Forcing Creativity

Writing a book is not a unique pursuit. There are many of us writers out there going about day jobs, pounding away on keyboards at night, at dawn or at the kid’s baseball practice. The difference between those that succeed in actually becoming a published writer and those that do not – I have been told

Happy New Year

Happy New Year!  I’m not going to lie. I have had a hard time with the start of this new year. I don’t know if it was because of the holiday whirlwind with two boys, our trip home to NC smack in the middle allowing no mental down time or the fact that 40 is

Love Wins

For all the bad news in the headlines lately that I feel I need to protect my children from, it was with great joy that I turned up the President speaking to a national audience today without hesitation or censoring. I didn’t need to explain guns or wars or terrorism or reassure them that they

Lazy Days of Summer

Today was a lazy day. The little guy had a half morning of kindergarten camp at his future school and the eight year old and I spent the morning reading and hitting up the library and attempting to fold an origami yoda before we picked up the five year old. The afternoon was spent in

High Heeled Mama Reads: Before I Go by Colleen Oakley

Colleen Oakley is an Atlanta-based journalist. I came across some local writers I stalk follow promoting the debut of her first novel, Before I Go and was intrigued. The book is currently only $1.99 for Kindle on Amazon (not an endorsement, just a fact), so I picked it up. It’s a solid debut novel about a young

Sick Days

The flushed cheeks. The heat radiating through his fine blonde hair. The watery eyes. The stuffy nose. The cough. The pitiful look. The cuddles. The nuzzling. The need. The tissues. The chicken noodle soup. The sniffles. The coloring. The screen time restrictions thrown out the window. The fever reducer. The nurses line. The hand washing.

2014 Achievements in Mothering Awards

Award season is upon us. I admit to being a victim of our celebrity based culture and enjoy a good award show with the best of them. But how many occupations actually have achievement awards, not to mention publicly broadcasted ones to millions of viewers around the world? Um….? Well, moms, I’ve decided it’s time we

Holding Hands: What America Needs Right Now

I don’t know if seventh grade relationships have changed much since I was in middle school in the 1980s. But back then, as we maneuvered around those awkward years of development and floated from group to group looking for our own pack and tried out sports and clubs and navigated changing classes and took foreign language classes

Movember

I have a sticky note (or several) over my desk where I scribble ideas for blog posts. Some are there only to note important moment for myself and never go farther and that’s okay. Others bloom into larger ideas and grace these pages. And a few stare at me for awhile until I feel I can do them justice and then,

One Fish, Two Fish

Most of life’s lessons, I’ve found, come right after uttering, “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” B’s fifth birthday was a couple of weeks ago. For awhile, he’s been pretty insistent that if he ever had a pet, he wanted a pet fish. Seemed easy enough. No doggie poo to pick up in little