You can read this article again at the Huffington Post Canada. This Sunday is Mother’s Day, a day we traditionally honour and celebrate the mothers in our lives. Moms, grandmoms, great-grandmothers, step-mothers, adopted moms, surrogate mothers, mothers-to-be: they all get at the very least a nod of appreciation (if not a full-out display of love …
When my mother turned 65, my sisters and I had pre-planned a quiet celebration for her at a local café called Samuel’s. We met on a dreary Sunday afternoon for chai lattes, specialty coffees and cheesecake, while rain misted the windows and sidewalks outside the old heritage building housing the restaurant. Upon leaving, we huddled …
“Most of us, swimming against the tides of trouble the world knows nothing about, need only a bit of praise or encouragement – and we will make the goal. “ – Jerome Fleishman Dear You (For When You Need A Word of Praise): Encouragement is like a love letter to the heart. It instantly lifts. …
Life is filled with so many hard ‘little and big’ lessons. Some we learn through watching and others we learn by living. Today was a busy day which had me again rushing out the door coffee cup and papers in hand. After a crazy morning followed by a solid lunch hour of choir practices, I …
Last week, I was reading a couple of blogs I follow regularly. On both blogs, the women who write for them were raising important awareness around standardized testing, accompanied by its pros and cons. Both women supported a parent’s right to choose whether or not their child should be tested, and in the conversation that …
Dear Teachers, It’s April. We parents are hardly able to clasp the few shards of fading sanity remaining from Spring Break (as they slip nimbly from our hands into the oblivion of another work week). So we can hardly imagine how other adult human beings around the country are faring out. (Can I get a …
Kindness halts me. Silences me. Takes away all the words that come easy. Not that kindness is a robber, a thief- but that it is just so stunning and brilliant and overwhelming that I don’t always know quite what to do when I encounter it. Kindness shines and brightens. It is light radiating in dark …
When he gets frustrated, he uses the puppets to talk out his feelings. We role play, he and I. This is not time for academics, paper and pencil. This is pure, unadulterated imagination. He needs it; oh, how he needs this opportunity to freely play. Unstructured. Liberated from the confines of classroom protocol, even if …
What would our prayers be like if we focused them around the things, people and situations in our lives for which we didn’t feel overly grateful? Thanking God for the things we’d sooner we DIDN’T have…rather than asking Him for things we DON’T have and want/desire. I wonder. Would we then appreciate more the difficulty …
image retrieved from www.cafepress.ca Dear Politician Who Says You Were Never challenged in School, It’s election time again. With that being said, I heard your address to a large group of parents at a Home and School forum recently. And I happened to catch you saying that you had not been challenged enough in school- …
“To reveal someone’s beauty is to reveal their value by giving them time, attention and tenderness. To love is not just to do something for them but to reveal to them their own uniqueness, to tell them that they are special and worthy of attention.” – Jean Vanier I stand over her, feeling helpless. Hopeless. …
There is something to be said for silence. Still, quiet tranquility. Where I find her- my quietude, is on an oft-silent side road on the western end of a snow-covered Island, just before evening turns to velvet night. There is a little inlet that leads to a river and there the water is just starting …
