Shane Bolks's Blog, page 8

Sports—Camaraderie, Character Building and, oh yeah, Exercise

If you’re a sports fan, subscribe to your local paper or regularly watch a morning news show like “Today” or “Mike & Mike”, there’s very little chance you haven’t heard that World Cup Soccer is in full swing. I fall into all three of those categories—especially the first one.

In my family, watching or playing sports is as natural as breathing. Yeah, it’s a way to get some exercise, but it’s also great for family bonding and teaching important life lessons.

My daughters have learned about pride in doing your best; humility when winning; perseverance when losing; leadership and teamwork for the whole rather than the individual.

Some of our best family memories have taken place on a court, a field, or in the stands together. Some of our most disappointing and some of our funniest moments have been the same.

Sure, participating in a sport is great for your body—strength, conditioning, and flexibility. But it’s also vital for character building. And it’s definitely a fabulous way to bring my family together.

Whether it’s a walk around the neighborhood with our dog,

training for a half marathon with my sister

or two of my daughters

participating in a Ladies Football Clinic with my mom

or organizing a 3-mile family fun run and tennis tournament during a Christmas family reunion in Florida

sports has always played an important unifying role in our lives.

Right now we’re in the throes of World Cup Fever, cheering for the USA!

If you’re a soccer fan you probably already know this, if you’re not don’t be surprised when I tell you that thus far in the Cup as a USA fan we’ve experienced pride in our boys and our country, humility in finally beating Ghana, perseverance in losing the lead and ending our game with Portugal in a tie, and leadership and teamwork as we gear up to take on the powerful German team on Thursday.

These are all vital character traits we can all stand to improve. In my family, we simply like to dress up a little crazy now and then while we work our character together! ☺

GO USA!

Summer Reading for Kids

There’s a great post on my publisher’s blog today about summer reading lists for kids. Amanda Forrester makes a great list of classics every child should read. Check it out and comment there–or here–about some of your favorites. Any that shouldn’t be on the list? I told her The Three Musketeers and The Scarlet Pimpernel were not good choices for kids.

Summer Reading Blog

Teaching Our Children About Respect

We talk a lot on this blog about teaching our children respect—respect for themselves, their bodies, their parents, their friends. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we teach our children to respect life, specifically non-human life.

If you have kids, you may also have a dog or a cat or a bird or fish. Pets are great because they teach kids how to care for animals and how to treat them. I have two cats, and it’s been a process to teach Princess Galen how to pet the cats, how to avoid scaring them, how to treat them kindly. But I can’t help but think that message is muddied when I take her to the zoo.

Are animals to be treated kindly or locked up in cages for our entertainment?

Recently, I watched the film Blackfish. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. It’s not graphic or incendiary. It didn’t make me cry, and it didn’t make me furious. It did make me determined.

The film is basically interviews with former SeaWorld trainers, and they discuss an orca named Tilikum, who has now killed three people. It’s a fascinating look inside the culture of SeaWorld as well as an education about orcas—their natural behaviors and lives in the wild and captivity.

Princess Galen sees commercials on Nick Jr. about SeaWorld, and they certainly make it look fun. There’s a SeaWorld only 3 hours from us, in San Antonio. I told her I will never take her. Nor will I take her to the circus, the rodeo, or the horse or dog races. You see, animals were not created for our entertainment. Whales weren’t put on this earth to dance in pools to synchronized Christmas music. Elephants weren’t put on this planet to do cute tricks inside arenas. You don’t even have to believe in God or a higher power to realize that we demean these beings when we imprison them or make them perform like humans.

Aeriel shot of Tilikum at SeaWorld Orlando. He is kept in a small tank, isolated. His nose and tail can touch both sides of the tank.

That’s not a lesson I want to teach my child. But form your own opinion. Watch the movie Blackfish and then take action.

Here’s something easy you can do right now. Sign these petitions from change.org

Southwest Airlines: Stop Promoting SeaWorld Cruelty

Free Orca Morgan

Humanely Release Orca Tilikum to a Seapen for Rehab 

If you’re on Facebook or twitter, let SeaWorld and its sponsors, like Southwest Airlines, know you don’t support them. Recently, I tweeted this.

.@SouthwestAir Please stop promoting Sea World. Promote kindness to animals instead.

My husband says blogging about this is useless because it’s an uphill battle, but I’ve never not done what I thought was right because it was hard or unpopular. I hope I can teach my daughter that same value.

Guest Kasia James on The Milk of Female Kindness

“I bet you’re looking forward to when the baby comes,” a work colleague of mine said to Leslie, who sits next to me, and is hugely pregnant. “Then you can put your feet up, read some books…”

I must admit that I was somewhat gobsmacked by this statement, having a tiny of my own, and knowing exactly how much intensive, hard work it is to bring up a child. To be fair to my co-worker, I myself had very little idea of what it would really be like until I was caught up in the whirlwind of motherhood. I knew that there would be sleepless nights, and nappies would be involved, but it is difficult to understand the sheer physical relentless nature of having a baby around until you do. Or the way that they magnify all emotions: if they are having a bad day, then odds on everyone else will too. By contrast, when they are happy, they don’t hold back, and you can feel yourself bursting with joy.

There were other surprises too, in the way that I was treated by society, which I had not expected. I felt that people were treating me as ‘Just a Mum’, and hence had dropped about 50 IQ points. Marketers treated me as if I had gone from being a complex human being, with varied interests, to someone who’s world had shrunk to nappies, shopping and the state of my post-baby body. It bewildered me, and made me angry. I started to chat to other mothers from around the world (many of whom I met through blogging), and found that the story doesn’t seem to get much better as our children grow.

So ‘The Milk of Female Kindness’ was born, about a year or so after my bub. Women at all stages of life: mothers of young children, of grown up children, and women with mothers, started writing and sharing their honest experiences of what it is really like. How there are complex decisions to be made, and balances to find. The book came together as poetry, short fiction, essays, artwork and interviews. Twenty-eight brave women have been totally honest about their experiences, and I hope that this will at least broaden the discussion about parenting.

I think that one of the most important lessons to come out of compiling the anthology for me was a simple one: there is no right way to parent, and you can only do the best job that you can. Forget all the media pressure. Buying the latest gadget will not make you either happier or a better parent. In the end, it’s about finding your own way through the labyrinth of motherhood.

Get your copy here

Mommy chuckles

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Be Awesome!

So it’s the second Tuesday of the month– a date I personally chose so I’d remember when I’m blogging and any followers would know when to find me here.

Enter LIFE– yes, at this moment it deserves all caps. I’ve been working on several huge projects for my day job, struggling through revisions for my agent, juggling RWA chapter president duties, enjoying a little part-time gig I love despite the added time crunch, dealing with family obligations and personal ups & downs…. boy, just re-reading my list made me have to stop and take a breath.

{{{{deep breath}}}}

Okay, so maybe I have an excuse for forgetting about my blog day. But I don’t have a good reason!

Yes, there’s a difference. I’ve said something like that to my girls in the past, so I should look in the mirror and say the same thing to myself.

I could beat myself up for forgetting. Let that old Catholic guilt I’m so good at flare up and leaving me feeling bad.

Or, I realized I could hop on the PBOK blog, wave hello to everyone and post one of my favorite YouTube videos to watch when I’m feeling overwhelmed.

Have you seen the Kid President? Have you heard his “words of wisdom and advice” on how to live a good life? On how to be AWESOME? Let this little guy inspire you!!

I hope you’re having an AWESOME Tuesday!

If life is bogging you down, push the pause button on your day, spend a few minutes with the Kid President and the PBOK moms and know we’re rooting for you!!

Moms and Loneliness

When at Home: Are You Lonely, Mama?

I saw this awesome blog on When at Home about not allowing loneliness to ruin the time you have with your kids when they’re small. I wanted to reblog it, but I’m ashamed to say, I couldn’t figure out how. But I could figure out how to leave a link. I know I was desperately lonely at times when my daughter was an infant. It’s much better now, but it’s still easy to look at people who travel, sleep in on weekends, or go to a movie whenever they want, and feel a twinge of jealousy. This blog is a good reminder about why it’s important to manage those feelings.

The Book That Changed My Life

I come from a long line of worriers. We’re incredibly good at it. I have vivid memories of my grandmother from when I was a little girl, anxiously waiting at the door when we would arrive for a visit, and laying into my dad for being (a few minutes) late. She had us in a terrible accident, gravely injured and en-route to the hospital, rather than simply a tad behind schedule. The modern age of cell phones could have saved her a lot of worry.

Then there’s my little girl. She’s rather accomplished at worrying, too. She worries about tests. She worries when she doesn’t feel well. She worries if someone looks at her the wrong way. She worries about the status of her friendships. She even worries if she realizes she’s not worried, because that makes her worry that she’s forgotten what she’s should be worried about. Seriously. She told me that.

And then there’s me. I definitely honor my worrying heritage. I had all the same worries as my daughter, and then I went through a decade of infertility and miscarriages, and high-risk, high-stress pregnancies, and my anxiety/worrying soared off the charts. Sometimes I could barely breathe. It’s probably partially why I developed Bell’s Palsy while pregnant with my son (who doctor’s warned us, you may recall, wouldn’t make it.)

So there I am one day when my husband sits down with me and tells me he wants me to read a book. At that point I was still voraciously reading fiction (before two kids I actually had time!), and he was handing me a non-fiction book. More than non-fiction, it was one of those self-help jobbies. To say I was skeptical is an understatement. But being on bed-rest left me lots of time, and eventually I cracked the pretty pale green cover and checked out what was inside.

 

Within hours, my life changed.

Aptly named, THE POWER OF NOW by the wonderful Eckhart Tolle deals with living in the moment. Too often we sentence ourselves to a prison of the past, living the darkest moments of our lives over and over, saturating ourselves with them–punishing ourselves. Or, conversely, we travel forward, projecting ourselves into moments yet to come…frequently dark moments, worst-case scenarios…moments that may never come. It’s like a mammogram. We go in for the test and almost automatically feel the twist of anxiety over a possible bad result. And if we get that call about some abnormality, our mind takes off, and suddenly we’re already battling cancer and thinking about the devastation of not being around to raise our children. And these thoughts are like poison. They flood our body with their toxic power, forcing us to live through the horror of what we’re imagining, a horror that may never come to pass…even though the moment that we’re in is a perfectly fine moment…a moment that we’ve just lost, because we were projecting forward, rather than staying where we are. Thanks all the same, but when it comes to the bad stuff, I’d much rather experience it only once, rather than over and over again. It’s like taking a drive through the worst part of town. Maybe you have to do it once…but why do it daily if you don’t need to?

Our bodies respond to our thoughts. It’s the whole fight or flight thing, with the flood of adrenaline to keep us safe from the wooly mammoth. But when our thoughts are trapped in fight or flight mode 24/7, our body is constantly primed for battle—and survival. And nobody can live like that, not healthily. What fascinated me was to learn that from a purely physiological standpoint, our body cannot differentiate between reality, dreams, memories…or any other kind of thought. You know the dream you wake up from, the really amazing dream or the really terrifying one, and your heart is slamming and your body is on fire, as if what you’d seen behind closed eyes really happened. Or how when you meditate, you close your eyes and focus on a happy memory, a sun-drenched beach or snow-topped mountain, a babbling stream in a field of poppies. These are peaceful images, and when you wrap your mind in them, your body responds as if you’re really there…because your body can’t tell the difference. Your body reacts to your mind…and the real power comes when you realize that you control your mind (not the other way around.)

Tolle’s insight was life changing for me, having often destructive life-patterns spelled out for me like that, the way that I was torturing myself with my own thoughts. I realized that even though bad things might happen, I only wanted to live them once, rather than over and over. I realized that, more often than not, the dooms day scenario my mind concocts (and I react to) never comes to pass. And I realized that the past was over. Truly, it is. Yes, events of the past shape us and change us, and yes sometimes really horrific things happen, but to actually go back and relive those moments amounts to self-torture. A far more productive path is to live in the present moment. We can’t change the past. Ever. It’s over, done. We can only move forward…and if you keep looking in the rearview mirror–or worse, turning backwards–you’ll never see what’s ahead.

A few of my favorite quotes:

“Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body’s reaction to your mind — or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body”

“Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within”

“Nobody’s life is entirely free of pain and sorrow. Isn’t it a question of learning to live with them rather than trying to avoid them?

“Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath”

The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.

The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind.”

“The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future — which, of course, can only be experienced as the Now”

“Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry — all forms of fear — are cause by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence” (SERIOUSLY…think about that!)

“Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.”

Truly, I can’t recommend Tolle’s book enough, particularly if you struggle with anxiety or find yourself prisoner to the past. Do yourself a beautiful favor. Give NOW a try. It might just change your life, too.

 

 

The Parenting Season Rocking My World

When our oldest daughter turned three, we welcomed twins into our family. When the twins turned three, our last baby was born. For about six years, our family life revolved around colic, thousands of dirty diapers, playing Thomas the Train on the living room floor, and gallons of coffee.

Moms, you remember these early years, right? If it’s blurry, the disgusting smell of spit-up, the whirling of the breast pump, and the sweetness of those first baby grins might jog your memory. These infant/toddler years are so hectic, yet the hours of rocking crying babies creep by so slowly.

While in survival mode, I got some advice from moms in a different season. We live in a neighborhood where most of the kids are a few years older than ours. When I was sitting on the bathroom floor during those early years, trying to coax twins to use the potty, my neighbors were outside with their elementary-aged kids. When we would see each other at the park, they would mourn the busy-ness of their lives. “I remember those baby days!” they would tell me. “Believe it or not, your life will get even busier.”

Really? Impossible. Their kids were not only old enough to potty unassisted, they were old enough to bathe themselves. Fifth graders could read their own bedtime stories. First-graders could watch an entire movie without getting distracted. Or freaked out by the bad guys. Or freaked out by the squeaky noise their closet door made. These moms could reason with their bigger kids. Their parenting season had to be easier.

But they only said, “Bigger kids, bigger problems.”

Fast forward to this year, the year that has rocked my parenting world.

Our kids are turning 10, 7,7, and 4. All of the sudden, they’re big-kid busy.

Overnight, they’ve developed these huge personalities, they have all these ideas, and they are always going, going, going. They want to try it all: after-school clubs, activities at church, private lessons, and sleepovers with friends. This means I’ve been promoted from chief bottle-washer to swim team taxi, pool party lifeguard, and math-fact & sight-word tutor. Our lives have suddenly become one of those movies stuck in fast-forward.

You know what the difference is? Why this season feels so much more hectic than the early years did? Because the kids now have their own opinions. Organizing their schedules is like arranging the schedules of four unique adults.

The older moms were also right about “bigger kids, bigger problems.” My kids are struggling with learning disabilities, bullying, hurtful friend drama, and real-life disappointments.

Yes, they may be able to tuck themselves in at night, but it’s important for me to be there. This is when they ask the really important questions. I may not be rocking them to sleep, but I’m still in that same rocking chair, now talking about how we know God loves us and why He lets bad things happen.

While I am able to shower with a little more regularity, this season is rocking my world. It’s definitely the busiest of our lives.

I’m sure the puberty years will be easier…

Right, Moms of teens?

Hello?

 

Christina Hergenrader blogs at www.christinasbooks.com/blog and writes Christian books for women. She lives in Katy, Texas with her husband, four kids, elderly Cocker Spaniel, and surprisingly-slow Greyhound.

 

 

 

When Will My Life Begin (Again)

Moms of older kids, I could totally use some insight or encouragement. I love the movie Tangled, and I can totally relate to Rapunzel’s character when she sings “When Will My Life Begin.” I absolutely adore my daughter, who’s four and a half. Before I got pregnant I was aware that having a baby meant sacrifices, changes, and upheaval. I was prepared to give up sleeping in, time alone, and meals at nice restaurants. I embraced Elmo, the Alphabet Song, and diaper bags. but I have to admit, when I entered year four, I started to wonder, when I could resume some semblance of my previous life.

Now, to be fair, I do have an odd job. I don’t go to an office, and I’m my own boss, so I tend to work nights, weekends, and early mornings. I’ve also had a bit of momentum in my career of late, and I’ve had a lot of opportunities, which means more work. But with all the mom stuff and all the work stuff, I don’t have time for anything else. I’m an author, and I hardly have time to read. I have to read for research and also for work (books I’m judging in contests or I’ve been asked to read and blurb), but I rarely read anything for fun. I rarely read anything I pick out myself.

And TV? Forget it. I see all these tweets about shows called Revenge, Once Upon a Time, Game of Thrones, Call the Midwife, and The Voice. Never watched them. Not one of them, not even one episode. I have watched every Barbie movie ever made, but that’s not exactly something I’m excited about.

Let’s talk movies. My husband and I get to a movie maybe once a quarter, if that. On date nights, we could choose to go to movies more often, but then we give up rare opportunities to have conversations longer than 3 seconds. I haven’t seen any of the movies at the top of the box office charts right now. Wait. That’s not right. I saw Rio 2. I’ve seen every kid’s movie that came out in the last 12 months. Again, not an accomplishment I was going for, but you have to do something on cold or rainy days.

And let’s not even talk about the news. I have no idea what’s going on in the world. If there’s a shooting somewhere other than my backyard, I probably don’t know about it. A plane disappears? I think I heard something about that in passing. There’s a war in Russia? I don’t watch the news. I’m asleep when the nightly news is on and I can’t watch with my daughter because I don’t want to explain what a land mine is or have her up all night because she’s afraid a tornado might flatten our house. It’s not that I don’t care about the world. I do. I just can’t fit more than 5 minutes of NPR in between errands into my day.

So here’s my question, moms. When do I get to watch TV again? Not like hours of TV, but a few shows a week? When do I see movies again or catch up on world affairs? Do I have t wait until she’s 18 and moves out or is there an age where you get to have some of your old interests back?