happy birthday to me and happy coming out day!

ok...i keep meaning to post more often, and i will get some recipes up soon. today i turn 36...where do the years go??? i certainly don't always feel like the same girl i was 20 years ago, when i still had big dreams about my future...then again, i do still have some big dreams about my future, they've just shifted gears a bit...instead of wanting to be married at 20 and becoming a big fashion designer i've decided i want to raise 2 awesome kids to be self assured, creative young men and that i'd love to one day have my own business and a cool eco friendly home with plenty of room for an awesome garden. will it happen? i don't know, but instead of dwelling on past mistakes and divergences from the path i wanted to be on i choose to see those as learning experiences and growth opportunities and keep moving forward to a future that could be brighter and better than i even imagined. i still make mistakes, i booby trap myself...setting myself up for failure at times...usually afterwards i have a thought of "oh, you walked right into that knowing it wouldn't work and it didn't what were you thinking?", but i think a lot of people do that. i say just keep being the best you you can be and move forward, don't let anything hold you back, because you never know what lays ahead, just around the corner...waiting for you to take that chance. what's in store for me in the next year? i really have no idea, but with some luck and hard work, maybe i'll finally be able to start my business.

today is school picture day and the boys are dressed rather handsomely...connor is in a ralph lauren multi-coloured plaid button front shirt and declyn is in a blue striped button front shirt with an argyle sweater vest and his hair is slicked with pomade for the first time...he loves that it can easily go back into place even if it gets messed up easier than with gel. sometimes, from things he says or does i wonder if he may be gay, but he could be bi or straight, yet a bit flamboyant or just care about how he looks...nothing wrong with any of it...he's a sweetheart and as long as he is comfortable with himself then i'm happy with that. he and connor are so different in many ways, just like my sister and i are very different, yet we love eachother so much (my sister and i are not identical twins, we are 2 1/2 years apart, but just goes to show how each child is truely unique no matter how much their DNA is identical).

so in honor of coming out day i just want to say how proud i am of all of my friends and family who have pushed those closet doors open and come out...it's not easy , but i hope it gets easier and easier for everyone to be able to do. Love you all! stay true to yourself!

accentuating the positives and elimintaing the negatives

ok...so i've tried blogging many times before, but finding something i really wanted to write about or that seemed really worthwhile has been a challenge, however my friend Ilara had been posting on faceboook about negativity and needing more love in the world and someone had commented about the idea that the brain doesn't process the "no" or "not" in front of a word so thinking "no war" your brain processes "war" so it's better to think "peace"...i started thinking "well, how would that be to raise kids with that in mind and to not only use that with our kids but hard wire our whole brain and thinking to eliminate the negative and accentuate the positive". now this will take quite some time and a lot of work since for 35 years my brain has been pretty much trained to be the way it is and unlearning the negative thoughts and reprogramming to think positive and training my 4 and 1/2 year old twins to also focus on the positive could take quite a bit of work...i know when i'm angry i snap into the kind of mode i've always had people react to me...with yelling and aggressiveness, which is going to be a huge hurdle to navigate, but i believe that it can be done.
i'm formulating a plan...my sons and i will do yoga and i'll need to make mediation time for myself as well as doing some journaling and some meditating with the kids and while there are just my sons and i i think we would benefit from "family meetings" and the use of a talking stick, which i will make...i'm also looking into connecting more with our environment and with our food really getting to know our food and food sources better (and eliminating processed foods) as i think that what we eat greatly impacts our moods (partially due to our bodies toxic load and the energetic values of food, etc.). at this point i'm only reiki 1 certified, but would like to work my way up to reiki master and i want to work more with the kids on the reiki energy and reiki training...they are already aces at making reiki energy balls. i found that for the first week or so after receiving my reiki 1 attunements(many years ago) that i was less stressed and less aggressive (aka...much more relaxed and positive). another thing i think would help is to clean out and declutter our home and in fact our whole lives as much as possible (this may take quite some time and lots of baby steps).
people talk about holistic health and i'm a huge fan of holistic health approaches, but i want people to think of parenting holistically as well...nurturing the whole child...their mind, their creativity, their spirit and their body and whole foods and clear clean actions, intentions etc would really help in doing so. i'll be checking back in with progress on our accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative progress and on other radical parenting notions as regularly as i can.