Just as some food allergies can cause delayed reactions that are hard to place, so are all the weirdnesses caused by sheltering in place wreaking havoc on my children’s emotions and their abilities to self-regulate. Take today, for example, when my 9-year-old smashed her iPad down onto the dining table at 10:13 a.m., shattering her…
priorities
Fall into Winter (again)
Although much has changed since this summer-fall recap post was originally written in December 2019, I’m backdating the post upon belated publication to reflect my reality at that time. —— When I look back on past Novembers when I did NaPoWriMo – National Poetry Writing Month – I love knowing that I found joy in…
On being recently separated
It’s been two and a half months since my husband and I separated and I moved into a nearby townhouse. After my initial sharing and the kind replies of support I received, I’ve since had a handful of “how are you doing?” questions. A few – most of the ones in person – have been…
On screens, suicide and surviving
It was a year ago that I got clear just how profoundly my brother’s suicide nearly 30 years earlier had affected my life. I’d started to think about its impact on my health when I read Donna Jackson Nakazawa’s The Last Best Cure in 2013 and, in July 2015, Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Biology…
Transformation and vision – big words, small steps
If I had to draw a picture of the past few months, it would be something like a tornado, all swirly and intense with flecks of debris scattered throughout. Edited to add: Curiously, the day after I originally published this post, I found I had accidentally taken a fuzzy swirling photo of my foot during…
Busy spring!
The first two weeks of May have been packed. The month started with a Clean Air Awareness event I helped to organize. It was successful and I hope will lead to more awareness about clean air habits, especially people turning off their cars while parked at school. That drives me crazy! The event went well…
Water me like a new lawn or watch me wither
My lawn and I have a lot in common. We both have struggled over the past several years, and we both require a lot of maintenance to thrive. When we first moved into this home that we fully renovated on the inside, there was no lawn. There were dozens – hundreds? – of baby oak…
What we teach our children, and ourselves
When I was halfway through my first pregnancy, I found myself startled to realize that I would be giving birth to a white male. After all the time I had spent teaching about race, gender and class privilege, I wondered how I could ensure that my son wouldn’t grow up feeling entitled. Last spring, as…
Behind the scenes with Jennifer Robins of Predominantly Paleo
It’s super exciting to watch a friend be as successful as Jennifer Robins of Predominantly Paleo blog and author of five cookbooks including the new Paleo Kids Cookbook that comes out on September 6. I met Jennifer when she came to a Holistic Moms meeting I organized with Stacy Toth of Paleo Parents as our…
Lab report & retort
If you don’t think blood test results from the lab are super exciting, I get it. It’s not like I expected to be distracted the entire afternoon by their bolded “high” numbers. I would have preferred to actually look at my children, to attend to them instead of breaking the rules about no screen time…
Declaring my love…for essential oils
Here is the post where I share that I am getting serious about incorporating essential oils into my family’s healing regimen. This time, it’s for real. I’ve been using essential oils for a long time and have been ordering them through a distributor since 2003! For a while, I built up a supply, loved some…
What I’ve Been Up To!
It was February the last time I wrote, in the wake of a Femworking meeting after which two members challenged me to think about what success means to me. Things have been moving a lot since then! I was also getting some coaching and working with a therapist, both of which helped me to integrate…
What would “success” look like
Today I was challenged to define success. This was at the end of a networking meeting, and I was spinning my wheels about what I’m trying to achieve with Mindful Healthy Life vs. what seems realistically possible given the commitments I have to my health, to my family, and to my community. Well, that was…
Missing the moment, and then not
When I saw the other parents in the room at my daughter’s last dance class of the session, I froze. What were they all doing in there? I was supposed to be on a phone call! I mean, I could have figured we might be invited in at the end of class, but from the…
Slippage
Whew, this month is kicking my behind. Or at least this week is. So much stuff to attend and cover, so much school stuff – all-day field trip Monday, two health committee meetings today. Business-building phone calls and interviews… Trying to build a team… I am waking early and exercising and writing. But I’m also…
Taking the message to heart
I had a wonderful time this weekend at the National Kids Yoga Conference. But I did end up missing the last hour so that I could heed the advice of Leah Kalish of Move with Me Yoga Adventures: to take care of yourself before your To-Do list. Or, well, maybe I kind of mixed them…
Getting my kids at home outside
“It takes me a while to get to stuff” would be an appropriate opening for at least a dozen blog posts I could write. One of them has to do with getting on the ball about making my kids at home in the outdoors and also getting at home in the garden. When we set…
What I did today
Today I did write before the kids got up, but nothing personal for here. So behold a partial accounting of my day. Today, I: wrote this play review about Hansel & Gretel put together this quick weekend preview of DC-area wellness events after some research, emails, texts and a phone call added this School Garden Meetup…
My Experience Wish-List
On my yoga mat this morning, I had that feeling you get when you are addicted to exercising and you have just gotten a hit of the drug. I had just spent 22 minutes on the elliptical, which I’ve done (or exceeded) nearly every day of late, except yesterday. It’s been regularly followed by yoga,…
Channeling the yoga class I didn’t take my kids to
This afternoon was pretty only with respect to the weather. The rest of it had lots of ugly moments, and buckets of tears from my five-year-old. No, I didn’t do yoga with my kids today, and we didn’t meditate together before bed or anything like that. But I did hold on to the imagined beauty…