Grateful for All of Our Spring Chaos

The past few weeks have been spring chaos around our house. Don’t worry. There were no fires or life threatening emergencies. Alan was out of town for two weeks. He traveled all over the place and had his own cool adventures, to include meeting a group of Rosie Riveters from World War II and ringing the gong at the European stock exchange, Euronext. But this chaos isn’t about him. It’s about me over here, eighteen years into parenting, still struggling like a fly in a spiderweb. Last week, I was wriggling all over the place. Things kept happening the past […]

Day 24 of the Decluttering Challenge: Outdoor Storage

For day twenty-four of the thirty day decluttering challenge, we are tackling those outdoor storage areas. Full disclosure, I do not like cleaning out a shed in the cold, so I picked out four storage bins that are air-tight and plastic (so I knew there were no critters aboard), and brought them inside to work on. You may not have a shed, but this could be any storage area. It could be a carport, storage room, attic, garage, or whatever you have. If you have anything other than outdoor equipment in your outdoor storage shed, then you are in my […]

Day 13 Decluttering Challenge: 27 Fling Boogie for Your Desk

Welcome back to the 30 Day Decluttering Challenge! I hope y’all are having fun with this. Today we are doing a 27 Fling Boogie on our desk, or home office work space. Wherever you sit and do your computer work or pay your bills, that is where we want to focus. I wrote about this at greater length before. You can find that here. Today we are going to do that same task, but we are going to do our 27 Fling Boogie slightly differently. In my previous post, we put everything in one bag and sorted it at the […]

When You Don’t Know if You’re Moving Or Not

There are, unfortunately, times in life when you don’t even know if you are moving or not. It reminds me of a few lines of Dr. Seuss. “I’m sorry to say so, but sadly it’s true, that bang-ups and hang-ups can happen to you…” We are indeed in that dreaded place, “the waiting place, for people just waiting.” If you do not know these Dr. Seuss references you must read Oh, the Places You’ll Go! ***When you purchase through Amazon links on my website, I do collect advertising fees. But seriously, at least check that book out at the library.*** […]

Good Reasons Not to Fret Over all the World’s Problems

This article is the second part of my series on Handling Stress. As I mentioned in my last post, Psalm 37 has always been a huge inspiration to me when I am going through a hard time. The very first two verses of Psalm 37 remind us not to fret because of the evil we see in the world. Evildoers will soon fade like the grass. All these problems and people are temporary. Life on earth is temporary. I feel like this is God telling us to chill and to stop freaking out. This is funny to me because honestly […]

37 Tips for Handling Stress (The Stressed Out Series)

Welcome, to my new series on the blog: The Stressed Out Series. If you have been here before, you know the theme of our summer was moving. Actually, the theme of the whole first half of the year was moving. Now we are moving on to the theme of stress management, because as it turns out if the theme of your year is moving, stress is going to come along too. Most of the boxes are unpacked, but I still have not found JD’s clothes, the scale, or my Fitbit charger, just to name a few. School has already begun, […]

5 Reasons to Not Take Yourself so Seriously

Today I realized something important. I have been taking myself too seriously. Do you ever do that? Have you ever been in the middle of a personal crisis and suddenly realized, “Wait a minute. I need to chill.” Life does not have to be a serious, sad thing. Instead, let life be what you want it to be. Yes, we have had a hard summer, but I have to remember that it is also still funny. This week lots of funny things happened, and I did not laugh at any of them! Have you ever had a phase like that? […]