Weird night in Europe recently, according to the New York Times:
What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.
According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered just over a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.
Juxtaposed against that black comedy in the paper's Most Emailed list was the story of another kind of invasion: the nightly encroachment of the "family bed babies" into mommy and daddy's sheets and blankets. For some reason, the article relates, the 1990s were the dawn of the co-sleeping era, when exhausted parents bought a few hours of sleep by sharing their beds, their warmth, and their heartbeats with their babies. The price - no more sex for the parents - was deemed a steep but fair deal.
Now, we're told, as those co-sleeping kids grow into large, gangly collections of limbs, they still insist upon invading their parents' beds nightly. And parental defenses appear inadequate: buying fancy Harry Potter-inspired 4-posters and Cinderella beds may delight the kids while the sun's up, but at night the family bed is the only hot spot in town.
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More articles like this one in: Ahhh!, Kids, Parenting, Balance, Rest, Energy, Gearing Down, Stressbusting, Rants, Disease, Newsletter
Q: My daughter gets very worried and stressed about all sorts of things. I try telling her to calm down, but it doesn't help. How can I help her get more centered and calm when things aren't going her way?
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Q: I want to get my family into much better health in 2007, but I'm overwhelmed at how unhealthy our lifestyle is. I don't know where to begin. How do I start?
A: When my son was learning to write, he loved composing letters to friends and family. I knew what he was up to because he always began the same way, by asking me, "How do you spell 'dear'?"
When I was distracted, I'd reply, "D-E-A-R."
He'd love up at my in frustration, not having begun to print the letters, awash in confusion. "Yeah, only what comes FIRST?"
When parents come to me looking to improve their own fitness and health, as well as that of their children, my urge is to go on and on about plant-based nutrition, about joyful movement, about deep awareness and relaxation. I want to load them up with recipes, with workouts, with meditation CDS, with coaching - oh my gosh, my professional life is all about self-restraint. I have to relax myself and remember my son's dictum: "Yeah, only what comes FIRST?"
So, as we approach the season of reflection and resolution, I'd like to provide three mindsets for getting started on a path of personal and family fitness for 2007. Next week, I'll talk about specific strategies, and how to create an action plan to create your own Fit Family.
Today's New York Times features an article about a branch of homeschooling known as "unschooling." More or less, it's the kind we practice in our home, first with our daughter and now with our son. The thing that struck me about this otherwise fine piece of reporting was a two-word phrase in a caption of a photograph in the multimedia slide show that accompanies the article. Keep Reading…
Q: What does one do to start meditating? Do you have to take a class? Keep Reading…
Q: How can I retrain my body's natural clock to wake up earlier? I feel like I have become actually softer as I age and, though I know it would fix so many things wrong in my life, I still sleep in as late as possible before racing to the shower then out the front door off to work…
A: Our need for sleep is based on a number of factors, Keep Reading…
Here's an interview and Q&A session with Greg Lynn Weaver, Spiritual Director of the PeaceWeavers. The topic: "Peaceful Parenting When You Feel Like Wringing Their Necks."
Greg Lynn answered questions about:
- how peace is related to fitness and health
- what peaceful parenting looks like
- how we get peaceful when we’ve had a lousy day
- how we can practice peaceful parenting so we have the skills when we need them
- how to break the cycle of guilt that leads to poor choices that leads to guilt…
- how to not beat ourselves up over not being perfect
- whether expressing anger verbally is appropriate or bullying
This call is not for the faint-hearted. The "s-word" is used three times, and Mother Teresa is described as "ballsy." Greg Lynn is not a mountain-top theorist - he’s living in the real world, and his language is real as well. His gentle and compassionate style and great sense of humor can help us remember what’s really important as we go through the impossible and wonderful task of raising children.
Turn on your computer speakers, and you can listen right now to a 5-minute excerpt of the call, in which Greg Lynn helps a member explore her question about expressing anger toward her kids:
The entire call is available as a CD (and soon as an electronic transcript).
Brian Wansink's new book, Mindless Eating, is due out in a few days. The Cornell professor has conducted fascinating experiments looking our how much we eat, and why most of us seem to be eating way more than we need.
His conclusions are fascinating, and they speak to the large topic of mindlessness. For example, moviegoers in Chicago were given buckets of 5-day-old popcorn to eat as they entered the theater. Those given large buckets ended up eating 53% more stale popcorn than those with smaller buckets. And they didn't even enjoy it! Keep Reading…
Q: What do you think of the energy drink "Cocaine"? Their website says that it's a healthier, stronger version of Red Bull that doesn't let you down with a "crash."
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When I was nine years old, I decided to give up the piano and study the violin. By that time, I was old enough and musically sophisticated enough to realize what a horrible racket I was making when I scratched the bow across the strings of my cheap, three-quarters size box of agony.
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