just confessed to my husband that I blogged about “Working with my DH”: http://ping.fm/vklmZ

Really accountable now to VERY public new year’s resolutions- my STS blog & http://ping.fm/zGPQj (#21) – add your own in comments!

Pls nominate the FANTASTIC Savor the Success site (www.savorthesuccess.com) for Niche Social Network in the Open Web Awards: http://ping.fm/nBrEP

Looking into donation options for my corporate holiday gifts – so excited to do something more meaningful than fruit! GlobalGiving, Kiva, or DonorsChoose in consideration.

I met Lynn Colwell through a social networking site (Savor the Success), where we are both “official” bloggers. Together with her daughter Corey, Lynn has self-published a great new book: Celebrate Green!

I don’t know about you, but I for one have been increasingly attentive to trying to live more “green” in the last couple of years. A couple examples:

• My husband can’t stand grocery shopping with me because I shop by reading the ingredients on the back to determine how natural and/or organic an item is. Needless to say, unless it’s something I regularly buy, all that ingredient-checking really slows me down. But it makes a huge difference – when I first started avoiding processed ingredients and “natural” corn syrup, that alone made me drop pounds. And I’m so unaccustomed to processed stuff now that indulging in a soda or a few meals out have a direct physical impact. (A side note: My husband recently begged me to buy Hot Pockets so he would have something to snack on. After trying 3 kinds he admitted they sucked (ha ha told you so). Kashi dinners are the only frozen meals in the freezer now.)
• We recycle – and having a second bin for recycling was seriously the make or break feature when we shopped for our kitchen cabinets.
• I live for June – because that’s when my favorite farmer’s market opens. Buying local, and my girls love to play hide-and-seek for the resident cats.
• I hijacked the thermostat in my house to save energy. Adjusting the temperature settings saved us money to boot!

Anyway, I have to admit that while I try to do my part and certainly advise others to eat more naturally because of the impact I’ve felt on my own health, I’d hardly consider myself a full-out eco-star.

Honestly I feel a little inadequate when I’m around women/moms who I KNOW are more devoted than me to living green. But the reality is that there is only so much time and money to go around, especially in a WAHM’s world. Sometimes life requires compromises.

My point: this is where Celebrate Green! succeeds so tremendously. The authors don’t preach – you implicitly understand that THEY UNDERSTAND. It’s not eco-guilt-inducing, but ECO-INSPIRING.

Lynn and Corey write conversationally – you feel like you’re learning over a cup of coffee with them. Tips are simple, easy-to-do, and backed by interesting and enlightening statistics. They walk you through ways to transform a year’s worth of holiday celebrations into opportunities to celebrate the earth – in addition to the holiday. And they make you understand that it’s okay to change just a little – because you are still changing, and are that much more aware.

It would be impossible for me to pick just a few tips from the many in the book – but the great thing I noticed is that after reading just a bit of it, I was already inspired to start thinking in a more green mindset. For instance:

• I don’t think I will ever buy another roll of wrapping paper. For one thing, I have about a million gift bags I’ve saved to recycle when I give gifts. And even though I only get the business weekly paper and the Sunday local paper, we always have a ton of newspaper – and my daughter loves to stamp and decorate so why not let her be creative!
• I had a party last weekend and needed to package “goody bags” as my daughter says. I was going to buy something to put the gifts in, but after reading the book: why? I found some medium-sized brown paper bags (from the farmer’s market!) and had my daughter decorate each one with a unique “work of art.”
• I bought recycled paper napkins instead of regular. (I try to use fabric, but realistically the paper kind are still needed in our house.)
• I am REALLY going to try to remember to bring fabric bags and boxes to carry my groceries.

Anyway, this is a fantastic book and will be a wonderful gift. I’m looking forward to involving my 5-year-old in making some green holiday plans. I’m sure I will be ordering some books for my friends and family. And you couldn’t ask for a better fundraiser for a group with green ideals. Get your own now!

Last week my husband volunteered for an Honor Flight to Washington, DC. This meant he woke at 4am to leave and didn’t return until 10:30 at night. I know that on a typical day, I do more “family duties,” but having my husband go away for a full day – which rarely happens – reminded me that I am extremely lucky to have the husband I do.

While we have our share of problems and disagreements, and I do feel that I am made more responsible to keep the family rolling, I realized just how much he contributes.

Little things like how splitting kid duty in the morning are the things that keep us more or less on time. I got Sofia to daycare a full hour late that day, a snowball effect of having to get myself ready, then having to get her breakfast since she was too late for breakfast at daycare, cleaning up the kitchen and swigging a cup of coffee when I could.

Anyway, it continues to amaze me the number of moving parts that moms have to juggle. And I really don’t mean to discount dads, because in many cases, like mine, they contribute a lot. But I think we women are just wired differently. Men just don’t think about all the little requirements, all the little steps that go into making something whole. My husband flat out told me that if I wasn’t around, all those forms my daughter brings home from school just wouldn’t get filled out. He wouldn’t have the patience for it. I think most moms can relate to being the CEO of the family – we know:

• when the doctor and dentist appointments are, the fieldtrips, the “sharing days” at school,
• if daycare’s been paid,
• who needs more clean clothes,
• who’s out of pants that fit due to a growth spurt (and exactly what size they wear),
• cycling in the seasonal (or outgrown) closet change,
• what food is in the cupboard and fridge, and where’s the cheapest place to get the staples without trading off on nutritional quality,
• how much calcium the baby’s been getting since she doesn’t like milk,
• when the vacuum filters need to be cleaned out,
• when the bills are due,
• how much money’s in the bank and owed on credit cards,
• where the [fill in any blank] forms are…etc.

I’m sure there are many dads who are up on these things – but I’m sure they don’t run through the list in their head like a litany and worry about the things not done. I sure wish I could turn that off from time to time. 

And for us WAHMs, we’re often CEO of the family and of a business if we have our own business. God bless single moms (and dads!) and those whose spouses are often away. My hat off to them because it takes particular strength to parent on your own. But hats off to ALL parents, who figure out their own ways to get through each day and week while growing strong kids.

I’ve decided to take a different approach to this blog – since I have been getting here SO rarely to write. The reason is that I have a million topics in my mind at any given moment and I can’t decide what to write or feel like I have enough time to do the topic justice.

Out the window with all that. I’m just going to stop here when the mood strikes – and write what brief thought is on my mind at that moment. Over time, some kind of overall understanding will coalesce.

Right now: what’s on my mind is something my husband told me this weekend. Words I never expected to hear him utter since ordinarily he puts up a fight to prove that he does as much or more as me around the house and for the family.

He admitted that I do twice as much as him to keep the family rolling smoothly.

I couldn’t believe my ears, but I saw the sincerety in his face. I hope he will realize how much that means to me, and that giving credit and showing appreciation for all the little things I am doing and keeping track of every day really has a huge effect on me. Here I am 3 days later still thinking about it and grasping onto it as proof that despite my feeling “not good enough” so often, I really DO accomplish a lot. And someone notices.

[It does bear mentioning that my 5-year-old daughter notices all the time. Her affirmations help so much too. How cute is it to hear your daughter say, when pretending to be mother to her baby doll, "It's hard work to be a mommy." And when I ask her why, she mentions several of the things she sees that I must do to take care of her, her baby sister, and the house. So incredibly insightful for a kindergartner, and even as a preschooler she said it.]

Help give away $80,000 – Squidoo: http://ping.fm/57aIl passing the good tweet forward, do the same!…

So as you can tell if you look at the dates on the previous entries here, it has been AGES since I last wrote.

Well, I am making a new commitment to me. Something I think all women (especially moms) struggle with is making time for themselves. It’s perhaps even harder for us WAHMs who are already at a disadvantage because of the relative lack of boundaries between work and life. It’s already hard enough to keep work hours separate from family hours. Ask us to somehow build in time for ourselves and you’re likely to hear a dismissive “whatever” or an exasperated “maybe with an extra 12 hours in the day!”

I’m going to make a real effort to say enough is enough. This blog and you readers (well hopefully I’ll get some readers soon!) will be an outlet for me. I love to write. So writing for myself will truly be a joy. And here I will unabashedly be myself. I won’t have to put on a professional face as if I’m doing something for the business. And I can ooh and ahh over my kids to my heart’s delight.

Once I start to get good at the “making time for me” thing, I’ll hopefully be able to do such beauteous things as go out with friends, draw and paint, read for pleasure (and not just the coupon pages from the Sunday paper).

September seems the perfect time for a new beginning. It’s a second New Year. I’d love to have you join me and commit to yourself.

OK, So it’s been ages since my last (and only) post. I’m not going to judge myself! Not time for that when you’re juggling so many balls.

Anyway, this is just a quick post to remind us of the joy in little things. Here it it 9:30 at night. My husband and I of course are sitting at our computers in the office working. The baby? Asleep upstairs. The 4-year-old? Well, I confess neither one of us has been motivated to get her ready for bed yet as we try to finish work tasks.

So, what’s she doing instead? …Going crazy dancing to “the Hamster Dance”!

And watching her huge smile of unadulterated joy just reminds me that sometimes we all should do the hamster dance. The tune is a little catchy. By the time my husband whisks her upstairs, we’ve all joined in singing and clapping.

Now, the word “unadulterated” gave me some pause when I re-read the sentence. It may not be the dictionary.com definition, but when you pair the adjective with “joy” as I have above, I wonder if you might be able to look at it from another perspective – joy experienced without all the “adult”-erating of life. We spend our childhoods yearning to be adults, and as adults allow so much else (worries, duties, stress) to enter in and muddy it all up.

“Unadulterated Joy” – take a moment to “un-adult” yourself every once in a while and remember the pure child-like joy of the many beautiful moments in life – even if it involves the Hamster Dance.