I’ve been knocking around ideas for making this blog more intentional and came up with the idea of daily themes by looking at other blogs. So, I asked myself, what should those themes be? The idea of wholeness and balance appealed to me. It’s important to parent from a place of wholeness. It’s easy to become unbalanced, because being a parent can become all consuming, especially if you are a parent of an intense child.

How does wholeness and balance show up in my life and practice? As a Christian, I seek balance with spirit, soul, mind, and strength in the energy that I give to loving God. The YMCA seeks to build healthy people in three areas: spirit, mind and body. Alfred Adler, whose holistic ideas inspire Fiddlehouse’s methods, spoke of balance between the life tasks: work, love, and friendship. So toward the end of having a balanced blog, I identified the following daily themes.

1. Spirit Sunday: Spiritual aspects of parenting and fostering spiritual health in ourselves and our kids.
2. Mind Monday: All things brain based from brain science to mental health to strategies to foster a healthy brain.
3. Teach ’em Tuesday: Ideas for teaching kids social skills and more using the triad of direct teaching, integrated teaching, and situational teaching.
4. What’s Up Wednesday: An update on current parenting and family related trends, events, research, products and publications.
5. Thinking Thursday: My day to blog about what I’ve been thinking.
6. Fun Friday: Simply ways to have fun and bring play into your parenting and family life.
7. Soulful Saturday: Emotions and how to use them effectively in parenting from energy matching to emotional intelligence.

Watch for posts under each category to grow as time goes on and be sure to let me know if you see something interesting that I should include.