The Luckiest No Matter What!

After getting inspiration from my sister Laura, Josh and I went vegetarian for the month of January. Prior to this, I have reduced quite a bit of my animal food and animal products in general to be kinder to my body, these living things, and also kinder to the environment. I research before buying vitamins, shampoo, lotions, and makeup to keep them as vegan as possible. I keep my leather purchases to a minimum; I recently got Josh an awesome vegan leather briefcase for work. And, I do use plant-based 'meat' quite a bit now. Going fully vegetarian in January both felt like it was something in my wheelhouse and great way to push myself at the same time, which I think makes it a perfect thing to TRY ( #oneword2020 ). It wasn't completely new, but I had never been so meticulous and so intentional before so I was certain it'd be challenging as well. Here's the good, the bad, and the ugly of my month of vegetarianism... THE GOOD: Most of my meals were not just vege...

My name is Kristin- I am a teacher, a learner, and a global citizen. I have four sons going through this public school system. I thought I might enlighten you to what a day looks like for one of my sons.... He wakes up over two hours before school starts. This gives him enough time to take care of regular routines like getting dressed, making his bed, and eating breakfast. This early morning start allows him to spend a bit of time relaxing and gives him some much needed time to work on homework. When you get 6-8 pages of math homework per week, the expectation of reading every night, and spelling/vocabulary work, sometimes you need the mornings AND the evenings to stay caught up. The school day starts. My son is in school for more than four hours before he eats lunch. During this 4+ hours he is experiencing a very long literacy block. He needs to sit still, he needs to listen, he needs to work fast. My son does not work fast- he has always taken his time. I love that about ...

My boys celebrated all their half birthdays in November. This halfway point makes me pause and reflect on each of them. It's almost February so clearly my reflection is a bit delayed ;)  Here's what's going on with each of my boys... NOLAN, 6.5: Nolan is the biggest fan of all sports. He wakes up every morning just to look at scores and see teams' records. He just is a sport enthusiast. Currently, he's started playing basketball for the first time and has loved playing soccer and t-ball. Nolan is a reader and I love it. He reads in the car, he reads to calm down, he reads to learn, and he reads for enjoyment. We feel very lucky this love of reading is already inside of him. Recently, he's been big on atlases and just informational text on countries, populations, weather, etc. He also likes chapter books. We've been reading The Princess in Black, Nate the Great, Notebook of Doom, and Magic Tree House series. This kid needs to be kept busy. If left to ...

During 2020, I'm TRYing something new! Every year I have so much I want to accomplish and change and focus on. I'm a super goal-driven person so, to be honest, sometimes the new year makes my head a little dizzy. There are always so many things I want to do and achieve and it's hard for me to focus and be intentional to see real difference, real change. That's why I got into doing this #oneword thing in the first place. Only choosing one word instead of a myriad of bullet points or some lengthly serial comma of a resolution helps me zero in and narrow what I'm working towards. I really think it's helped me. This will be my third or fourth year choosing only a single word as the foundation of my new year so I was ready to change things up a bit.  My family is all in a group chat. As this new year was coming, we started talking about what some of our resolutions might be. We always happen to share about this because I think it gets all of our good smart juic...