“…you know that a good, long session of weeping can often make you feel better, even if your circumstances have not changed one bit.” – Lemony Snicket So I will start by admitting that what I am about to tell you might seem a little ridiculous so right up front I am going to just admit […]
When I sat down tonight to contemplate what to write about my day my first thought was to write about wanting to throw a temper tantrum at the end of a really bad day. I had just gotten off the phone with Comcast’s customer service line with a gentlemen offshore who, bless his heart (its […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Today was one of those days. It wasn’t that it was a really bad day and it wasn’t that anything horrible happened…it was just one of those stressful days where you are going like crazy all day yet feeling like you are making no progress at all…when you are being pulled by this person and […]
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 […]
We made it! It is finally upon us – Christmas Eve followed by Christmas Day. My favorite holiday of the entire year. I am so excited for tomorrow. I even stayed up late wrapping every gift tonight so that tomorrow I can enjoy my time with my family without stressing over the mounds of gifts […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Do you ever feel like you are suffocating at the very thought of trying to get everything done that you need to? Yeah, I pretty much feel like that every day of my life I have decided. And yeah, yeah, I know, try to delegate more and say yes to less and cut out the […]
When my kids were little time-out at our house consisted of sending the kids to sit in the “happy chair” where they would have to stay until they were able to be happy again. Our “happy chair” was a bright yellow chair with a sunshine and happy kids painted on it – all designed to […]
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 […]
As I sit here at the hospital tonight, following my daughters second ACL surgery that took place earlier today, I am trying to reflect on what lessons I have learned in my life today so I can share those thoughts with all of you. It’s funny how just sitting around in a hospital waiting room […]
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 […]
