Okay fellow blog readers....

As a Christmas promotion, I am giving away five (5) Little Grey House CDs. This is your chance to win a copy to give to a friend or sister or wife or the lady down the road who does your nails.

I enabled the comments for this entry only.....ALL you have to do is enter a comment in the comment section below and you will be entered in for a draw. You don't even have to say anything witty, although witty comments are certainly welcome.

The winners will be notified by email and will receive a copy of Little Grey House in the mail in time for Christmas.

And speaking of Christmas... I got lots of orders last year that came a little too late to send in time for the holidays. So if ordering a CD is on your to-do list, you'd better do it pronto, so me and my team of elves can get them sent off. (Hardy har har. My team of elves. More like the team of me and my 2 kids asking if they can draw felt pen stick men on the envelopes. I'm sure a few of you have gotten a package with pen scribbles across the top.)

All for now...

~K.M.

My attempt to cook tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches for supper while talking on the phone and doing a few other things. (You have to look closely to see the charred piece of sandwhich.)


How could I have possibly said the CD would be out by Christmas? This is never going to happen.
In fact, things are a bit of a mess in that regards.
But I won't bore you.... all will be well and the songs will find their way somehow. Eventually. One of these days.
The wind is blowing tonight. Every day we wake and look out the window to see if snow has come, but none so far.
Most of the trees are bare, and there's a little snow on the hills.
Today I am wondering why i even DO this. Why? Why the need to put songs into the world, or books, or poems or anything for that matter?
Why can't we all just sit around in our cozy houses, sipping tea, telling stories, reading books (er, I guess that's a bit of a glitch in my theory... someone actually has to write those books, but you see what I'm saying...)?
If you want the truth, I ask myself that question more frequently than I'd like to admit.
But the other day, I got this wonderful email from a a kind man who serves at the Utah State Prison for Women. He said that during song time, the women prisoners frequently request a song I wrote some years back, and that it touches them deeply.
So I remind myself of this now and again. And I am reminding myself of this tonight while the wind blows against the panes.

After a long pause in the record negotiations, I think we're finally getting rolling again. There is talk of the CD being out by Christmas. Maybe. There are a few final, vital things to sort out. But many of you have been asking. And the answer is: It's coming. Just so you know.
.........................................................
Today I dropped Iryn off at an hour-long sparks meeting and then tried to make it through rush hour traffic to the grocery store before having to be back again to pick her up.
Crazyness.
Ella helped me carry the block of cheese into the car, and I forgot she had it until I looked in the rearview mirror and saw her gnawing on something. I confiscated the cheese, which Ella had nibbled a hole into, and eaten almost one whole side of.

When we all got home, the phone rang. It was my dear and long-time friend Sherri, in town on business.

"How ARE you?" She said.
"Ugh. Worn. My kids are crazy tonight. I'm thinking about taking up drinking."
"Really?" she says.
"I would, but I don't really like alcohol that much." I say.
She laughs. "I love alcohol."
"You'd be an alcoholic in a minute if you were around here right now." I tell her.

I'm always aware that I might possibly sound ungrateful, so just to clarify: I adore my girls. I mean, tonight when Iryn started singing in the car, she sounded like a sweet angel, making up the words as she went along. And Ella is totally into helping me sweep the floor. Like, she actually gets excited about it. She makes messes sort of on purpose, so she can sweep them up. And the cute level around here gets so over the top sometimes. Like the other day, Ella put on her bright yellow underwear on sideways, so they were riding up her bum--which looked a little painful--with one whole butt cheek exposed. And you should have seen Iryn at the clinic the other afternoon, when she had an ear infection, and she was quiet and scared, and said: Am I going to go deaf? and I remembered that even though she acts 13 sometimes, she is only 6, and I promised her she wouldn't go deaf, and wrapped my arms around her tight until the doctor called us in.

But sometimes it's hard. Like, really hard.
It doesn't make it less beautiful. Just hard too.
And that's okay.

Last night Iryn was really angry and frustrated and letting it out on everyone. And finally, I said: Here is a piece of paper and some felts. Draw a picture of how you feel.

She drew a picture of her and me. She drew her arm pointing out at me, like she sometimes does when she is mad at me, and she drew a sunshine over her and a raincloud over me.

But - I'm not kidding - it seemed to make her feel better.
So whatever. She can draw pictures of suns and clouds and me with Xs for eyes until the cows come home. As long as it helps. Maybe I can even make it into a business and sell books full of all the pictures. I might make some money.

Today, at the grocery store, I bought some new fancy felts to entice her to draw more. I left them on the table for her.

She didn't use them, but after the girls went to bed, I picked them up and drew a picture of how I was feeling. I drew a stick girl with a frown, and my arms up in the air, one hand holding a spoon (domestic life) and the other holding a star (my creativity and things I love to do). I stared at it for awhile, then crumpled it up. I remembered an exercise I sometimes did with a workshop I used to teach. It's called "opposites" and you're supposed to draw a picture of a negative posture you feel you are in, and then you're supposed to draw the resolved posture.
So I took the pens again and drew another stick girl, but this time she was smiling and her hands were empty, but inside her heart there was a swirl of aliveness and pure being, and I drew it spinning around and shining and radiating however it wanted to in each moment.
This is how I want to live.