It’s ALWAYS your turn. Do what you should do.

I was having a conversation with a friend the other day. We were talking about work and the possibility of working outside the home, or even volunteering somewhere. Her kids are all in school and she was looking for something to do. But as we talked, she admitted she was scared. Scared of the unknown. Scared of uncertainty. Scared of working and learning a new job. Scared of trying. Scared of failing. She’s been raising kids for the past 15 years and now she’s looking to do something else and she’s being held back by fear. It was almost as if she didn’t feel worthy or qualified to find a job or do some of the things she’s always wanted to do.

This conversation got me thinking about a book I read recently called “What to do when it’s your turn (and it’s always your turn)” by Seth Godin. Oh my word I dig anything Seth Godin writes. This photo of the first page sums up the point of the book (it’s a good one):

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We live in a world where possibilities are endless. And we no longer have to wait for someone to pick us–for someone to tell us it’s our turn to do whatever it is we want to do. We don’t need permission. We get to do what we want to do. It’s OUR turn. Not because someone picks us or told us it was our turn, but because it’s always our turn. Inherently we each have the capability to do things. To “speak up, stand out, solve an interesting problem, write sing, invent, create….”

One of the hurdles we can face when trying to do things, accomplish things (ANY “things”) is being in the mood.

A similar scenario like this plays out in the book. Imagine you’re having a day. You know, a day. Anything that could go wrong has gone wrong. The weather is bad, you think you’re getting a cold, a friend stood you up for dinner, and your kids have been rotten all day.

You’re feeling entitled to the bad mood you’re developing.

But then a good friend you haven’t heard from for awhile calls. Just to say hello and how much you mean to her. You walk in your front door and your husband has dinner fixed and the house picked up. And your kids are bathed and ready for bed.

After such a scenario Godin asks:

“How’s your mood now?

Here’s the real question: if all it takes to turn a lousy day into a great one is a little dinner party and a phone call, why would you ever choose to have a lousy day? Even better, why would you let someone else have a lousy one?

The people who need you need you to fix their mood, even when you don’t feel like it. And we need you to learn to fix your own mood so you can be the one who fixes the rest of us. The mood-fixer is a precious resource, and you can learn how to be that resource.

Do what you should do. Your mood will follow.”

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I think of that phrase nearly every day. When I’m not in the mood to do something. Something I know I want to do (or at least I want the end results that come from doing certain things) but I can’t quite get in the mood to do it. “Do what you should do. Your mood will follow.”

Sometimes I just have to repeat it over and over in my head as I plunge ahead on making things happen in my life.

It’s our turn to DO those things we’ve wanted to do. No excuses. Face the fears. Make things happen. Get our mood to follow our actions if need be.

It’s your turn. It’s always your turn.

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Games your family will love

Every year on Christmas Eve we give the kids new games to play together as a family.  We stay home on Christmas Eve and it can end up being a very long day for kids who are excited for the next day to come.  Several years ago we started letting them open a few games Christmas Eve morning and they spend much of the day playing those.  And continue to play them throughout the year.  Huge win.

Here are a few of our family’s favorite games:

Ruckus -Family Edition

Games your family will love
This game is easy enough for my 5 year old to play on his own, but fun enough I don’t want to die a quick and painless death while playing it with little kids.  You know what I mean.  It’s fast-paced and very straight-forward.  Great game for the whole family to play together.

 

Clue The Classic Edition

Games your family will love

 

I played this game as a child so I’m a little nostalgic about it.  My kids love it just as much as I did.  Colonel Mustard in the kitchen with the wrench.

Pictionary

Games your family will love

I dare say this is my MOST favorite game.  I love this game.  Love. It.  I’m terrible at drawing, but for some reason, this game is just fun.  My kids are still a little young to play this, but you’d be surprise how well a 5 year old can do.  We played this once as a family on Thanksgiving (boys against girls) and had to stop.  It got a tiny bit intense.  No one threw the game board across the room (like my brother used to do when we were kids) so I guess it wasn’t that bad.

When we play this game, we do “All Play” every time so every team draws every time and whichever team gets it first gets to roll the dice.  It’s a little more fast-paced this way and far more fun.

Uno

Games your family will love

An oldie but a goodie.  This is a good stocking stuffer gift as well.

Guess Who Game

Games your family will love

I also played this as a kid.  This is a good one to use for some one-on-one time with kids.  Time like that is precious around a house with 4 kids.  This is also a great game to take in the car when we go on road trips.

Sequence for Kids

Games your family will love

This is a great game to introduce kids to the idea of strategy when playing games.

Scattergories

Games your family will love

This game is a little slower-paced than some but can be pretty hilarious depending on who you play it with.

HedBanz

Games your family will love

Especially hilarious to play with younger kids.  For some reason we laugh a lot when we play this. Must be the way my kids ask questions.

 

This year we’re adding Operation , Pie Face Bounce-Off , and Battleship for the kids to open on Christmas Eve.

I’ve also heard Ticket To Ride is a must have.  Our youngest kid likes to ruin most attempts we make at playing games together so we’ll wait until he’s a little older to add this one.

Anyone have any games their family loves?

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Change the way you document life. Forever.

We’re all taking photos, but are we taking of photos of the right things in the right way?  Are we really documenting our families or do we just have a handful or photos of what people look like?  What are the stories we’re telling with our photos?  And how are we telling them?

I wrote the Every Day Photos Guide with the intent to help people change the way they think about photo documenting.  To help us all stop taking photos of just what things look like, and focus more on capturing what life FEELS like. Capturing who people are and why their stories matter. The every day moments and things that make up our lives.

The Every Day Photos Guide is ON SALE (first time ever) for just $11 (almost 50% savings) until midnight on December 12th!!  You can read all about the guide and its value RIGHT HERE.

If you don’t have this guide already, now is the time.  For the cost of one lunch, you can change the way you look at taking photos forever.  I guarantee it.  If you aren’t 100% happy with the e-book, just e-mail me within 14 days of your purchase and I’ll refund the money so there’s no risk to you.

The Every Day Photos guide–you’re guide to documenting your story through photos!!

EVERYDAY

 

Christmas traditions ideas.

I don’t think many of us would disagree about the importance of traditions in families or life in general.  I won’t go into the psychobabble of it all, but there’s something to be said for traditions and the role they play in our lives.

I love traditions.  Ones from my childhood and ones Mike and I have created with our own little family.  I’m also always on the lookout for new traditions to add to our family both during Christmas and throughout the year.  So I thought I’d share some of ours with you, and then I’d love for you to share some of yours with me in the comments.

DECORATING THE TREE

My husband and I both have birthdays around Thanksgiving time.  Sometimes each of our birthdays are ON Thanksgiving.  It’s a crazy time of year.  But somewhere around Thanksgiving (my husband prefers after the actual Thanksgiving holiday, I’m slowly trying to move it up a few days) we get out our tree and decorate it.  I let my kids do all the decorating (after I get all the stinking lights working each year–I have a layer of lights that don’t work that I’ve pushed back on the tree and added working ones on top).  My kids are still young and the youngest still doesn’t respect the “don’t touch” rule of ornaments.  So we’ve got cheap-ish ones (that won’t cause heart ache if they get broken) and the kids get to put them wherever they want on the tree.  Which right now means lots of clumping of ornaments.  I kinda dig the clumps  It’s a good indication of the phase of life we’re in right now.  My oldest daughter has tried to start spreading them out, but our youngest keeps moving them back to clumps.  Apparently the ornaments like to have friends nearby.

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THE PIXIE

This is one tradition that gets a lot of questions from people.  Understandably so.  When I was a kid, starting on December 1st we’d put our shoes out by the fire place.  Each night, “the pixie” would come and leave some sort of small treat in our shoes.  We’d do this each night until Christmas day.  I can’t explain why, but it was one of my MOST favorite traditions.  So we carried it over to our family (much to my husbands dismay–he doesn’t get it) and my kids love it just as much as I did.  My sister also continued this tradition (my four brothers did not) and now that her youngest is 13 and she has two kids in college, the pixie still comes.  Her kids insist.  🙂

I honestly have no idea how this started or why.  I’ll have to ask my parents.  Regardless, it’s fun and the kids looooove it.

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STOCKING FOR JESUS

We put a stocking out for Jesus each year.  We are celebrating his birthday after all.  The intent was to write things on a piece of paper that we would “give” to Jesus that year and then focus on that all year long.  Turns out we haven’t really done that yet.  We’re still in little kid survival mode so best intentions don’t always get carried out.  But one year we’ll start doing that.  I still like the white stocking hanging up there to help us keep the focus on what really matters.  (And yes, we have some non-matching stockings there at the end–we added those kids after I bought the matching red and white ones and Target didn’t carry them anymore.  One day we’ll get all matching stockings.  Or not.  Cause it doesn’t really matter).

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CHRISTMAS STORIES

Starting December 1st, we read a Christmas story each night.  We wrap up 24 Christmas books and each night one of the kids gets to unwrap one book and we read it together as a family.  When we had super young kids this caused a little drama as they wanted to unwrap the book each time (or all the books at once).  But the kids are old enough now they do pretty good at taking turns and they really look forward to this each night.  I bought most of these through some Scholastic school orders so we got good prices on the books.  You could start with less than 24 books and slowly add more Christmas books each year until you have enough.

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FAMILY MEMORIES

This is one of my personal favorites.  Several years ago (1995 to be exact) my mom had the idea to write down family memories.  Each person was assigned another person in the family and we had to write a memory (or memories) about that person.  As you can imagine there was some significant grumbling about this each year, but the tradition lived on for 7 years.  I come from a family of extremely talented writers so there was some “stressing” about writing well-written essays.  It was entertaining to watch different people (who will not be named–and I was not one of them–I write how I talk and I’m perfectly okay with that) finishing their final drafts just before we started reading them.

Christmas Day we’d go around to each person and they’d read their memories out loud to every one else.  It was one of my favorite parts of Christmas.  As we added in-laws, they got roped into it too.  And when grandkids started getting old enough, we included them as well.

One year for Christmas my sister and I collected all the written memories (my mom saved them all in a folder) and we put them into a book for each family to have.

My family is funny.  Really funny.  So there were definitely tears of laughter as we read this.  But my family is also not super emotional.  We don’t say “I love you” to each other and we aren’t great at expressing feelings.  So this was a great opportunity for us to tell each other things we admired or loved about another person.  It got kinda uncomfortable sometimes but being uncomfortable can be a good thing.

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When we assembled the books we included a few pages of pictures from each year as well.

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FRIEND MEMORY BOOKS

Each year I have a friend Christmas party with 6 (there were 7 of us total) friends who were pretty much inseparable growing up.  I loved the memory thing so much, I somehow talked all of them into doing it one year.  So we each wrote memories about each one of the friends (nothing long–just a few memories of each person) and put them all in a book.  We had plenty of memories to draw from as some of us have been friends since we were 7 years old which basically makes us family.  It’s SO fun to go back and read these stories.  Some of my friends have memories of me that I have NO recollection of.  I also think it will be fun for my kids to read these one day and see what my friend dynamics were like when I was a kid.

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TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS

We didn’t do this every year, but we did it several times when I was growing up.  Twelve days before Christmas, we would start “The Twelve Days of Christmas” for a neighbor or friend.  Each night, we’d leave some sort of treat on their doorstep usually with some clever poem (my mom is a genius writer and came up with some award worthy poems with our treats).  We’d continue this for 12 nights.  It was a riot to try and leave it at different times of the evening (so they wouldn’t know when to anticipate us) and get hidden before the door was opened.

A few years ago, a friend did this for my family only they left a piece of a nativity scene each night with a scripture that went along with it.  This was a year when we had four really young kids and life was feeling pretty chaotic.  The Christmas spirit was hard to come by at the time and this service made a HUGE difference for me personally that year.  Each evening when the doorbell rang, we’d find another piece of the nativity with a scripture that corresponded with what piece it was.  And on the 12th day (Christmas Eve) they gave us the baby Jesus and sang a carol for us.  I thought it was such a great idea and something I’ll never forget as I put that nativity out each year.  This is a tradition I plan to add to our family that we can do for someone else each year.

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PHOTOS FOR AN ALBUM

This is something I started last year and it’s MY favorite gift to give and was one of the kids favorite gifts.  Two of my kids specifically mentioned they wanted it to happen again this year, which it will. It’s a tradition I plan to carry on each year.  In my opinion, it’s the best kind of gift you can give.  You can read all about it HERE.

 

These are a few of my favorite family traditions.  I’m always looking for more and would love for any of you to share some!  Hope you all have a holiday season filled with peace.

Alcatraz–a family session

One might think Alcatraz an odd place to do a family photo session.  Turns out it’s amazing for photos.  I flew out to California and spent a day with my brother, his wife, and their daughter for a day in San Francisco and some photos at Alcatraz (one of my brother’s favorite places).  I’d never been to Alcatraz before.  It was fascinating.  And FULL of awesome places for photos.  We just had to avoid all the people (easier than I thought it would be) and the wind on one side of the island (it was crazy windy and cold on the west side).

This was definitely my kind of family session.

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Easily one of my favorite family photo sessions I’ve ever done.  Alcatraz.  Who would’ve thought.

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