The Friday Recliner ~ October 30th

Hi friends. Welcome.

Well and truly late off the mark this week – so we’ll call it the Saturday edition – because sometimes life and family and repainting the girls room get the final say.

It’s been a big week so I was grateful for the rain on the roof that’s made staying in bed and drinking the second cup of coffee an easy choice this morning. Hope you’ve got your feet up somewhere too.

As always here’s a few good things as we head into the weekend – – –

A Good Word

From A Peace of Werk

A Good Look

Just close your eyes and be for a while

More of this gorgeousness at Lola Tiliches

A Good Idea

One Clean Space

This week between redecorating Livs room, cleaning out a few more cupboards and one thing leading to another, I’ve pretty much pulled the whole house apart. With no exaggeration it looks like there’s been a slight earth tremor and everything’s come out of all the cupboards. Then those items have wandered into other rooms for a change of scenery. Plastic containers from the kitchen are in the bathtub, (we can thank last weeks mouse for that) paint, paint rollers and drop cloth are on the bathroom floor, storage baskets from Eths room are in the loungeroom – no idea why and everything from Livs room she doesn’t want anymore has made its way into the hallway and it only gets worse from there.

One thing I’ve managed to do though – and very deliberately to avoid feeling utterly at wits end – is keep the kitchen bench cleaned down. Its an oldie but man it works a beauty .

My kitchen bench stands smack in the middle of the house and if its cleaned down with something pretty on it – – – well everything else doesn’t look quite as bad.

One clean, clear space and the chaos everywhere else recedes a little. Like light in the dark.

Like hope.

A tiny reminder that it will be OK, that calm and order and beauty are are possible even when all seems a shambles. Weird how that works.

So can I recommend in times of overwhelm or uncertainty or heart overload or just plain old fashioned busy, create yourself one simple sane lovely space where you can rest your eyes and be revived. Be it literally – a room, a corner of a room, a bench, your bedside table or make some space in your schedule, your afternoon, your week that works the same way.

“Cultivating beauty is not frivolous. It’s an integral part of human flourishing, evidence that we are here and that we are a people of hope”. Marian Vischer

A Good Read

Stacks of Love

By Lindsey Cornett

I wake up in the guest bed in my husband’s childhood home, the navy and white comforter pulled up to my chin to fight off the air conditioner’s chill. I hear my three children in the kitchen, asking my mother-in-law for chocolate milk and pancakes. She cooks them made-to-order pancakes every morning of our stay. I think she’s spoiling them.

For as long as Evan and I have been married, we’ve lived far from our families. At first, it was just a two-hour drive from Orlando to Tampa, but then we moved to the midwest. Our kids don’t get simple or impromptu sleepovers with their grandparents on Saturday nights, but they do get week-long vacations. When we come, my mother-in-law stocks up on butter and eggs and the griddle is ready to be deployed. Every single morning, pancakes are for breakfast, a joyful feast.

When I make pancakes at home, my kids are sorely disappointed by the uneven color and wonky circles (“circle” is a truly generous description). I can’t compete with Gram, whose cabinet is full of pancake molds—snowmen and reindeer, butterflies and flowers, T-Rex and Darth Vader—and a pancake pen, which she uses to indulge my children’s every whim and obsession. They don’t make it easy for her, requesting semi-trucks and excavators, humpback whales and porcupine puffer fish. She does her very best to draw their requests on her hot nonstick canvas, and if ever a figure falls apart during the flip, she calls it a “demolition derby.” We adults are more than happy to eat the wreckage.

– – – Keep reading

and one more