Scarlet Hiltibidal's Blog

I'm too excited. My eyebrows are stuck in the raised up position and I'm having to uncaps a lot of ALL CAPS things. So, here's the news. I JUST SIGNED ANOTHER BOOK CONTRACT WITH MY BELOVED, BEAUTIFUL PUBLISHER, B&H! 

I will not talk about this much or for a very long time because this is a lonnnnng process and the release date for this one is quite a ways off. 

But, I'll tell you how this all came together. 

Back when we were deciding color swatches for the Afraid of All the Things book cover,...

Ten years and two days ago, I called Brandon from a Starbucks parking lot and told him I was going to die. I’d just ordered a double shot of espresso so I wouldn’t pass out, and my heart was beating too fast and I kept looking in my rearview mirror at my eyes because the whites of them looked gray. They’d been looking gray for a while. I’d been sometimes anorexic, but mostly bulimic, for three-and-a-half years at that point. It was a secret. I was consumed by it. I couldn’t stop living the w...

I get sad about weird things. The other day, I got sad thinking about sending in the book I'm writing to the editor in a few months. I love writing so much and I've always wanted to write books, so as ungrateful and impossible as this sounds, the truth is, sometimes I have a hard time enjoying good things while I'm experiencing them. Sometimes I have a hard time appreciating a sweet thing while I have it. I get sad too soon about it being gone someday. I'm looking ahead to the time when it e...

When I am filled with cares… I type Nate Bargatze into YouTube’s search box and watch videos like this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJgSm...

When I am filled with cares… I re-read this dumb fake-article about a frog who got a human brain transplant and shortly before dying, said “Moses.” If you don’t feel like clicking on the link, here’s my favorite line -- “Now that scientists have cut open a frog’s head and took out the frog’s brain then put a human brain in where the frog brai...

I have country sounds in my life now. And I love them. I hear roosters crowing and a billion birds chirping and I hear wind! Did you know that you can hear wind? Just on a regular day, when it’s not stormy? I never noticed that. And, it’s Easter and we’ve got a swing in the yard now. And this morning my kids were already sugared up and saying cute things like, “Easter is about Jesus when he ros-ed from the deck!”

So, I stole away to the front porch swing in the country with the sounds and op...

In 7th grade, I went to a “Glamor Shots” birthday party. There was a place at the mall, somewhere near Burbank, where you could get “professional” photos taken. There were big lights and long lenses and silver reflector square thingies and watercolor backdrops and it was so extremely grown up. My mother saved my glamor shots (oh, I’m sorry, I just noticed in the corner of the photo that it’s actually GlamOUR shots) and gave them to me a few years ago. In this one I’m featuring here, I’m wea...

YOU GUYS, I’m not making this up. I signed a book deal yesterday. Right at the kitchen table with my husband while my dirty kids ate mixed vegetables with their hands. I still can’t even believe it. I laughed. I cried. I pinched myself. I pinched my husband. I got onto my daughters for pinching each other. We’re all really excited. Writing this book has been a lifelong dream.

I’m writing the story of my struggle with fear and anxiety and how the gospel changed everything. I’ll be telling st...

I once slept through a Category 5 hurricane. It was Hurricane Andrew. I was six and living in Miami. My mom had just remarried, and we’d just left Connecticut. The home I’d known was gone. The school I’d known was gone. And life felt unpredictable and stormy in every way.

I was too young to understand that a direct hit from a Category 5 hurricane was a big deal. So, I slept through it. We put our hurricane shutters on and I went to sleep for the night. When I woke up and went outside, I cou...

I almost died on a date with Brandon the other night. We were eating at Olive Garden. I was talking and eating and laughing and laugh-eating and talk-chewing and eat-talking and snort-swallowing, as you do when you spend a lot of time with tiny people, but now you’re in a quiet restaurant with your favorite grown-up person and you’re too excited to remember to breathe and chew and talk and laugh at separate times, instead of all at the same time.

I was a mom-jerk this morning in record time.

While the girls were still asleep, I got up to go to the bathroom, and when I got back all three were in my bed. It made me smile. And we snuggled. And we did our morning things. And we went down for breakfast. And while I carefully arranged blueberries in the blueberry part of her pink sectioned plate, the 2-year-old blonde started screaming at me, and I felt a familiar surge of frustration so quickly it surprised me.

And I realized, I must have...