Blogging as hospitality
Sacraparental is my lounge, on a night when we’ve all changed out of our work clothes, people’s kids are in bed and we have something delicious on the coffee table. You are invited to drop in, drop onto a sofa, and talk together about important and nourishing things. Silliness and chocolate and geekery are also encouraged.
If you’re visiting for the first time, check out the Greatest Hits page, or browse the blog using the top menus and drop-down boxes.
I like having voices other than my own as part of the conversation, so please (continue to) join in! Everyone is welcome, and welcome to their opinions.
Of course, you’re in my lounge, with other guests, so it would be kind of weird if anyone were rude or unkind or excluding or passive-aggressive. Apart from anything else, it can make cake go down the wrong way.
Speaking of cake, thanks for stopping by. Imagine I’ve made this or these for you to try.
If you are a long-time-reader-never-commenter, it would be lovely to hear from you when you feel ready. WordPress has a pretty detailed stats page that tells me, among other things, what countries readers are in and what links they have clicked to get here. It’s great to be able to put a name or voice to the location – please do say hi!
The Sacraparental Facebook page is the chatty kitchen off this slightly more serious lounge. Come and join us for more conversation and daily-ish links to fascinating things. You can also follow me on Twitter for the more ranty stuff and I’m on a campaign to use Pinterest for good and not for evil, so you’ll find more about social justice than about decor.
If you like what I do here, and want to be part of helping me do more of it, you can also join my Patreon.
Not a wild hera/thaliakr/me
I am a minister-turned-mother, a parallel-parking, cryptic crossword-cracking, wannabe hippie, a full-time feminist and mother of two tornadoes: SBJ, born in December 2011, and Baby HM, born December 2014.
I’m not really anonymous, and you can see me for real here. I just try to keep my and my family’s names and faces off the blog to give them the option (or illusion!) of privacy. If someone googles our names, it’s nice that they’ll find other things before this. ‘not a wild hera’ is an anagram I’ve used since university.
This blog is my weaving project. I think of parenting as a sacramental task, somewhere God can be keenly experienced. All the things I’m trying to weave into my parenting – hospitality, hilarity, feminism, emotional literacy, social justice, good nutrition, music, science, churchy stuff, everything – all of that is stuff I care about because I try to follow Jesus Christ.
You might be interested in some of that stuff for that reason or other reasons. Everyone’s welcome.
Myanmar/Burma, Thailand and Partners Relief & Development
In late 2015 my family moved to South East Asia to work with Partners Relief & Development, a small international charity working to bring free, full lives to children affected by conflict and oppression.
You can read more about our move and our reasons, starting here. If you’re interested in supporting our work there, with your time, skills, encouragement or money, we’d love to hear from you here.
Other stuff: contact, content and artworks
If you’d like to contribute a guest post, and you are a regular reader here, please get in touch at sacraparental [at] gmail [dot] com (that’s just a normal email address written weirdly to avoid attracting spam). We can have a chat about how the subject matter will fit into the palette here, and I may be keen to offer a bit of an edit to help it match other posts in terms of format and stuff.
But that’s just for stuff you’re interested in blogging about because you like reading here. At the moment at least, this blog is entirely free of advertising or sponsorship. I don’t do paid or sponsored posts, or accept them from anyone else, so please don’t ask. If you write proposing a guest spot to promote your own products or services but are not already part of the readership, I probably won’t respond.
I enjoy linking to art and artists in the posts. As far as I am aware, everything I have included is with permission or according to a Creative Commons licence. If I have used something of yours in error and you’d prefer a different form of use or acknowledgement, or for something to be removed, please contact me, again at sacraparental [at] gmail [dot] com.
The photo at the top of this page is my husband carrying my baby up Glastonbury Tor. We’re a British-Kiwi family and the Tor is part of our family landscape, and an ancient place of worship and contemplation.
If there’s no photography credit on a picture, it’s usually because I am the photographer. Please contact me before using any of those pictures in any way, and please don’t use any photos of my family for any purpose. Thanks!