Today we are happy to celebrate our website’s “first birthday”!
Penina and I started creating this website in January last year (if you would like to know more about our story, click here). Having discussed at length our desire for raising our children as spiritual beings and sharing the experience of supporting each other in service to the Baha’i community as well as maintaining individual spiritual perspective throughout the challenges that parenting brings, we decided to combine our interests and talents to create simple, easy-to-use, and inspiring online resources especially for Baha’i mothers of young children.
We set a goal to get the website up and running in time for Ayyam-i-Ha 2012, working late into many nights and discussing at length our vision, purpose, and plans. We launched the website on Valentines Day, 14 February 2012, symbolizing how this website is a “gift of love” to Baha’i families around the world and sharing a 10-part series about Ayyam-i-Ha as our first resource. Our children were 1 and 3, and 10 months and 3 at the time.
One year later our followers have grown to over 1,370 Facebook fans, 350 email subscribers, and 150 followers on Pinterest, and the website maintains an average of 180+ unique visitors every day. We have received messages from Baha’i friends living in dozens of countries filled with love and encouragement, and have been inspired by the numerous stories shared with us about how Baha’i mothers are engaging with our website to enhance their services around the world.
We hope the Enable Me To Grow community can inspire you as well as give you practical tools to live a spirit-filled life and guide your children along a spiritual path as well. We are by no means experts in this, but are striving to create resources based on our experience and to share learnings that we have found along our own individual journeys.
Two New Resources
To celebrate this day, we have a few exciting developments to share with you.
First, our CD “At First Light” Volume 1 is now officially launched! With 41 tracks, it is only US$9.99 and can be purchased and downloaded immediately through CD Baby. Find out more about the CD launch and the “At First Light” Arts Exhibition featuring art from 9 countries and 30 artists around the world here.
We hope you enjoy the music and that it helps you and your children memorize Baha’u’llah’s soul-stirring words!
Second, over the past month we have been working with an artist to create a special piece of art for our website which you may have already seen displayed as the beautiful new banner on our homepage and made a matching prayer poster. We have added five sizes of the prayer poster to our membership package (8×10, 5×7 and 6×4 plus 11×14 and 12×12 with extra wide edges to print on a canvas) which you can get printed at most stores that print photos.
To read more about this resource please see this post.
Both our CD and more information about our membership materials can be found on our new Store page which you can see at the top of our website. We will also add our upcoming CDs there when they are available. We are aiming to release “At First Light” Volume 2 around June 2013 and the Radiant Hearts Audio Stories in later 2013.
As busy parents, you can probably appreciate what a commitment it is to have developed this website and to keep contributing to it. Therefore we would greatly appreciate your support, by purchasing one or two of our products. We have done our best to make them very affordable and useful to you!
Plans for the Future
We have many ideas (and tentative plans) for how to develop our website and community, and look forward to what the future years hold. We are considering the possibilities of creating Radiant Hearts Community Lessons, so that parents around the world can contribute their own ideas for teaching about 19 new virtues; hosting a mothers’ virtual conference; creating a members dialogue area on the website; offering an online course for adding spirit into family life; offering many other original resources for Baha’i children; and more.
Saying this, we also know that unexpected events happen in life and we cannot plan ahead too much. Some ideas are simply part of the path which will lead us to a place we never envisioned originally.
So we will do what we can during this busy stage in life, caring for our children (now ages 2 and 4, and 1 and 4), and frequently calling to mind the comforting words of ‘Abdu’l-Baha who lovingly reminded us: “Little by little, day by day.”
Thank you for joining us. We look forward to offering more resources during the upcoming year. We greatly appreciate your feedback and comments, and would love to learn alongside you as we share our journeys together.
