Wow, it is already 2009 and I hope you have a huge list and many wishes for the new year. Every year, Gal and I sit with the kids and write lists of wishes and goals for the year to come. It is a ceremony that is most important to me and I nag until we find time to sit and write our wishes down.
Unless there is something wrong with them, all parents want their kids to be healthy and eat well. With so many supermarkets and so many items on the shelves that are mostly processed, full of food colors, additives and lots of sugar, keeping your kids healthy is not easy. Not easy, but more important than ever!
Every year, people go through some form of cleaning. Cleaning gives a good refreshing feeling of a new start. As if the old and the dirty is an obstacle to moving forward. Cleaning the house is a task that not many people like. Parents find it necessary, but it takes away very important and valuable family time.
Money, whether you like it or not, can buy happiness. Is it better being poor and healthy or rich and sick? I believe the healthy and rich is the better option and I bet you do too.
A recent research has looked for the link between money and happiness and has found out that we can indeed buy happiness, but we get the happiness when we spend our money on someone else.
Read Buying Happiness by Giving »
If you are a teacher or a parent of a child who struggles with writing, here are some things you can do to help make life easier for them. Remember, they do not need to be labeled. They do not need a stamp of “Dyslexia” or “ADHD”. If you find they are struggling, lend them a helping hand and change some of the classroom rules to suite their need.
These days, when children’s eating habits have led to an increase in obesity, parents’ responsibility to raise food-smart children has increased too.
It is the quality or the nutrition in the food we give our kids, coupled with the teaching of good habits, that will determine our kids’ health as children and later as grownups.
Read How to Raise Food-Smart Kids »
This week, I have read (again) an alarming statistic about the rate of divorce and the devastating effect of divorce on children. When I think about my parents, I know I need to thank them in every way I can for being able to handle all the conflicts between them and reach their 50th anniversary.
Conflicts between parents are inevitable. After all, Mom and Dad are two separate people, coming from different backgrounds and sharing life together – a house, romance, kids and finances – in hope of making it the best experience ever.
In research done in 1982 (R.E. Emery) and 1990 (E. Mark), it was found that even young kids are strongly hurt by their parents’ conflicts. It is actually possible to measure parents’ anger through their kids’ psychological, behavioral an emotional state. When I worked with groups of 2-4 year-olds, I could tell when there was tension at home or when one of the parents was away from home.
Read Monkey See, Monkey Do »
When my daughter was born, I did not attend a sleeping school to learn about good sleeping habits. Sure enough, we were so excited with the arrival of the new baby that we tried to spend every second with her. When she was 11 months old, we discovered that we did not have a life.
Eden was a “no-sleep baby”. She just did not want to go to sleep. Once she closed her eyes and stopped moving, she would sleep really well, so I am not complaining, because this meant that I rarely had to wake up in the middle of the night. But, the difficulty I had was in getting her to go to bed and fall sleep.
Even now, when she is 19 years old, we still see every night the struggle between her body and her mind. Her body tells her to go to bed and her mind still thinks that sleeping is the greatest waste of time.
One of the hardest things to measure is change. Whenever we are not happy with something in our life, we want to change it. But then, sometimes for years, we look in the mirror and we can’t notice the changes we go through. Only while looking at photos from last year do we notice the changes. We are different, but we feel the same.
Have you ever looked at photos of people from your high school reunion and through “They look the same, but somehow different”?
Gal (my husband) and I looked at some photos of our high school reunion (which we have missed – poor us!). Some of our friends had glasses, some were bold, some “grew sideways”, some looked older and we realized that we must look the same to them, the same but different.
Read Snapshots: Tracking Changes »
Ronit and I have a very good friend, who has been in a difficult personal situation in the past couple of years. He feels very frustrated by his circumstances and sees himself powerless to break out of them and live a happy life again.
Often, when he talks to other people, he uses sarcasm.
For example, one day he was contacted by a large company, which I was not familiar with. He got excited about it, but wanted to seem like he was keeping his cool, so as not to get disappointed if he did not get an order from them later on. So he said to me, “Gal, I just got off the phone with company XYZ”.
“What is this company?”, I asked.
“Oh, it’s just a small company nobody knows”, he said in a seemingly casual tone.
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