Now that I am rushing I need to make sure I get good rest to stay trim! Studies show that one out of four men and women report sleeping less than six hours a night. There are several large studies that link lack of sleep to obesity. One interesting study that tracked more than 68,000 nurses for 16 years found that the odds of gaining 33 pounds were 32% higher for among those who slept no more than five hours a night compared to those that slept at least seven. Appetite just went way up. Gherlin (a hormone that make you hungry rises and leptin (a hormone that controls appetite) drops. Studies also show increased insulin resistance, therefore a higher rate of diabetes. This also may also have a evolutionary link to sleeping less in winter and storing fat during that time to protect our bodies.

So get your rest and help your body work the way it should. We are always looking for a way to effortlessly keep our weight under control. What could be easier?

Now that I am restored…it seems I need to hustle to get everything ready for my daughters Caylin’s first visit home from college. I am making lots of room for her visit and it is very likely she will have very full calendar and I will have mre spare time than I think:) The organizing lesson I get from the last five days of doing absolutely nothing in FL to rushing now is that life has ebbs and tides and staying organized means you need to go with those rhythms.

Hello from sunny Florida! I took a quick, spontaneous trip to visit my mom and aunt in St. Pete’s and really did not think I needed a break…but apparently I did! Leaving Saturday morning—I was exhausted, washed out and slightly sick. I spent days in the sun, ate great meals, laughed and did not accomplish ANYTHING for work! Look out world! I actually can’t wait to just get going tomorrow morning! I have a list of things to do and feel like I can just barrel through them! The point being that I was struggling before I left and now I am ready. So if you are stuck…give yourself a break and see what happens!

Cleaning up before bedtime is the WORST time to ask kids to cooperate and clean up their toys/rooms. There is no motivation not to stretch this chore out for hours so that they can stay up later. This is when kids are tired and cranky too! Have your children clean up before a meal time. There is a built in reward to get busy and get the job done. It also lets the kids be busy while you are putting the finishing touches on a meal. Keep it positive and make sure they have enough time to succeed.

It is a great day for our country! Whether you are blue or red-it is nice to see our country’s eyes open to the possibility of choosing a leader regardless of race. With the fear created by narrow minded thinking is stifling. Every kind of person now has hope and that is a powerful and positive in its own right.

Sibling Rivalry is a big problem in families that needs to be addressed very early in the process. There are three strategies I found to be very powerful.

1. When one child is mean to another, don’t lavish all your attention on the child that hurt their sibling by yelling at that child. Go directly to the child that is hurt and give them the major share of you attention. Make sure that there is no “reward” for that behavior. It is amazing to watch how that child seem a little deflated because they did not get what they may have ultimately wanted, your undivided attention.
2. A fun exercise to get siblings to show their respect is to simply have them plan an imaginary extravagant birthday party for each other. Help them be outrageously generous to their sibling. What would the cake be made of? How enormous would it be? What movie stars would attend? How many presents would be there? What would be the best one? What would it be wrapped in? Where would it happen? It is a fun way to flatter and respect a sibling.
3. Decide on a family goal and set up a reward that they all the siblings want to achieve. Make it something they can really do and set them up to cheer each other on and celebrate each other’s successes so they all work towards the same goal! It is a delight to see them help each other!

When I meet client and they show me their messy spaces they often punctuate that tour with “and when we get all this done, I can finally do my photos”. People are often paralyzed when they feel a task is really important. This problem only got worse when scrap booking came into fashion. People are able to invest in all these possibilities but ultimately get overwhelmed because they made it too hard! Now there are so many ways to do it “wrong”! This “all or nothing” thinking is an attribute of disorganized people and it really comes into play with photos.

What to do? DECIDE! Decide on the materials you are going to use and get started with what is current. I did the research and tried the products and here is my “professional opinion” for the average Joe who just wants to protect and organize their photos. (This is not scrap booking).

I use the 12 by 12 Pioneer Photo Albums with the Easy Top Load Pages with Black pages.
The 12 by 12 size holds more pictures per page and I like to arrange photos on the page and glue them in. I do crop them but I try to crop using similar dimensions. I will crop a 4 x 6 horizontal picture to be 4 x 4 so it fits in a layout with a vertical 4 x 6 picture. If you use consistent cropping size, more pictures fit uniformly on the page. I do not use many shapes like hearts because they look dates FAST and it is hard t use the photo any other way. The only shape cutting I will do is an occasional circle. I like the way the pictures look on the black paper and they really pop when you put them in the sleeve. The sleeve makes view easy because photo corners are not lifting where the page bends and smeared glue want make pages stick together. I use a photo safe glue stick to quickly glue them in place.
I use basic photo boxes from Exposures and the Photo Envelopes from Light Impressions.
I organized my photos chronologically as best I could and kept aside a “best of” envelope for each very important person in my family. I marked on the front of each envelope the rough dates and theme/event. Then I marked some of the “star” photos so that they would be easy to retrieve later. If there was a photo where a very important person was the focus I would put it in their best of envelope.