Encouragement

The holidays for our family, like most families, are a little manic. From the time we carve the turkey on Thanksgiving day until we cut the King Cake on 12th night, we are filled to the brim with family events, eating, running from here to there, more eating, staying off schedule, not keeping up with laundry, opening presents, still more food, and lack of sleep. By the time mid-January rolls around (I'm a resolution procrastinator), I'm ready to get my life in order by de-cluttering, refocusing, and de-stressing. This is usually when I detox. I don't mean the celebrity detox where you drink cayenne water for 3 days. I'm speaking of a life cleanse. To cleanse means to rid yourself of things that...

Between spending more time indoors, the holidays, sentimental Christmas music, and extra glasses of wine that tend to accompany the latter weeks of December,  I tend to spend a good portion of my thought life reflecting on the past year. This particular year has been eventful to say the least. Our family started and finished construction on a new home and we started a new business. On top of "mom"ing, "wife"ing, and blogging, I'm feeling somewhere in the middle of frazzled and tired. These feelings led me to my current state of mind which could be described in one word, "unresolved." I started to wonder how I could top this year (NO, MOM, I'm NOT having another baby). Basically I've gone from one day to the next not really living in the moment.  Instead...

I don't breathe deeply enough. "Take a deep breath" is so easy to ignore when I'm going or planning or worrying or cooking or working or feeding or cleaning or driving or... you can fill in the blank. I need this air to live and most of the time I'm breathing so shallow, not taking enough of it in. That's not good. We're supposed to breathe deeply to calm down and even to manage pain and I HAVE to do it to survive, so how can I forget to just do it better? One quick Google search and I find this. (I did NOT know there was an American Institute of Stress! Cool.) So, I'm sitting here, writing, taking some deep...

I am not a child of divorce, but my son is. This is a lifestyle that has become new and unfamiliar to me. Heartbreaking at times. It has its moments. I am learning as the years go by. It’s not the life I would have wished for my child to experience, but it is the life I chose for him, for us. We persevere. We share the holidays. For my son, this is all he knows. His parents were divorced when he was an infant. So he has always had two families; it’s what he knows and it’s all he remembers. So as the temperature drops and I begin hear the jingle of the music, I anticipate the reminder of what his...

I watched her little girl running around our living room while I held my newborn, so still. She grabbed for everything I had on the coffee table. And tried to eat it. She hit her head on a piece of furniture when she fell. Her mom followed behind her, sometimes getting ahead of the action just in time to avoid disaster. She never sat down (neither of them). In the first five minutes, I found out that my living room was far from baby-proof AND that I never wanted my newborn to grow up. I would never be ready. It was The New Baby Visit. The first of my close friends to have a child had come to my house...