The Only Scheduling Tool I Use

by | Sep 12, 2017 | Parenting, Tips and Techniques

How do you find the time to do all the things you need to get done in a day?

Much less fit in any self care time?

Can it even be done?  Especially in this culture of busy?

Would you believe me if I told you it could be done, and that I manage it, most of the time even though I have four daughters 11 and below, I run three businesses, am married and have several hobbies?

Let’s go back almost 3 years ago.  We had just moved 30 minutes away from the area of Maine we first moved to four years ago, effectively leaving most of our support system, so that we could save about that much time in my husbands daily commute.  Our youngest had just turned a year old, and unlike some of her sisters had gone straight into the “must watch constantly because she might kill herself” mode that meant I was always on guard.

I was working on building a business, anything really to be able to help supplement my hubby’s income while being home with the girls.  I was trying out an MLM for the second time and having about as much luck as the time I had tried one 10 years previously.  The one thing I knew I needed was support.

Through making connections on Facebook (and following instructions from the MLM I was a part of) I found a business coach down the coast in Maine and I started chatting with her.  To make a long story short she was getting ready to have a free virtual week which I joined and then later became one of her clients.

The biggest tool I think I have learned from the amazing Britt Bolnick of In Arms Coaching is that of Sacred Structure.  And it is through the regular use of this tool that I have been able to obtain a fair amount of balance in my schedule for the must do’s, the want to do’s and fun stuff.

The only slight twist I have added to Britt’s amazing concept is that of Grace Time.  Every week there is at least one (if not two) blocks of time that are labeled grace for catching up on all the business or other tasks that didn’t happen at their assigned time.  Because you know, as a mum, it doesn’t always happen the way you thought it should!  That grace time has saved me on more than one week.

What I love about Sacred Structure is you can set it up over and over again, so that it is always reflecting what is most important in your life right now.  We all have different seasons in our life, and what might be the most important right now (for instance healing from this broken ankle) will not necessarily be such a priority in another future season.  Sacred Structure adjusts for this.

Sacred Structure has changed my world.  The first thing I started putting in it was crafting/creative time, and that is still something that needs to happen regularly for my happiness.  Strangely enough that creative time bleeds over and makes everything else I do, whether it is parenting, running my businesses or cooking dinner, easier to accomplish.

What would be the first thing you would add to your schedule that you can’t currently find time to do?  Tell me in the comments below.  And check out Britt’s free Sacred Structure guide right here.  She even has videos for it now!

Chase Young is the founder of The Mommy Rebellion a place for judgment-free parenting.  She’s created a place to get tips, tools and support for what it is truly like to be a mother, stories from the trenches that show you you’re not alone.  Tips that real mothers use.  Tools to give to yourself and to your parenting friends to feel more focused, have more patience and energy, and feel less tired and snappy .  
You can follow Chase here on this blog, sign up for her newsletter here and follow her on Facebook and Instagram.

There’s No Perfection in Parenting – Part 3

by | Aug 31, 2017 | Affirmations, Parenting, Tips and Techniques

Today we finish up our 3-part series from Robyn Wiley.

Robyn will be leading us through accepting that There’s no Perfection in Parenting and today she finishes our series with one last powerful tool.

Join Robyn in the video below and if you missed Part 1 and Part 2 just click on them!

Robyn Wiley is Mama Bear to a lovely and spirited 9 year old boy. When she’s not playing outside or watching Pokemon cartoons, she also serves as an Author, Joy & Authenticity Coach, Reiki Master Teacher, Speaker, and Workshop Leader in the realm of Personal and Spiritual Growth.

At the core of Robyn’s work is her desire to help others connect to their most true, Authentic selves so they can experience the greatest amount of Joy, Passion, and Fulfillment in ALL areas of their lives- parenting included!

From many years of feeling very unhappy and disconnected from her own authentic self, Robyn understands the pain of living this way. After receiving massive benefits from working with her first Life Coach and Reiki Master, Robyn realized her calling to share the tools she had learned and to develop her own tools to assist others on their paths to happier and more authentic living.

Among her training and experience, Robyn has completed a B.A. in Philosophy, Reiki Trainings from 2009-2017 to the highest level of Reiki Master of Masters, a Certification in “Assertiveness Coaching” and has Coached dozens of clients from 2014, has designed and led dozens of Personal/Spiritual Development workshops, and has published a Guided Journal called: “My Happy Book: a Guided Journal to Light up your Life.”

Robyn continuously seeks training and experience to support her in being the best person, parent, coach, and teacher she can be, and is currently enrolled in a second Coaching Certification program, the highly reputed Robbins-Madanes Core 100 Program.

To learn more about Robyn and her work, please visit her website at:

Teaching Patience

by | Aug 30, 2017 | Parenting

This week’s blog post is something that I recorded on my phone at 1:47 AM when I couldn’t sleep.  This is literally the transcription of my recording and my thoughts on teaching patience to our children.

Teaching patience in a digital age where everything can come in nanoseconds is such an interesting parental concept.

I grew up in that teeny tiny gap generation from 1977 to 1983.  Before the Millennials but after Generation X.  My childhood was analog but my teenage and college years were digital.  So I kind of bridge and understand both and yet, it is so important to me to teach my kids patience.

And yet I remember what it was like to be a small kid and be stuck in that idea that it NEEDS to happen RIGHT now. But when I was growing up things didn’t happen right now.  You had to wait one week to the next week for a tv show, you couldn’t binge watch a whole season in a day. My kids totally want to do that when a new season comes on Netflix or Amazon Prime, and I am like “No, no, save some for tomorrow, don’t binge watch it all in one day!”

It’s so funny when the Grand Tour came out on Amazon Prime (you know the car show, we usually watch Top Gear when everyone is sick, because it’s this innocuous slightly funny show, doesn’t harm anyone, no swearing, and it isn’t cooking.  Because I mean sometimes watching a cooking show when your tummy is upset, is a REALLY bad idea).  Anyway when the Grand Tour came out and Amazon would only release one episode a week and my kids were like “OMG, we have to wait a whole week for a new episode?”

These are lessons in patience.

Patience, I think this is one of the reasons why it is so important to get kids involved in gardening.  Besides that digging in dirt is a natural antidepressant, but just the fact that it doesn’t grow overnight.  I mean even my husband’s hops which can literally grow six inches in a day, still it’s a way to learn patience.

My almost 11 year old has gotten ducks and we recently got more ducks because we needed more girls, and we got a duckling.  My 11 year old kept being worried about the duckling, and we kept saying it’s only for a few weeks, in a few more weeks it is going to be a duck, this passage of time, and figuratively she’s had it for six weeks and it is now much more of a duck than a duckling, it doesn’t need to follow its mama anymore than when we first got it.

These lessons in patience.

So I broke my ankle hiking and it’s been a little bit more than 3 weeks since I broke it. (Note: I wasn’t doing anything crazy – this is a hiking trail I have been up at least a dozen times before and I am sure I will go up a dozen times again.) But I slipped on some rocks and broke my ankle. Ever since I broke my ankle, every single night, my 9 year old comes to say goodnight to me, because I am sleeping downstairs in a chair to elevate my ankle, and she says “I hope you feel better in the morning.  I hope your ankle is better in the morning.”

And I get it, I get that she wants everything to come back to normal.  It is never going to come back to normal that it was before, because that is just not how life works, everything changes.  I tried to explain this to her, but I think it is one of those things that you just have to experience.

But the other thing I want to say is it is not like pain is linear.  I mean we would like to think it is, that everyday we are healing we are going to get just a little bit better. But healing is like grief, it comes in waves, it cyclic or spiral or cylindrical.  You are going to have bad days, days when it hurts more or you can’t do it.  Where you’ve got to push more, or days when the grief just overwhelms you, but it’s going to happen.

It becomes part of you, part of your soul, just like grief does.  It can be 5, 10 years down the road and it can come up again, because it is part of who you are, you will be reminded if nothing else.

Teaching kids patience is like teaching kids about money these days because money doesn’t exist, it’s all invisible.

Teaching kids patience, trying to explain to my 5 year old and my 9 year old that their 11 year old sister is just going through her uglies, and that this is just a stage and she will get better and that right now she is just being a bit of an ugly duckling.  That it won’t always be about her.  Again an example about patience.

Patience, we really do need to teach our children about patience, because as Simon Sendik says about the Millennials Generation that I am slightly too old to be in, and are happening now, they were given a shitty hand, a bad set of playing cards and they don’t know how to deal with patience.  Because you can order something on Amazon and it arrives the next day, in some places within a couple of hours.  So they don’t understand patience.

Teaching patience.  I think it should be on every parent’s curriculum.

If you any good ideas beyond what I have shared here, I would love to hear them.

How do you teach your kids patience?

 

Chase Young is the founder of The Mommy Rebellion a place for judgment-free parenting.  She’s created a place to get tips, tools and support for what it is truly like to be a mother, stories from the trenches that show you you’re not alone.  Tips that real mothers use.  Tools to give to yourself and to your parenting friends to feel more focused, have more patience and energy, and feel less tired and snappy .  
You can follow Chase here on this blog, sign up for her newsletter here and follow her on Facebook and Instagram.

There’s No Perfection in Parenting-Part 2

by | Aug 24, 2017 | Journal Writing, Parenting, Tips and Techniques

Today we continue with part 2 of a 3-part series from Robyn Wiley.

Robyn will be leading us through accepting that There’s No Perfection in Parenting and today she leads us through a journal writing exercise to get to the root of our limiting beliefs about parenting.

Join Robyn in the video below and join us next week part 3 and the conclusion of this series!

And if you missed last week’s video you can find it  here.

Robyn Wiley is Mama Bear to a lovely and spirited 9 year old boy. When she’s not playing outside or watching Pokemon cartoons, she also serves as an Author, Joy & Authenticity Coach, Reiki Master Teacher, Speaker, and Workshop Leader in the realm of Personal and Spiritual Growth.

At the core of Robyn’s work is her desire to help others connect to their most true, Authentic selves so they can experience the greatest amount of Joy, Passion, and Fulfillment in ALL areas of their lives- parenting included!

From many years of feeling very unhappy and disconnected from her own authentic self, Robyn understands the pain of living this way. After receiving massive benefits from working with her first Life Coach and Reiki Master, Robyn realized her calling to share the tools she had learned and to develop her own tools to assist others on their paths to happier and more authentic living.

Among her training and experience, Robyn has completed a B.A. in Philosophy, Reiki Trainings from 2009-2017 to the highest level of Reiki Master of Masters, a Certification in “Assertiveness Coaching” and has Coached dozens of clients from 2014, has designed and led dozens of Personal/Spiritual Development workshops, and has published a Guided Journal called: “My Happy Book: a Guided Journal to Light up your Life.”

Robyn continuously seeks training and experience to support her in being the best person, parent, coach, and teacher she can be, and is currently enrolled in a second Coaching Certification program, the highly reputed Robbins-Madanes Core 100 Program.

To learn more about Robyn and her work, please visit her website at:

There is No Perfection in Parenting part 1

by | Aug 17, 2017 | Breathing, Parenting, Tips and Techniques

Today we begin the first of a 3-part series from Robyn Wiley.

Robyn will be leading us through accepting that There’s no Perfection in Parenting and today she starts out the series leading us through a breathing exercise to accept ourselves exactly where we are at.

Join Robyn in the video below and join us next week for part 2.

Robyn Wiley is Mama Bear to a lovely and spirited 9 year old boy. When she’s not playing outside or watching Pokemon cartoons, she also serves as an Author, Joy & Authenticity Coach, Reiki Master Teacher, Speaker, and Workshop Leader in the realm of Personal and Spiritual Growth.

At the core of Robyn’s work is her desire to help others connect to their most true, Authentic selves so they can experience the greatest amount of Joy, Passion, and Fulfillment in ALL areas of their lives- parenting included!

From many years of feeling very unhappy and disconnected from her own authentic self, Robyn understands the pain of living this way. After receiving massive benefits from working with her first Life Coach and Reiki Master, Robyn realized her calling to share the tools she had learned and to develop her own tools to assist others on their paths to happier and more authentic living.

Among her training and experience, Robyn has completed a B.A. in Philosophy, Reiki Trainings from 2009-2017 to the highest level of Reiki Master of Masters, a Certification in “Assertiveness Coaching” and has Coached dozens of clients from 2014, has designed and led dozens of Personal/Spiritual Development workshops, and has published a Guided Journal called: “My Happy Book: a Guided Journal to Light up your Life.”

Robyn continuously seeks training and experience to support her in being the best person, parent, coach, and teacher she can be, and is currently enrolled in a second Coaching Certification program, the highly reputed Robbins-Madanes Core 100 Program.

To learn more about Robyn and her work, please visit her website at:

Teen Depression Is NOT Normal

by | Aug 10, 2017 | Mental Health, Parenting, Teenagers

Today I am excited to bring you a reprinted post from Mary Herrington of Destigmatize.Me

Mary has just published a book From Stressed to Best that talks about our worst fears as parents – failing our children and how to avoid it.  Today Mary brings us a short article on how Teen Depression is not normal and how to avoid it.

Teen Depression Is NOT Normal

As a society, we tend to think that anxiety and depression are a part of the tween/teen experience. Five years ago, I had a friend tell me: “All teens attempt suicide. It’s just part of being a teen. You just need to accept that.”

Yet, I couldn’t. At the time, her oldest child was only five years old. My oldest was 15 and was in a mental health facility for attempted suicide. I would NOT accept that teen suicide is normal. Her daughter is now 10 and our friendship has moved away from one another. Sometimes, my mind wanders back to her and that comment and I wonder if she will feel the same if, and when, her daughter attempts suicide.

Being the mother of a mentally ill child is difficult. The stigma around mental illness often prevents me from telling people, and when I do tell people, I often never hear from them again. They are afraid of my daughter. At 19, she has accomplished so much more than anyone had previously thought possible. All professionals had told me to expect her to be dead by age 18. Not by the horrible hand of cancer, but at her own hand. I had been told that her severe anxiety, depression and PTSD would cause her to give up and have no life to live. I was advised to make my peace with that and to make sure I had arrangements with a funeral parlor ahead of time because when it happened, I would be too distraught to handle it.

I hope you’re shaking your head in disbelief because as I type these words, that is what I am doing. Three little letters come to mind while I type and read that. They begin with a W and end with an F.

My oldest has not only graduated high school with a 3.89 GPA, she has started her own business, volunteers to help others with anxiety and depression, volunteers at church on their production team and has had a long term relationship with the same young man for almost 3 years now.

Yes, she has mental illness.

NO she is NOT her illness.

The stigma around mental illness is reprehensible! We hear about shootings at schools and the media immediately looks to see if the person suffers from bipolar, as if blaming the actions of a madman on a biological disorder of dopamine in the brain is an excuse for their behavior and choices. It is NOT!

Mental illness does NOT make someone violent in and of itself. Most people with mental illness, especially if untreated, are more dangerous to themselves than to others. Most parents, and tweens/teens, won’t even seek treatment for anxiety or depression until they are so entrenched in the illness that it takes much more medication and lifestyle changes to regain a sense of normalcy. When they do regain that normalcy, they live in shame and fear that someone will discover they use medications or a special diet or were “weak” and needed help.

We need to stop the stigma behind mental illness. It is not to be ashamed of, but instead further researched and explained.

In my new book, From Stressed to Best, features how self-directed learning is a proven method of not only education but also a way for tweens/teens to have a way to B.R.E.A.T.H.E. freely again. With self-directed learning, they will be:

  • B-etter Prepared for College and Careers
  • R-elaxed
  • E-nd Arguments (around homework & school)
  • A-ctively Learning
  • T-hinking for themselves
  • H-ealing Inner Pain
  • E-ducating Themselves for Life

Mary Herrington is an internationally published author, speaker, and Mom who has lived in the trenches with children who suffer from learning disabilities, anxiety and depression. She has used Self-Directed Learning since 2009 to empower her children. Max graduated with a 3.89 GPA and Sara is 2 grades ahead.  You can find out more and read an excerpt of her book here.