Category Archives: Living

Where The Red Potato Leads

Are you afraid of cooking? I thought there was blood in the mashed potatoes the first time I ate red potatoes. I’d been cautioned before, while peeling potatoes, that if I wasn’t careful I’d cut myself and we’d have to eat bloody mashed potatoes. Bloody mashed potatoes. That’s an awful way to start a post [...]

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10 Time Management Tips For Moms

As an at-home mother of little ones as well as a writer, composer and flute/voice teacher who volunteers as choir director and natural family planning teacher, I have to be really smart with my time in order to accomplish anything at all. Here’s my take on maximizing time and productivity, based on my experience as [...]

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7 steps to get organized this week

You’ve spent the last seven months rushing kids out the door, partner to work, and orchestrating the near-chaos that is the beauty of your life. Sound about right? Now your house has slipped into disarray. It’s time to gain back some of that lost ground!

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Spring cleaning? 5 tips for managing toys

Toys are not fun when they’re all over the house. If you’re stepping on green army men, threatening to sell wayward dolls on eBay and are using items like daddy’s lighter as a body doubles for game pieces, the toys have taken over.

Your children’s toys aren’t evil, they’re just a little misguided.

Here are five ways to manage toys in your home so that they feed your children’s imaginations and not your trash cans.

Also posted in Advice, Family, Featured, Parenting | Tagged , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

What story do your numbers tell?

Have you ever thought about how much of our identity is defined by numbers? Social Security, driver’s license, phone, credit card, salary… Numbers can reveal a lot about a person, but those aren’t the ones that do it. Here are some of the numbers that define my life: 36: age. 5-4. Height. (Mumble mumble144mumble): my [...]

Also posted in Inspiration | 3 Comments

5 Things I learned I can live without

In our consumerist society, we fixate on getting things, and often forget that everything has a limit – there is a limit to how much money, time, and energy we have to spend. Instead of figuring out what else we need to get, it would probably do most of us good to think about what [...]

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7 Things I wish I had known about makeup as a teen

I’m happy to report I’m better at color selections (and application) than I was back then. As a former celebrity makeup artist I’ve a treasure trove of information about enhancing beauty.

Also posted in Advice, Featured | Tagged , , , | 29 Comments

The Book Club Breakup

It started as a casual relationship. A woman living in my neighborhood said she had started a book club, and invited me to come. I was flattered, because I knew she was extremely well read, and wasn’t sending out an open invitation to just anyone—she had hand-picked me. After receiving my BA in English years [...]

Also posted in Stories | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Supermom Is Just My Alter Ego

For years now I’ve heard the phrase, “I don’t know how you do it all” over and over again. Yes, I’m a mom of three young kids. My husband works long hard hours, too. I traded my housekeeper for lasik surgery last year, so now I do most of the housework and can see the [...]

Posted in Living | 6 Comments