"And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years."--Abraham Lincoln

Okay, well I sooooo overdid it today!  Today, I woke up, did weight-lifting, went swimming with the girls, did a walk/run in the woods on my own, and then watched the kids play and ride bikes outside.  I don’t know why I did it.  Actually, I DO know why….the weather is so beautiful out, especially for November.  When I walked outside today, it just smelled alive.  My heart skipped a beat.  I knew I was in trouble right then.  How can it be possible to have such a lovely day here in November?  The squirrels are scurrying around gathering nuts.  The Canadian geese are stopped at tiny pools of water all around our area, resting as they make their way south.  The signs are all around that the colder weather is on its way.

Weekly Focus Tip--Positive and Negative Messages

One of this week's family focus tips we are trying this week comes from William Gladwell Foundation's booklet, "Building Family Communication (Family Matters) published just this year.  We are focusing on positive and negative verbal and non-verbal messages that family group members convey to one another and why it helps to build a more fabulous family when we increase positive messages and decrease negative messages.  Here are a few quick guidelines that we are trying to keep in mind as a family this week:

“To be effective in a close-knit group such as a family, communication must be believable and trustworthy.  When someone avoids the truth, he or she loses the respect of the others….All family members must be open, candid and trustworthy.”

Football and Pizza!

Gorgeous weather for November--a bit crazy after a snowstorm in October!  After raking leaves we were all set to do our family activity.  Last week, my husband had been picked to be the first one to choose a family activity and he chose a football-watching and pizza-making evening.  The big game started at 4:00, right when my daughter had a soccer game.  What to do, what to do...


(This post also filed under "Family Activities").

Family Meeting Two (Day 8)

The kids actually asked to have our team meeting this Sunday. I’m taking that as a good sign! I came armed with “star charts” and information from the little book, Building Family Communication by the William Gladden Foundation, just published this year. (A review of this booklet can be found in my blog’s Family Resource Reviews section). Before we even sat down at the table, someone had found the “talking spoon” and my daughter had tacked up a huge sheet of paper for our discussions. We discussed upcoming weekly events, positive achievements that each person had this week, reviewed our use of the word “BACON” to halt arguments during our meeting time, and then discussed positive and negative verbal and non-verbal messages based on the Gladden book. Then, we got down to the nitty-gritty. It went a little bit like this, more or less:
MOM: Okay, let’s start with our next item: Positive Family Achievements. Five minutes.
LIZA: Well, we behaved at the football game last night.

Maybe She'll Forget By Then...

So last weekend, my husband took me out for my birthday. That was exactly what I wanted—to just go out together as a couple, and another time as a family (which we'd already done earlier in the month), to do something special together. Due to the Great Recession, we don't go out much at all.  He had found cheap tickets to a local musical and decided to surprise me with them. That was the best gift right there!  He even arranged for his mother to watch our kids--at her place. His mother is a little round Italian woman with a very eccentric personality, much like most of my husband's large, very extended family on his mother's side (and when I mean very extended, I mean we see third and fourth cousins in his family fairly regularly).

Figuring Out How to Manage Holiday Stress

This is my stress-reliever picture for today!  As the calendar turns to November and the holidays move closer, I can already feel my stress level climbing.  I love the holidays.  I love all the family time and beauty that the holidays bring.  I love all the connections and memories the holidays can make for people.  It's all the planning that stresses me out!  This is definitely something I'm going to want to explore these next two months--how to lower holiday stress and how to focus on meaningful family connections.  For now, I'm just going to look at pictures of my favorite places! 

When It's Okay to Lie...

I think that when you’re late getting to your son’s “Halloween Costume Parade” around the outside of his school because someone in your house took your hairspray....and once you find it in a pumpkin basket in the family room (how did it get there…???), you realize that you had mistakenly put down the all-important camera during your panic-filled search through the house….And, when you find the camera, hairspray your hair, and run out to the car, you realize that the gas tank gauge is past “Empty”...