The Mom Blah Blah Blog

My daughter turned 7 yesterday and for one of her birthday gifts we gave her a little diary with a lock on it.  She has been all about privacy lately and has been loving writing on any little scrap of paper she can find so we thought this would be a good idea.  I asked her this morning about where she put the key.  I don't think she really understands the idea of how this "secret book" works since she told me she put it with the book so she doesn't loose it.  I tried to explain that if the key is with the book it really won't keep her brother out of it but she apparently doesn't have a firm grasp on his level of curiosity.  Even though he just turned 4 and has no ability to read he has still managed to break her privacy in less than 24 hours. We were upstairs today and my son brings me the opened book.  She apparently also doesn't understand how to even lock it since it was locked on only one loop, therefor not locking it closed at all.  The book was...

If you know someone with low self esteem, and I'm sure you do, you might wonder why no matter how many times you compliment them it just doesn't seem to sink in.  They just can't seem to see themselves the same way others do.  You can tell your friend, girlfriend, wife, mom, or whoever how amazing, intelligent, funny, beautiful, creative, caring and loving they are until you are blue in the face but they just can't hear you. I would like to tell you a few reasons why. For starters, you might have heard this little saying when you were young, sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me.  This saying is quite simply not true, in fact it is dead wrong.  We all know it.  We always have.  I think that the only reason that anyone ever said it was simply to try and convince ourselves that we are strong enough to ignore the hurtful things said to us.  It didn't work. The things said to us when we are young, even if they weren't outr...

This last week we were talking about the different phases and stages of our lives.  In the book You're Already Amazing by Holley Gerth she likens them to the trip taken by the Israelites coming out of Egypt.  When they were in slavery trapped in Egypt is a parallel to when we are stuck in a rut, doing something that is not beneficial for us or just outright sinning.  The second phase was setting out.  This is when we make a change to remove ourselves from those issues or problems we are stuck on.  Third is being encamped.  This phase is a difficult one in a lot of ways.  It's when we stop moving towards our goals.  This pause can also happen for a lot of reasons.  We could need time to heal from hurts we have gotten on our journey, we may be to tired to continue and need some rest or it could be that the thing we are heading towards is not attainable yet for any number of reasons.  The final phase is the promised land.  We move into...

I was just in Virginia on vacation with my mom and kids.  I don't often make it down there so every time is a learning experience for me.  That being said I thought I would share with you 5 things I learned in Virginia. How to prepare and cook a squirrel.  Commemorative shot glasses make grate gifts for kids. Dairy is not necessarily the first ingredient in half and half.  Every radio station plays the same 10 songs every hour. We get ripped off when we but ANYTHING in Canada.   I knew I should have bought a lot of Easter Peanut butter M&Ms.  I don't even know if they're sold up here.  

The theme of loneliness continues to pop up in my life right now.  In things I see, things I read and in the lives of those around me.  What I continue to discover is now much insecurity in connected with loneliness.  It seems our confidence in ourselves can hinder us from reaching out to those people we see and think, "She is so amazing, I wish I could be better friends with her!"  There can be so many different reasons we feel this way but I know for me it stems from a feeling of not being good enough for that person. There are things about myself that I don't really like and I attempt to hide them.  Sometimes I think I'm hiding really well and there is NO WAY anyone is going to spot me there.  There are other times when we are called out and we are confronted with those parts of us that we wish weren't there.  Have you ever overheard someone talking about you or had someone tell you about the bad things they have said?  I know I have and th...

When the movie Anna Karenina came out a while back I had a mild desire to see it.  However, when movies come out that are taken from novels, especially classic novels, I will usually read the book first. It sort of slipped my mind for quite a while though until I found it as a free book for my Ereader. Quite a few years ago I remember this book was one on Oprah's Book Club.  One of the first things I found myself questioning was whether or not she ever even read anything more than liner notes or coles' notes at best.  This is a long book....I mean really long.  This is coming from someone that has read the Game of Thones series (A Song of Ice and Fire).  What make this book seem so long is all the superfluous information you encounter at every turn.  I seem to recall that it was more than 10 chapters before Anna was even introduced.  Though the side story is pertinent and somewhat interesting, it can often overshadow the main storyline. What also m...

In keeping with the endeavour towards improved self esteem and confidence I have discovered one area of my life I need to work on is my tendency towards loneliness.  It is something that plagued me for as long as I remember.  It's this idea that I don't fit in, that I am an outsider and a fear that the people that really and truly get to know me would not like what they find.  Of course when I struggle with loneliness that also means that I assume I am the only one that feels this way.  I see the relationships of people around me and become jealous of the intimacy and the comfort they feel with each other and it leads me to not only feel the sting of this but to further withdraw into my own shell determining that it's too late for me to find my place in these social circles so I might as well just give up.  I can now see that this would be a self fulfilling prophesy and have attempted in a few small ways to try and break the pattern I have set in my life when sa...