This year has been a year of finding my daily rhythm. I was really inspired after watching this video, How Boredom Can Lead to your Most Creative Ideas. Growing up as a kid, I had lots of time to be “bored” and I am very thankful for the things I discovered in that time of boredom. It helped my life in many ways. As I have grown older, it has been easy to gravitate toward my phone, social media, tv, etc.

Coffee and I have had a long road together. I have been drinking it for a while and it has been the topic of many conversations with my friends. It has really brought me joy. The feeling of walking into a new coffee shop has always been exciting and fun, especially when we travel to a new city. I have gone from drinking Dunkin Donuts, to Starbucks, to strictly local coffee shoppes, to getting beans the day after they were roasted.

I have always loved creativity. Since I was a little girl, creating with my imagination was my favorite thing. Sometimes it can be hard to get in a creative zone, when you are juggling work, parenting, and everyday life. I’d like to share 6 ways to get your creative juices flowing. Read the beautiful book called, The Artist’s Way. If you commit to doing this book and everything it tells you, you will get creative in new ways.

At the start of this pandemic, baking cookies, bread, and muffins were my top priority, but as time went on, I went back to focusing on eating healthy and working out. What I realized after trial and error is how you can get fit without spending anything. First, you need a reason why you want to get fit. For me, I was noticing groceries were getting harder to lift, shoveling was exhausting, and my energy as a mama was running low.

I have always loved reading since I was a little girl. I remember reading books on car rides with my family, instead of paying attention to the scenery. I was especially drawn to positive books and still am. When I became a mom, I really started analyzing the books I was reading to my son and found myself changing the word’s quickly or switching the book I was reading. It has become really important to me to read positive books to my son.

I was always scared to travel on a plane with my son, when he was younger. Then when he turned 1, I felt more comfortable and decided to give it a try. We have now gone on two trips. We first went to Florida and then to San Francisco. I really prepared for each trip, by asking more experienced mothers for their advice and researching as much as I could. I didn’t expect to be stuck in an airport and airplane for 16 hours, when our airline experienced bad weather, circled in the air for hours, took us on and off the plane, and finally at 11pm at night canceled our connecting flight and landed us in a different state without a place to stay.

Many people have noticed when they come to visit that we don’t have millions of toys for our baby and the toys that we do have are mostly wooden with no sounds or flashing lights. It is not that we are trying to deprive our baby of toys, but after years of teaching children and not using props in my theater classes, I came to realize how an over abundance of toys, can overstimulate kids, when they are just starting to notice so much around them.

Now that I have become a mom, I have realized that there are so many different ways to approach parenting, from what diapers you use, to what parenting philosophy you follow, to how your baby sleeps, to how you feed your baby. Being a parent is not easy and I support whatever approach works for your family. I want to share something a friend told me about years ago. It is called Baby Led Weaning.

I am always trying to figure out the healthiest things to put on my body and in my body, so when it came to my baby, I was even more concerned! Here are my favorite natural products to use on my baby and a few products I feel are safe for baby to be on. Everything on my list is rated between a 1 and a 2 on the environmental working group website.

I am thankful to my dear friend, Cynthia, for bravely sharing her story of her traumatic brain injury below. Cynthia is a passionate art teacher, talented artist, and long time vegetarian. Below you will see how she has learned from her long journey and risen above it. In October of 2016, I suffered a traumatic brain injury after slipping in a stairwell in my apartment building. After the initial shock of realizing that I had just fallen down a flight of stairs, I thought to myself, “I’m going to be ok.