Two adults, four children, six weeks, and eight states. It was gently suggested that I not get my hopes up, that my teenagers wouldn't appreciate and my younger children wouldn't remember the monumental effort and expense we were about to expend in the interest of family togetherness but we decided to roll the dice. We needed...something. There was a stagnation to our everyday lives. A layer of scum was growing over the fresh water of our lives, obscuring the clear waters and

Shame. The word itself elicits an emotional reaction. Hearing it, reading it, brings up the memory, like a foul taste - a small sip of a bitter drink. Shame is trending. What our culture will have you believe is that the word does not describe an emotion but an action. Shame has had a recent transformation into a verb. Which is not to say that humanity has not changed the parts of speech or meanings of words before. One need not go much further than singing "I Feel Pretty" fr

My son looked at me across the dining room table. He noticed I was pensive -- a huge milestone in maturity for a teenaged boy -- and he asked me what I was thinking about. Knowing he'd likely tune me out I, nevertheless, answered sincerely in order to model actual conversation versus the typical "oh, nothing really." I explained my thought process over the previous few minutes: observations, questions, answers, plans, possibilities, and more questions all leading me along a t

Did you know that the Calorie originated as a unit of heat? I guess it makes sense then that we talk about "burning" 200 calories on the elliptical. The crazy case of the calorie A long time ago in a land far, far away a guy burned some food as fuel to warm some water and called it a Calorie (the measured heat signature of burning specific foods to increase the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius). That sounds strange, for sure, but that's a fairly accurate sum