A Peek Behind the Curtain!

YAY! It’s book release day!!!!

The Glorious Mysteries is available for purchase!

Finally!

So, if you want to buy it, you can!

It’s also another very special day for Illustrated Prayer… it’s the one year anniversary of this website.

And so, to celebrate these two wonderful occasions, and because I’m in a slightly sentimental mood, let’s get a little personal…

This is a picture of me writing a blog post:

As you can see, the lighting is pretty dark, and there’s a good reason for that: it’s pretty late at night.

I had just finished singing songs to my toddlers, said goodnight to them, and picked up the toys on the living room floor that they had played with earlier that day. And then I finally sat down to write a blog post on my eight-year-old laptop… only to be interrupted by my baby! She was fussy (you can see she’s been drooling quite a bit on her onesie, so I’m guessing that she was probably teething pretty badly that night), so I gave her a big hug and set her down in my lap, and started bouncing her with my legs.

And then I started typing.

My husband, who was doing other chores around the house, saw me comforting our baby while simultaneously typing out a blog post and grabbed the camera. “Give me a big smile!”

So I did.

And thus, he captured this moment.

Writing and making books feels a little bit like being a magician. You see the finished products… the pretty website that I designed and created, the beautiful books that I’ve made, and the polished articles that I’ve written and posted.

But there’s another side too… a human side of this whole operation that is often hidden. A side involving early mornings, late nights, and a lot of work.

And that means you miss some of the messiness involved… and trust me, in a house with three children with ages four and under, there is plenty of messiness involved!

But that also means that you miss some of the sweet moments as well. Like that moment which my husband captured. And all the moments that were not captured… after all, most of the books that I made, I made them one-handed, while holding a sleeping baby in my other arm. 🙂

Anyway, on this first anniversary of this website, I wanted to take a moment to thank you all from the bottom of my heart. It has been such a fun journey for me both making these books and sharing some of the most touching religious artworks of all time with you through this blog. It’s been a lot of work too, mind you, but it truly has been such a joy as well! And it makes it more fun to know that I am sharing these with real people who are reading and connecting and praying with me as well.

So!

If you’ve watched this site for a while, thank you for sticking around!

If you’re new, I hope you enjoy what you’ve seen so far and thank you for visiting!

If you’ve commented, thank you! I don’t always respond to comments because I get a bit tongue-tied sometimes, but I read everything and love to see your insights!

If you’re here because of my books, I thank you for supporting this website by getting my books and I really hope that you like them! And I hope that, if you’ve gotten my new book, The Glorious Mysteries, that you like that one just as much!

I will be praying for you… please pray for me as well!

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If you would like, you can now purchase The Glorious Mysteries! It pairs the prayers of the Glorious Mysteries with beautiful religious artwork. Take a look at it here! Most of the proceeds of the books goes to support this website and the book making operation… and the rest goes to my pretty cute family. 🙂