Never Really Alone
The other night, for the umpteenth time in the past few months, I woke up on the floor in my boys’ room at midnight where I had fallen asleep in the middle of putting kids to bed. Cramped, drooling, disoriented, I dragged myself to my own bed, where I collapsed for a few more hours of rest before some small child might come creeping into my room. Sometimes one of the kids, suffering the ill effects of a bad dream, will snuggle under the covers, and I won’t even realize it until morning. Read more »
What should you do if you’re feeling stressed? A new study from the University of Wisconsin at Madison suggests that calling your mother on the phone can help. In a study of 7 to 12 year old girls, when placed under a stressful situation, girls who were able to speak to their mothers in person or on the phone had reduced stress hormones and increased oxytocin (a feel-good chemical) levels, compared to a group who watched a movie instead (the girls who watched a movie saw their stress 
I don’t mean to gloat, but I’m sitting here childless. No kids. Say it with me – No. Kids. Not to say that I don’t have kids. I have two beautiful daughters, ages three and six, whom I love with every fiber of my being. No, I definitely have kids; I just don’t have them right now. By some awesome aligning of planets my parents called up this morning and volunteered to take their grandchildren away for the weekend. It was one of those phone calls that we all dream of getting; much like the call from Publisher’s Clearinghouse to give us a 
During the day, see if you can detect the bloom of the present moment in every moment, the ordinary ones, the ‘in-between’ ones, even the hard ones. Work at allowing more things to unfold in your life without forcing them to happen and without rejecting the ones that don’t fit your idea of what ’should’ be happening. See if you can sense the ’spaces’ through which you might move with no effort… Notice how if you can make some time early in the day for being, with no agenda, it can change 
Have you ever tried to help someone, only to get overly emotionally involved in their problem? Before you know it, you are caught in the web of their drama, as your emotions escalate along with theirs, and then you are wondering how you got there? How about when your child is upset over something seemingly small, but then in a flash, you are just as upset, and there is a dramafest going on between you? 
I moved about two years ago, and I’ve been finding myself missing my old home town a lot lately (I think it has something to do with being super-pregnant, not being able to travel, and my new home town experiencing its coldest winter and hottest summer on record, as well as an uncharacteristic earthquake all while I’ve been pregnant…not to mention missing my friends, family, and my way of life in my old city. It may also be a sort of yearning for how “easy” my life was when I lived there 
Getting ready to have my second baby has given me flashbacks to the time before I had my first child. It’s amazing how much has changed since then. Primarily, my expectations about what having a child is like.
A new study from Brigham Young University finds that positive sibling relationships have an array of benefits for children. Professors Laura Padilla-Walker and James Harper found that positive relationships between siblings (regardless of the age difference between them) defend against depression, lower the risk of delinquency, and promote pro-social behaviors such as kindness and empathy. Sisters, in particular, were especially good at guarding against depression, perhaps 
What is it about summer that makes the days seem to move faster than the rest of the year? Is it the weather that we seem to wait the whole year for, and then somehow passes in the blink of an eye? Is it that school is out? Or that the days are longer and brighter? Or that we have so many plans and so little time to fit them into?
Living near the Gulf of Mexico for the past year has opened my eyes to the effects of natural and manmade disasters that are out of our control. Five years after Hurricane Katrina, many lots still sit vacant, save for concrete foundations of destroyed buildings. And now the oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon is causing more environmental and financial damage, the total of which won’t be known for years. There is a sense of powerlessness in the face of such destruction.