Back in Malaysia, my parents live in a small town called Batu Gajah (literally “stone elephant”) not unlike Duvall in size and population. They are retired schoolteachers. My dad golfs and my mom line-dances and sometimes, they drive around in our erstwhile blue Toyota station wagon.
Kindly note of the words “erstwhile”, meaning it’s now more [...]

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We all know by now, hopefully, that having kids means having stuff. It doesn’t seem to matter if you have one or eight kids, little by little their stuff will creep into your life, your kitchen, your wine glass . . .
Come on, am I the only one who has ever found a Polly Pocket [...]

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With two kids under five and my tendency to fly by the seat of my pants, our days were beginning to look a lot like chaos.
Ear-splitting, soul-sucking chaos.
Having no structure seemed to work fine when Orlando wasn’t much more than a toddler, but now he’s almost five and has a toddler brother. After too many [...]

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Working full time, for anyone, is time consuming. Typically you spend eight hours, each day, doing work that you get paid to care about. On your off time, each day, you end up doing work that you don’t get paid for, but that still has importance and must get done. And honestly, I find the [...]

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As part four of my Essential Advice for New Bloggers series we’re talking about balance. Specifically, how to balance blogging and the rest of your life.
You remember your life, right?  Come on, think really hard.  Oh yeah, that! 
It’s true, blogging has a way of creeping in, taking over, and destroying everything in its path. Sort [...]

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One interesting aspect of adoption is the ability to choose. Having a biological kid, well, you kinda just get what you get. You have sex, the fastest sperm and the egg for that month collide, and you’ve got a baby in the making. (Yeah, yeah I know – I’m oversimplifying the process.) What comes out [...]

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My never-ending battle with clutter started to end when I began throwing the toys away. Just kidding! I don’t throw them away, but they do go “on vacation.”
It all started when my son asked, “Where is my green car? I need my green car! Not the red one, the green one!”
The green car was likely [...]

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As part three of my Essential Advice for New Bloggers series we’re talking about establishing a readership.
So far we’ve covered networking and basic search engine optimization, which means you’ve got the tricks for getting people to your blog.  Now you need to know how to keep them there. 
It’s all about the content
The single most important [...]

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Well, I missed last Friday with many good intentions of posting Monday… Well I went to bed Monday night and when I woke up it was Friday again, so my apologies, but here goes!
First of all, Carrie could use some love. She’s had a rough couple of weeks….
But congratulations go to Jenn who just finished [...]

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Living in Washington, more specifically Seattle, we all know about the lack of sunshine in the Great Northwest. I personally think Seattle gets a bad rap about rainfall. I’ll be honest; we see a lot of rainfall here. But I think it’s more about the lack of sunshine then the actual amount [...]

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