avatar by on September 29, 2010   •   19 Comments Marriage You

How Expectations Change Relationships

When you get right down to it, you hear what you expect to hear, you see what you expect to see.

Expectations change the experience.

If you walk into a conversation with a friend and expect it to be a litany of complaints about their job or relationship or the state of the world, more than likely that’s exactly what you’ll get. Another friend could enter the same conversation more open and interested in connecting with this person, and walk away from the conversation feeling energized and excited.

So what’s the difference?

Expectations change the experience.

And I’ve found this rule applies to relationships.

See, the patterns that infect every important relationship comes from your parents. Like it or not, the way your parents modeled marriage and family influences what you do in your own marriage and family.

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avatar by on September 27, 2010   •   133 Comments Work You

My Top 11 Blogging Tips

Alright, so I’m taking a slightly different direction today. I was going through some emails this weekend, poring through questions from the best readers on the Internet (this would be you). I have quite the back log of fantastic reader questions and post suggestions, and I hope to tackle a number of them this fall.

Quite a few repeated themselves about the same subject — blogging. Apparently, some of you think I know how to blog daily while keeping a dust-free home and perfectly groomed children who love each other and never fight.

I have absolutely no idea how one does that. I’ll keep my eye out for the answer, but in the meantime, I I’ll compromise and answer the overarching blogging question, which basically asks, “How do I blog well?”

I don’t know everything about blogging. But I do know some things. Here are my best tips about blogging while still miraculously getting dinner on the table.

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avatar by on September 26, 2010   •   2 Comments Links

Weekend Links

So hey – do you subscribe to our free weekend newsletter, Simple Living Weekly? If not, I encourage you to sign up. There’s been some fun giveaways lately, and there are more to come. It’s one email each weekend, highlighting the best posts from each of the SLM blogs.  Just thought you’d like to know…

And congratulations to these five winners of Sandy Coughlin’s The Reluctant Entertainer:

Enjoy this fabulous book!  Look for an email from me soon.

“Accept the challenges so that you can feel the exhilaration of victory.” -George S. Patton

avatar by on September 24, 2010   •   food & drink

Be Flexible: You will be Blessed!

Today’s guest post comes from my friend, Sandy Coughlin of Reluctant Entertainer. I met this fun mama awhile back at a Blissdom conference (can’t remember which one), and I thought she was all kinds of fun. She’s a treasure. And! Her book, The Reluctant Entertainer, released not too long ago, and today she wants to give away five copies of her book to Simple Mom readers. Find out at the end how you can win one!

I’m glad I could be flexible with our dinnertime last Sunday night. We really wanted to see our friends. And their commitments on this particular Sunday were going from one thing to another. They weren’t commitments of wasted time. They were commitments of reaching out. Touching lives.

So when we asked our friends to come over for a steak dinner, we were willing to push our dinner out and wait for them, as eight-thirty was the soonest they could get to our house. Not only did we want to see these friends, we knew that coming to our home would be a relaxing way to end a very busy day for them. I had also purchased some steaks at the “10 lb. Meat Sale” that we wanted to barbeque, along with veggies and salad from our yard (and of course yummy bread). My friend brought the dessert (delegation!).

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avatar by on September 22, 2010   •   82 Comments Family Bonding Your Family

How to have a simple, inexpensive and meaningful birthday party for your child

Birthday celebrations are meant to be fun. However, they often turn into expensive nightmares with wasted food and unnecessary gifts. They also come year after year, which means the waste continues for years to come!

My older daughter turned four last week. It was also the first time ever that we had a real “party” since all the others in the previous years have just been family gatherings. Needless to say, I was incredibly stressed about a number of things – the primary one being the money my friends and I might spend towards this one little girl’s party and secondly, the amount of unnecessary gifts and clutter that would land in my home as a result.

I planned over weeks and weeks and even lost a few nights of sleep over it, but it worked out really well in the end. The real reason it worked had less to do with the actual party and had more to do with the “approach” for the party.

In this post, I hope to share just that – my “approach” — with the hope it will help some of you have less complicated, less wasteful and more enjoyable birthday parties. So here are my takeways from my most recent experience.

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