Last Sunday night, Dedê was gone. All her adult life she lived inside her own world, in her unique, beautifu mind and heart. All I pray now is that her butterfly wings take her to the peace and love she couldn't find here the last years. At least she suffers no more. Saudade, a word that only exist in my language and that express exactly this: I'm gonna desperately miss you.

At 2 Witches Blog I found a beautiful song, mantra-like, "We all come from the Goddess". It soothed me a little while I was working this morning with my head spinning wildly.

Blog Carnival's Winner

And so the winner is... Kim, from Beanish and Other Languages I'm Learning. Hope talking to you soon! For everybody else who participated, thank you very much for your kind words about my giveaway, you're all very sweet! Hope to see you around here soon again , and we'll surely meet on the next blog carnival! :)

ABC Wednesday - N

As today was Earth Day, I couldn't resist bringing the ABC forward for one day and posting about Nature, my main source of inspiration to teach my son (and myself) about life, love, death and everything that is in between... These photos were taken last Ostara, in August, at our favorite park, near our house, and I simply adore them.

We wanted to reinforce this little ritual today but with the dengue fever around and unfortunately with the park as a mosquito focus, and the weather being so bad, raining all the time... we ended up going to the Museum downtown, and visited an exhibition about the habits and cultures of people from the Tropics. It was also good because Lucas could see the different aspects of the Goddess &the God according to each place, like Indonesia, India, Thai, Africa. But I'm wandering... Back tot he photos!

We have these cute little monkeys at the park. Lucas always love to feed them with bananas. Mama Nature thanks for his care and for not giving them cookies instead!

Lucas walked down the path, looking for the perfect place to plant his sunflower seeds, and only stopped when was sure he found it!

Here is his happy smile for the good work done. We took some time thanking Nature for the precious chance of living and being connected with her, and I'm sure Gaia blessed us then, as you can see by the beautiful photo Lucas took - he said he wanted to catch the sun through the trees.

Hope you all had a beautiful day, and remember to stop by at the ABC's main page, to see awesome N photos!

Let's Party again!

So this is my second time in a Carnival blog party! It's really fun and you should try it! it's a great time to meet new bloggers and win cool prizes! I'm Nydia, the proud mom of Lucas, my almost five-year-old littlw witch, and I live in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

My humble giveaway will be this little wooden box hand-painted by myself. It's a black box with a waxing moon with green leaves around it, with a craquelet effect. Inside there will be round little candles and a matchbox with a sweet fairy decoupage decorating it. If you want to win this (international visitors included), just leave a comment telling me your favorite candle scent, until Friday, April 25, at 8pm central time. All the names will be put into the box itself and Lucas will pick up the winner, then I'll post that announcement on Sunday, April 27th. Good luck!



Let's have fun, and don't forget stopping by the Carnival blog's main page for more giveaways!

Free Book's Day

Today is the Book's Day in Brazil. At schools tales are told, and special visits to libraries and book shops are made to celebrate this essential tool for imagination.

As a family ritual, since Lucas was 2, we free a book on this very day. I don't know if any of you know about this activity. The international site is Bookcrossing. The idea is simple. At a certain date you choose a book from your bookshelf, put a message on the back of the cover (I print "Today is Book's Day, and I'm a Free Book. Take me with you, read my stories, and after you finished, leave me again somewhere so someone else will have the same pleasure you had by reading me"), leave it a a public spot, like subways, park's benchs, cafe tables, and someone else will pick it up, read it and luckly will pass it on.

Above is the book I chose for this year: Zelia Gattai's book, "Winter Garden", about her exile times in Yugoslavia with her husband, Jorge Amado, the Brazilian author, during Brazilian dictatorship years (because they were comunist - those were "Inquisition times"...). A great book.

I have fun watching people's reactions from a distance. Usually they pick the book up, take a look around, open the cover page and read the message. Some will take it with them, some will not, maybe ashamed of being watched. But usually it's taken.

This book was grabbed two minutes after it was left! See below the picture of the guy in light blue shirt and blue bermudas walking away with my book in his hands (sorry, it's so tiny and blurred, my camera has a poor zoom!):

After I started taking Lucas with me for this, he has fun with me, and the first time, he 'spoiled' the whole thing, by shouting "He picked it up, mom!!" out loud when a man took the book from the bench at a park near our house. The poor man dropped the book again and left in a hurry... LOL Since then, he learnt to stay quiet and just watch, only whispering excited when a person is "trapped".

Below is Lucas "freeing" his book - he chose one about baby care that I still had from the time he was born and he used to like watching the illustrations. He is wearing his uniform, because it was done on our way to his school, so we were getting late and couldn't watch the pick it up:

Have you ever found or a free book or have you ever free one?

Beatriz gives us a fright

Yesterday my brother Delcio, my niece's dad, told us that suddenly she began to get a haemorrhage, evacuating blood. Doctors were trying to identify the cause, but after a blood test (no infection detected) and an X-ray, nothing was found. Today she'll go through an ultra-sound, for a deeper exam. Last night Delcio told me that the doctors could control the flow for a minimum, and that this morning she evacuated with no traces of blood. Go figure it! I can surely say that it was the scariest night I've had, praying and asking for her to be brave and fight for her life. My family is going through a more than delicate phase, it's a "bang" after the other... but I want to believe that everything has a cause, nothing happens by chance and something good will come out of this sadness. At least we're all connected and in close touch all the time, all of us get along well with one another, which makes things a little better to stand.

As my own mom uses to say when things get hard, "I want to go back to my mom's belly!"

ABC Wednesday - M

So today is the ABC Wednesday, the letter is "M", and I thought about Music! This is something that is so present in my life, at home, that I couldn't resist talking about it. My hubby loves playing the guitar - and he learnt it all by himself - and as anyone can see below, Lucas is following dad's steps... (photo from my arquive, taken last year, in June):

Brazil is very rich when the subject is music. We have excellent musicians, and our home is full of CDs and DVDs from diverse Brazilian artists. I'd like to invite you all to enjoy a few of my favorite ones, some from the old times, some from nowadays (in each name, there's a link to a video with a song, so make sure you have time to listen to them!):

Lenine is a great composer and singer, and his carrer is well stablished abroad in Europe as well. He plays the guitar wonderfully and his calm, sweet voice soothes me, but don't get me wrong, he's very energetic depending on the song.

Ney Matogrosso, whose performance alive is breath-taking, and his voice is superb. It's amazing how pure it is - and how sexy this sixty-years-old man still is after such a long time on stage...

Seu Jorge is amazing. His strong figure when singing makes everybody move, and his melodies are just great. I also love

Skank, a band that is on the road for almost twenty years now. They grew maturity along the years, but their songs are always light and bring a smile on my face.

Of course, I can't forget Chico Buarque, I bow down to him... in my opinion the best composer ever. Period. Beautiful melodies and lyrics.

Cássia Eller was a perfect singer, all emotional. Unfortunately she left us too early, but her songs will remain in our hearts. This specific song always bring tears to my eyes, literally, so beautiful it is.

Nando Reis. Ah... speechless. A great composer, came from a super rock band. His solo carrer is praised as one of the most solid ones. Lucas looooves this song, Mantra. And it is so meanful to me in this painful time of my life.

Tom Jobim is timeless. Along with Elis Regina (another powerful voice and incredible artist who left this world too early. I had to add two songs, the second one is my fav one of hers. Used to sing it at the shower when I was a kid... and I still do, poor hubby...) he made this sweet duet.

Toquinho, who composed a lot with Vinicius de Moraes - another genius, made this incredibly sweet and true song about life, for a TV special show for children, many years ago.

And that's it. I have to stop here because the list goes endlessly and I don't want to bother more you with it... Hope you enjoyed at least some of them . Let me know which you liked most, and don't forget visiting the ABC main page to see other great posts! :)

It's a girl!

My brand new niece was born last afternoon at 4pm! Beatriz came to bring light to our lives at a time we need so much this kind of energy!

Delcinho, one of my brothers, is the proud father of little Beatriz. It's his first child and he couldn't be happier. Of course, she arrived healthy and gorgeous, according to him. I just can't wait to meet her next weekend. As they live in Petropolis (as all my family does), one and half hours away from Rio, only on Saturday I'll be able to visit them.

There's a beautiful birth blessing written by Starhawk in her book "The Sacred Fifth Thing", that goes more or less like this (if anyone has the original version, please send it to me, my book is in Portuguese, so I translated it):

May you always find the cure whenever you need it.
May you always have enough to eat and to drink and to share with others.
May you find true love.
May you escape from every trap prepared for you.
May you have strength to survive.
Be free, be strong, be yourself.
Be happy, be proud of being who you are, be loved and be loving.
Live among flowers, surrounded by current waters.
Live to the heat of the sun, breathing pure air, nourished by the light of the moon and the stars.
Understand that you are welcome, that you are a precious gift for us, blessed be.

This is something I think every human being should receive at birth. It's so beautiful and so true! When I meet my brother and my sister-in-law Alcione, I'll give it along with a gift to my little niece. That's all I wish for her in life.

Welcome to our lives, Beatriz, auntie Nydia already loves you so much!

*Image: My little niece Beatriz voraciously suckling her mommy's milk; and the family: dad Delcio, pretty mom Alcione, and their sweet daughter Beatriz.

For Marcia

Not simply for the friendship, but mainly for her really excellent blog's content.

Questions from a piercing little mind

Today Rodrigo told me that before I got home for lunch, Lucas started asking him why it's necessary to have man and woman in the world... so Rodrigo explained that to create human life it's needed both of them.

Let me open a parenthesis here: Lucas has already asked me about how babies are "made", and I was fair with him according to his age. We didn't want to tell him about "storks" or anything of the sort, so I went with dad's little seed put in mom's belly, with careful details about how and where the seeds are built inside dad's body (because he asked it) and how they're put inside mom's bell (again, because he asked - add some sweating here from this usually-oh-so-self-assured-and-calm-mom who types - nervosism very well disguised, by the way). The funniest thing in the whole world was when he told me, then, very matter-of-factly, that he had already felt his own seeds getting out of his body when he was doing a wee. I had to hold my breath not to laugh...

I avoided the sex details - don't ask me how - because I think he's still too young to get to the facts but thing is that Lucas is so sharp in his curiosity that we have no choice but answering the best way we can. Otherwise, he will insist ad nauseum until feeling satisfied.

So back to Rodrigo's hard time. After listening about why men & women are needed, Lucas asked, "So how the first men and women were built, since there was no one to start them?" ... You can imagine my poor hubby's agony, trying to explain something that all the scientists are still trying to discover. His solution was Darwin, whom Lucas already knew about, thanks to a exhibition at the local museum we went to. He explained in a four-year-old reasonable way to understand about the evolution of species - under the attention of Mama Goddess and Papa God, Lucas quickly added (!), and that seemed to satisfy him, because stopped torturing dad for a while. Rodrigo wanted to tell him some pagan myth to illustrate and make it cute, but the only thing he could remember was Adam & Eve myth, and he controlled himself not to make a mess out of our son's mind by thinking this is thew only story available, and us being pagans, etc....

I think that if he insists on the subject (and if I know my son well, he will), we can also tell him about some of the myths that different cultures & religions have. There are beautiful legends in Greek, Indian, Buddism, and of course in Paganism, etc, that tells about the creation of human beings. I think he would like it, since he's the kind of boy who loves a good story, as long as it won't mess him up. Give me some feedback on it, that would be great. :)

ABC Wednesday - K & L

I'm a week late! So I'm posting post both letters K & L.

This was taken last October, at a friend's b-day party. This is Knight Lucas riding his mini-horse, all proud for being brave and enjoying it, under dad's close eye. It was his first time, and the sweet horse called "Farinha" - Flour in English - was so calm that he wanted more and more! Lucas thanked and fed Farinha after his ride, and that afternoon was a special one, when we all had fun in a beautiful place:

Also for L, here's my Little Library at home (this TV needs to be placed somewhere else, it spoils my bookshelf!). We're addicted to books, and I just can't let them go after reading them. I'm the kind of person who would read anything I can put my hands on, but I'm Stephen King, Asimov and Gabriel Garcia Marques' biggest fan - this trio has a growing section every month. And of course, the Magick authors have a special place, with books by Scott Cunninghan, Starhawk, Marion Zimmer Bradley, etc. Lucas is already growing a passion for books too, can't imagine why... :) . I'd love to hear from you about your fav authors & books!

Don't forget to stop by at ABC Wednesday main page to visit other cooler posts!

Chaotic times

As everybody could see, I've been offline lately. The last weeks have been absurdly paranoid here... Explaining: in Brazil and especifically in Rio, we are facing a terrible epidemic - literally speaking. There's this awful mosquito, Aedes Aegypti, that's causing hundred of deaths, mainly children, by its bite - the disease is called dengue fever. It's so absurd that, in the 21st Century, we're still as if in Middle Age. I feel totally frustrated and impotent. Government is the main guilt for not paying attention to it months earlier, along with people who simply are not careful about the simplest, basic things in hygiene terms... oh well... for those who don't live here is hard to explain Brazilian politics, but you can easily guess...

The symtoms are very similar to flu, so when we started getting sick at home, I panicked. First Rodrigo spent one week in bed, all sleepy and aching body, but no fever. Then it was my turn, high fever, aching body, headaches. And finally, Lucas, the same thing this week - and THIS really scared me, because his fever was higher than ever. We all had blood exams, to be sure it wasn't this stupid dengue fever, and we had to pray to all gods until the resutls were available and we could be calm. Thankfully it was "only" a virus - in Lucas' case, his old friend, tonsilitis.

But I'm still pissed off (sorry for the language) because we're in a state of emergency in our city, and it didn't need, at all, to get to this point. We have to shut doors and windows at 5pm, after spraying pesticide and burning citronella incenses to avoid the mosquitos. We only go out after passing repelents, and every time a relative or a friend gets a flu, we think it's dengue. It's so ridiculous, and so sad, to see this happening. I can't wait now for the cold to come and take this nightmare away.