Do you say the truth of what is in your heart and mind? All the truth? How often? Hardly at all, sometimes, or all the time? No judgment here, but I am curious: how many of us are truly truthful?
Sometimes I suck at telling my truth. It’s not that I want to lie intentionally — I hate lying. I remember the first time as a kid I ever told a lie. I was about 8 and took a dollar from my mom’s purse and never told her. OMG, stealing AND lying. Bad, bad. For days I lay awake at night, cowering in my bed because I thought the Hand of Zeus would come down from the clouds and smite me while I slept. I remember being surprised when it didn’t. Lying still gives me that feeling, at least Capital-L Lying does. Smiting. **shiver**
There are other kinds of lying.
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Not to go all Grinchy on you, but I think it’s time for some serious change with the leaving-cookies-for-Santa thing. Let’s organize something, shall we? A new movement. I am pretty sure it will catch on. Occupy Cookie Plate. OCP for short.
Last summer, my eleven year old daughter got her first laptop. Becoming wired meant a lot of great changes in her life. She can communicate more easily with me now, via IM, email, or Skype. She can research school stuff better, without waiting in line for the family desktop computer. She can write her Great American Novel. She can stay in touch with pop culture more easily (for her, this mostly means watching music videos on YouTube). And, becoming wired means Facebook.
I am 
I was a Yes Mom. Not the good kind. The out of control kind.
It’s time we stopped trying to fix our shy kids. So what if they quietly sit on our laps at Mommy and Me classes? Those kids aren’t detaching from the world or being swallowed up by the floor; they’re being quietly observant, taking in and analyzing the world around them. Not to diss the extroverts happily parading around the room banging on drums, taking tigers by the tail, and generally being Awesome with a capital A, but 
I was once a Sanctimommy. I had high ideals about how I would raise my children and judged others for failing to toe my self-imposed line. Especially about what my kids ate. My kids would not eat junk food, I vowed. Processed foods would not cross our door. I would cook everything the Little House on the Prairie way, if you didn’t count my electric stove, my Vita-Mix superblender and my All-Clad pots and pans. Sugar would not pass my children’s lips unless it was unrefined organic Rapadura cane sugar home-baked into organic whole-wheat cookies or nutritious carrot muffins. My children would adore broccoli and all green vegetables. They would blissfully pass by fast food McRestaurants, never knowing what was inside. 
I was all set to publish a post on Rebecca Black’s “Friday” when I saw 
My 15-year-old son Nathaniel is having trouble with a person in his life who has been saying unkind things. We’ve talked about it several times. “It’s not what he says, it’s how he says it,” Nathaniel says. True enough, the words by themselves, taken out of context or written nakedly on a page, often don’t show much. But they hurt just the same. It’s how you say it.
I am one of the lucky moms. My daughter talks to me. Every Friday, or over the weekend if it’s a school holiday or she has a sleepover or something, my 5th grader phones me and we spend at least an hour talking about the things that happened in her week, my news, and the things she thinks about and worries about. I love that she shares so much with me, and I love our sense of connection despite the 3000 miles between us. I know her friends’ names and personalities, their little peccadillos. I know what she loses sleep over. I know what her dreams are.