on one side of the river, Kentucky on the other.

 I love days like these. I love the city. We finished the day with sushi and iced coffee. Pretty perfect!

Arian

BeLoved BeFree Piano

My lovely and talented sister called in a favor --- "Could you paint an old piano with your BeLoved BeFree image?" No problem!

Shortly after, the piano arrived on our front porch and I got to work!

Vintage pianos are such beautiful pieces of art. This one was gorgeously aged, smelled like a basement, and sounded like a old western saloon : )

They're using it in a video promo for a creative project my sister is a part of. I'll share the video with you as soon as I get to see it!

Andrea, doin her thang.

Plus, having a piano on our front porch made for a great, very "Kentucky"style family photo op. Reminds me of this old Kentucky family photo.

It was a fun project and reminded me of my days in the scene shop working on theatre props and sets. In fact, I used a lot of the painting techniques from our book, "Stage It Right"(shameless plug) ; )

Hope you're having a great day!

Arian

Business Day

On the heels of our second quarterly family vision retreat we needed another full day to talk business --- family business. Daniel and I want to work together and also build something we can invite our kids into some day. Our lives aren't really structured to work together at the moment. Daniel spends his days and creative energy at an amazing company that he loves. And I spend my days and creative energy at home with our kids, squeezing in time to draw a few hours a week while I pay a babysitter to hang out with the boys. So anything creative that Daniel and I work on together has to happen late at night, when we're tired and need sleep.

We need a plan.

So my mom took the kids for a Saturday and Daniel and I got to spend a full day hashing out a plan for how to work together and what to work on. We started out at Coffee Emporium and talked about everything from what creative projects we want to work on to who we want to work with and even sketched out our dream home/studio/greenhouse/office design.

To make the moment even cooler----that's our Jason there in the background (our "like family" friend that has been living with us for over a year to learn what he can learn about being a dad and husband). And that's his beautiful new girlfriend with the lovely hair and dress. To get their relationship off on the right foot, the two of them spent the day mapping out their OWN vision for this stage as a new couple--- everything from coordinating schedules to physical boundaries to planning fun dates. I have to admit, it felt like no small victory to see Jason taking the reins and beginning to lead a beautiful woman through love and adventures. YAY!!

From there Daniel and I headed home to work on character sketches for the next music video we want to create.

(garden cucumber and sparkling water, a new summertime fav)

Daniel is a pro both on paper and on the screen. The stuff his brain comes up with just amazes me.

Slow and steady but it feels like we're moving in the right direction. Despite the few hours that we are opening up during our day times to work together, it will still be a season of late nights and overflowing laundry, but what else is new : )

Arian

Garden Fruit

The garden is alive and well this summer. This year's garden epiphany? Zucchini flowers are edible! I didn't know this! Learned that from Mireille Guiliano's book and immediately went out to our garden to pick some. Pro tip--there are male flowers and female flowers. The females have thicker stems that turn into zucchini. Males have a long skinny stem. Pick the males (though both are edible), just make sure you leave a couple for continued pollination.

I've battered and fried them like tempura. I've also put them on homemade pizza, on quiche,

and on top of this noodle-less zucchini lasagna based on this recipe. They are mild in flavor but beautiful to look at and make normal dishes look fancy : )

This year we've also enjoyed roasted green beans.

And swiss chard, which we used in this swiss chard spanakopita casserole.

Basil, juicy tomatoes, zucchini, and a plethora of hot peppers for Hudson's upcoming homemade Fort Armstrong Hot Sauce business venture.

This year I also started, what I hope will one day be, a big and beautiful collection of lavender plants.

This seasons's harvest is small so I'll have to use it wisely, maybe lavender scones for a special occasion?

I have hopes of planting a second round of seeds this week and having a fall garden. We'll see!

Arian

Family Vision Retreat Summer 2013

Though the time between our spring and our summer family vision retreats flew by, there was much to talk about and figure our during our 4 day stay at our friends' beautiful guest house in the country. It was only our second quarterly family vision retreat but I don't know how we ever managed without them! I think, as our vision for our family has grown, so has the need to get away and dig deep into what God is trying to tell us.

My biggest goal during this retreat?---- to wipe the slate clean of all I think I know about what it means to be a wife and mom and start from scratch using the Bible as our guide. One of the things I've realized through reading a lot of French culture books recently (Lessons from Madame Chic: 20 Stylish Secrets I Learned While Living in Paris, Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, French Women Don't Get Fat, and currently Women, Work & the Art of Savoir Faire: Business Sense & Sensibility), is that a good number of my thoughts on what it means to be a good wife and mom are just American ideas and not necessarily universally or Biblically true.


I'm not super interested in being a good "American" wife and mom. I want to take all my cues for living a good life from the God who created life and knows me better than anyone. So we read and dissected each reference to wives/women/mothers in the Bible. There are definitely things that I've heard people write off as "old fashioned"in there. But if you get to the heart of what is said, in light of the times in which it was written, it's good stuff!

Oh man, I wish I could sit down with any interested lady reading this and discuss what the Bible says about being a wife and mom. We'd drink wine and eat dark chocolate in comfy pants and talk for hours and it'd be awesome. (Then we'd love on our kids, buy a vineyard, manage our servants, dote on our amazing husbands, design our own clothes and home decor, run successful businesses, and create delicious exotic meal plans. Read about the Proverbs 31 woman...she is a rock star. I want to be like her when I grow up.)

Practical questions we asked.

1. What is Arian's value? I mean, I am valuable simply because I am human! But specifically what skills, interests, strengths, ideas, experiences, etc do I bring to the team? And are they all being put to use well in my role in our family? I am an artist. And art is valuable to our family. When we make art together it blesses us and blesses others. And I can make money from art so it's good financially too!

So how can we free up space for me to create art? We've hired a friend to watch the boys a few hours a week so I can work on art. When the kids are sleeping, she folds laundry and mops the floors. We send our older kids to public school instead of home schooling, unlike most of our friends. (I am pro homeschool for the right reasons, just to be clear.) And we hired a friend to cook a few meals per week for us. I set the menu, but she does the work. Doing so frees up a couple more hours for art. We opt to spend our money this way at, perhaps, the cost of fancy vacations or replacing the rusty '91 Toyota Daniel drives. All this because we think I was made to be an artist and therefore it's important that I be creating art, not just for my well-being, but for the good of Fort Armstrong!

(Single ladies---marry a man who values all that you bring to the table and has a big enough vision for your family that you don't have to duck down to get under it or bust out and do your own thing. Though I didn't know to look for those things at the time, I am REALLY grateful I chose wisely! Plus, Daniel is hot.) ; )

(not my baby, but very cute and holdable)

2. What is our value as a couple?
It's also important to see the value in BOTH Daniel and I being artists. We are realizing more and more that we were created to make art TOGETHER. So we are shifting our schedules and our priorities to make that happen. We're jumping into our next animated music video project together (this was our last one, btw) and figuring out how to make our co-created projects not just a hobby, but the means through which we support our family. FUN STUFF!

And while we did spend lots of hours hashing stuff out on the whiteboard, we made sure to have fun too!


The boys had a sweet time playing with our friends who own the property, swimming in their pool, and exploring the woods. We enjoyed good food, good wine, good conversation, and good music on the giant covered porch while it rained.

Our next family vision retreat is scheduled for this fall. Looking forward to it!

Arian

Rocking My American World

K, so I am not a fan of parenting books. I have a very "you don't know me" kind of attitude about them. They're just not for me. And, since I don't get many chances to read books, when I DO get a chance to read, I usually pick a Christian book that speaks to a specific struggle I am having, like C.S. Lewis' "The Problem of Pain" or Greg Boyd's "Is God to Blame".  Buuuut some how I am on the last chapter of a non-Christian book on parenting (go figure!) and it is rocking my world.

In continuation of my newfound interest (obsession) with French culture, I borrowed "Lessons from Madame Chic: 20 Stylish Secrets I Learned While Living in Paris". After Daniel went to sleep each night, I huddled over the book with a flashlight in bed and finished the whole thing in a week (that is FAST for me). Everything she said about the French way of life sounded wonderful but impossible if you have kids.

 So I decided to read "Bringing Up Bebe", this time via audiobook because I needed to get through books AND sleep at night. I've gotten a lot of practical ideas on fun ways to improve the way I parent my boys, but more importantly, I feel like God is using the book to show me how He wants to parent me!! I've got journal page after journal page of thoughts and if you've talked to me in person any time over the last couple weeks, I've probably gone on and on about all the ways these French culture books are unearthing lies I believe about myself, God, parenting, food, beauty, clothes, home, schedule, marriage...  For an extreme introvert, I've been preeeetty talkative about it all.

 In short, somehow French culture books are just what God needed to free my heart from some unnecessary restrictions I've placed on myself.

One practical little effect it's had on our regular life is we've added long walks and picnics into our schedule almost every day. The food is always simple but delicious---usually bread or crackers, cheese or hummus, and fruit. Our trusty, tattered picnic quilt goes with us every where we go. It's just our way of getting fresh air, fun exercise, and enjoyment from food together.

 I think my learnings have been good for ALL of us. If mom is happy, everyone is happy, right? : )

 I'm looking forward to sharing it all here. Don't worry, I'll be concise and show lots of lovely pictures. I myself don't read blogs that have too many words and not enough pictures : )  

More soon!

Arian

This Week

This week we've been enjoying time in the country. A whole WEEK at my in laws' house (which is a good thing). Fresh air, the smell of honeysuckle, the sound of rain on the front porch...


and time to slow down and cook slow food. You know those recipes you have saved that take hours to make so they never get made? We made those! Fire roasted, slow cooked, long simmered...food that needs time to rise or to caramelize in browned butter for hours. Yeah, THOSE recipes.





We hung up a sheet and got out the projector to watch movies on our "big screen" in the living room. And we played long rounds of cornhole to the sound of croaking frogs and chirping crickets late into the night (cornhole is basically bean bag toss with special rules for all you non-Midwesterners...it's a big deal around here)


And I drew! Nothing digital, just my sketchbook and some colored pencils.


I'm working on some projects you'll be able to download and print yourself soon!


It's back to the real world today. But not before we drive out further into the country to pick out donuts made by local Amish bakers. Best. Donuts. Ever.


Happy weekend!!

Arian