The How and the Why

The pile of suitcases use to give me the thrill of adventure ahead; now they taunt me with the amount of work ahead to get five people packed and loaded to make a trip. As much as I dread the packing, I know my husband also dreads the six to sixteen hours ahead driving across country. I'm sure sometimes he thinks he'd rather poke himself in the eye with sixteen needles rather than endure one more hour in the car. Can't say that I really blame him.

With each kid and each passing year the road trips home to see grandparents and aunts and uncles seem to become more and more work. Yet over the years the number of trips made seem to go up rather than down more years than not.

The summers come, the holidays come, the wedding dates, the big birthdays, the momental anniversaries and we load up those suitcases, we strap everyone in, we empty the bank account on gas and countless dinners out and hotel stays. We take to the roads driving through blinding sun, pouring rain, snow and ice,  adding miles beyond miles in cars that don't last us much more than five years with all the miles we put on them.

We now face the tears of constantly saying good bye. There's usually barely a day, sometimes only a few hours, to unload and unpack before launching back into a full work week.

There are always reasons and excuses to not pack it up and go, and to say they don't cross our mind most trips would be a lie. But then we remember the reasons to go.

1. The lifelong relationships they're building with grandparents, aunts and uncles,  and cousins despite the distance.

2. A cornerstone of the foundation of their childhood we're building with our dedication to spend time together as a family and with the rest of our families.

3. The countless memories that will fill their childhood memory box.

4. The gift of time- time with us, time with grandparents that one day won't be here, time with cousins that will grow up one day.

5. Live, laugh, and love- all three are out there on that open road from one destination to the next where we live in the adventures we seek and in the moments with the ones we love. Laughter echos inside that closed little space of the car and in the family gathered around the table celebrating whatever in life is worth celebrating at that moment. Love is there in that car, in those hotel pools, it's there with the family that only gets to see them every so often. It is everywhere around them, and the greatest thing is they know it and they know it well.


There s always the question of how and why we do it. Sometimes the how is not pretty- it's sometimes the grumpy parents, over exhausted kids,  occasional disaster mishap of getting from one destination to the next but the why- the why- is the beautiful reason and why we won't stop anytime soon.

Join Us for Our Online Mompreneur Shopping Expo

With our modern day social media age an opportunity has been created for moms to build more financial freedom for their families from the comfort of their own homes while they tend to the needs of the household and their children.

Some do this as their only source of income and others do it as an additional income, but either way there are a lot of mom boss ladies out there. I really wanted to be able to support them this holiday shopping season so I'm hoping to do that two ways: one in hosting an online shopping event for others to support their business and two I plan on doing some of my Christmas shopping with them. I also plan to tag my husband with all the things I want him to get me from them as well!

This holiday season next weekend, November 17-19, nine of us will be running sales and specials at our online facebook event here . It's a public event so anyone can come join us and shop. Husbands are very welcome so let them know you might be tagging them with things you'd like for Christmas. But if you're an early shopper or just not very active on facebook or hate getting all the notifications- which we're going to try to minimize by having a set schedule of who posts when so you're NOT hit with 10 notifications an hour all weekend - I have linked below all of our vendors and their sales pages so you can start shopping right now if you'd like or just come back to this blog post during or even after the event to do some shopping. The only thing is there may be certain sales that only run the weekend of the event, but as you know sales tend to run all the time; they just change date by date so happy shopping whether it's now, at our event, or even in the weeks after the event if you're a late holiday shopper.

Now to introduce our vendors:


Myself- I am Angela Williams Glenn, author of Letters to a Daughter - an interactive journal between a mother and her daughter with thirty two mini inspirational essays to inspire conversation between mothers and daughters. No matter what age mothers begin the journal with their daughter, whether she’s young or grown, it will be gift daughters will treasure, as a mother’s words of wisdom will forever be logged here for her daughter to cherish for the rest of her life. You can get the journal for $11.89  right now with checkout code LULU15.


I am also the writer of Moms, Monsters, Media, and Margaritas- a book that examines the perceptions and expectations of motherhood in our 21st Century digital world. Each mother walks her own path with her children.  This book will leave you with a humorous and inspirational look at the individual journey of motherhood that takes each of us from the girl we were to the woman we become. You can get this book for $6.80  now with checkout code LULU15.

Also feel free to join our free facebook community to get daily bits of humor and inspiration in your facebook feed. I am also published in two Chicken Soup for the Soul books for moms, and these as well make great gifts for the teachers and daycare providers in your life so feel free to contact me at glennbabies@gmail.com about purchasing those directly through me.



Leslea McKillip with Lipsense:

I'm  your Lipsense lady!! Have you heard about Lipsense or senegence cosmetics?!?  I have never been a huge makeup person until about a year ago! I got a couple of tubes of this Lipsense stuff and BAM!! I was hooked. My lips have never felt so amazing!! Choose a color or two and a gloss and you are good to go!! Check out www.senegence.com for more details, but please order through me at sprinkleoneself@gmail.com for the best service!! Thanks so much!






Tammy Gragg with Young Living Essential Oils:

 I am with Young Living Essential Oils. Did you know that Essential oils support all 12 systems in our body! They are used for hormonal, sleep, and emotional support as well!! I use them for cleaning, in my skin products, and my laundry!! Essential Oils are the most powerful part of the plant. I encourage anyone to research the benefits of essential oils!! They are sooo versatile and amazing!!! I have an Educational Facebook Live class once a month that is completely free to attend that explains the benefits and uses of the oils! Please message me, Tammy Williams Gragg to be added to the event! Young Living offers Membership or Retail Option! Here is my link to check out these fantastic oils! Please message at tammygraggyloils@gmail.com with any questions!!




Erin Staponski with LuLaRoe: I have been with LuLaRoe since 2016. I love to help women feel good in the clothes they wear and life is too short to wear boring clothes. Join my facebook group to catch the latest styles and deals this holiday season and into the new year.





Tara Simpkins with Thirty One
 I will be your Thirty-One Consultant for this shopping expo! If you are not familiar with Thirty-One Gifts, here is a little bit of info! We offer a wide variety of "giftable" products including signature purses, jewelry, totes, and other organizing solutions that help organize your life! Each season we develop new products built on the idea that our products must be functional, fashionable, and make great gifts! We offer our customers unique opportunities to personalize many of our products by adding icons, words, initials and phrases through embroidery, print, and laser etching! The name Thirty-One comes from verses of Proverbs 31. I specialize in helping you find the products that make you happy, help organize your life, and help with finding the perfect gift for that special someone!
Please feel free to browse my site and let me know if I can be of any assistance to you and your shopping needs!   

 

Jessica Ballenger Hoyle with Scentsy:

Check out my website but contact me directly at jvhoyle@hotmail.com to order. I always can offer the best deal on shipping and our products.  








Holly Simpkins with Paparazzi Accessories:

Hi, my name is Holly Simpkins and I am a Paparazzi Consultant. I started out as a customer who was buying jewelry then realized how addicting it was and also realized I could sign up and sell it to others who could and would also love it too. I absolutely love the products that are available and love the fact that there is always new items coming out 5 days a week therefore allowing there to be NO catalogs. Its only available through consultants like myself so please it would be my privilege to be your jewelry lady.

Paparazzi Accessories are trendy, affordable and for all ages including the men in your lives. Also this month only being customer appreciation month, when you shop my online website and spend $35 or more you'll receive a FREE piece

 

Sandia Pantano with Sandia Pantano Imaging and Photography:

I'm Sandia Pantano, a wife, mommy, OB/GYN Ultrasound Technologist, 3D4DUltrasound Imaging Technologist and Photographer! My love and passion for Newborn and Maternity and Childbirth Photography stems from my past/current field of Ultrasound technology in OB  and 3D4D Imaging. I believe that both require a special eye and passion for and without either, it would not work and because I am a seasoned ultrasound tech of over 10 years I feel very comfortable  working with Maternity and Newborn family/clients! It's what I do everyday! I love having the privilege to work with maternity, family, newborn clients to provide them with precious moments,  captured and frozen in time to cherish for a lifetime.  It's a win win for me all around, especially when some of my patients I see  turn out to be my clients! So its  literally "Photography from the womb and beyond" for some of my patients and I just LOVE it! I am in the Baltimore/DC area  contact me @ 703-581-2044 to set up your holiday mini session appointment for only $65 or "like" my facebook page to enter the holiday mini session giveaway for a free holiday shoot.  




Sarah Ryan with Pampered Chef: I’m Sarah, your Pampered Chef Consultant. After 7 years with PC I’ve learned something really important... everyone eats 😂! Grab great gifts for the bakers, coffee drinkers, pizza lovers, health nuts, wine enthusiasts, experienced and inexperienced cooks, busy mamas, manly men and even the kids in your life right here.  I'm looking forward to helping you find the perfect Pampered Chef gifts and maybe a little something for you too!  

The Stepping into Motherhood Community

One of the greatest roles my dad played in life was coach. He LOVED it. For fifteen years my dad coached probably well over two dozen different girls from their little girl years on the t ball field to their late adolescent years on the softball diamond. He didn't make a buck from this work, but man you knew he loved it. And he was good at it; not so much because we did win more games than we lost, including bringing home some nice hardware from more tournaments than we could count (though he could probably give you the exact number), but he was  good at it because of the way he had about talking to us girls and he just had a way about teaching you about more than just the game.

To some people that's what they remember about my dad- that he was a coach-not what he did to actually make money. Sometimes the things we do and what we're known for isn't connected to the life's occupation we choose to make our money. Our greatest accomplishments aren't always connected to our careers or paying work. In fact, the things we're probably the most passionate about and that have the biggest influence on others is probably something we don't make much, if any, money for.

I've always wanted to be a writer. My mom says since I was in the second grade, and it really was from about as far back as I can remember. Though I've ventured out with sharing my writing five years ago now, I still avoid really "talking" about my writing in person because in the writing world it seems if you're not making boo koo dollars and known by more than your small circle of readers then are you really a writer? This is where I often come back to the example with my dad. No, I am not some rich and famous author.

The thing about modern technology is it allows me to do something I love and connect with moms and readers. I am for the most part a little unknown writer. Though Chicken Soup for the Soup tells us publishing with them makes us a published author, and today's modern world has opened a door for independent authors, I still see myself as a writer, a published writer, but a writer more so than an author. I once read where a writer is something you are; whereas, an author is more a label for an occupation that provides you income. I was a writer as an eight year old kid and now I'm still a writer at 36 years old but with more than two readers these days. I have gotten to work with publishers like Chicken Soup for the Soul and I did work with Disney's Babble top writer on my Letters to a Daughter (who does make six figures writing essays for moms so maybe if I dream big enough maybe one day I'll be her :) ), and those were neat, growing experiences for me as a writer but I'm still just a writer and I'm okay with that.

So I'm not making boo koo dollars from this passion of mine, but I LOVE the connection and community with moms that have resulted from my little passion and that is worth way more than any kind of dollars. I've made most of my income from selling the four books I'm a part of, the second place my income has come from is what editors have paid me to publish something I've wrote, and the last two sources of income I've made has come from ads on my websites and product reviews. Because I'm not here to get rich and retire early, when I first started making any money from my work back in 2014 I wanted to use it to donate so here's the breakdown of how that's gone so far.

The Stepping into Motherhood community- and I say the community because without them I wouldn't sell books to make money, I wouldn't get enough reads to qualify for payment for the articles I have published on other sites, and I wouldn't aquire more readers that possibly buy books themselves or read and share the articles I get paid for- has raised enough money in 2014 and 2017 (I only blogged and didn't publish work for profit in 2015 and 2016)  to donate $75 to a childhood cancer non profit organization, buy a few gifts for an adopt a child one Christmas, $50 to a local elementary school, and now $50 to help a fellow community mom in need. Again I say this is a Stepping into Motherhood effort as it is writing income gained from readers that has led to these donations so thank you for being a part of the community.

I really wanted to use Letters to a Daughter money to help two moms in the Stepping into Motherhood community as they have encountered some of the toughest battles any of us moms could imagine this past year with breast cancer and having a stillborn death. I closed up October's book sales yesterday. I didn't get the initial sales I hoped for, but I think with the holidays coming around there will be more. We were able to raise the first $50 donation for one of the moms of the  Stepping into Motherhood community with the sales these last two weeks of October. I'm hoping with November sales I'll be able to sell enough books to make a $50 donation to the second mom in our community that could use a little help.

Both of these moms currently have GoFund pages at Doty Memorial Fund  and Taking on Cancer with Leslea too if you'd like to make a donation or share them on your personal pages. With the end of October though I've sold over 150 books and if I can hopefully sell out all the ones I have in stock currently I'll reach almost 200 sold books and definitely have the $50 to donate to the second mom of our Stepping into Motherhood community.

If you would like to support my writing and the Stepping into Motherhood moms, you can purchase a copy of Letters to a Daughter here or check out my independent author bookstore. If you're interested in a Chicken Soup for the Soul book contact me at glennbabies@gmail.com You can also email me at glennbabies@gmail.com for a discount on three or more copies of Letters to a Daughter or to package any of the four books I'm a part of together.

As always, thanks to my readers, because it is way more fun being a writer with readers than one with no readers!

Review of the Ha-Ha Joke Coloring Book

My girls at 8 and almost 6 love to color. I'm always trying to find new color workbooks for them for our long road trips. Even though regular old color books work well, I like to try to find them things that are more interactive and different to give them some variety on those long evening drives like we have coming up this next week.

This week just in time for our trip we received the HAHA Color-Me Joke Book in the mail. My girls love attempting to tell jokes. I say attempting because usually they forget the punch line, and my husband and I are just left staring at them with this confused look on our faces before we force ourselves to laugh and then we laugh for real because their joke telling was so bad.

But with the HAHA Color-Me Joke Book they can actually read us the correct punch lines so we don't have to fake laugh for them. Not only are there 28 actual jokes they'll be able to read and maybe actually remember the correct punch line for but there's a picture for them to color with each joke. I'm sure on our upcoming trip my husband and I will probably even have the jokes memorized ourselves as they read them to us multiple times on the way up and back. There are also several pages in the back of the book for them to attempt to write their own jokes! And a few jokes with no pictures to color where they can draw the image  themselves to go with the joke.

The girls are excited to take them on our upcoming trip and I love that it will have them reading, coloring, drawing, and writing all in one book! These would make great birthday party favor gifts or inexpensive Christmas gifts for the littles on your list.


You can order your copy here for $9.99. For every book sold the author Neesha Mirchandani will be donating a free copy to a child in need.

 

It's About the Relationship

At Christmas I gave my oldest daughter a journal book for us to write to one another back and forth in and I will probably start this tradition with my second daughter next Christmas. My hope is this is something we continue through their teenage years. At only eight years old I can already see both hers and my emotions getting in the way of being able to effectively communicate with one another at times. I want this journal to be a place where we can go after our emotions cool to reopen the door of communication between us.

We're only a few months into this third grade thing and I can already tell we've turned a corner here. A fellow mom of a now fourth grader warned me third grade was a big transition year. As Ave and I have talked about how school is getting much more intense with more homework, actual letter grades and so many tests it seems like, and more competitive sports, I've mentioned how this is just the beginning of things getting harder.

It makes me sad on one hand to think that already the easiest part of her childhood is already over. I know as she's stepped up onto the more competitive soccer field she's struggled self esteem wise with it, I've seen her hide the one poor grade out of about a dozen other A/B papers she brought home and then burst into tears when I asked her what she was hiding because she didn't want us to know she struggled with something the first time, and the friend drama already started in second grade and I imagine that's only going to get crazier from here. Though she hasn't hit puberty yet, I am afraid to see how much more emotional she's going to get in the years ahead.

I know we have high expectations of her, and my dad so kindly pointed out to me sometimes as parents we don't have realistic expectations of our kids. He's right. She's only eight, and I've always treated the girl as being older than she is. Though we may butt heads, she's a really great kid.  But she's my first and there are going to be so many growing pains between us as we figure out this preteen to adolescent to grown daughter thing in the next ten years.

Here's the thing, mommas, I'm going to make a shit ton of mistakes. Probably way more than her, but because I'll push her to excel, push her limits so she can reach her max potential, hold her accountable even when it breaks my heart because she thinks I'm the most awful mother, and I'll try to do what I think is best for her in the long run even if it temporarily makes her angry and frustrated with me because I'm her mother first and her friend second, the years ahead aren't always going to be easy. Her emotions are going to the get the best of her and though I'm the adult mine will probably get the best of me too.

I wanted us to have a safe place to be a calm center for us, a place that was for building our relationship, not adding to the tearing down of it that can result in those heated arguments between mothers and daughters. The constructive criticism and redirection and "parenting" would all happen as the moments unfolded but this would be a place for us to reconnect and rebuild our relationship with positivity and gratitude for one another. Despite all the trials and emotions of this phase of our life together I want there to be no doubt in her mind of the depth of my love and admiration for her in those tough moments now and for her to hold onto years down the road when maybe I'm not there to remind her despite her struggles she is loved and will always being amazing in her momma's eyes.

She loves our little journal, and I can always tell when she's read it as the encouragement I leave her in there seems to remind her despite mistakes and struggles she may be having I still think she's amazing. It was from starting this with her that I decided to create Letters to a Daughter. Whereas my writing at first started as an opportunity to do something I have loved since the third grade, it has become so much about building relationships. First I wrote here on the blog to build relationships and connections with other moms. That's been an amazing experience for me.

But as a mother and a daughter myself, as I've watched friends my age start to lose their own mothers; as my cousin, sisters, and I had a smack in the face with our own mortality with a cancer diagnosis to one of us last spring that thankfully is in remission now, and our newsfeeds too often remind us of tragic losses of young mothers I wanted to create something that was for us as mothers and daughters. I didn't want my writing this time to be about creating a relationship between me and other moms- this blog has already done that- but I wanted to give something back to readers that would give them the opportunity to build two of the most valuable relationships they have- the one with their daughter and the one with their mother.

It will be for sale in paperback for $13.99 and hardback for $21.48 next Tuesday. I hope you can attend the the facebook launch party that is next Tuesday through Thursday. Join the event to see how you can enter to win a free copy and there should be publisher coupon codes I can offer throughout the event to get the book discounted. My goal is to sell 125 books in these three days so I can hopefully donate $100 to three different families medical needs- two of which have been readers here since the beginning in 2012.

As always, thanks for reading!