art Tag

Posts tagged 'art'

Singing Family Full of Joy

Noff with a microphone and Tsoof on guitar

On my happy list, I wrote, “It makes me happy to listen to my kids singing”. This was true even when they were babies. I remember my youngest daughter Noff joining us in Alicia Keys’ song Fallin’ when she was one year old. She always joined on time and it made us all very happy.

Singing is a very sensitive thing for me. Well, it was very sensitive. Today, when I run workshops or stand in front of a big crowd during my presentations, no one can guess that years ago, when I was young, I sometimes had no voice. Speaking was difficult for me and singing was not even an option.

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Handy Family Tips: How to Get Kids to Eat Vegetables

Vegetables are good for our health, but they are not very popular. I think this is because the advertising departments of junk, sugary and chocolaty food companies are much better than the advertising departments of vegetable companies. It is very simple. If we had the same publicity for vegetables that we do for junk food, it would be easy to get kids to eat vegetables and they would do it happily.

Even more than advertising, the best way to get kids to eat vegetables is to love eating vegetables yourself and to buy lots of them for your home. If this is what kids have on hand, this is what they will eat. Obviously, this is not as easy to do as we might think. Otherwise, everyone would do it and every kid in the world would eat vegetables at every meal.

The A-Z Vegetable Challenge

One of the tricks I offer to my clients to get kids to eat vegetables and overcome eating problems is the A-Z Vegetable Challenge. Starting with the letter A, the family chooses a vegetable beginning with that letter to focus on for the week, to learn about, research, cook with and eat.

This post is part 21 of 24 in the series Handy Family Tips

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Social Media Reality: Look Up! What Are You Missing?

Technology and social media have become a significant part of our life. Recently, I learned some valuable lessons about just how they affect us and the opportunities they make us miss.

My 13-year-old daughter, Noff, is the youngest in our family. Lately, she has been struggling with not having a mobile phone to take to school. To her, mobile phones are very cool. Some kids need them to coordinate pick-up times or for safety on the bus.

Unfortunately for her, she does not need it for any of those things. She so much wants to be part of the mobile phone in-crowd that she uses our old phones to play games. She struggles with not being like everyone else and I struggle with my parenting.

I have some beliefs and rules about social media and I know I need to adjust them to suit the times. I have three kids and I cannot apply the same parenting rules regarding media with Noff that I did with my first two.

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How to Have a Happy Life

I have dedicated my life to promoting happy living. I have watched many people living the life they want and, unfortunately, too many people who have no clue about bringing happiness into their lives.

I suggest to all my clients that they come up with an A to Z list of living a happy life. Below is just one version of what they have come up with. I hope it will encourage you to come up with your own.

Appreciate yourself and others. Accept everything as it is. Appreciation is the ability to see good in yourself and others. It does not change who you are but how you perceive things.

Be yourself! This is the main goal in life. Do not try to be someone else. It is draining. You are unique, special and perfect, just the way you are. Cherish it!

This post is part 4 of 6 in the series A-to-Z Guides

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School Holiday Activities for Kids

In Australia, we are halfway through another school holiday season. I love school holidays, even though I finished school many years ago. For parents, the holidays can be a stressful time. Here is an A-to-Z guide of what you can do with your kids these school holidays to make the time a bit easier.

Acting is a very healthy and fun thing for kids to do. Give them opportunities to rehearse a play and present it to you. They can make puppets and use a table as a stage. Be a very supportive audience and encourage them to perfume for you.

Beach is a great place to be in the school holiday. Give the kids a ball and some boxes to build sand castles and they will be busy for hours.

This post is part 1 of 6 in the series A-to-Z Guides

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Proud as a Peacock (again)

Being a mother has been one of the greatest achievements of my life. Each of my kids is an achievement, and they are also big achievers themselves. Some say that it is a cycle. We, as parents, make our kids successful, loving achievers and in return they make us successful, loving achievers.

One of the best descriptions of my feeling towards them is pride. They do amazing things and I am enormously proud of them. I have come up with a theory that I like to call “Pride Therapy”. Every time one of my kids has an achievement, by proxy, I have also achieved something.

In my coaching and presentations, I sometimes ask people to describe their feelings as animals. I find it makes it easier to express these feeling. It does not have to be an animal that represents all your feelings all the time. Each feeling is a different animal. For example, you might be a panther in the office, and a sloth on a relaxed Sunday.

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Kids Cheating with Mobile Phones: Who is to Blame?

Schools struggle a lot with the increased use of mobile phones by children. Many new regulations are in place to stop children from bringing mobile phone to school. At a primary school level, some schools ask the students to deposit their mobile phones at the office. In high schools, the phone devices are part of everyday life and a regular item in each class. In the past, teachers had to deal with the concentration and focus of the children. Now, they need to fight the attraction of the mobile phones as well!

With the introduction of mobile phones, one new problem that teachers to deal with is cheating on tests. In the past, students had to think of very sophisticated ways of writing cheat shits on paper, on their hand, the back of the ruler or the calculator. Kids today have a very handy way to keep the information and they use it well.

A survey conducted by a media sources with some common sense discovered that a third of teens with mobiles admitted to storing information on their phone, using it in an exam or texting their friends the answers while their friends are in the exam.

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200 Fun Things To Do With Your Kids

Up to 6 years ago, Gal was the person who worked outside of home while I stayed home with the kids. Being around kids has been a great joy for me. I think it allowed me to borrow some strength from my work and use it at home and vice versa. When I need an idea of what to do with the kids, I only need a couple of seconds and I can come up with heaps of ideas. Usually, the parent who stays at home with the kids is the one with most of the ideas. They have the task of spending time with the kids, taking care of them. It makes them very creative, flexible and preferably efficient.

One of my clients complained that her husband had to spend one evening with the kids, while she had to go studying, and that she was very stressed about it. Her husband said he had no idea what to do with them. When she gave him some entertainment suggestions he said, “No, I want to do something with them that will be meaningful”. This made me think that some parents do not understand that for kids, everything can be meaningful if it is in the form of play.

I hope this post will be great help for parents who are sometimes stuck for ideas.

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Handy Family Tips: Bathroom Art

Children are very artistic and love to draw. The problem is that they seem to love drawing on the walls. I am not sure if you have ever tried it, but it is much more fun than drawing on a piece of paper. Do you remember the times when you were younger, when you went to the teachers’ blackboard (yes, it was black back then) and tried to write on it? For some, this was the highlight of the day. Teachers know how exciting it is for students to write on the board and they try (well, those who understand and are not control freaks) to give them opportunities to do it.

Drawing on a piece of paper requires fine motor skills (delicate use of fingers) while drawing on the walls has a different feeling altogether and requires gross motor skills. The problem kids have with drawing on the walls is that this fun activity is usually accompanied by the pain of anger and disappointment from frustrated parents or teachers who prefer their wall or board clean and ready to use.

The simplest solution at home is to buy a big whiteboard and position it at a height that will allow kids to use it as much as possible. I have discovered that this is a great solution for kids who continue to practice their graffiti skills, no matter what you tell them (sometimes with permanent markers).

This post is part 16 of 24 in the series Handy Family Tips

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Happiness is in the Right Brain

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift. The rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift”
– Albert Einstein

Happiness depends a lot on which side of the brain we use. If you feel under pressure, your brain is telling you that you have been using your left brain to its maximum capacity.

85% of the time, we function using our left brain. We make sense of things, think of sequences, analyze language and meaning, interpret information and communication and absorb new facts from all around us. Although these functions are necessary to our life, the left side of our brain has its limits and uses pressure to signal that we need to let go and switch to using our right brain.

The left hemisphere of our brain functions like a sequential receiver and processor, while the right hemisphere is in charge of our imagination, sleep (dreams), memory, intuition and all of our creative functions. We absorb with the left side and create with our right side. The brain is like battery – the right side charges it and the left side uses the energy and empties it. Our goal is always keep our mental battery charged.

In our fast-moving world with way too much information, our brain reaches this point of pressure very often. This is when the brain pushes the “red alert” button and says “Enough! No more information. No more analyzing. No more thinking and no more talking!” If we ignore this signal, the sounds of the red alert and danger increase until we collapse or fall asleep from exhaustion.

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