Autumn.

This is officially my favorite time of year.*

Yep, when the leaves start falling, it feels like time to strap on the walking shoes.  Time for a little crunch action underfoot.  Put your kid in the stroller, grab an apple for Mr. I’m-too-big-for-a-stroller Preschooler and another for yourself, and get out there and enjoy the next month or so of gorgeousity.  The colors are intense and the air is a little crisp.  It feels really alive, yet when you get back home, your ears a little reddened by the slight bite of the wind that you never felt because you were too busy enjoying those rays of sunlight arching through the trees overhead, you feel really glad to be indoors again.  Glowing.  Completely alive.

There’s a reason this feels so good. Read the rest of this entry »

The Law of Attraction. You’ve probably heard of it.  It would be difficult not to have.  But … what is it, and how can you make it work for you to help you create the life you want?

A few weeks ago I was in Portland Oregon attending a Law of Attraction workshop given by Esther and Jerry Hicks.  Esther channels the entity called Abraham, and their material on the Law of Attraction forms the basis of what has become a huge empire for Esther and Jerry.

It also works. Here’s what you can take from it: Read the rest of this entry »

According to Time, “nearly half of Americans are concerned they may get sick from eating contaminated food and are avoiding items they normally would buy, an Associated Press -Ipsos poll has found.”

The salmonella outbreak in tomatoes and previous contaminated beef scares have consumers who took the poll in favor of a tracing system that will tell them where their food is coming from.
Read the rest of this entry »

Face it, we’re all busy and too often, some of us order out from the local Thai or Chinese food joint or pack the family up and head to dinner. I don’t know about your family but a trip to Boston Pizza usually costs us around $70 for the 4 of us and take-out Thai food around $50. We were doing each of these things about once a week, which added up to a whopping $480 a MONTH! That’s a lot of bills!

Read the rest of this entry »

When feel angry, or sad, or filled with anxious energy, one thing that really helps pull me out of that mood and into another is music. I forget sometimes how powerful music is, but our lives would be really dry and featureless without it.

Here are some of my favorites, and why: Read the rest of this entry »

One of the best books I read as a parent was Raising Your Spirited Child by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka. Not only did it show me ways of seeing my older son (and later, my subsequent children) that I hadn’t considered before, but it showed me things about myself and my little peccadillos that suddenly made them more acceptable and understandable than they had been before.

Both my kids and I are energetically sensitive to other people. You probably are too, but like me, may have walled off that part of yourself so that you can even function around other people and the moods and energies they bring to your space.

But kids, they haven’t developed those walls yet. Kids are incredibly open until they do so. And I’m not sure I even want my kids building too many walls, because eventually they will probably have to unbuild them again, something I am in the process of doing for myself right now.

So what do we do? How do people affect our kids and how can we help them with this? Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I got to thinking about gratitude as I watched the varying reactions of my kids to the gifts they received. Maybe it was a stretch to consider some of those reactions “gratitude,” (in my four-year-old, for example) but at the same time, why not? I think that gratitude, like, say, love, manifests in different ways.

I know it’s been said that it’s good to focus on things in our lives for which we are grateful, but sometimes I think this implies that we should feel grateful for things in our lives, for everything, that we should be looking for the good in everything. And every time I hear that word, “should”, I go sort of numb and feel like resisting. What if I’m not feeling particularly grateful just now? Does that imply I’m lacking somehow? I don’t think so; I think it just makes me human, you know? Read the rest of this entry »