From the category archives:

Personal Development

Tracking Your Daily Habits

6.18.10
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As bad as I am at keeping to a schedule, I am inexplicably drawn to creating them. I love calendars and check-lists and all forms of organizers. One type of schedule that has really helped me lately is my Daily Habits List, which you can download free right here.

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Stepping Back

6.5.10

My number one goal right now is to be a better role model for my kids. Part of that means being a better me, and part of it means letting go of some things that simply didn’t add much to any of our lives. So the blogging mojo? I actually feel it coming back now that I’ve let go of the pressure on myself. For the time being, I think I just might have found the elusive balance.

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Melancholy

4.30.10

I recently took an online personality/temperament test after talking with a friend about a more advanced (and IRL) version of the test that she had taken which helped her to better understand and relate to her family members. I’m a big fan of self-analysis, so I Googled and found this test.

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Growing As a Parent: Revisit the Past

4.3.10
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Last week, I went through my old blog, PHAT Mommy, and pulled out the posts I wanted to import into this blog. I wanted to choose the most important posts that told the story of my life over my past 5 years of blogging. What I thought would be blog maintenance “busy work” turned out to be a very enlightening experience.

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Mom-Improvement Monday

3.29.10

Welcome to “Mom-Improvement Monday.” Each week I’ll be highlighting my favorite blog posts that inspire us to be the parents we want our kids to become.

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Achieve Anything In Just One Year

3.19.10
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I’m reading a great book (in between my ferocious consumption of The Hunger Games and Catching Fire) called Achieve Anything In Just One Year. It calls itself, “The last self-improvement book you’ll ever need!”

And it just might be.

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Oops, I Did It Again

3.8.10
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This is my new home. Join me. Because I love this place. Because blogging is powerful and inspiring and helps us connect and grow. And because I need you all — family, real-life friends, online friends — to support me, as I hope to support you, on the journey to “mom-improvement.”

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Four Reasons I Got Teary-Eyed at Blissdom

2.9.10

This past weekend I was in Nashville for the Blissdom blogging conference and my trip was full of emotional ups and downs. Here are four reasons why I got weepy at Blissdom.

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Routine and Responsibility: Musings

1.23.10
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While I know where I stand on my schooling philosophy, the “responsibility and routine” theme of our conversation kept haunting me. My kids have responsibilities (that don’t involve specific schoolwork), but they don’t have a routine.

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My #1 Parenting Tip: Shut Up!

1.16.10
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Yelling has never gotten me anywhere in my parenting. Talking to my kids, reasoning (don’t you see that this behavior only gets you in trouble?), and negotiating has not solved one problem. Ever. What has gotten results?

Shutting the hell up.

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Zen In Ten

1.2.10
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It’s all about focus for me this year. No more plowing along, deepening the rut I’ve been in. If there’s one thing this year has taught me, corny as it may sound, it’s that everything in your life can change in an instant. Make the most of now.

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The Mom In The Mirror

11.18.09
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I think a lot about how my children are a mirror of myself. I think this is one of the most profound things about being a parent. I have stood, slack-jawed and wide-eyed, looking at my son and thinking, “I do that. How can I help him NOT to act a certain way when I act that way all the time?” And I am at a loss.

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I’m a Strange Breed

8.14.09

I used to envy people who discovered their passion early in life and ambitiously drove toward success. That’s the kind of person I see myself as, but my life hasn’t worked out that way. I waffle, search, dip my toe in, then change direction. As I explore, I learn.

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How Did I Get HERE? Part III

5.17.07

Part I Part II In her post, Stop Trying to Find the Homeschooling Mom a Career, Mother Crone wrote, “I HAVE a career. I am a homeschooling mother, and I LOVE that career.” Her post was timely for me because I had been thinking the exact… opposite. As I read her words, filled with passion [...]

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How Did I Get HERE? Part II

5.13.07

Continued from here. I immersed myself in stay-at-home mom-dom. We had recently moved to a new town and I had no friends, so I joined the local MOMS Club and immediately began taking on responsibilities. I designed our chapter’s web site, did the layout for the monthly newsletter. Soon I was V.P., and the next [...]

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How Did I Get HERE? Part I

5.10.07

This is the first of a series in which I will be revisiting the past 10 years and exploring that all-important question: What do I want to do with the rest of my life? It was the summer of 1996. I had recently left my job covering IPOs for Bloomberg Financial Markets so I could [...]

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