Beth has had four full days of school thus far. Fortunately, swim practice doesn’t start until mid-September, giving her a chance to get adjusted to the school schedule. She’s tired, and when she’s tired, things get a little tougher. (Why should she be any different than the rest of us?) She’s very motivated at school and very conscious of peer relationships. Consequently, she’s pretty whipped at the end of a day of trying to make everything go perfectly. It isn’t an obsessive/compulsive or controlling need to make things... more

I mentioned in this post about Mark Riley, a man I met at the NACAC conference in Tampa last week. Mark used to work for the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) and has tons and tons of contacts in the child welfare arena.

Mark is excited about what ATN is doing, and on that note is plugging me into many of his contacts. While this is quite exciting, it is also a scary prospect … will we be biting... more

Tonight I am in St. Louis, with four hours to go tomorrow. We’ll head directly to the location of the second day of Beth’s swim meet. She competed tonight, quite successfully from what I hear. We landed in our hotel later than normal and my mom is crashed. (She said I could stay up and write my "blurbs" while she went to bed!!) We didn’t leave Tennessee until about lunchtime. I am still trying to process what I experienced this past twenty-four hours in that nursing home. I can’t help but wonder if I will see my relatives again during their... more

I have been struggling all morning to write this post. I started off the day quite early, preparing for a live segment on our local Fox News about our upcoming conference. For awhile this morning the videotape wasn't working correctly, resulting in a flurry of emails and phone calls about that. It appears to be working now.

After the TV spot, I rushed home to prepare for a scheduled radio... more

I am stiff, sore and sunburned today after a long, physically exhausting day yesterday. Beth and I headed out early in the morning with the horse trailer in tow and managed to find a place to park it at a local hospital while I had my last physical therapy appointment for my out-of-alignment bones. Then we headed once again to the middle of nowhere Missouri to pick up our new horse. We made good time getting there, BUT … we spent OVER... more

Today was one of those non-stop days. I started by attending the KC METRO Child Traumatic Stress meeting. This is a networking coalition that is an off-shoot of a group that I attended when I lived in the KC area in the 90’s. At that time it was called the Coalition for Positive Family Relationships and anyone in the community—any nonprofit or agency or whatever—that dealt with kids, families, elderly people, or anything family related, could come to these meetings... more