The Mom Blah Blah Blog

Humility. This was the subject of discussion on Sunday and I sat down thinking this should be an interesting topic for someone who is struggling with not thinking highly enough of myself. At first thought being humble doesn't seem to be something I have to much trouble with. I mean, I think more highly of pretty much everyone than I do myself. Great, now I'm worried that I sound like I'm bragging about how humble I am. It seems I have been confusing humility with self deprecation. This doesn't really translate to humility at all since it really does take a lot of focus on oneself to bring yourself down like that all the time. A good comparison that was shared was that humility is thinking of yourself less not thinking less of yourself. Being self deprecation really does draw a lot of focus on oneself even if it's not positive or uplifting it's still attention that could be shifted elsewhere. I have thought before of how people will sometimes try to pick...

Today I am having a very difficult day with my self esteem. I have been beating myself up a lot and feeling a bit like a failure. I had been on such a good upward climb I suppose I would end up sliding back a few steps here and there I just had hoped I wouldn't backslide. You see I started to read Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain by Portia de Rossi . It's a story of her struggle with bulimia and self image. I had heard a few people say they were reading it and it was quite good so I picked it up from the library yesterday and dove in. Now I don't want the people who recommended this book to feel bad because truthfully reading a book like this should be helpful to me. Unfortunately this shows me that I am not "over" my destructive thinking. This might sound very strange but I have always in a sick and twisted way admired women who are anorexic or bulimic. I have envied their self control and ability to resist eating over a certain number of ...

Ryan Blair is a very successful multimillionaire entrepreneur and one of the founders of ViSalus. This book tells us how he has gotten to where he is today. For someone that doesn't have much business experience and has dabbled in my own small start up companies this was an extremely helpful book. It showed me where I have gone wrong in the past and pointed out traits that will both work in my favor and others that I will need to overcome. I enjoyed that Ryan does not come across as someone that has done everything right. He draws as much, if not more, experience from his mistakes and failures as he does on his successes. He is not afraid to point out the things about himself that have held him back and this is something I have found most helpful. Sometimes you get the impression from very successful people that they have had all the luck, all the opportunity, all the chances and that they really didn't have to work for what they have gotten. With Ryan you really see th...

Over the last little while I have been thinking about relationships that just sort of slipped away. I've been remembering people that I used to enjoy spending time with and wondering what happened. A lot of the time I expect that if I am interesting enough people would want to spend time with me and they would make the first move of contacting me. So when relationships sort of fade away I assume that it's because I just wasn't interesting enough for them to want to spend time with. Self confidence has played a big part in my letting friendships drift. I'm not sure why it never occurred to me that the other person could simply be thinking it was me that wasn't interested in spending time together. I'm attempting now to remedy the situations that I have created and recontact some people from my past. It's going to take some time and some doing but I know it will be worth it. Last week I had a great coffee "date" with a friend I haven't se...

Obviously I have been thinking a lot about health and fitness lately. I have been doing quite well with my running and I've been in a much better place mentally. This is not my first time attempting to be and stay fit however. In high school I did a lot of fad diets. None that worked even well enough for me to loose 5 lbs. I also was one of I believe 2 girls that ever set foot in the weight room in our high school. I think it even took a few years before I even found out we had a weight room. I tried that for a little while as well but no matter what I tried back then I was always the same weight. Looking back I can now say it's because I was already fit but when I looked in the mirror I did not see things that way. Over the years I stayed a pretty steady weight. There were some sight fluctuations physically but the big change was mental. I already had a fairly negative way of looking at myself and since I am a person that holds more value on words of affirmation, neg...

You know when someone tells you they aren't allowed to tell you something and it just makes you want to know about it all the more? That is what happened to me last Saturday. There was one of the ViSalus scientists talking about some of the ingredients in the flavor mix ins. He mentioned phytonutrients and then informed us that they are really great but the government doesn't allow them to tell us what they do. This made me very curious of course. So off I went to google! This is the web site I found. http://www.glyconutrientsreference.com/whatarephytonutrients.php It was a very intriguing read! It made me very happy that they thought to include this ingredient in the mix ins. I think I will have to be more diligent about using my flavor mixes. It also reminded me of a cancer treatment that was being taken by someone I know. She was getting very high dose vitamin C injections. This has been found to help greatly in being able to fight off cancer. The problem wit...

It's amazing to me how you can be going about your days just getting by and thinking everything is going pretty well, then something happens and you realize you weren't doing as good as you though you were all along. This is what happened to me. I was thinking about this as I was out for my run today and kept getting a lump in my throat just thinking how grateful I am for the what I have been given. I really did not realize how poorly I had felt for the last.... I'm not sure how long, until I started to feel so much better. I know my situation wasn't bad to begin with and that there will be many people who might think "what a whiner! Doesn't she know she doesn't have anything to complain about? Her life is good." Those people would be right. I know a lot of people I know could see that I wasn't really feeling happy and I knew I didn't have it so bad but emotionally I was down in the dumps and just couldn't bring myself out of it. I...

Today I am going to talk about a few of my faults and hope I can turn them into strengths. Some of these will be harder to do than others. I am really not good at organization! I'm a very scatter brained and disorderly person that tends to procrastinate. I am also very stubborn. That should be enough issues for one post. I know it's enough for me to handle right now. So at the start of the list to cover is my disorganization. Order is very difficult for me to accomplish. I do try by attempting to write notes and to put things in the same place every time. I can do quite well with that. If there is a place that I have set up for a certain thing I do make every effort to put it back there. The problem is there just isn't enough established locations for all the things I have but if I were to have someone organize and set me up for success I know it would be sometime I could continue. Note writing I enjoy. I really does help to focus my scattered mind on one item ...

I have a tip today to share with all you people out there with tough dry and cracked feet. I have quite a problem with this! Some of it I believe is hereditary but also I think some of it came from way back in my teens when I did 2 short term mission trips. I went with Teen Missions international, an agency that requires everyone to wear steel toe work boots 24/7. At least they did the first year I went. The second year we were allowed one reasonable pair of "dress" shoes for Sunday so we didn't look so ridiculous in our work boots and floor length floral dresses. I would like to think that I was able to rock that look but I'm not sure if that's even possible. The problem with wearing work boots all the time is when your feet get wet, and they do when you run an obstacle coarse in the swamp of Florida every day, they stay wet all day. Since I wasn't particularly good at the obstacle coarse my feet were always wet and that led to a condition known as ju...

The very last thing that I wanted to do today was go for a run. I've had a bit of a cold and have been using that as an excuse to not get out. I have been trying to run every other day and for the last month it's been going pretty well. I'm now able to run continuously for an entire 5K. If you would have asked me even 2 months ago when I started all this if I thought I would be able to do it I would have said I'm not sure. After hurting my knee on my 5 th run I started to feel like maybe this was something that just wasn't going to work for me. I'm glad I was wrong. With a few minor adjustments I have been able to keep from hurting myself again and my endurance is definitely improving. I have noticed now that I'm not winded from carrying Alex up to his room any more and Randall actually noted that I'm not turning quite the same shade of purple after I work out. Don't get me wrong, I still look like a cooked lobster but hopefull...

I was very privileged to have gotten an advanced readers copy of the Realms Thereunder by Ross Lawhead . I read most of the novels written by his father Stephen Lawhead in my teen years and they were some of my favorite books. This being his sons first full length novel I was intrigued and excited to see how it would measure up. I was quite pleased that Ross' writing style is similar to that of his father. He is able to draw you into the story quite quickly and keep you guessing the entire time. The story followed the adventure of the main characters Daniel and Freya and the chapters would alternate between telling the story of their past and their present that clearly is leading to the next book in the trilogy. I found the story compelling and was pleased that the plot and characters were not typical and predictable, a quality that bothers me in a lot of novels. There was a few passages of the book that were dry and difficult to get threw however it was for a purpo...