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Planning for the First Days of School
Here in California, we will be doing distance learning for the foreseeable future. Andy and I will have four kids home and learning, which in the spring time was very stressful and haphazard. As the first day of school approaches, I am looking back to my time as a teacher and instructional coach to plan out for a successful beginning of the school year. When I was a teacher, the rule of thumb that was thrown around was “Don’t teach anything the first month.” Of course, teaching and learning was happening every day, but the phrase was a reminder that the first month of school the reading and math are…
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Chasing flow
I work as an interpreter between American Sign Language and English. When I am working, my mind and body are fully engaged. My mental chatter falls away and I become fully immersed in the challenge of working between two languages. My head gets “in the zone” and it’s one of the reasons my job is so rewarding. Psychology researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls these immersive experiences “flow states.” He describes a flow state as a time of intense concentration involving both your mind and body. During these work periods, people feel an appropriate amount of challenge and they feel like the way they experience time is altered. These states of flow…
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Less is More
Survival mode with four young children always involves physical chaos. There are always toys strewn around the living room. Much of my time was spent trying to clean up after the mess and even more of my emotional and mental energy was left overwhelmed with what I couldn’t get to that day. My focus was to finish the basics – laundry, dishes and food on the floor- and anything else that got done was a bonus. Part of moving toward a richer, more colorful life requires time. If we have no free time, we can’t have adventures or create art. One way I have freed up more time is to…
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What about amateur creatives?
In the old days, if you wanted to hear music, you needed your very accomplished daughter to play the pianoforte for the room. If you wanted a pretty bowl, you needed to buy one from a local artisan. People told stories around the fire. For most of human history, the amateur artist or artisan neighbor made and played a huge percentage of the art, music and stories that we consumed. In modern times, we have access to perfect music at the touch of a button. Fancy cameras live in our pocket and we can always take an exact image of things we’d like to capture. We can see high quality…
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Rediscovering Creativity
When I was living in black and white, all my hobbies were pushed to the sidelines. As a young adult, I used to quilt and sew. I liked crafting and painting when I was a child. As a new mom, I taught myself to crochet, but by baby #4 I wasn’t even doing that. Survival mode meant stripping down life to the very essentials of baby care and self care. I needed to take some time to actively bring some fun back into my life, and for me, the spice of life is creativity. My bare bones life wasn’t killing me, but it was very dry. Rediscovering my creative side…
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Running Out of my Comfort Zone
When I started running, just walking out of the front door was a stretch for me. My default mode was to stay in the house. When I was in survival mode with four young kids, staying inside was much easier than dealing with getting four sets of little shoes and socks on the kids. I needed to get out of the house a few times a week. I needed to see the sunshine. I needed to breathe fresh air and soak up some vitamin D. The nice thing about running is that I could do it by myself. I started working out on summer mornings, so I would get out…
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Holiday Color
A key part of the full-color life is the enrichment from sensory experiences. When I run outside, I feel the cold air on my skin and smell my neighbor’s burning fireplace. It takes me deeper into the body. It grounds me in a sense of time and place and season. It is a trigger for me to move out of the conversation in my head and into a more mindful space. I have had a hard time developing these mindfulness triggers inside the home. Most of my mindful places and spaces are outdoors. I know what indoor sensory experiences that put me in the opposite head space. Cluttered horizontal surfaces…
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Prayer and following what works
One of the most difficult times for me spiritually was the first year of my babies’ lives. While the baby period comes with many wonderful moments, it has always been a desert time for my soul. It’s a time where I find it very hard to feel God’s presence in my life or to see the divine in everyday life. I suspect it has to do with sleep deprivation and not having all my basic needs met. I am not great at praying to begin with, but during the baby period, I find it especially difficult to communicate with God. Recently, I have been trying to learn more about prayer…
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Taking tiny steps
I started exercising by accident 2 years ago. I was coming out of a year of the infant survival mode and I realized I was tired of being woken up by someone screaming for Mommy. I wanted to have a morning routine that was more peaceful and allowed me to wake up before I needed to be “on” as a parent. I started cruising Pinterest for morning routine ideas and I stumbled across Crystal Paine’s “Make Over Your Mornings” online course. I love online courses now, but at that time I had never tried one. This one was short and cheap so I thought it was worth the money…