Core Truths

I have a confession to make. For whatever reason, this is rather difficult to admit.  Maybe because I have been hiding it for so long…keeping it quiet all these years.  But like most things, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one.   So here it is…I cuss like a sailor (no offense to actual sailors).  Ok, not me.  Like not the me that most people know.  No, it’s my inside voice that talks that way.  Not like the “you’re in the library so use your ‘inside voice’” voice…it’s the voice that is just in my head.  And boy, does she have a potty mouth! I won’t go into specifics of expletives. For some people, you may think, “My goodness, I can’t even say those words in my head!”  For others, you may say, “Is that all you’ve got?” But no matter where you draw your line, my inside voice has a vocabulary that includes the words that are on the other side of the line I have drawn for myself.  Where my outside voice would never say these t...

It’s no secret I am a huge Marie Kondo fan.  I first read her book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up , a few years ago when our family went through The Great Purge .  While that was what I thought would be the purging of all purging, I was wrong.  Was it life-changing? Yes, definitely.  Did it seem magical? Absolutely.  Is it indefinite?  Nope. With the release of Marie Kondo’s new eight episode series on Netflix, I have a renewed zest for tidying up and I am finding much joy in the process.  As with the first time we “tidied up” using her methods, there is much to be realized and much to be learned. One of my first realizations as I started the process again is that we never went all the way through the process the first time.  I mean, I knew we didn’t, but I didn’t quite realize the effect it had on everything else.  The first Great Purge included almost everything, but we stopped or got side tracked or ran out of time when it...

Like a good book, being married is a real page-turner! Today, we celebrate 18 years since we said, “I do.” The time has seriously gone by in the blink of an eye, and still, it seems we were just kids on that cold January day when our story first began. I have a terrible memory in general, but I remember so much about that day.  I’ve had lots of memorable moments since then—kids being born, all their milestones, parenting, and all those milestones—but the day we got married is still one of my favorite days of all time. After the wedding and reception, we were whisked away in a limo and the next day boarded a plane for our honeymoon in Paris.  When I say it was all like a fairy tale come to life, I mean it! After the honeymoon it was back home, back to school, and back to work.  My new hubby was a high school science teacher at the time, and I was still in college.  Once we were married, I moved two hours from home to where he had been living the few m...

Well here it is… a new year.  For some, a new year may mean a New Year’s resolution or new health and wellness goals.  For some, it may mean writing down where they see themselves in one year or maybe making a list of things they would like to accomplish.  I have done all of these things at one point or another, but last year I did something a little different.  Last year, for the first time, I chose a word for my year.   I saw lots of friends on social media posting their word of the year and all of the positivity they experienced by remaining focused on that word.  I thought, this is for me! I didn’t know how the word of the year got started, and I didn’t know if there were rules or exercises to help choose the word, I just knew it was bringing hope and growth to other friends and I wanted to be in on it! So last year I just started to think and reflect, not so much about where I had been or who I was at the moment, but about who I wanted to be i...