Beach for a Massage Studio

After photo of a walk down to the ocean (East Coast), a barter job for a massage studio.  The before:

Paint changes everything about a room!  Does the base color make a difference?  Yes, especially if the other 3 walls are that color.  I think it is important to tie everything together and to make sure it looks good with the flooring.  You can's see the carpet in these photos, but know that it meshes well with the blues and grays in this ocean scene.  The sand and sky have a lot of the base color showing through, washes on top layers.

Found this while Pinning...

A Lovely Flock blog: My 1st Best Friend

My comment:

Thank you for honest, real writing.  I am the mother of a son who struggled with addiction (instead of calling him an addict).  We lost him 18 months ago after years of rehab, treatment, program after program, changing the locks, relapse after relapse, endless prayers, counseling & never giving up on him.  Reading the sweet early childhood memories you have of your brother was uplifting & a good reminder of what our Maxwell had with his siblings before the drugs.  I agree about NOT enabling, but loving and forgiving.  Good LDS link quotes, too!

Happy New Year!

 This is not just because NieNie's family does it, but I will admit I love her family tradition of a Sunday family photo.  Good ideas are meant to be shared/copied/passed on.

We got all the way home from Church and I remembered that I really want to start a new tradition of taking a family photo every Sunday---realizing it would be easier at Church, easy to find a willing phone holder.  John was a good sport and grabbed the ladder from the garage, set up the timer...

This is my favorite portrait photo spot:  just inside the front door.  Notice the black background behind the guys' heads.  The house interior disappears and the natural light flooding in from the open screen door makes us look good...

No flash here.  Everyone showing teeth but Roxie.

I want a way to document who is here/visiting.  How we change/grow up.  Haircuts.  Weight loss/healthy lifestyle.  And use it as a way to keep the Sabbath Day holy.  Sundays are for gathering, connecting with family, rejoicing together, discussing what we learned at Church.  Planning, brainstorming service we can do throughout the week.  And for us, it is eating together, reading scriptures, playing together, and squeezing in Seminary preparation for the week.

We are off to a great start!

(yes, astronaut space man earrings.  If you can drill a hole for a wire into something lightweight, it can become an earring!  Lots of compliments on these today.)

Blog vs Instagram's Instantness

It has been a month since I blogged?  Weeks since I journaled.  Days since I exercised.  Only two days since Instagramming.  Faster, easier.  This blogging takes more effort, plugging in camera, downloading, filing...

John & I did go out this morning---NOT shopping, but walking our neighborhood route.  I forgot to put on my fitbit, so that is 4,000+ steps plus 11 flights of stairs unrecorded.  We are trying to be healthier.

This photo is from the Trunk or Treat night at Church.  We went with Day of the Dead theme, sugar skull makeup, dark suits with fedoras for the guys, flowers in our hair and black lace for Roxie & I.  The lip temporary tattoos were cheater makeup, easier to stick & stay on our lips through a chili cook-off meal.  I loved the "Book of Life" film with the culture of remembering family dead.

My little friend, 18 month old King Henry did not recognize us.  When we talked to him, he gave a startled 2nd look.  Didn't try to hold him...

For a "trick" gift I made skull earrings to pass out to the young women.  Erasers from Target were the perfect softness to push in and glue the earring findings.

Nice People

Aegis Newspaper Photo

I sneaked a look at blog visitors, and was suprised....I have not been a regular poster lately, and still have friends come to look at what we are doing???

Top photo:  flowers from Tiffany, along with a musical note locket to remember Max.
Middle photo:  fruit boquet from Carey remembering Max this summer.
Bottom photo:  Candlelight Vigil.   You can see me behind the lady in red t shirt wearing my florescent green jeans (!), and Sam with head bowed in background.  I've got my arm around Roxie, hugging her closely as she sobbed.  John's head behind mine, looking at slide show of all those who died from drug use in the county.  Last year the vigil was held in the park.  This year it rained, so we were inside the white bubble Zion church tent.

My technical goal today is to try and figure out how to make that cute little PIN button on photos on my blog...Originally trying to figure out how to Instagram something from a Pin and vice versa.

We have a drug-sobriety talk on Thursday at North Harford Middle School.  I have over a 100 t shirts done and ready to give away that night and at next presentation.  Family members that want shirts need to text me orders with sizes.  Guessing is hardwork when I don't see nieces and nephews often enough to see them growing!

They are still free--but we have been blessed with some generous donations to help pay for bleach, vinegar, and thrifted 100% cotton dark shirts (they work best).  At a yard sale Saturday my neighbor gathered up all the shirts that qualified and didn't charge me.  "It's for a good cause," said Dawn Carver.

From the Local Paper

We keep telling the same story.  A little different every time.  This last one, at the middle school where 3 of our children attended, we spoke last Tuesday night.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/harford/abingdon/ph-ag-aberdeen-heroin-forum-1016-20151014-story.html

I made sure all of the students attending left with a Defiance t-shirt.  Gave out the rest of our supply to parents on the way out the door.  And the sheriff's office ordered 16 shirts for their entire task force.  They loved the idea, the image, the word, Defiance, and the meaning we are attaching to it.

And that is the reason I am bleaching more today!  Trying to restock, have enough for next week in the northern part of the county where some of our children attended school before we moved here.

Same message:  be sober.  I always pray like crazy to know what to emphasize, what to say, what to leave out. 

Suicide Prevention Talk

 Wow---back from suicide prevention week on Aberdeen Proving Ground military post.  The first speaker, Tammy Woodard who works at the official suicide office, spoke about the worth of people.  She had a $20.00 brand new bill.  Asked who wanted it?  Then wrinkled, folded, stepped on it, smashed it up, now who wants it?  Still worth $20.00.  Good visual example.  She had a great power point with risks, danger signs to look for, resources (I want to take a photo of that slide on Friday, when she repeats her talk, and we do our 2nd one).  She threw the bill out into the audience, and Amy Landbeck Snyder caught it with her left hand!

John spoke first, then we showed Emma slideshow with Maryland State Boychoir singing, then me.  These are my notes, mostly followed, or paused and came back and read things.  I didn't know how emotional it would be, so I needed complete sentences to read, just in case...

1.  There are a lot of good memories in those photos.  

Thank you for listening so respectfully to my husband. 

I appreciate what Tammy said, grateful to be here today.  Max's youngest sister and brother are here, Roxie Jane & Sam, and his grandparents, John & Sandy Landbeck and one of his aunts, Amy Snyder.  Thank you for being here today, all of you.

2.  Bodies are precious gifts.  After Max was hit by the train they sent his body to Baltimore for autopsy and investigation.  When the funeral home picked him up, washed his hair & beard, let us come see him and say goodbye.  The funeral home pulled out one of his arms so we could hold his hand, hand a towel over the right side of his face and warned us to leave it in place and not move it.  I stroked his cheek, kissed my son, ran my fingers through his hair that was never that soft and full bodied in life. When your baby is born, you count all his toes, and fingers, make sure he is all there.  I touched his feet through the body bag, made sure he was all there by feel.

I gave him life.   We helped create that body, and it hurt me when he abused it, smoking pot, getting high, he picked up cigarette smoking in rehab, tripping out is scary---not just the crazy things he would say and talk about seeing.  

His self-medicating took him away from me.  Drugs hurt you.  They hurt my son.  

Suicide affects the whole family--siblings, cousins, we all miss him.  And we need to keep talking about him. 

Our youngest daughter, Roxie, was able to go to a grief camp with other children who lost a loved one recently.  They had a volcano room, where they could rip apart magazines, pound pool noodles against the wall, scream if they needed to, just to release the angry feelings that come.  Parents talk, but we need to remember the children that are affected by the suicide or death, too.

I have become a SOBRIETY ACTIVIST to try and help other parents know what to do when their children choose to use drugs.

3.  People ask all the time if DEFIANCE really is his middle name--and yes, it is.  Our firstborn son inherited the John Stewart Landbeck IV name of his great grandfather. 

Defiance=openly resist or refuse to obey

-not a sy-fy game, custom bolt rifle company

-The show takes place in the future on a radically transformed Earth containing new species, some having arrived from space,

The story begins in the year 2046. re-built ruins of St. Louis.  ALIENS = VOTANS

-Fort Defiance is a restaurant in Red Hook, Brooklyn,

 -Defiance College, OHIO yellowjacket mascot, -and a town in Missouri, beer company in Hays, Kansas,

We needed a good, strong name for son #2.  Nothing whimpy.  He needed a strong name, with meaning!  We gave him Defiance as a middle name with the prayer that he would defy the bad stuff in the world and that he would stand up for what is real and true.  We wanted him to fight for goodness. 

I don't know everything our son was feeling;  I have read through his journals and papers he kept carefully in a traveling file folder as he went from rehab and place to place.  Some of his struggles included worries about money & jobs, his love life and lack of confidence worrying that he was ugly, questions about God and where he fit into the world.  A lot of things we all have to deal with.

4.  Everyone feels self-doubts and insecurities, or trying to wade through grief or trauma, sadness, disappointments, depression to some degree.  That is normal part of life. 

I absolutely know that if I had talked more, during tough times, I would have been better off emotionally--in high school, struggling with postpartum depression…

FIND someone who will listen to you, and TALK and be a better listener!  A conversation can change your life!  Reach outside of your security zone, help someone, and be better at asking for help. 

5.  T-shirts are kind of a thing in our family.  When Max died he had no $ in bank, he had lost a lot of his possessions, but he still had some really cool t-shirts.  His 5 siblings divided them up, and I made a quilt for each of them, so they could all have a Max hug anytime they needed one.  They still smell like him.  (show quilt)  They opened them up at Christmas, and we had a lot of moments of silence, all wrote letters, what we would say to him and want him to know. 

This is a Defiance t-shirt, homemade!  We make these t-shirts with a stencil in our kitchen, using bleach, and then quickly rinse in vinegar to stop the bleaching process. 

You can show DEFIANCE of the complacency and acceptance of drugs, defy the people who can't remember how many inhibitions they let go of while under the influence.  Rebel against drowning your sorrows, be bold in being sober, challenge the drug humor, revolt against smoking pot.  Confront society's fear of talking about suicide.  THIS is what this t-shirt means to me. 

We have one for each of you today.  Thank you.