Author: Karen

I am an RN, Author, Coach, and Speaker. I write novels about relationships to help people find insight into their own. I guide people to create comfort, clarity, and connection in their lives. By combining metaphysical tools with over twenty-five years of nursing experience, I infuse the 'art of nursing' into my practice by providing partnership and resources help people compassionately honor their health.

jumping

by Karen, posted in family, fitness, health, no fear, tweens, yoga

i was at my regular saturday morning yoga class and the teacher taught us a short ashtanga (http://www.yogajournal.com/basics/1366) sequence that involved jumping. one of the women said something like, “kids do it all the time, but how often do adults get to jump in real life? never!”.  i was thinking, “i do! i was jumping just the other day!” i had, in fact, just been jumping two days prior. i was sitting in my cubicle at work and suddenly realized i had been sitting for a couple of hours straight and needed to get up and move…i have a programmed alert in my outlook calendar that pops up every hour, prompting me to “GET UP!!”, but i must have inadvertently clicked on ‘dismiss’ instead of ‘snooze’ earlier in the day. so i stood up, and surprised my fellow cube mates (not to mention myself) by starting to jump up and down. i don’t know where it came from, but it was like the jumping just spontaneously sprang forth from my body, without my prior knowledge or consent. once i started, though, i realized that it felt good and i continued for several more seconds before self-consciousness gained the upper hand and i stopped.

reasons to jump:

1. it’s fun!

2. if you own a trampoline, you can get your money’s worth!

3. if you have a jump rope (come to think of it, i do), you can get your money’s worth!

4. it’s good cardio!

actually, speaking of cardio, money can be raised by jumping. my daughter recently participated in a jump-a-thon  (for the american heart association) at her school and raised $55.

http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=2360

how long has it been since you jumped up and down just for the fun of it? 🙂

Rule #1

by Karen, posted in family, fitness, no fear, tweens

my daughter fell off her horse at her riding lesson last week. her instructor said something like, “is this your first time falling off a horse?” fortunately, her dad brought her to that lesson, not her mom, so there were no hysterics involved. when he asked her what happened, why she fell, she said, “I let go of the reins”.  which leads me to

Rule #1: always wear your helmet!

i understand that “first time” implies there are other times to come. i try not to worry too much about this. i try but i don’t succeed (hel-lo? remember Christopher Reeve?). i looked up some info online about horseback riding lesson: http://www.wikihow.com/Get-a-Child-Horse-Riding-Lessons

now that i know a little more about what i didn’t know about horseback riding, i feel like i can comment a bit on this topic.

  1. about wearing jeans: my daughter did just fine wearing jeans and then one day she finished her lesson with a complaint that her leg hurt. upon investigation, we found a large round blister on the inside of her shin just below the knee from the inseam of the jeans…prior to that day she had been wearing long johns under the jeans (it was COLD, riding outside in february!) but in the warmer weather she had adjust her riding wardrobe to prevent injury.
  2. another point made in the online article was to ask your child if she prefers private lessons or riding with another person. turns out, she prefers riding with others.
  3. it is a good idea to shop around. ask for referrals from friends whose children ride (or ride themselves) but be prepared to make up your own mind. just because someone speaks highly about a facility doesn’t mean it’s right for you or yours. also, prices for similar services can vary widely.

the bottom line was that she did get back on, which i understand is a sure sign that she  really does want to learn to ride a horse. 🙂

8 tips for shopping at the farmers market

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, gardening, raising chickens, shopping

the farmers market is unofficially open in portland, maine (and maybe where you are too). here are some ideas to get you started off on the right foot:

  1. bring a bag! preferably a reusable shopping bag vs those plastic ones (although these are available from the farmers if you do forget your bag. which I typically do).
  2. don’t be afraid to ask, “what the heck is it?” if you don’t recognize it.
  3. don’t be afraid to ask, “how the heck do you cook that thing?” . they’ll tell you. (most likely it will involve frying it in butter, but hey, doesn’t butter improve most things?).
  4. bring small bills and a handful of change. nothing will make you feel more uncomfortable than handing over a $20 to pay for $1 worth of parsnips (reference #3 above) and  nothing takes longer than a farmer counting out your change in those precious one dollar bills that he will desperately need to make change for other ill-prepared shoppers a few hours later.
  5. if you see a pile of something on the ground behind the vendor’s stand, ask for it! they are often happy to give you those carrot tops (or whatever) that their other customers didn’t want but that your chickens will swoon over for just the price of taking it off their hands.
  6. show some restraint! don’t buy up all of those “early girl” tomato seedlings when they first appear. by the time the heirloom varieties (purple brandywine; amish paste, hawaiian pineapple, stupice, thesoliniki) are presented, your garden will be overfull (and your significant other will be saying, “I told you so!” with that smug look as you sob that “there is no more room in the garden! Why didn’t I wait?!”).
  7. shop around; nothing is more annoying than to fork over $4 for that small bunch of cut daffodils and then find the much larger bunch for $3.50 two stalls down.
  8. plan to visit the market as close to when it opens as you can; it is definitely an “early bird catches the worm” kind of shopping experience. they have what they have until it’s gone.

and remember: they hauled all that stuff over here, the least you can do is to go buy a parsnip or something (reference #4 above).

anyone else have any tips for farmers market shopping? …or any good parsnip recipes? 🙂

find a local farmer’s market: http://www.localharvest.org/

learn what to do with what you bought: http://www.farmfresh.org/learn/recipes.php

 

(another) new restaurant in the old port

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, restaurants

KAMASOUPTRA is the new restaurant, and they serve (you guessed it!) primarily soup. they have a cool tag line:  steamy. hot. soup.  i mean really; how could you go wrong?

well, for one thing, that stupid construction vehicle that is blocking the entrance is …bad feng shui. also, the stairway to the second floor where the restaurant is located was shut down, so i was forced to take the, um, rather suspicious looking elevator which was  moving so slowly that my usually latent claustrophobia was starting to dust itself off. once the doors finally opened and i escaped…i mean arrived at my destination, things  began to look up. the servers were clean and friendly. all soups i asked to try were graciously handed over, no charge. i thought the cheese containing soups were too…cheesey, but my cheese loving friend thought they were just right. the vegetable tortilla soup was my favorite.

a bonus was … they had CUPCAKES! from the TULIP CUPCAKERY! the name alone primes you to love them! and did i mention the sample was free? it was half a cupcake, but still.  having just finished 5 soup samples(not to mention lunch and the scone i had been gifted with earlier), it really was more than i needed, or expected. (full disclosure: the cupcake was a little dry but the frosting more than made up for it).

they sent me on my way with a menu that included a 10% off coupon for my return visit (this week) and several extra coupons for my coworkers.

all in all, it was 10 minutes well spent this afternoon.

if you are in the portland (maine)  area, check them out.

http://kamasouptra.com/home.html

gardening

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, gardening

are you gardeners out there getting excited thinking about your vegetable gardens for this year? the rain last year left my tomatoes (and me) in misery; there was so much mold that when i finally did get a tomato or two that were edible, i had no appetite for it…and i love tomatoes. fortunately, this  is still vivid in my memory so i will not be going tomato crazy when it comes to plant buying time this year (the last two years i had in excess of 18 plants…).

so, this year i will try to do get more bounty from fewer plants. that is my plan. i hope i can stick to it when i am looking at all the different varieties of tomatoes seedlings for sale at Agway…

here are some helpful links:

http://www.agway.com/

http://www.gardeners.com/KitchenGardenPlanner/kgp_home,default,pg.html

http://www.5dollardinners.com/2010/03/free-gardening-planners.html

“The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.”~Vita Sackville-West

10 things i’ve learned about roosters

by Karen, posted in family, raising chickens

It all started off innocently enough; 26 chicks in a small cardboard box arrived in the spring…we learned some things from books and friends in advance, but some things are learned by doing, through “on the job training”.  1.when ordering new chicks from vendors, you often will not receive all female chicks . this is not good for several reasons, which leads us to …. 2. boy chickens often do not play nice with each other.  3. boy chickens grow up and start crowing pretty darn fast. 4.The dollar store earplugs don’t work. 5.Putting a pillow over your head does work some, but it interferes w/breathing, so can’t be a long term solution. 6. no one in the family hears the crowing at 3:07am except me.  (DAWN I  could handle; but 3:07AM?)  7. “free to a good home” is not an effective advertising strategy for this purpose; you can’t GIVE away a rooster. Nobody wants them, or certainly nobody wants more than one. 8. Except some people do; they will take all you have, as long as you don’t mind if they eat them. 9.. A friend with  a farm may offer to take them, so they can “free range”, which is a euphemism for “being eaten by hawks”.  10. the bottom line? we would do it all again. in fact, we have, several years in a row now. it has become one of our spring rituals. 🙂

here are some resources to get you started if you are interested in learning more:

1. http://www.idealpoultry.com/

2. http://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/index.html

 

the terrible 10’s?

by Karen, posted in family, tweens

my thoughts are harkening back to my 10 year old daughter’s toddler years this morning…they are not warm and fuzzy thoughts.  after her 5th “No! Don’t talk to me! I don’t want to talk about it!”, all before breakfast, i was having deja vu…haven’t we been here/done this before? seems like we’ve come full circle in her first decade of life; i remember similar behavior from her (and her older brother, come to think  of it) when they were in their “terrible 2’s”, that lasted until they were nearly 4 yrs old…hope the terrible 10’s don’t last quite so long. it would be nice to have a breather before the teenage angst sets in. any other parents of 10 year olds experiencing this? how do you manage it?

here is a website with some advice about how to manage some types of close encounters with your children:

http://kidshealth.org/parent/positive/talk/temper.html

bowling

by Karen, posted in family, fitness, tweens

recently i went bowling for the first time in more than a decade. i took my daughter and was immediately presented with a bowling dilemma: to add bumpers, or NOT to add bumpers? that is the question. with bumpers, will they ever learn to throw the ball properly so that they can one day bowl without them? without bumpers, will they become so demoralized by their gutter ball induced lack of measurable scores that they will not want to play ever again? hmmmm.

how do you other parents out there solve the bowling bumpers dilemma?

the worst thing about bowling? the SHOES (ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww).

the best thing about bowling? spending time having fun with my family doing something other than eating.

bottom line: bowling is fun.  here’s a link to find a place to bowl near you:

http://www.bowlcandlepin.com/bowlzip/index.htm

trust your instincts

by Karen, posted in family, fitness, tweens

well. my daughter has been riding at the new barn (http://home.comcast.net/~goodrich-puffer/index.html) for a while now, and loves it here. she is learning things like “posting”, “diagonals”, and “emergency dismounts”…oh my! more importantly, i am not experiencing that vague feeling of uneasiness that never left me at the other barn…the “i can’t put my finger on it, but something doesn’t seem quite right” feeling that mothers (and others) sometimes feel. i don’t feel like that at all when she is riding here. plus, this instructor taught her more in an hour than the prior one did in a month. this instruction makes the other look like…pony rides. expensive pony rides.

have any of you ever had a “gut feeling” about something that turned out to be true? did you follow your instinct right away, or wait awhile first?

happy easter

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, good grief, tweens

one of my favorite holidays growing up was easter. my father loved easter, and always went out of his way to make it fun for us. we had the requisite easter baskets, usually one of the prepackaged, pre-filled ones from the closest department store (we were a family of 4 kids born in 6 years, after all), but i always loved mine. the best part of the day was the easter egg hunt. dad would fill the plastic easter eggs with small change and “hide” them around the house (my father was disabled and not-so-agile, so most of the eggs were at about waist level, in plain sight). we would race around until we had found them all.

this year is the first that neither of my kids believe in the easter bunny anymore. here’s the funny thing about that though: they both still expect baskets and booty from the fictional bunny. as a mother, i certainly don’t want to disappoint them, but this year i wanted to focus on “less is more” and so i scaled things back some. instead of large, overstuffed baskets, i made them easter bunny bags to hold their candy (http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/holiday-ideas/easter-table-decorations), an idea i got from Good Housekeeping Magazine. they were easy to make, and more importantly, they were quick, since it was 10pm on easter eve before i got to actually assemble said bunnies. the other good thing about these little bunnies is that they form an enclosed space within which the contents must conform; no candy or toys spilling out over the tops and the sides…another reminder for me not to go “over the top” with filling them.  i did, of course, fill the plastic eggs with small change for the egg hunt. even though the morning will be rushed, with us getting ready to drive an hour and a half to have dinner with family out-of-state, and the older child getting ready to go to work, we will have our traditional egg hunt.

i would not want to miss that opportunity to honor my dad. 🙂

what easter rituals does your family have? are they carried over from your childhood?