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!, Balance, Disease, Energy, Gearing Down, Kids, Newsletter, Parenting, Rants, Rest, Stressbusting
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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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…
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).
Life puts a lot of demands on us: the question is how to balance work, family, and our own desire to better ourselves. Eating right and exercising are both things we intend to do, but often we fall short on these goals. Whether we're unmotivated to work out, too busy to get to the gym on a regular basis, or reluctant to trade time with the family for 45 minutes on a treadmill, there are solutions.
The first principle of fitness is to "play out, not work out." Let's start by rediscovering the fun activities we enjoyed as kids: hiking, jump roping, dancing around the house to the radio, or playing tag with the dog. By modifying a few of your mental preconceptions, it's definitely possible to feel as lean and vital and strong as you did when you were a kid. It might even be fun.
Many of us confuse taking care of ourselves with selfishness – in fact it's just the opposite. If you want to provide service, you must be well and strong. If you want to show love to others, you must have a well of self-love to draw upon.
Sign up to read dozens of tips and principles for getting fabulous exercise in a short amount of time.