Winners, Friends and Writing Programs

Thanks to those of you who left your sweet comments behind to be entered to win a copy of Chicken Soup for the  Soul: Devotions for Wives. 

And the winner is (randomly picked by myself via scraps of paper!)… Chaunie! 

Chaunie and I met almost two years ago at the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids Michigan. She is a super sweet gal who was quite pregnant with her third child when we met.  We shared stories about writing and how to best navigate Disney with kids (she had already been, we were planning our first trip!), which seems completely fitting given our roles as mommas and writers!

Chaunie brought the manuscript of her book Tiny Blue Lines: A Guide for Young Moms to that conference and wound up finding a publisher! Her book is due to be published next Spring (May 2014). WooHoo!

I admire her tenacity and commitment to writing and to being a fantastic mother…and how she is striving to find a way to balance and manage it all. If you have a chance you should check out her very cute blog at www.tinybluelines.com. 

If you are a reader and writer you should also consider checking out the Festival of Faith and Writing. It is a biennial (I just learned that "biennial" is the proper term for happening every two years!) conference that brings in some fantastic writers and speakers. This will be my fourth time attending the conference and I always leave feeling inspired and having met some WONDERFUL people. Several of the women I have met at that conference have become wonderfully encouraging friends.

While we are on the topic of writing I finally purchased some writing software for my computer. The program is called Scrivener and it is supposed to be a fantastic writing tool (so fantastic that the very well known Michael Hyatt apparently now uses it to organize ALL of his projects, which is definitely saying something!) and it seems very cool. The problem is that I need a one-day intensive on how to use it so that I can actually start organizing my ideas in it!

I may opt for the Scrivener for Dummies book!! (I'm not joking!).

Learning to Be a Helper (My Chicken Soup Devotional story)

Have you helped your hubby out lately?! I confess, it's not always the first thing on my priority list with three children at home…which is what inspired this story...

Learning to Be a Helper

“The Lord said, “It is not good for man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him” 
(Gen. 2:18)

           

            It was an ordinary, chaotic weekday morning. A floral canvas lunch box needed to be filled, breakfast needed to be served, backpacks needed to be packed, hair and teeth brushed, clothing properly picked out and put on all in time to get our oldest daughter, who was in kindergarten, to the bus and our youngest to her preschool class on time.

            In other words, as usual, the needs of my children were far more pressing than those of anyone else in the house (read: my husband!).

            “The children need to be eating in two minutes!”

             “They need to be dressed in fifteen. The bus comes in twenty!” 

            In the midst of scrambling eggs and buttering toast for our two girls, he often finds a moment to fix me a cup of coffee, cut a grapefruit into sections or make me an egg sandwich for the road.

            “Here you go babe,” he’ll say as he slides them across the counter to his manic lunch making wife.  

            I am embarrassed to confess that not only do I do no such thing in return, but I often forget to even offer a “thank you.”

            Then, one day, several weeks ago I reread a scripture in the book of Genesis that really impacted the way I started to think about things.

            “The Lord said, “It is not good for man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him (Gen. 2:18).

            A helper? Perhaps in the early years of dating and marriage I strived to help, but in the six years since becoming parents “help” had become such a large part of taking care of the girls that there seemed little time or energy left for helping my husband in tangible ways. If anything most days left me asking for help from him rather than offering help to him.

            On this particular morning, several days after reading that passage I decided to do something that would surprise him; I made him a toasted peanut butter and jelly sandwich and ran outside (in the snow!) to start his car while he was getting dressed.

            As he came flying down the stairs to head out the door to his morning sales appointment and raced to find his keys I smiled and said, “They’re in your car. I started it for you.”

            Stopped in his tracks he looked at me with raised eyes and a confused grin.

            “Really?!”

            “Yes. Really. And there is some toast wrapped for you to take on the road.”

            “For me?” He almost laughed, “Where did you come from?”   
         

            The question was well deserved. While there are many times I have wanted to be a helper to him, I have allowed the needs of the children to take priority over the needs of my husband, leaving him to fend for himself.

            I’m realizing that, even in the midst of the busyness of raising small children, I can be more deliberate about finding small ways to help him.

            When I am being a “helper” even in the midst of the mayhem I am not only serving him, but HIM—the heavenly Father who brought us together in the first place.

           

Dear Heavenly Father, Thank you for my husband. I pray that you would help to show me ways to be his helper today. Please forgive me for the ways that I have neglected his needs and give me the strength and energy I need to be a good mother and wife. Amen.       

This story/devotional can be found alongside the encouraging voices of 100 other women in Chicken Soup for the Soul: Devotional for Wives  (Available on Amazon and at other major booksellers).

If you are a wife you will definitely be encouraged by the stories in these pages…it also makes a sweet gift (:


By the way…I'm giving a copy of the book away this week! You can either leave a comment here or on my previous post about being published in this book and I will randomly draw one name to be the lucky winner. You must comment before the end of the day on Friday. I will draw a winner and post their name here on Saturday morning (:

How About Some Chicken Soup? A Giveaway!

Many of you know I had the delightful opportunity to be published in a Chicken Soup for the Soul book earlier this year. Yay!


The official title of the book is Chicken Soup for the Soul: Devotional Stories for Wives (you can check it out here on Amazon).

It's a super sweet book full of short, but really encouraging stories written by 101 women (myself included!) on all sorts of topics relating to being a wife.
The whole thing has been such a great experience.

I submitted this story last February, when I had a little bit more time to write because Miss Aubreycakes was tucked safely away in my belly while I tapped away on my laptop at Starbucks and the girls were in school (haha! those were the days!).

So, as you can imagine, it was quite exciting to hear from them shortly after Aubrey was born to say that the piece would be appearing in the book which would be published in September.

Ironically, a sweet friend of mine (Amelia Rhodes) who I met at the Festival of Faith and Writing several years ago was also featured in the book. Neither of us knew that we both had stories in the book until that email came out and we posted our delight about being featured on Facebook. This was Amelia's second Chicken Soup appearance and she will be featured in a third book early next year (Great job Amelia!).

(As an aside, while I'm telling you all about Amelia, you should know that she wrote a very sweet and encouraging book about friendship, fellowship, community and relationships, and the importance of it in our lives. That book is called Isn't it Time for a Coffee Break? You should definitely check it out (I reviewed it back in January.  You can read my review here).

So, back to the Chicken Soup devotional...

What I love about the Chicken Soup brand is that they continue to publish sweet, inspiring, positive stories about people and life. They are a little bit of light in an often gloomy world.  And there is something for everyone (wives, daughters, mothers, runners, writers, dog lovers, musicians…you name it and there is probably a book related to it!).

What I also love about them is that they are a large enough company and brand that they do a pretty good job of marketing their books and materials and hire folks to work on marketing for each of their books. Their marketing gal did such a great job that my small, local, community newspaper, without ever a word from me, ended up calling and asking if she could interview me and wrote up the sweetest little piece in the paper.

I confess...I was a little bit embarrassed at first.  I mean, I didn't write a BOOK after all...it was just a teensy weensy little story.  But honestly, the writer did such a great job that it ended up being a really great experience and a very sweet piece focused more on the challenges of trying to fit writing into my life as a mom (very true indeed!) than anything else.

A friend of mine even told me later that her sister bought a copy of the paper to give to one of her friends who is also a mom with a desire to write, but who hasn't had a ton of time to devote to it-- she thought the story would encourage her and inspire her.

Honestly, that made it all worth it!

I'm just a momma, etching out some words when I can and hoping to encourage other women and mothers in the process. If any little thing I say can be an encouragement to someone else I count that as a blessing and thank God for it.

I also have an extra copy of the book to give away! Yay!

If you'd like to be entered to win a copy of the book just leave a comment below (make sure your name is in the comment section so I know who you are!).

For an extra chance to win you can:

Like my "Little Writer Momma" page on Facebook (click on the FB flag at the top of this page) and leave me a comment either there or here letting me know you've done that.

OR

Lastly, I'd love to get my Google Connect Friend number over 50...that #48 has been staring me in the face forever!! (Not that it REALLY matters...but you know...). So if you click on "join/connect" there and let me know I'll enter your name into the drawing an extra time!

I will draw a winner on Friday night and announce it here on Saturday morning!

I'm also going to post my devotional story from the book on Thursday...so check back if you'd like to read my story about making Scott peanut butter and jelly.

Yes, that is ACTUALLY what the story is about. I told you it was a silly little story! Stop back on Thursday to read all about it (:

While we're on the topic I haven't told many people this yet, but I have a second story coming out in Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Dating Game. The book is due to be released in just a couple of weeks on December 24th!

It's kind of funny, after ten years of marriage, to think about having a story included in a book called The Dating Game, but it is the story of how Scott and I met (I was his waitress) and I HAD to submit it! I'll share more about that next month after it comes out (:

What We've Been Up To-- Thanksgiving, Sitting Up and Everything in Between

Hi Friends, 

It's been a fun filled couple of weeks around the house…We've had Thanksgiving dinners at school, Christmas shopping excursions, sledding adventures, gymnastics classes and all sorts of other activities. 

Speaking of gymnastics, our living room has turned into a gymnastics studio…that's right, the back of our couch has become a balance beam, the girls have been doing flips and somersaults over the chair in the corner, Ava has been practicing round offs from the edge of our cheap Christmas Tree Shop coffee table and there has been every manner of flip, hand stand, split, cartwheel, stretch, jump that goes on in the middle. All of this around Aubrey who is now crawling and finding ways to scoot herself to baskets of books and power cords, which we regularly find in her mouth. 

I vacillate between wanting to take order and telling the kids to sit like proper children and not jump all over our furniture and realizing that they are kids and they'd rather play "gymnastics" than watch t.v. and I'm actually ok with that. 

We'll buy new furniture when they're all out of the house someday…

And yesterday we pulled six or seven bins of Christmas decorations out of the basement to decorate the tree. I told Scott that our house looks like we just moved in. There are random bins and boxes and furniture scattered willy nilly all over the place. It's so far from orderly that I'm waiting for one of those Clean House shows to show up here…I would welcome them with open arms actually! 

And I'm still putting Halloween decorations away. Uh huh…we've got Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas decorations all melding into one fantastic decor. 

While I'm telling you about this you should know that there is a strand of Christmas lights…clear bulbs…across the top of our house that we turned on today. Guess what? They've been there since last Christmas. 

Oh gosh…we've become THOSE people. 

It's kind of funny actually…we were going to take them down SOOOO many times this year and then something would come up. Um, like, us having a baby…and next think you know it was September and we said "Why bother?! At least they're clear. Actually, if you didn't know they were up up there you might not even notice." 

Expect now I've told you all. 

Ah yes…life at the Littlewood household. It's a funny place. 

Here are a few photos of the fun….

And while there is so much more I'd love to say, there is not time to say (type) any of it…

Hugs to you all. Happy Thanksgiving. Merry Christmas preparations. 

I'm working on being present to all that is happening and counting my many messy blessings. 

It's probably time to put the baby jungle mat away when they pull it over and crawl under it instead of playing quietly on top of it…what do you think? 

We're sitting all by ourself!

Ella is apparently thankful for rubber bands among other things…which completely cracks me up and doesn't surprise me at all! 

Our attempt at practicing intentional thankfulness during the week leading up to Thanksgiving… Those our all of our hands (except Aubrey's…I've been meaning to put hers up there, but you know how that goes!)

And while there is so much more I'd love to say, there is no time to say (type) any of it…

Hugs to you all. Happy Thanksgiving. Merry Christmas preparations. 

I'm working on being present to all that is happening and counting my many messy blessings.