A Heart That Loves is Always Young

Since its the love month and my birth month, kindly allow me to be a little extra cheesy in this post, photo speaking. Rolando and I didn't really get the chance to celebrate Valentines on the 14th. I hosted a Spa Party that night so he wasn't allowed to set foot at home until the party was over.

In keeping with our tradition to do a photo shoot on my birth month, I let the hearts strings decor from the party hanging over the weekends. I always tell him we should take as much photos together as we can while we are still young and childless (but hopefully not for long).  Once a child is introduced in the equation, I'm pretty sure we won't have a minute to spare for silly-corny-cheesy stuff like this. 

Well actually, we don't celebrate Valentines extravagantly. A simple dinner (kahit nga sa fast-food lang) or a bouquet of even the simplest flower will do. After all, everyday should be an opportunity to love each other so why only show it on V Day? Don't invest on Valentines day just for the sake of joining the Valentine fever---flowers, chocolates, gifts and all that. Invest on everyday little things, on those little acts of love and sacrifices that never get to be shared in the social media. Even more, when you are married, love is translated to a more tangible and practical ways such as making him a coffee, ironing his clothes or giving him a foot massage and vice versa. Depending on your husband's love language, invest on that as much as you can, as often as you can.

Married for almost 2 years now, I learned that to love is to love young, to love fresh, to love anew everyday as if it were the first day I realised I can't live without this person. To love young is to keep doing whatever silly or crazy or cheesy stuff that make us click and to just giddily commit that we will stay together, forever and ever. Teenager lang ang peg.

On a serious note, I learned that for us to really enjoy our marriage, we have to be intentional to follow God's will for marriage (i.e. husband to love his wife just as Christ loved the church and wife to submit to her husband as she does to the Lord). Love and submission are the operative words that you can only do with a humble heart that is ready to love anew every waking morning.

It is my heart's desire to love and to stay young in loving, ready to start everyday with a blank canvass, ready to paint our God-given love story with hearts, colours, cheese and lots and lots of photos. Go ahead, hover over the photos and bear with our corny and cheesy poses in our pambahay  topped with scarves. :)

DIY Valentine Decors

I am planning to post more of my DIYs here so I'm gonna start with the decors from the Valentine slash Spa slash Advance Birthday Celebration held at our home sweet home on the night of the 14th.

Since it's Valentines, the goal was basically to set the mood using hearts garlands, hugs sign (i.e. xoxo) and the word love as an accent (which I made using spare buttons and spare tiles). This was also a Spa party so I just used lots and lots of candles to decorate the  apartment while all the other spa supplies including the foot massage and back massage appliances were brought by the ladies. In my opinion, aside from creativity, resourcefulness is the key to achieving a low budget, or in my case, zero-cost decors. 

To achieve this, I just brought out all the supplies that I bought in the past from sale or a store closeout---heart-patterned gift wraps, pink yarn from the €1 euro knitting starter kit I bought ages ago, wood twines, ombre pink candles, dainty doilies and lots of construction papers (bought last year when I used to teach on Sunday school). I also used hubby's fishing rod for the floating heart backdrop. 

So as you can see, I just worked on whatever supplies I had and as you might have known now, I'm a sucker for SALE especially on craft supplies because they don't take up much space anyway and I know I will always need them in the future. In that sense, I think my instinct was right to spend a euro or two for them.

So here are the DIY decors and the little details: 

Here's our guest room turned into a Spa Room:

The DIY Love accent:

The floating hearts backdrop: (full instruction here; I basically just copied all the steps except that I couldn't find a heart punch in Dulin so all those hearts were painstakingly manually cut).

Materials used:

More of my crafting and DIY adventure in the future. :)

While Waiting

And so I entered a new season of my life---a season of waiting. As life offered me necessary endings, I decided to take this season as an opportunity to trust Him who knows best. While waiting for so many things to happen that are not beyond my control and for which I can only do so much, I decided early on that I will embrace this season and be fully in it. That I will be productive. That I will do things in humility. That I will get to know new hobbies---scrapbooking a.k.a. Project Life, calligraphy and oh yes, knitting! That I will be better at the ones I have known---photography, writing and oh yes again, playing the guitar. That I'll be a better wife to my husband who's been working like a dog these days. And that, most importantly, I'll grow up in my faith walk.

As January came to a close, I let it go with no regrets and what ifs and what nots. Amidst all the let downs, life is still beautiful and God is still God. And though there are times inspiration is hard to come by, I will press on. Though it's not easy, and we are never promised an easy life anyway, I will wait---for His timing, for His yes, for His provisions, for His wonders to take me to heights I've never been and seen. I will wait---joyfully, faithfully and expectantly knowing that every detail of my life has been taken care of.

"But those who wait in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint." - Isaiah 40:31

Necessary Endings

How can I even begin writing about my two toughest weeks of 2014 by far? (Insert the longest and  deepest sigh here.) I might be your Ms. Smiley on those snaps but I was hurting and worrying when they were captured, truth be told.

Let me begin by saying that in the span of just two weeks, I lost two precious things---my job and my iPhone 5. The former I relied on for financial security; the latter I relied on for connectivity. Not to mention that the smart phone was a gift and therefore had a sentimental value.

Week 3 - The Lost Job

It's the first time ever in my nine-year career that I lost a job. I was briefly told that it wasn't about my performance but that the company could instead hire trainees, either for free or for only half of my salary. I knew this for a fact (as well as the cash flow difficulty) so I accepted the decision humbly knowing that it was God who willed this to happen. 

Now I am and was grateful for that job. But there were days I had no joy at all going to the marketplace. There were days when, the minute I sat on my desk, I was wishing the day was over even before the computer asked for my password.  There were days when the only motivation I could hold on to was Colossians 3:23. Coming from big companies in the past, I value integrity and quality at work more than anything else but perhaps I didn't share the same values with this company I worked for. At one point, I was even told that I wasn't assigned any "messy work" because I was used to "structured work", whatever that meant to them. So I knew it was just a matter of time, that I would leave this company soon. 

Apparently, God has other plans. He obviously wanted me out of there sooner than I expected. I was delighted to be out of that work but the moment it sunk in, I got worried about our finances and the job-hunting difficulty in the private accounting sector (i.e. not audit or accounting practice which is really not for me anymore in this stage of my life). My number one encourager in the person of my husband recounted the times I had no job but God sufficiently provided, that we managed to pay the bills somehow. Slowly by His grace, I felt like I was getting back on track.

Week 4 - The Lost iPhone5

However, days after, my iPhone 5 was pick-pocketed in the city. I hadn't fully recovered yet from losing one thing then here came another lost. It was ironic because this unfortunate incident happened the week I was fasting from social media. Naturally so, I posted a question to God; I asked why He stripped me off one thing after the other. Obviously one of these is to be more careful with my belongings because apparently, smart phone theft is the number one crime in Dublin these days.  That I have to learned the hard way.

Necessary Endings

Then I was reminded by this that necessary endings are necessary for pruning, for letting go and for accepting that some things, no matter how good they are, must come to an end. As the wise Solomon puts it:

"There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens."

There's a beginning and an end. Our four seasons in a year in Ireland is the quintessential of this verse. The same goes with life. The same goes with possessions. The crucial thing is to know when something has ended so you can learn, let go and welcome the new season fully and wholly.

Rolando understands this concept better than I do. When I lost my job and my phone, Rolando got to me wherever I was and just locked me in his warm and tight embrace. No blaming. No scolding. Just pure unconditional love shown at the time it was needed the most. His words of encouragement to me were:

"Lai those are just material things. Eventually, they will get lost, they will be broken. So don't put your security in those things so that when they're gone, it won't hurt as much and you won't feel less of a person."

Necessary Beginnings

Necessary endings are also necessary for something to begin. Of the countless trials I hurdled in the past, God never took something away from me without replacing it with the best ones! He has never allowed something to end without leading me on to a new chapter, a new season. So even if it was painful to lose these precious things and to put an end to the comfort they provided, I know He is preparing something for me. I may not see it now, I may not see it in the coming days, I just simply need to trust His sovereign plan.

Lessons Learned

On why these things were stripped off me and had to end? Because most likely, these are not good for me or they are holding me back from my true calling. It can be that I may need to step out in faith and explore other avenues where my talents and gifts can be maximised. It can be (and this one is quite obvious) that I need to spend less time on a smart phone checking feeds/sites when I can be accomplishing something worthy of my time like honing a skill or doing a hobby.  It can be that He desires to make rooms for something better. And no, better may not mean a newer phone or a higher-paying job. Better means being able to cultivate gratitude in our hearts.  Better means growing up in this season of inconvenience and taking it as an opportunity to be moulded by God. Lastly, better may simply mean finding joy knowing and trusting that God means well and He knows best. The answers can come later. :)

Home Sweet Home

The second week of 2014 was a frantic and tiring week both at work and at home.  During the day, we were busy bees at work and at home during the night, we were busy ants packing our stuff, tidying the house and entertaining future tenants. Yet, no amount of tiredness and weariness could keep our excitement from going down the hill. We were just too excited to move. And move, we finally we did!

A few memorable snapshots of our frantic week here before the house move:

Leaving the first home we lived in as husband and wife is a bittersweet thing. At one point during the week, I sighed an emotional sigh, a long one which worried my husband for a second until I told him I was just being emotional that we were leaving our tiny abode that witnessed our humble beginnings.    Our Home#1 was the silent spectator to the just-married dreams that we dreamt---those that came true and those that were broken, to the laughter of good times and to the tears of rocky roads, to the finally-we-have-savings days and to the super thrifty days. Needless to say, it was also the silent witness to all the burns, the cuts and the chapped skin I got from domesticating myself. 

The truth is we were not supposed to move (even if we were planning to) until that problem with the  noisy boiler occurred sometime in November when the winter season officially began. We would like to think that it was God's way of moving us out of that place since we've been praying and we've been on the lookout as well for an apartment away from the hustle and bustle of the city. So I reckon we moved earlier than we should.

My Instagram has some snaps of what our home inside looked like:

The seasons and the number thereof that we spent in our first home:

We will miss the local cafe that we used to frequent for breakfast, coffee and snacks. 

But we have to move on to something bigger and brighter.  And with that, I welcome you to our Home#2:

More of our new apartment in the next month or so, that I can guarantee. :)