Five things to do for your child:
by Rachel Snyder
ReceiveOffer someone the gift of giving to you. For once, let yourself be the one who receives. Receive a gift of helping hands, of food, of money, of love, of recognition. Sit back and accept a gift of tender loving care. Don’t argue, don’t refuse, don’t make excuses. Receive graciously and with gratitude. If you’ve always been a giver, now is the time for you to receive. Voice what you need. A tricycle? Clothing? Connections? A friend? Let down your defenses and your tough-gal exterior. Prepare to receive all that you deserve and know it will be provided. Let go of your white-knuckled, stressed-out grasp on life and let your palms fill with overflowing abundance. Someone wants to help you receive. Drop your foolish pride and tell him or her you’re willing. Willing and ready to receive.
“no one is going to love you if you don’t love yourself”
You’ve probably seen the words above countless times before. It’s one of those things that gets thrown around, usually when someone is in a down-and-out state and struggling to understand why he or she doesn’t feel loved. If they’re being said to you they can be painful, but the pain underlines a telling fact: those words are true. Whether or not you want to believe it, if you don’t love yourself, no one else can truly love you. Certainly you can be in relationships and experience varieties of emotions similar to love, but if you don’t love yourself, if you don’t respect yourself, I can guarantee you that no one else can really, truly love or respect you either. […]
by Peg O'Neill
Motherhood costs us. There’s no question about it. Parenthood requires sacrifice – not only financial, but also physical, emotional and in many other realms. For “older” mothers, this may be particularly true. The harmonic convergence of mid-life and raising young children creates numerous opportunities for growth, but also many challenges. Of course, most of us would agree that whatever the price, our kids are worth it. Whatever we pay in terms of lost sleep, delayed retirement, worry over aging parents while still raising our own families, and other costs, our lives are enriched in countless, priceless ways by our children. […]
by Patricia Cohen
For the first time, middle-aged men and women are the largest, most influential, and richest segment in the country. Floating somewhere between 40 and 64, they constitute one-third of the population and control nearly seventy percent of its net worth. In booms and recessions, a trillion-dollar economy feeds and fuels their needs, whims, and desires. Better-educated and healthier than their predecessors, these early and late midlifers are happier, more productive, and more involved than any other age group. Women are part of the first generation to enter their 40s and 50s after the feminist movement, and they have options that their mothers and grandmothers could barely imagine. […]
by Karen Hug-Nagy
The Winter of 2011-2012 has been what us Midwesterners would call tolerable, to date. Our weather has been mild and the kids haven’t had any snow days, yet! My kids are beginning to show some signs of maturity, yes, even at eleven years old, therefore our family activities have changed, too. […]
by Rachel Snyder
There comes a time when only soup will suffice. Your Nana’s homemade chicken soup. That tomato soup you always had with grilled cheese sandwiches when you were a kid. Thick, hearty minestrone that you get from the corner deli. Mulligatawny, zuppa di pesce, avoglomeno, menudo, borscht. Soup winds around your bones and finds its way into every nook and cranny of your soul and warms you from the inside out. Soup is as comfortable as a bear hug and twice as soothing. It quiets down cranky children and anxious adults and gets the thumbs-up when nothing else will do. When a sandwich is too much and a salad too little, soup hits the sweet spot. Steaming in bowls and mugs, tickling noses and warming hands, soup offers pure love in every spoonful and a meal in every can. For super-duper suppers, nothing satisfies like soup.
by Jamie Walters
Many of us have experienced, or are experiencing, a sort of radical rebirth, a reincarnation within this incarnation.
We’re living in uber-transformative times, so perhaps it comes as no surprise that transformation around us happens through transformation within us, even as circumstances seem to conspire to nudge us into that change. […]
by Andrea Lynn
I pretty much read any article I come across about older motherhood, so this one in my local paper of course caught my eye:
It all hit home to me. It is the story mom Julie Morris (a new mom at 41) and daughter Maggie Fisher, fast-forwarded to 18 years later. Maggie’s father, 71 when Maggie was born, died when she was still a little girl. The writer says:
“It made Morris consider her own mortality, too, and raise it with Maggie. “When she was 10, I had to sit down with her and ask, ‘If anything happens to me, what would you like to happen to you,’ It was a pretty hard moment for her.” Oh, my death fears. Don’t get me started. […]
by Valerie Gillies
“I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future – the timelessness of the rocks and the hills – all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.”
― Andrew Wyeth 
I hate the cold, with a passion. Spring, summer, and early autumn, with their warmth and lushness and never-ending sounds, are my times. No matter how hard I try to reframe it, I loathe winter for its dark, bitter bleakness. […]