A Mom's Life

The New Year looms around the corner and it's at this time that I look back at the past 12 months to reflect on my life, and ahead, to decide what to improve in the future. I do this every year, and while I have good intentions, I pretty much break every New Year's resolution. I have to ask myself why I set resolutions and why I then proceed to break them. I'm a reflective perfectionist so it is my nature to obsess about what I did wrong and how to fix it. I recently read in (the scholarly journal) Real Simple about rumination- when one fixates on something very small, stresses out about it and makes it a bigger deal than it really is. Well, my middle name might as well be Ruminate. I am so good at it! Since I'm also very moody and sensitive, I strive to make every interaction, with every person I encounter, perfect. To err is human, and I'm often a big mouth fool so 2/3 of the time, I screw up and then I feel terrible for like, um, a year, or longer. Setting goals ...

Caroline's teacher is awesome and I'm not just saying that because some of my friends who read this happen to work at Caroline's school. My sweet Caroline, my beautiful little girl, can be a very stubborn diva. A very exhausting, stubborn diva. I'm at my wits end after spending the weekend with Caroline, I can only imagine what it is like for her teacher to deal with her day after day, along with 19other five year olds. Oh, yeah and try to provide them with the academic foundation needed to succeed for the next decade of schooling, too! Sending your baby off to a bunch of strangers each day can be difficult. It's not like Caroline gives us a blow-by-blow of her day to provide us with insight into her daily activities, the friendships she's forging, the accomplishments she's making and the growth she's experiencing. Instead, our dinner conversations go a lot like this: Andy: Hey, Caroline, so tell us, how was your day? Silence Andy: What did you do today,...