Secret Keeper Girl

Posted by Dannah Gresh, Creator of Secret Keeper Girl  Ugh! It’s not actually time to shop for swim suits is it? I made the dastardly error of throwing mine away last fall in a hearty effort to force myself to buy a new one this year. (I think it’s been about seven years!) After all, elastic can only take so many years, right? So, I am faced with not only shopping for myself, but buying two fifteen-year-old girls new suits. One of said teenagers rebutted my annual “no bikini” speech with: “You just don’t understand because no one wore bikinis back in the day when you were a teenager!” I explained that “back in the day,” I was often the only girl at a pool party in a one-piece. This drew incredulous disbelief that the bikini had actually been invented when I still had ample collagen in my lips! I’m certain that won’t be the last laugh in the Gresh girl’s swim suit shopping. Here are a few tips to meet with the inundation of emails we’ve been getting at Secret Keeper Girl/Pure Freedom about how to find modest suits.

• 1.) Discuss your expectations before you start looking! Sit them down and say, “Here are some things I’d like to see you avoid and here are the reasons why.” For example, on my list was “no sheer fabric.” A quick trip down memory lane to share my sixteen-year-old, most-embarrassing moment caused by a wet, white one-piece settled that factor for my girls. (And gave them something to laugh about.) Also on my list: no bikinis, no low necklines, no high-cut hips. Discussing these things early lets them know what the guidelines are.
• 2.) Be positive by focusing on what they can purchase! I like to actually go on-line and show them some suits that I think are modest and that they’ll actually like. This sets the standard. They might not pick exactly what I show them, but they have evidence that modest swimwear can be cute. Here are two pictures I showed them this week. This suit is from kohls.com:

I found a good variety of modest suits at that site as well as at hapari.com. This is the photo I highlighted for the girls from hapari:

Showing them helps also establish guidelines. It’s really important when you are teaching your girls about modesty to show them what you can say “yes” to, or all they hear is “no” and that can crush their spirits. If you have a younger girl—a Secret Keeper Girl—you can show her pictures like these two from childrensplace.com:

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•  3. Be sure to shop for cover ups while you’re out there. I’m fine with my girls jumping in the ocean or a pool with swimsuit, but if there are guys around I expect them to cover up when they get out. Laying out may be OK with girlfriends, but not when there are guys around. A pair of cute matching shorts like the ones above, paired with a t-shirt are great. Lexi and Autumn (my girls) prefer a pair of  nice board shorts and a t-shirt to a frilly cover up, but either can make for some modest attire between the pool and home!

This post is just an excerpt from our semi-monthly news letter. If you want to get great tips like this, and hear about upcoming Secret Keeper Girl events for tweens and their moms and Pure Freedom events for teens—be sure to subscribe at  our main website.

Finally, do you have any ideas on how to get a cute, but modest look for the pool and beach this summer? Let everyone know about them by posting here today! 

Thanks for all your comments! We are in the process of picking a winner therefore this giveaway is closed. Winner will be posted on June 3rd along with the next fashion give-away.

Hey girls and moms! Welcome to 5 weeks of giveaways! You could win over $700 worth of clothing in the next 5 weeks. We are giving away all five of the outfits modeled in our Spring Secret Keeper Girl live events. This week, we’re starting with our “punk rock” outfit. The goth look is huge and I know you can wear it well! Since a Secret Keeper Girl loves Jesus, she represents life. So, we vote “no” to darkness and skulls and crossbones.  Instead, try bright pink with a touch of black. These zebra print wrist gloves accompanied by her “music makes me dance” tee keeps the look bright.  With this outfit you can always get some tune-age! We keep it modest by layering the black mini skirt with jean Bermuda shorts.  This outfit is bound to pass the criss-cross applesauce test! Leave a comment to win this rockin’ outfit

Our “Punk Rock” outfit is a size 10. It includes Bermuda jean shorts, a black mini skirt, a hot pink t-shirt, zebra wrist gloves, and a cute black hat.

THIS GIVEAWAY IS CLOSED!

Hey, San Antonio! WE DID IT! You San Antonio Secret Keeper Girls and moms showed up and packed the house, blowing our attendance estimates to pieces! Those who chose to sign, took our Bod Squad Petition signatures to just over 8,000! That’s 8,000 moms and daughters joining together to send a message to the fashion industry that we want to purchase age appropriate clothing for our daughters. (Watch for more details this fall as we host a nation-wide SHOP TIL YOU DROP day to encourage retailers who consistently provide modest clothing for our girls!) Here’s one mom adding her signature:

Be sure to sign now if you haven’t already and invite five of your friends to join us, too. Now, we need to get over 10,000!

In addition to this great landmark, the night was full of Texas-sized fun. Including Suzy’s brand new cowgirl hat which she donned for our San Antonio fashion show. Check it out!

If that weren’t enough big fun, we had a really big-time awesome Holt International story at San Antonio. As you probably know, our tour sponsor is Holt, a leader in international adoption. We ask moms and Secret Keeper Girls to consider sponsoring orphans waiting for families in the U.S. to adopt them. This means that for $30 a month they are paying for the basic needs of a child to be in a foster home until their forever family comes for them. Well, Gretchen (a mom) visited the Holt table in tears. She said: “I just brought my son Isaac home from China about one year ago. I  know that for 20 or 21 months, a family sponsored him and met his needs while we were working to adopt him.” We got to stand Gretchen and her daughter, Emily, up to thank the 13 family’s who chose to sponsor a Holt child at our San Antonio event! Here are a few of our Secret Keeper Girls checking out the pictures of children available for sponsorship at our Holt table…

Hey, see if you can find your face in this massive crowd of moms and daughters being mesmerized by Suzy’s great story-telling. IF YOU DO…post a comment and we’ll send you one of our four Secret Keeper Girl fiction books absolutely FREE! Be sure to tell your friends if you see them, because they’ll get a free book, too! Don’t see yourself in this photo? No worries. There’s always free stuff at secretkeepergirl.com. Post a comment on our May 1st blog entry for a chance to win a Mother/Daughter summer reading box to be shipped June 1st.

 Book giveaway is good until May 31st!

Secret Keeper Girls in Wichita Falls, TX celebrated Mother’s Day by choosing to follow the truth. Moms got one of the best gifts in the world: daughters who believe that they are masterpieces created by God, who desire to dress modestly and who do not let the world determine their value.   I talked to my mom that day and asked her what brings her the most joy.  She said that is when her daughters desire to please the Lord with their whole life. If she could choose any Mother’s Day present it would be to spend the day with her daughters.  (I unfortunately only created her a mug with pictures.) Starting that connection on Mother’s Day weekend is the best Mother’s Day gift a mom could ever have. Being able to watch their daughters soak up the truth and speak love and truth into their lives surpasses any mug with pictures on it! I hope you all had a Mother’s Day as great as those moms in Wichita Falls. Check out the pictures of these Mother daughter moments. 

Posted by Dannah Gresh, Creator of Secret Keeper Girl

Miss California, Carrie Prejean, has taken a lot of hits from the secular media since standing up for a traditional, biblical view of marriage at the Miss USA Pageant last month. What she did not expect was for the Christian media to also blast her, citing immodesty and breast enhancement. (You know full well the views I have on modesty and body image. As for beauty pagaents, that’s an entirely different issue for another day.) On May 12, I was invited to add my voice to the crowd on Chris Fabry Live! It wasn’t my first invitation, but the first that I accepted because this is an extremely complicated discussion occurring in our culture right now. Dr. James Dobson, who had just hosted Miss California on two days of his program, spoke first, defending his choice to host her. Some stations across the nation boycotted the shows, and I was invited to discuss this opposite Jennifer Hayden Epperson, a manager who refused to air the show from her station.

I believe that the greater issues at hand in Carrie’s controversy is marriage and the body of Christ’s presentation to a lost world. No doubt sin (like Carrie’s immodesty) is the Achilles’ heel of the body of Christ. Many secular mediums have criticized her for being hypocritical in embracing biblical standards regarding marriage, but not in terms of beauty and modesty. Her sexual photos and body enhancement have hurt her message. And she knows that. Yes, sin is our Achilles’ heel. Our precious Carrie Prejeans and Bristol Palins remind us of this fact. But the answer is not in silencing them. The world MUST see us forgiving them and standing with them, not “shooting our wounded.” Carrie Prejean risked her dreams to defend Biblical truth. She did a brave thing and deserves to be applauded and supported (though not placed on a pedastool of perfection). What have I risked to defend marriage? What have you risked to defend marriage? And if we did, what weaknesses might the left-wing find to bury us under? Without a doubt, I am a die-hard modesty chick, and I’d love to have the chance to just talk with Carrie about her responsibility to the minds of men, and to the girls who aspire to be beautiful like her. But I don’t think that boycotting her is the answer. It does more harm to our message than letting her have a voice.

I can teach my fifteen year old daughters using Carrie’s story, flawed as it may be. The twenty-one year old has stated that she is sorry that she posed for some of the more sensual photos. There is an unfortunate learning curve happening right before our daughter’s eyes. We can talk to our daughters about this. We can say: “Miss California IS a hero for standing up for biblical marriage. She is standing strong for truth. I want you to be strong like that. Along the way, this brave woman is learning that some decisions she made concerning modesty and beauty weren’t good, and she regrets them because they make her voice less credible. She’s learning in a painful way.” That is what we can show our daughters. If we have done our jobs well, they will still embrace modesty and see the harm of failing to do so. (And, if one of my girls turns out to be HALF as courageous in defending biblical truth as Carrie, I’ll be one blessed mama!)

But boycotting Miss California sends a message to a lost world that you have to be perfect to be a spokesperson for God’s truth. I’m not sure we’d have anyone left standing if that were true.

David?Esther?

Me?

You?

Listen in to  Chris Fabry Live! Then tell me: what do you think about Carrie Prejean and modesty?

P.S. For a great balanced article on this situation go to The Baptist Press.

In our travels we often come across a little girl who has been rescued by the work of Holt International, our Secret Keeper Girl Tour sponsor.  In Allen, TX we did! Her name is Gabby.  She was adopted through Holt International 12 and half years ago. Gabby was born in China and lived in a foster home until a family in the United States adopted her when she was 14 months old. She does not remember anything from her life in China but when she was in 5^th grade she got the opportunity to go back to China and meet her foster family.  When I asked her what was the highlight from that time in China she said that it was spending time in the orphanage holding the little babies.  Gabby is just one example of lives changed through Holt! I am continually amazed by how God weaves, constructs, and crafts everything together in His perfect plan.  God brought Gabby all the way from China to bless a family in America and to use that family to teach her more about Him. Holt International was there to make this happen. (To learn more about Holt, you can visit their website.) The SKG team loves hearing stories of how big our God is! Here are a couple pictures of Gabby. Fun fact: she loves to shake people’s hands!

We had a great time in Allen, TX. Thank you for your many demonstrations of southern hospitality.  I especially want to thank Mary Freeman and her family for providing a home away from home for me, Kelly, as I rested between SKG events.  Thanks to them I got to experience the highlights of Allen; shopping, coffee, and kolaches!

If this photo doesn’t get your attention, I don’t know what will!

I found the photo today at momdot. It was posted by a mom who took the photo on a playground a few months ago. You can read her story of how the photo was taken and maybe weigh in on the public discussion. I did. I simply HAD to respond to the blogger who thought it was perfectly OK that this little girl was wearing a thong and wrote: 

“Where do you people get this idea that every second guy is a pedo? Do you want to know what is sexualising our kids? . . its this type of paranoid delusional thinking, thats what sexualises our kids. One commenter mentioned how she dosent allow her daughter to wear a bikini and she must cover up . . . . . what information does your daughter get out of a decision like that? . . . she would imediately think that shes some kind of sex object. What signals are you giving to your kids by being this paranoid?Never in the history of humanity have kids been so safe as right now.The drawbacks are, they dont play outside anymore, and they dont comunicate with adualts until they are about 18.Get over it people, the media plays on this subject daily and you all believe that your kids are in danger at every corner. Youre wrong. Freekin paranoid! . .” 

A lot of us moms who gather here have similar views about modesty. What we cannot forget is that we MUST influence moms like this one or our daughters won’t have much in the way of positive peer pressure to support our preference for modesty. (What little positive peer pressure is left!) I encourage you to log onto momdot.com and comment. Here’s what I wrote to Allison:

Unfortunately, Allison (comment 50) is writing out of extreme naivete and lack of information. In 2007, the American Psychological Association release a report on the sexualization of girls. Their findings strongly indicate that little girls who are allowed to grow up too fast by wearing make-up, thongs and other sexy clothing that make them look 17… tend to be more likely to be sexually active at a younger age, experience eating disorders and suffer depression as teenagers. Sadly, in 2003, parents of 7-12 year olds spent $1.6 million on thong underwear for their little girls. That has to be stopped along with the other stuff the fashion industry is doing to our girls. Let’s fight for them to be little girls for as long as they can be! It works better for them.  

Let me remind you that I’m doing something about this and I need your help. I’m collecting the signatures of moms who want to send a message to the fashion industry to STOP sexualizing our girls. I’m up to 7,692 signatures and I need MORE! Please take a moment today to ask a few of your friends to stop by our Bod Squad Petition and add their name! If you’ve lost your energy for it…take one more look at this…

P.S. Remember to register for the Summer Reading Box Giveaway posted on May 1st! 

Posted by Dannah Gresh, Creator of Secret Keeper Girl My husband knocked my socks off with a surprise trip to New York City to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary. Not just any old trip, but a “themed” trip. The theme was a secret and he was going to offer me clues the day before we left. On that Monday morning, he showed up at my bedside at 7am with Starbucks. He said: “I got you a tall caramel machiatto. Does that mean anything to you?” I sat up straight in bed: “It’s the drink that Meg Ryan orders in You’ve Got Mail!” He didn’t expect me to get it so quickly. He had this prepared in case I never did get it:

He took me to every romantic site in the movie. (I can’t tell you too much because I’m going to blog about the details for our teen bloggers at lies young women believe dot com.) But suffice it to say that it was the most romantic 20th anniversary celebration you can imagine! He posted photos on his facebook page as we experienced it, and friends were all grumbling about how hard they’d have to work now that their wives have heard of this romantic celebration! (He tried to make it go down a bit easier by sharing that he almost chose “Space Balls” as the movie!)

Below we are at the grande finale of our celebration. He took me to a little restaurant across the Brooklyn Bridge called  The River Cafe. It was perfectly wonderful. The flowers in this place were immaculate. Bob told me that the restaurant had their own florist on site to make special arrangements. We sipped on lime sodas at the bar and waited for our seat by the window to overlook Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. It was worth the wait. When we got to our table instead of a lavish center-piece, I was greeted by a bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils! I cried! In the first scene of You’ve Got Mail, Tom Hanks tells Meg Ryan that he’d like to bring her a “freshly sharpened bouquet of pencils.” It may just be the most romantic gift he’s ever given to me. More than this gift said, “I love you,” it said: “Dannah, I know you!”

It is good to be known. 

Here’s to twenty more if the Lord allows it!

Posted by Dannah Gresh, Creator of Secret Keeper Girl Many of you know (because you subscribe to our bi-monthly Pure Freedom mailing list) that I have been shopping for prom dresses with my daughter Lexi. The overwhelming influx of frustrated mom diatribe emails following that e-blast blew me away. So, I thought I’d bring the dialogue to you in a more public forum. Don’t have a teen? Not prom dress shopping? Remember rule #1 in teaching your daughter modesty: It’s never too early! Since this area of prom dresses is one that the normally modest teen equivocates, it’s a good idea to talk to your 8-12 year old about special occasion modesty. (By the way: I did SURVIVE prom dressing. Lexi and I met with success and I’ll post a photo of her in her beautiful dress next week after prom. So come back!) Until then, here’s my advice to every mom who hopes to survive prom season!

1.) Be Prepared to Invest More Into A Modest Gown

You aren’t going to find this dress on sale at Charlotte Russe. The cheaper the line, the more revealing the dresses seem to be. That seems to be the basic bottom line. So, be prepared to either put a little more money toward modesty or to invest the time to sew your own. This beautiful orange dress passes all my modesty standards, but costs $249.00 and is a special order at totallymodest.com.

Lexi is going less formal since she’s a freshman so we were looking for a short prom dress. I found this stunning white one at edressmeprom.com, but it’s $490.00. 

(Ironically, it’s sold out! The skimpy ones aren’t!) I learned quickly that modesty will cost me. Either I’ll have to find the money to invest in this dress or be prepared to invest the time to have it made for her.

2.) Involve Her Dad In The Final Vote

If you can, include dad in this decision. He’s a guy. He gets how these dresses impact a man’s mind. I asked Bob to help me communicate to Lexi my concern. He was blunt with her and nixed every single dress she’d picked. “That’s too short! That’s too low!” Here’s the best part: He doesn’t get upset about it. I do. His involvement will help us make a good final decision and it took the burden off of me. Don’t have a dad who will help? Ask a grandpa, brother or uncle!

3.) Show Your Daughter What the Parameters Are

It’s not enough to tell her. She needs to see it. I sent Lexi a long email with some sample dresses ranging in price from $100-200, which I’m willing to help her purchase. (My girls buy their own clothing with money they earn. That’s another blog on another day!) After she SAW what the parameters were, the options she brought to us were in line with our standards. (Before…not so much!) 

4.) Finally, keep reminding yourself that you are teaching her about a lot more than prom dresses.

This is a great teaching opportunity and though it is frustrating, your daughter will learn a lot on this process. Use it to encourage her to follow God’s best plan for her life no matter what everyone else is doing. You’ve taught her to be modest, but does that include everything but prom? If you cave in on this, what does that tell her about your other standards of purity? Can they be broken on certain occasions as well? Breaking the modesty rules for prom sends the message that we can try God’s truth on to see if it fits or not at the time. And that’s not how God’s truth works. It stands firm forever. Got your own prom dress ideas? Post ‘em here. And come back soon because I’m about to blog about SWIMWEAR! (Lord, help us all!) 

We got a lovely addition to our team Saturday in College Station! Stephanie Smith made a one day appearance with Secret Keeper Girl. She just finished the winter jam tour with Toby Mac and what an awesome time she had! Even still she was really looking forward to hangin’ with the team and being part of the message of Secret Keeper Girl once again. All of us: the team, the moms, and especially the girls loved having Stephanie Smith around for the afternoon. If you want to learn more about her go to Stephanie’s official fan site.  

Thanks to Brittany and her team of volunteers for their help in making College Station a great event.  In order to be ready for the noon start time everyone had to be at the church by 6:30am! That is commitment to God’s message of beauty and modesty! Here are some of the highlights from the event. Oh, and P.S. We are all staying healthy and are keeping far away from the swine flu here in Texas!