When I was growing up, there was nothing I loved more than walking through the Target aisles in early August filling up our shopping cart with everything shiny, pointy and new. Crayons, pencils and colored pencils all sharpened to perfection and markers ready to make their fresh, bold strokes on the page where my favorite. All those blank, wide open pages of mead notebook paper just waiting for their lines to be filled!

I'm not sure if the thrill of filling our cart was more about the promise of the new year, or holding something new and that was just mine. I literally could've spent hours curating my supplies. 

As we get back to school, I'm reminded of wandering Target aisles and remembering that I used to get a similar surge of adrenaline while embarking on a new eating "plan". 

All the diet/lifestyle "supplies" seemed fresh, new and exciting. A "protocol" that seemed equivalent to picking out fresh crayons because following this plan was going to lead to the promise of...

The cicada's evening chorus filled the dark night air as I opened the wash machine door for what seemed like the fiftieth time today. At least I had insect company as I stared down the two dozen plus freshly washed masks. 

If you’re anything like me, you almost forgot about wearing masks for the past two months of summer. Luckily, we were largely outdoors and with fully vaccinated friends or family so everyday didn’t feel like a maskmergency. It was my own joyful mask amnesia or masknesia as I like to say. My partial, not total, memory loss of daily mask wearing felt blissful. 

But, here we are, Delta variant on the rise or peaking in many areas of the country, school looming around the corner, breakthrough infections and cooler fall and winter temperatures on the horizon. 

My heart sank a little as I assessed my mask mother load. Don’t get me wrong, I love masks. If there was a community badge offered for civilians willing to remind people to put on...

My son looked at me with his striking hazel eyes after I offered him the option of a cookie or ice cream and he replied, “how about I have the cookie and the ice cream”. 

An hour earlier I gave the kids the option to leave the pool in ten minutes or twenty minutes and my older kids said “how about we stay here and walk home when we’re ready?”

Leave it to kids to remind you of the important life lessons that maybe there’s a third, viable option you haven’t considered. 

Like every parent out there, I’ve considered and used bribery, yelling, technology, threats and coercion, but lately I’ve been going back to good ol’ Love and Logic. One of the Love and Logic teachings is that the parent gives the child two options to choose from and the child gets to make the decision. The trick strategy is that the parent gives two options knowing that they’re ok with either option the child chooses. The child feels good...

Heart pounding with sweat dripping down my face, I grabbed for my water bottle as my legs slowed down. I love my twenty minute Peloton rides the mornings I can squeak them in before the daily chaos ensues. 

As class ends, Peloton shows you where you are on their “leaderboard”. I hate looking at this board along with the virtual high fives board (sorry, not sorry) during my class. Even though I close these boards while I ride, the leaderboard automatically pops back up at the end. It’s hard not to glance at the rankings as I close out the window on the touchscreen. I’m usually middle of the pack, but recently I noticed I was close to last. 

Hmmmm, I thought, as I wiped sweat from my body after an all out effort ride....that’s humbling. I don’t like feeling like I’m not good enough. My guess is that you, too, also don’t like this feeling yet tend to look for places where you don’t measure up. 

This got me thinking...