Tonight I came home after working an incredibly long day with the subcontractors at our home and collapsed into a chair. My daughter came home and I told her that the rest of the night was all time just for her and I to spend together. We sat together on the couch and started having a […]
I finished my day off today after going a million miles an hour non-stop from the moment I jumped out of bed (okay “jumped” might be a bit of an exaggeration, it was more of a begrudging stagger if I am totally truthful). I was trying to respond to a hundred emails, answer a constant […]
Every summer when I was a kid, my family would make the long drive from Washington State where we lived at the time out to Utah to visit our grandparents who lived here. That drive was a brutal 14 hour drive if you didn’t add on all the time for every potty stop we had […]
Growing up in a family of ten kids led to some awesome memories. One memory in particular that I thought about today was the following story: We were sitting around our massive dinner table (it took a huge table to hold all 12 of us!). We were preparing to sing Happy Birthday to one of the […]
“If you don’t have time to do it right the first time, how will you ever have time to do it over.” That has always been one of my favorite quotes because it makes such a good point! Seriously, if you can’t take the time to do it right you sure as heck don’t have […]
“If people are trying to bring you down it only means that you are above them.” I spent time tonight talking to a close friend who has a teenager daughter who is being horribly bullied in school. Her daughter, like many teenage girls, suffers from low self-esteem. She thinks her body isn’t thin enough, she […]
Anytime you come home from vacation it feels like you pay a major price for having been away. For me that is one of the things that causes conflicting feelings about getting excited to go on vacation in the first place. It’s knowing that you will have to face the punishment for having been away […]
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson We live in a world full of peer pressure to look like this or act like that. There is a constant bombardment of pressure to join the crowd or do what everyone […]
My name is Amy and without a doubt, I am a workaholic. There, I said it. I admit it fully. I have a problem and I am taking the first step toward recovery, which they say is to admit it. Step one down, only eleven more steps to go :)…. I finally discovered I had […]
Choices. We make them almost every second of every day. Some matter, some don’t. Some have lasting consequences, some have next to no impact on our life. The most important choices we make are the choices between right and wrong. I also think those are the easiest ones to make if you know your values. […]
I woke up today with a feeling of panic. My list of priorities to get done had once again grown completely out of control, and what made it worse was the fact that the vast majority of items had deadlines attached to them that if missed would have negative consequences. For example, year-end tax items […]
When we think of doing an act of service for someone we often think of it as having to be some major time consuming event that even the thought of doing stresses us out because we already feel that we have so much to handle on our plates that we can’t take on even one […]
Earlier this week I shared some thoughts on failure and how it is often our failures that end up leading us to the path of success in our lives. It reminded me of one of my favorite stories that perfectly illustrates the title quote from today’s blog: “Sometimes when things are falling apart, they may […]
We are all familiar with “the grass is always greener” syndrome. That syndrome that causes people to look around and think that something else would be better than what they currently have. Most commonly you hear of people catching that syndrome in their dating or marriage relationships, although it can extend to other areas of […]
I hate that we sometimes feel alone in this life – the fact is that we are never alone – there are always others out there going through the same thing that we are, it’s just that we need more of us who are willing to be honest about it so we give permission to […]
When my children were young I would lay down with them on our trampoline outside in our backyard and we would look at the sky together and play a game we called “Sky Castles”. In our game we would take turns building our pretend sky castles by saying what we saw happening in our life […]
“Families are like fudge, mostly sweet with lots of nuts!” As we head into the home stretch before Christmas Eve’s traditional gathering together of families everywhere, we ought to pause a moment to prepare ourselves to deal with the chaos ahead. I come from a very large family of ten children. My husband comes from […]
So for those of you out there who are like me, and who are still struggling to come up with a few more gifts before Christmas next week, I decided to put together a list of some last minute gift ideas that could help you if you are stuck trying to find a few more […]
Today I was feeling the stress of the holiday creep in and I decided that I needed an action list of things I could do to help take the stress off during this holiday season. Here is the list of ideas I came up with to help all of us cope with holiday stress: Make […]
So much to do, and not nearly enough hours in the day to do it. I get so frustrated when I work my guts out all day only to come to the end of the day feeling like I have barely scratched the surface of what I needed to get done. When that happens day […]
Tonight my husband and I were invited to go to the Governor’s mansion to celebrate Diwali. Diwali is a five day Hindu festival known as the Festival of Lights and it is one of the biggest holidays of the year in India. This festival is as important to Hindus as Christmas is to Christians. During […]
Today started out rough. I had to deal with a situation related to someone from the past that I once considered to be a friend, but who turned out to be an incredibly dishonest person who did a lot of horrible things that caused a lot of damage to a lot of people. Not exactly […]
Living a life focused on accomplishing is a good thing, except when you are trying to accomplish so much, so fast, that you forget to appreciate and enjoy the right now. I have been a driven person since I was a little girl. I have always been a goal setter and I have always been […]
“The best antidote I know for worry is work. The best cure for weariness is the challenge of helping someone who is even more tired. One of the greatest ironies of life is this: He or she who serves almost always benefits more than he or she who is served.” -Gordon B. Hinckley I absolutely […]
We make hundreds if not thousands of little tiny decisions every single day: whether to hit the snooze button, what to eat for breakfast, what to wear, what emails or calls to answer…and the list goes on and on, and usually we can make most of these decisions without having to put much thought into […]
As a business leader, one of the many lessons I learned was that employees often viewed the world around them in ways that were completely different from what was actually going on. I observed time and time again employees who interpreted something one way when the reality was actually totally different. I learned that when […]
When is the last time you were in a parade? Like actually in the parade itself? Marching down the street smiling and waving at the crowds along the route as you enjoy the music of the marching band… For me it was today as I drove the homecoming royalty (which included my daughter) in the back […]
Growing up at my house, the love of ice cream was an inherited trait. The entire Rees family, from my father to his father to his father’s father and so on, the love of ice cream was passed from one generation to the next. The fact was that if you didn’t love ice cream then […]
All of us have worries and concerns in life. Things we are scared of. Things we are dreading. Worries about what “might” happen or what “might not” happen. It seems that there is a truly endless supply of things to spend our time being worried about. Yet, at the end of the day does the […]
If it is possible to fry your brain by processing too much data, on too many items, in too short a time frame, well let`s just say that I think my brain has hit its “turning to mush” point already this week. The amount of data flowing through my mind as I am trying to multi-task […]
