Are you doing any New Year’s clearing of clutter? If so, have you checked… the inside of your head lately?  Not what you were expecting me to say? Take a minute to think about your mind in the form of your house.  Do you keep your mind clean and straightened up like your house?  Or do you keep old memories and mistakes and rude comments tucked in the back of your mind?  It’s an interesting way to think about it, right?

One of my all time favorite songs is Inside of My Head by David Wilcox.  (See lyrics below).  He walks through the metaphor of the mind as a house.  He shines a light into the dark corners of our minds – where it’s so easy to be our own worst enemy.

“I got such a mess between my ears
like dishes in the sink
Stuff I don’t believe just tumbles in
until I don’t have room to think”

Why do we do this to ourselves?  Many of us think that holding on to our mistakes will motivate us to...

It takes hammer and nails to build a life we love. This has been true for me and my family. It’s also taken a lot of blood, sweat and tears, but mostly lots of LOVE.

We often think life, love and self-care should come naturally. This is a myth–or at a minimum it’s a paradox. As Gretchen Rubin points out, truths can be funny. Sometimes what seems to be the opposite of one truth can be equally true. So it may be true that “All we need is love,” but it’s also equally true that we need to build our lives and our families and our homes with “Hammer and nails.” This is where I choose to focus for today’s blog post.

I am using a family photo for today’s post. It’s a new picture taken just in time for the holidays. You might look at it and see a happy family, which is true. Because of our photographer’s skill and our children’s cooperation during the photo shoot, you might also be tempted to “make up a...