Create Visions With Your Child

Welcome to Week One of the month-long
Carnival of Creative Mothers to celebrate the launch of
The Rainbow Way: Cultivating Creativity in the Midst of Motherhood created by Lucy H. Pearce 

Today’s topic is Nurturing a Culture of Creativity at Home. Be sure to read to the end of this post to find a list of links to the other carnival participants.

Join the Carnival and be in with a chance to win a free e-copy of The Rainbow Way!
November 27th: Creative Heroines
December 4th: Creative Inheritance
December 11th: The Creative Process

Create Visions With Your Child

By DeAnna L’am ©

Every New Year’s Eve, for the past 5 years, my daughter Ellah and I spend the afternoon creating Vision Maps.

We browse through all the greeting cards we received over the past year, peruse a pile of colorful magazines, and cut out images, phrases, photos, or words that catch our eyes and hearts.

This is a joyful and colorful process, which takes as long as it takes:-)

Then comes the creative part:
We each have a white cardboard and we start placing the images, words, and pictures on it, creating a collage of how we would like the New Year to look and feel like!

I encourage you to make time for creating a New Year Vision Map with your daughter, son, or the special child in your life.

It doesn’t matter if it’s late December or early January… what’s important is that you and your girl are together, taking time to envision and shape the coming year visually and creatively.

You are teaching your girl quite a few empowering lessons here:
· Envisioning is essential to creating the outcome you desire
· Creativity is the means to envisioning
· You’d rather do this with her than with anyone else!

My Vision Map is divided into quarters, each devoted to one of the coming seasons. I glue in place images and phrases that, to me, symbolize Spring, Autumn, Winter, and Summer of the coming year.

Once we complete our Vision Maps, we hang them up: Ellah in her room, I in my office. It’s inspiring to look at, throughout the year, and I love being visually reminded of the directions I set myself at the beginning of it.

Calling it A Vision Map makes it just so: a road map that you use as you go along, to ensure you’re on the path you chose for yourself, or to adjust your course accordingly.

When I look at last year’s Vision Map I can see that my year followed my vision rather closely…

On New Year’s Eve, just before creating next year’s map, Ellah and I give our old Vision Map to the fire in our fireplace, give thanks for the blessings we’ve shared, and let go of the ending year. Now we are ready for a new vision, a new road map, and a new year.

I would like to inspire you to chart the upcoming year, with your daughter or son,  in creative and fun ways that will convey to your child more than a thousand lectures will, the value of planning, the appeal of creativity, and the priceless connection you share with each other.

____________________________________
© 2013 DeAnna L’am, All Rights Reserved

 – exclusive access to a private Facebook group for creative mothers
– a vibrant greetings card and book-mark of one of the author’s paintings.

• Carnival host and author of The Rainbow Way, Lucy at Dreaming Aloud shares an extract from the chapter Nurturing a Family Culture of Creativity.
• Lilly Higgins is a passionate food writer. Now a mother of two boys, she’s discovered a new calling: to instil in them a love of food and creativity in the kitchen.
• DeAnna L’am shares how visioning the New Year with your child is an invitation to be inspired: use creativity and resolutions to create a fun road map for the year ahead.
• Molly at Talk Birth on Releasing Our Butterflies – balancing motherhood with creativity.
• Laura shares some of the creativity happening at Nestled Under Rainbows and a few thoughts about creativity.
• Georgie at Visual Toast celebrates her own unique culture of creativity at home.
• Esther at Nurtureworkshop spreads the love of the ordinary, the delights of everyday things that can be an adventure of the imagination.
• For Dawn at The Barefoot Home creativity is always a free form expression to be shared by all in a supportive environment where anything can be an art material.
• Naomi at Poetic Aperture is a mother, artist and photographer who tries to keep her daughter away from the expensive pens and paints.
• Aimee at Creativeflutters writes about keeping your sanity and creativity intact with small kids in the house in her post: Mother + Creativity – They Must Coexist.
• Amelia at My Grandest Adventure embarks on a 30 Days of Creativity challenge…you can too!
• Becky at Raising Loveliness explores creating with her smaller family members.
• Jennifer at Let Your Soul Shine reveals how children help us connect to our souls, through music and movement.
• Mary at The Turquoise Paintbrush shares her experiences of creating with kids.
• Joanna at Musings of a Hostage Mother explains why creativity at home is important to her in her post “I nurture a creative culture.”
• It took until Amy at Mama Dynamite was pregnant aged 35 to discover her dormant creative
  streak – she has found lovely ways of tuning into it every since.
• Emily at The Nest explores how creativity runs through her family’s life together.
• Jennifer at OurMuddyBoots sees that encouraging creativity in children is as simple as appreciating them for who they are: it just means overriding everything we know!
• Lisa from Mama.ie has discovered that a combination of writing and traditional crafts can provide a creative outlet during those busy early years of new motherhood.
• Anna at Biromums shares what nurturing a culture of creativity means to her.
• Zoie at TouchstoneZ argues that the less they are interfered with, the more creative children become as they grow up.
• Darcel at The Mahogany Way celebrates creating with her kids.
• Sally (aka The Ginger Ninja) of The Ginger Chronicles is continually inspired by her own mum and grandmother.
• Just being creative is enough, says Nicki at Just Like Play, as she ponders her journey of nurturing a creative family.
• Allurynn shares her creative family’s musings in her post “Creativity… at the Heart of it” on Moonlight Muse.
• Laura at Authentic Parenting explores how being creative saves her sanity.
• Mama is Inspired talks about how she puts an emphasis on the handmade in her home, especially in the holiday season.
• Kirstin at Listen to the Squeak Inside shares with you several easy ways for busy mamas and dads to encourage their children to be creative every day.
• Mila at Art Play Day always lived in her dreams, sleepwalking through life … now she is finding out what creativity is all about…. her inner child!
• Sadhbh at Where Wishes Come From describes how picture books can nurture creativity in young children.
• On womansart blog this week – nurturing a creative culture at home.