making space for creativity
Merry Christmas Friends! This year I discovered that the Hays family tartan basically looks like a Christmas tartan. So we are all sporting Christmas plaid this year for Christmas. The big events of this year were our summer trip to Rocky Mountain National Park … and the kids starting school in the Fall! Doing both…
This Fall is my fifth year participating in documenting in pictures a regular day in the Fall. It’s really an Instagram challenge and hashtag (#OneDayHH), which I have done and enjoyed, but I really enjoy taking my time and reflecting on those pictures in a blog post. (You can see my previous blog posts from…
Our big adventure this summer was our trip to Rocky Mountain National Park with our kids ages six and four! We stayed in Granby, Colorado for six full days of hiking. (Fancy hand drawn map of our hikes below.) It was nearly a two week road trip from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Granby, Colorado. We drove…
One memory I have of my childhood Christmas-longings was really wanting old, special family traditions. My parents made Christmas wonderful, but we, I felt, lacked in the tradition department. There was something about our family tradition of putting our artificial tree together that lacked that Christmas magic. One big reason for this is we kept…
Dear Friends and Family, Last week we started doing a little Advent devotional time with the kids. Pajamas on, teeth brushed, kitchen clean, all the lights off we gather around the table. We strike a match and light our first beeswax advent wreath candle and say together “Jesus Christ is the light of the world!”…
Dear Family & Friends, Merry Christmas! 2019 started out with our sweet Lily baby learning to crawl and ended with a little girl with brown curls bouncing as she runs after her brother (or Bro, as she often calls him now). Highlights of the year were our trips to North Carolina for…
The last of the warm Wisconsin breezes are bringing down the very first yellow ash leaves of Fall this week. All summer I’ve been trying to find the words to write about our local Anglican parish closing, to explain something so big and complicated, private and yet at the same time a deeply shared experience….
A few weeks ago on the first Thursday of November, I documented our day by posting hourly pictures on Instagram. This is something that the wonderful Laura Tremaine (originally with her blog the Hollywood Housewife) started many years ago, but it’s only my second time participating. It’s lot of fun to look back on past…
Two weekends ago, family and friends gathered to celebrate the baptism of our little Liliana June. As someone who didn’t grow up seeing a lot of infant baptisms (I was baptized twice, neither time as an infant, incidentally) the beauty and grace of infant baptisms is so striking. We had family and friends pour…
Sweet Lily is 11 weeks old, and I am happy to say that we are adjusting well to being a family of four. For so much of Jackson’s infancy I could not imagine how I could do an infant and a toddler at once, but somehow we are doing it. As I reflect back…
Our little Lily arrived at 6:30 pm right smack on her due date May 12th. This was especially awesome since beginning at 37 weeks my blood pressure started to inch up, and words like preeclampsia and gestational hypertension started floating around my doctor’s office, both of which could mean, besides the obvious health risks,…
Last month, I found a board book at the library about Easter for my two-year-old son Jackson. Honestly, he was most interested in the pictures of the spring bunnies and ducks, but when we got to the bit about everyone being sad that Jesus died, Jackson said “sad” in a solemn way. He’s been…
This year for my birthday we had our 20 week anatomy ultrasound for our second baby! It was a fantastic way to celebrate being 33. I can’t remember looking forward to my birthday more. I loved keeping Jackson’s gender a surprise for his birthday, but for this baby we decided to find out. It…
One of the wonderful bits of living in Milwaukee is that we can jet down to our alma mater Wheaton in less than two hours if traffic cooperates. This Fall has been unusually full, but we carved out a great day to go down for homecoming. Last fall we went down for Evan’s 10-year…
My parents met while traveling, and I think that has always made travel a part of our family. The summer before their last year of college, my parents spent the summer semester traveling through the Holy Lands taking Bible and archaeology classes and sharing a first kiss over the old city of Jerusalem just…