flawed but authentic

There is a fun little year-end list over at Huffington Post called “The Seven Habits of Highly Spiritual People.” Hint: It’s not about what religion you are.
Makes sense to me:
#5
They Count Blessings in Small Wonders.
They do not expect Spirit to appear accompanied by fire and brimstone and a big neon sign flashing in the sky. [...]

You might be familiar with the story of the soccer players who survived a plane in the Andes from the movie “Alive.” The most sensationalistic part of their story is that some of them resorted to cannabalism to stay alive for two months in the snowy mountains.
 I read an article about Nando Parrado, one of the survivors, [...]

…for holiday newsletters. Do y’all get these too? I send one out, but I try to make it funny and light rather than a two page, double sided brag fest about how brilliant and talented my children are. (And they are. Totally.) While searching for a funny quote to use [...]

Back in March, our Very Nice Old Neighbor Guy died. For the past nine months, I’ve noticed that his flowers aren’t quite as vibrant, his grass isn’t quite as tidy, and his wife isn’t quite as smiley. (She was never very smiley before he died, but now we couple her non-smileyhood with a refusal to [...]

I wrote this entry on my personal blog last year after I made the rather difficult decision to let my little boy just be a little boy. It seems silly now, as we try to catch Santa turning our Christmas tree lights on by magic, as we write our letters addressing them to the [...]

 My two older boys have been drafting their letters to Santa this weekend. They are six and eight, and their wishlists this year are overwhelmingly weighted toward technology: handheld games, console games, a new computer, new computer games, music players and robots. Nearly everything they’ve set their sights on has a triple digit price tag. [...]

Sometimes this photo is all I need.