Image by: catdancing on Flickr Licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 Wow, December first already. A side benefit of this "Just for Today Challenge" is that one day a week, I know what the date is. But no, knowing what the date is was not my own challenge for this week. This week, I was going [...]
Posts under ‘self care’
Sabbath
Image credit: Photo by Vanessa Pike-Russell on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons Spiritual inspiration can come from the oddest bits of serendipity. I was at a talk a few months ago by a Zen Buddhist who talked about making each moment sacred, about how we could light incense before doing the dishes and make the [...]
Party Pooper
Image credit: Photo by jennifer buehrer on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons I'm a party pooper. I'm a downer. I'm no fun. I ruin other people's good times. (Because I totally have control over other people's good times, you know.) You see, yesterday Mark and I had plans to take the kids to a pumpkin [...]
Spontaneity
Image credit: Photo by indoloony on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons A few months after I first met Mark in college, we ran into each other in a campus dining hall. As we chatted, he admired my high school class ring. I held my hand out to let him see it more closely, and peering [...]
Summer Vacation
Image credit: Photo by emdot on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons There is a parable in the book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People about a person who works harder and harder to saw down a tree because of a perception that there is no time to stop, take a break and sharpen the saw. [...]
Summer Solitude
Image credit: Photo by photo71 on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons I'm not one to keep busy during the summer, at least not in the sense of running the kids from place to place, activity to activity. Yet, not being busy — whether inside inside the house playing board games or (more often) just keeping [...]
Caring for Myself
Image credit: Photo by hyperbolic pants explosion on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons There's a picture of me somewhere, when my son was a few months old, sitting at the computer and uploading pictures of him to share. I got lots of advice to sleep when the baby slept. I was told by plenty of [...]
Asking for What I Need
Image credit: Photo by c@rljones on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons Earlier this week, I had a rough morning with my daughter, my son was sick, I had an IEP meeting scheduled (those of you who don't know what that is, be glad you don't) and on top of it all, I couldn't find a [...]
Finding a Babysitter for a Special Needs Child
Image credit: Photo by kandyjaxx on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons When my son Austen was two, my husband disclosed his addiction and spent a morning on the phone desperately looking for a marriage therapist willing to see us on a weekend. But once we had that appointment, having no family nearby, we had to [...]
Learning to Say No
I am getting better at saying no, when I mean no, but it's still an area where I have a lot of work to do. Saying "yes" to requests is like a reflex to me. Tap my knee and my foot bounces up, ask me for help and I say, "Yes." Oops. Wait. Let me [...]
