Search Results for: blog making family your focus

Exercise Can Improve Your Ability to Parent

Everyone knows that getting regular exercise is important. Exercise helps you lose weight, tone muscle, and stay healthy. Did you know that exercise can actually improve your ability to parent your children? This revelation could give parents a whole new reason to start exercising. Stasia Bliss wrote an article at Liberty Voice about the many ways that exercise improves parenting. She notes that when you are exercising you are nourishing yourself. Personally, I see what she is suggesting as “me time”. When you are exercising, your entire focus is on yourself and what your body is doing. It is a … Continue reading →

Things You Should Do For Yourself Right Now

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Are you someone who makes an effort to help, comfort, and pamper your loved ones? It has been said that many people take much better care of their friends and family than they do of themselves. Typically, there are more women than men that have this tendency, but it does include both genders. Now is the time to start taking good care of yourself, too! Here are some things you can start with right this minute. LifeBuzz posted an article that contained 30 things that everyone should start doing for themselves. You can view it as a guide to better … Continue reading →

Balancing Blogging and Mothering

I squinted to make sense of scattered letters through the glare on my screen.  Focused attempts at deciphering HTML became distracted by bursts of giggling from the other side of my window.  Rejoicing from finally making a text box that scrolled, I missed a small excited voice asking me to “look at me”.  Dripping hair and sopping wet footsteps ran inside to beckon me to join their mini water park complete with a blow up monkey pool.  Promising just five more minutes I shooed away wet fingers from my computer.  Next I looked up and the time for sprinklers, popsicles, and water slides … Continue reading →

End the Year With Family Time

New Year’s Eve is the perfect time to take stock of your life and focus on how you can make the most of 2013.  A new year means a fresh start.  Out with bad habits and in with better ones. For busy parents, evaluating the year gone by is a chance to reprioritize; for many that means figuring out ways to spend more time with their children. Of course, there’s no time like the present to get a jumpstart on that resolution.  To illustrate your newfound commitment, consider spending the last days of 2012 bonding with your kids.  Remember, it’s … Continue reading →

How Breaking Your Budget is Bad for Your Health

Here is another reason to stay on your budget. Breaking it can actually be bad for your health. Agonizing about how you are going to afford a new purchase can stay with you, even after you solve the problem. Researchers now say that our brains don’t like being in debt. Having fears about money affect our health long term. Whether we realize it or not, debt causes stress, and stress causes poor health. Stress and pain seem to register much more strongly than does pleasure. So, the next time you feel ready to break your budget, keep this in mind. … Continue reading →

Books To Inspire Homemaking

I’m loving the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder these days. I have always loved them, and my copies show it. The Little House in the Big Woods book is quite close to falling apart. This time, I am reading them with my seven-year-old daughter. We tried this a couple of years ago, to very little interest. This time, she is enchanted, and it is lovely. No matter how tired we are before bed, we read an entire chapter. The simplicity and do-it-yourselfness of life back then is what is enchanting about these books, as are the close family … Continue reading →

Praise And Your Toddler

It’s tough work, being a parent. It seems like every other day, I read something that lets me know that I am doing something incorrectly as far as how I have been parenting my little boy. That’s okay, though, I am open to new ideas and to learning which things make sense for me and my family and which ideas are best left to other people and their own families. Today, I read some interesting information about how praising children can do them more harm than good. Until about an hour ago, I was generously doling out praise to Dylan … Continue reading →

Top 10 Ways to Get Your Kids Excited About Reading: Family Bonding

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Do you want to get your kids excited about reading? If so, get ready for the countdown: ten days of ideas that will get you and yours into reading! Today’s challenge? Make reading into a family event. While all of the past suggestions that I’ve made apply to families, today’s ideas focus on reading as a family bonding time. Make a book of family stories, or collect memories from family members. One of my favorite school projects involved collecting stories from my grandfather. I’m sure that you have some family stories floating around. Even if they’re newer stories about what … Continue reading →

Bringing Back The Family Dinner

Is dinner usually a rushed affair in your house? Do you find yourself getting take out more than is good for your wallet or your health? If so, it’s time to learn to menu plan. Dinner is such an important meal, it’s usually the only one the whole family is together for so it should be minimal fuss so you can focus on your family. Meal planning may take a little time but it will make it easier to get a meal on the table while working around your family’s schedule and any food allergies. Planning also means less trips … Continue reading →

Making the Most of What You Have

I recently read a book where the author was sharing her experience of moving the family from what was their “white picket fence” home to a practically dilapidated one. It was met with a lot of anger from her teenage sons. She had torn them from the comforts of their home, friends and a familiar neighbor to the middle of nowhere. They were living in a house that could have almost been condemned. Then they decided to tear the whole thing down and build new. While they did that, they had to live with the grandparents for several months. Eventually … Continue reading →