Welcome

This is my first official post on my new Hala Baby blog.  I am so excited to be doing this!  I have been trying to figure out exactly what I wanted to say in this post and I decided that I should give a little history of how Hala Baby came to be.  This is just this little mama being transparent....

I am a stay at home mother of four children - age 10, 6, 2 and 6 months.  I have been married for almost 13 years.  I started out as a working wife, but when I was pregnant with my first child came to the realization that God's perfect plan for me was to be a stay at home wife and mother.  In a sense, I fought this for many years.  I struggled with letting go and letting God be number one and my husband number two in my life.  I rarely got the balance right and I always thought that I somehow had to help both of them out.  I struggled with allowing my husband to be the sole support of the family and trusting God to be our source.  I always seemed to fall back into "making ends meet" by getting a part-time or full-time job.  I found many times that this really just made things so much worse because it simply wasn't in God's plan for our lives.  So God had to do something drastic! 

Long story short, my husband and I went through a major transition in our life in 2006.  God moved us across the country and taught us a few lessons on what place He was to be in our lives and Who we were to depend on.  We learned a most valuable lesson:  God is our Source in every way, including finances. The transition was monumental and the lessons we learned sometimes painful, but God brought us through every one as long as we trusted wholeheartedly in Him. 

Nearing the end of that transition, I gave birth to child #3, a beautiful little girl.  God began showing me, through the birth of this child, the gifts that He had placed within me.  I had always had a desire to be creative, but somehow, having another little girl in my life brought out the desire to create something beautiful and different.  I started out with some pitiful attempts to make little bows for my daughters and my niece.  I look back at those and they were so ugly, but God tells us to not despise the day of small beginnings, so I cherish those ugly little creations that I so lovingly made. I did get better at making those little bows, however, and they became a passion.  

Soon after, God laid it on the heart of a very precious friend to bless me with a sewing machine.  Now, mind you, I spent the better part of my life fearing the dreaded sewing machine!!  I laugh now when I think about it, but I literally could not sew a button on.  No joke, if my husband ever had a button that needed sewing back on, he had to take it to his mother or do it himself!  Well, this wonderful friend took the time to show me how to thread the machine and sew a straight line and from there it went.  I sewed my first little baby "blankie" (as I call them).  It was an even more pitiful sight than my first bows!!  It looked like a four year old had sewn it!  But I was so proud that I had created something with my own hands.  I felt like I had wings, I was flying so high!!

Fast forward a couple of years at which time I was pregnant with our fourth child, another girl!  God moved us back across the country to our hometown once again. God began to show me that He had given me a gift that had lain dormant for so long because of fear.  He showed me that fear is a thief and it could dominate my life if I let it.  Well no more!!  I knew that I had a God-given knack for sewing & bowmaking and I knew that God had a plan for this family to have a business.  So, I began to research everything I could think of to do with sewing and bowmaking and anything to do with business.  I knew that God intended for me to be a stay at home mom, but I also knew that I had a God-given hunger to have my own business.  Yet I had no idea how to do it.  Knowing that God had given me these gifts, I also realized that I had to be a good steward of them, but where to start?

Well if nothing else, I was excited and knew that I could share that with others, so I started posting pictures of everything I was sewing and all the bows I was making for my girls and anything that had anything to do with sewing!  Lo and behold, someone saw it and asked if I would consider wholesaling to them!  Can you believe that?  Years of stressing and straining over all of the details and God does it in a split second.  How amazing is our God?  Well, I said yes of course! 

After that, it was like a snowball....I felt a release to move forward and begin a new business.  And here it is: Hala Baby.  A truly God-given business.  I don't where it will go from here, but I do know that if my heavenly Father has anything at all to do with it, it will be prosperous and it will be a blessing and an honor to His Name. And I pray that it will be a blessing to everyone who crosses the path of Hala Baby. 

For now, Hala Baby will be offering hand-sewn bows and fabric flower clips.  Soon, we plan to expand into handmade boutique-style clothing.  I hope everyone who stops by will be blessed!!