For anyone considering breastfeeding, chances are you’ve heard some variation of, “for something so natural, breastfeeding is not easy.” I’m here to report that this statement is true. But if I’m honest, the same could be said of parenthood in general. Being a mom is simultaneously the most amazing and amazingly difficult experience I’ve ever had. In fact, I think there are several lessons I’ve learned from breastfeeding that translate to parenthood as a whole.

Tomorrow is the first day of school.  For some parents, tomorrow will be the first of firsts, and for others, it will be the first of lasts. The emotions surrounding the firsts and lasts make it easy to forget the stuff in between. 

It’s summer.  The season that is between spring and fall, the hottest part of the year, the best season, the worst season.  However you want to describe it, we all have a common thought in mind: STAYING COOL.  

Moms everywhere tend to put themselves on the bottom of the priority list. Well, it’s time that mom puts herself on the top rung of that ladder. What we won’t do for ourselves we will do for our children. Do you want them to know how to embrace health and wellness? Well, then you need to be the role model mom.  Let's talk about how we can fit fitness, healthy eating and stress management in so we can practice OptiMOM health!

 What’s for Sunday dinner?  I want to have a family dinner that is healthy and not too time consuming. And I don’t want to spend a lot of time and energy cleaning up after a busy weekend. Sunday nights are now becoming MYOP - make your own pizza nights!  

The calendar is filling and it is only December 1.

There is nothing like racing your bike under the hot desert sun. You’re in the gate and your mind is racing. You ask yourself, what am I doing? I’m a 33-year-old wife and stay- at-home mother of two. 

No matter how many little siblings you grew up with, how many kids you babysat over the years, how many child development books you’ve read, you will never truly be prepared for parenthood when it happens.

A month ago, I was intrigued when my friend Sherry told me about this year’s selection for the One Book, One Mesa County program. Mesa County Libraries’ choice for this year’s literary event was Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, by New Yorker cartoonist, illustrator and author Roz Chast. It covers a familiar topic for Sherry and me: aging and dying parents... 

My mother died at the end of October at the age of 87. She didn’t “pass away” or “expire” or “depart.” She died. I’ve never understood why people use euphemisms rather than talk directly about death.

Her death certificate says she died of “end stage dementia,” whatever that is. She died because she stopped eating and drinking (or…she stopped drinking and eating because she was dying). She was tired of living – she was “done.”

As adults, we all have different levels of tolerance for messiness, but in general, we like it a lot less than kids. We dislike it so much that we sometimes go to great lengths to prevent children from making messes, especially big ones or ones that take a long time to undo. Think for a moment, though, what might be behind those kid disasters.

If you live in Mesa County, chances are your kids are back at school. And “back-to-school” for many of us means “back-to-trying-to-come-up-with-healthy-lunches-that-my-kids-willl-actually-eat.”

Lunches that get eaten and lunches that are healthy, however, are not mutually exclusive. Like so many other things, it often comes down to communication, and maybe giving up a little control.

Of all the things to love about summer, perhaps my favorite is that it’s family camping season. Sticky s’mores fingers, smoky campfire hair, endless games of Uno, rainstorms that force us to read our books and nap all afternoon ... I pretty much love it all.

I recently had the enjoyable experience of attending a picnic at The Botanical Gardens of Western Colorado, where JUCO teams and STRiVE clients and staff ate, played and bonded on a perfect spring evening.

I’ve always thought babies are a lot smarter than most of us give them credit for. Consider for a moment that 90 percent of a child’s brain is formed in the first three years of life, and more than 700 new neural connections are formed every second.

Pretty amazing.

The problem is that adults often don’t recognize all this baby genius because we tend to convey information with words, either spoken or written. Babies and toddlers, though, have a lot more going on in their heads than their limited or non-existent verbal language allows them to express.