New to come, a parenting and family segment!  I bet a lot of people wondered why my Spiritually Awkward Instagram page was mainly focused and centered upon parenting and my new child? Well, plans on launching a new platform for parenting tips, family life insight, family ideas and advice, as well as I really wanted to help spiritual parents out there to have the right mindset when raising their children. It’s not easy. Spirituality is hard enough when trying to focus on remodeling yourself, yet alone to have to worry about properly raising up your children. I’m supposing that you have to have a major degree in child-rearing to hand out advice? Lol… well I don’t have a degree but I do have tons of experience as well as a divine ordinance and sorry but that’s from heaven and all that I feel that I need.

So with that. I will be adding a few new types of videos to my YouTube platform. Parenting being one of them! Also, all of my videos will be uploaded to a new channel platform as a back up. You’ll also be able to find them on my website under the “Alura’s world” page. It’s going to be a lot of fun, giving everybody a personal glimpse into my own life and how I am with my family. Maybe I’ll even get lucky and get to see your temper tantrum or two by one of my kids in real time! Ah there’s nothing like broadcasting that LOL For now, let’s talk about traditions…

A special tradition…

When I was a little girl, my mother was what is known as a trophy wife. For many people that don’t know what that is, a trophy wife is a woman that is more into her appearance than being a housewife or parent although they are put in those situations. Why, I’ll never understand. Trophy wives can be self focused and it has a negative impact on their children. But what a trophy wife is, is where the husband wants to have a nice looking woman by his side, and he will not require her to work but just rather to look good. My father spoiled my mother. While I can’t say the same about myself in certain aspects because even as an only child between them… I felt unwanted, disregarded and had a harder childhood especially when it came to my mom… My dad was as good to me, as good as he could be considering that he had to work all of the time to keep up with everything and my mother’s needs as a Barbie wife.

all that I ever really wanted was my mom’s love and attention though. I was adored up until a certain age but when we moved at the age of six from our apartment, things changed at the new house. My mom didn’t really pay as much attention to me. Never really played with me, and anything I shared with her spiritually was always disregarded. I was alone. Are used to beg her even just to sit and read a story to me and that would never happen. I even tried to impress her time and time again. Even though I didn’t feel as though I had a lot of love for my mother, I still tried to show her a lot. I knew that she was that way because of her own upbringing. Imagine being a small kid having to dismiss the neglect because of knowing that the person was a victim of a victim. She hadn’t shared any of that yet, until later. However, and one of my many attempts to express my love and adoration for her I had suggested to my classroom teacher to get seeds for Mother’s Day, and do a class experiment of planting the seeds in a cup individually for each student to grow. In a few weeks, we could learn scientifically how they grew and also bring home a little flower for our mothers that we grew on our own.The teacher being very surprised that I came up with the idea so young, loved it. In fact, several of the other teachers also went along with the idea too. However, telling my mother about it she seemed to lack interest.

Later when it was time to bring home the flower, she just thanked me and stuck in it in the windowsill and didn’t bother to water it. I was very hurt because the flower was to represent our relationship blossoming throughout the years as a mother and daughter. My father being more aware, saw how bad it hurt my feelings and so, he took the dying flower and told me…that if we planted it outside, that it would more than likely grow back year after year. He was right. The flower actually was a tiger Lily, and it did grow and multiply. By the time I was about 11 years old we had an entire bush of dozens of them underneath of our tree.

I had grown up in that home until I was about 20 years old. Then we moved out. My father didn’t want to leave the flowers behind, but we had no choice. We moved around quite a bit afterwards, trying to find a place to permanently settle since we had not owned a home and even for all those many years, we had been renting. When we finally settled down into our rental house in Lindenwold back in 2010, my father told me that he wanted to go back to the old place and see if they still had those flowers growing, dig one up and plant in Lindenwold to start a whole new generation of tiger lilies from the same plant that I had given my mom as a child. For some reason it was very sentimental to him, even though the idea had been intended for my mom. 

And so that’s what we did. My father and I drove back to my hometown of West Berlin and ended up grabbing one of the flowers from under the tree and we planted the seeds in our yard. The following year many of them grew. He ended up with cancer though and even though I had healed him, he was never the same in vibrancy. HeStill continued to smoke cigarettes and I kept telling him that the cancer would return if he continued to do so. I think it was hard for him to quit as he had been smoking since Vietnam. Nevertheless this program buying a home together as a father and daughter team in order to provide a secure place to live for the family since he and I were the only ones bringing in any financial support. I had also warned him from my visions that many things were going to take place in the world where we would need a safe haven. It was around 2015 by that time. Eventually, we moved again. Finally we ended up buying our own home here in Blackwood New Jersey. After moving in, we mutually remembered the tiger lily tradition and agreed to retrieve some from the spawn of the first bushel, now in Lindenwold…continuing the tradition at the new home.

By that time though, my father was very ill as the cancer that he had been healed of earlier on in Lindenwold, had indeed returned. God can perform miracles, but if a person continues the same behavior, it doesn’t show gratitude does it? He didn’t stop smoking until the very last minute. It was just too late. Alas, we did not get a chance to repeat the same tradition, but I will. Sadly, he has just passed away October 2019, but in his memory I will go on to relive the tradition with my own children. I will always do this in memory of my father because he loved me enough to continue doing it in memory of my own idea.

It was fun, gave us time outdoors with one another, and had a deep spiritual meaning. Tiger lilies have a very deep symbolism. However, this was not the only version of this tradition that I have carried on with my own children, either. All along, I’ve also done something similar…

If you go to different stores such as Home Depot, and Walgreens etc. every holiday season around Christmas… You will find that they sell something called paper whites or Amaryllis. The beauty about those are that they are bulbs and so you can re-grow them year after year. Just like the Tiger Lily. So I started this tradition back when my daughter was little. My daughter Amber is 20 years old now so we’ve been doing it for two decades. From the same bulbs too! Now, I’m starting to do the same thing with my new little girl.

It’s a beautiful thing, to go every year around the same time of year, and pull out the very same bulbs that you had grown something from with your child. You can take the bulbs, clip where the flower had grown from and also snip the roots, wrap them up in black cloth after they have dried, and then store them away year after year. I even started doing this with my son Noah when he was one years old. At the end of the holiday season, I prepare the bulbs and store them away putting them in a container that has each of my children’s names on them, so that we always grow the same ones. And this year… was my newest baby’s very first paper whites. Adriel and I grew our very first paperweight plant together from new bulbs that I purchased this year just for her. I will do the same thing for her year after year until she’s older. Sadly Amber’s has died away and she did not want to repeat the tradition. But Noah’s Amaryllis still grows after our first growth back in 2007. 

You can do something similar with your child, or maybe even try this idea. The point is is that traditions are memories. It gives you time with your child no matter what tradition you create, and it’s something special that they always remember between the two of you. I never did forget regrowing those tiger lilies location after location with my dad and even the sense of thrill that we had from sneaking into the old yard to grab some seeds from the original plant. I want my kids to always remember me as being a loving parent that thought of very sentimental things like that too. A lot of parents are busy with work these days but even small activities such as this, take only 15 to 20 minutes, and make all the difference.. 

Try doing something with your child. It doesn’t have to be a holiday tradition. Traditions can be created out of anything at any time. And this, is just one of ours. I hope you will join me for my family and parenting piece to be posted anywhere from every two weeks to each month on the YouTube, and for other articles to be posted here. God bless you all!