We are enjoying some down time as a family this week in a beautiful area with palm trees and blues skies.

It's a feast for the senses, the fresh air, the fragrant flowers... a "dive-in" movie. Last night, we spread ourselves out on hotel pool chairs with blankets and pillows and watched Ice Age Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

"This is the definition of cozy," says my seven year-old, tucked under his Transformers blanket.

You better believe it.

A few hours earlier, we worried that our 10 year old might have Swine Flu. Turned out he was fine by morning. Must have been the fluids and a little couch rest earlier with Mom and Oprah, watching women jump out of an airplane. "Mom, why is that considered stepping out of the box? I mean, we step out of the box and we don't jump out of airplanes," says the fevered boy. "I guess they wanted to make a visual statement," I say. We sat on the couch with the breeze in our faces from an open balcony door and talked softly about life.

"There are so many people, Mom, soooo many people," he murmurs, his eyes glazed. "And how many of them are inspired?"

Um.....

"Good question," I say. "I guess it depends on a lot of things."

"To live an inspired life," he says, "You need ideas, you need things to invent, you need people to share ideas with, you need to do what you love, AND... you need to be able to see amazing things in everything around you."

"If you see all kinds of amazing things around you that aren't really actually that interesting but you make them interesting by seeing things in them, seeing patterns and colors and like secret riddles and all kinds of things, you are always inspired," he says.

Yes, yes, I get it. Seeing things. Hallucinations of love and joy everywhere. Using the world at large as the clues along the way to mark the path and preserve hope. Hope preservers...

He slept off his flu-like symptoms. This morning, after pancakes and apple slices, we all headed to an upside place called Wonderworks...

...and we played family laser tag and had more fun than two previously worn-out adults thought possible.

"Could we live here?" asks our seven year-old.

And I wondered about how long it might take to develop the kind of doldrum state we all slide into in our own home routines. Wouldn't palm trees and the Eiffel Tower stop stimulating the senses after some time? Do people living in Fiji get up every morning and marvel at the exquisite beach? How might we preserve this feeling of "loving where we are"...wherever we are? Instead of feeling like we need to escape?

I'm sitting in an empty theater space 90 minutes before I present my talk on "The Gift of Being a Flawed Parent." I remember when I first gave this talk in 2005 at a conference. I had no idea how much it would resonate with parents. How just the crazy juxtaposition of the words gift and flaw would draw so many and bring us all to our knees in tears and laughter and recognition of our shared struggles, fears, conflicts and doubts.

I have had the great privilege of sharing this workshop with countless parents again and again over the last few years, from coast to coast, each time humbled by the stories that connect us and the anxieties that melt away in the process. One of the things I often say to moms and dads is that "if were perfect, how would we learn and teach our kids forgiveness? Humility? Humanity? When we use our fears as a compass, we know where to look. We know where we need to go."

Same goes for all of fear's surly relatives that come along for the 'visit' until we learn to understand their purpose and embrace them. When I launched WYSH (wearyourspirit.com) in May, I knew that one of the phrases had to be Embrace your flaws.

Like the Indigo Girls sing in one of my favorite songs, The Wood Song:

The wood is tired

The wood is old

But we'll be fine if the weather holds.

But if the weather holds

We'll have missed the point

That's where I need to go....

Parenting is a redemptive, restorative, healing journey in which our kids raise us as we raise them. Along the way, we learn how to be human, how to mirror and model self-forgiveness, self-empathy. In a few weeks, I'm launching another  labor of love called Parent2ParentU, offering online integrative telecourses (including Flawed Parent), interviews with amazing luminary voices from around the world in an effort to connect with parents, support and empower us to live our best journey and enjoy the ride--detours and all.

We must keep the light on for and in our kids and teach them to do the same. But in order to do this, we need to keep our own light on. I am passionate about cultivating and preserving this "lights on" life practice through our flaws, and invite you to share with me how you do this for yourselves and with your kids. Visit http://www.keepingthelighton.net and drop me a note!

We saw the new Sendak/Jonze movie on the weekend.

Here were the post-movie reviews from my boys:

"There was a lot of unresolved anger in that movie. I didn't really like it." (10 year old)

"That movie was filled will anger and sadness." (7 year-old)

But, hooey those big puppets were cool huh?

What is this?

Come closer...

What's under there?

Ahhh.

My 10 year-old came home from school a few days ago, and instead of buckling under the perceived weight of his homework writing assignment and lamenting that "writing hurts my whole body and makes my mind feel like it's in a vice grip" (but how do you really feel, son?)...he walked into the house with a twinkle in his eyes and a sharpened pencil in hand.

"I am writing the best story ever, Mom! It's so funny and so scary. I HAVE to finish it before I forget it!"

And he slid onto our chabby chic barely sat-on couch (highly impractical; ivory; always looks messy even when the pillows are fluffed and who the heck cares anyway?!) and put pencil to paper in an exquisite silence.

Exquisite silence not because he was quiet but because his wheels of creativity and imagination were surging through his system in such a way that he was...calm. Peaceful. Inspired. And apparently, writing.

Yes, writing.

And so, I pulled this green hole-y blanket over his legs and he says, "Yeah! Over me Mom! Over me!"

And I stretched it taut. The hole-y blanket. And he wrote by the light of the holes in the afternoon light on the impractical white couch that nobody really ever sat on for very long before and he wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. Five whole pages of the story that gripped him under this lovely crochet cocoon and somehow inspired him out of the vice grip and all the rest.

And afterwards, a deep exhale of satisfaction from him.

"I LOVE writing, Mom. I love it. Can I read it to you now?"

I couldn't sleep.

I had been reading quite a bit recently on praise, motivation, and how the two don't go well together at all in a child's brain. Carol Dweck's work on motivation has suddenly (even thought she's been doing this work for 25 years plus) become the topic of discussion since Po Bronson's and Ashley Merryman's new book exploded onto the scene in recent weeks.

"Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children"

Their first chapter was printed in New York magazine, "The Inverse Power of Praise." In it, they discuss Dweck's work and studies in which she and her colleagues discovered how praise drains a child's motivation.

Bestselling author of "A Whole New Mind" Daniel Pink does a wonderful talk on TED.com about how rewards and incentives lower performance--in kids and adults.

He distinguishes between rewards for a mechanistic task (performance intact, because task is menial and simple) versus rewards for coming up with, say, a creative solution, in which case, rewards and incentives dull the mind, making it difficult for us to think.

I wanted to connect the dots further, so I looked at the effects of shame on motivation too. And so, that sleepless night recently, I surfed online for articles and research and stumbled entirely unaccidentally on the work of a man named Donald Nathanson, M.D. an author, psychiatrist and expert on how shame affects our brains and everything we do as a result.

He wrote several books, one of which grabbed me by the frontal lobe, called "Shame and Pride."

I read David Boulton's long, brilliant interview with him and watched videos on shame and motivation on www.childrenofthecode.org a website of resources for parents, educators, therapists and anyone else who is interested in the vast information gathered here.

http://www.childrenofthecode.org/

Here, in my groggy wee morning glassy-eyed curiosity, I delved into a fascinating world where phrases like "Shame Disabled" is commonplace. Shame cognitively disables us and kills motivation.

Nathanson came up with The Compass of Shame, as a way of explaining how we build internal defenses to "deal with" our shame.

Avoidance

Withdrawal

Attack self

Attack others

My mental wheels began whirring as I thought of all the shame-inducing practices that still live in our current parenting and educational mindsets: ultimatums, isolation, humiliating threats, removal of privileges, imposed consequences, punitive and reactive approaches to often innocuous or age-appropriate behaviors. Behaviors that could be understood in context, as opposed to being seen as a character flaw or sign of potential immoral development.

My friend's 3 year-old son was "put in a chair" last week at pre-school after he laughed during a game of musical chairs. He was told he could "come back to the group" when he was ready to "behave."

"Mommy, we can't talk to anyone or laugh at school," he explains.

Adults rationalize that kids must be taught a lesson.

"He has to learn," we often hear.

Learn what?

How to behave.

Not to laugh?

Not to laugh when it isn't time to laugh.

What if something is funny? And you're three? And you are not, say, running with scissors and wielding them maniacally at the class gerbil? And if you were, would there not be something to look at there...something deeper than "misbehavior?"

Brene Brown, PhD, author of "I Thought it Was Just Me (But It Isn't)" is a shame researcher, and when I called her to connect about collaborating on a future interview, she explained something so interesting and breathtakingly clear about the difference between shame and guilt:

"Guilt is "I did something bad" but shame is "I am bad." Yes! [www.brenebrown.com]

How are we instilling these notions of "bad" self in our kids without knowing it, without intention, without malice--without any sense of how our own shame is driving our perceptions of and our actions with our kids?

I contacted Dr. Nathanson a couple of days ago to ask for an interview and we ended talking (and laughing) for more than an hour, at which we forged a new friendship and agreed to film an interview about the role and effect of shame in parenting and educational practices.

"I can tell you that in 95% of all cases where people express rage, behave violently, aggressively, angrily, and lash out," he said to me, "they have experienced feelings of humiliation which have led them to react that way."

He says we (in this country especially) are taught to attack or lash out at anyone who we think has humiliated us.

Think about it. Every time you lashed out at someone, a stranger who you found exasperating, a sibling or parent or friend or spouse or student whom you felt incited your wrath, in many cases, did you feel a sting of humiliation leading up to it? A sense of feeling "offended" or dismissed or treated in such a way that you interpreted it as reducing you in some way?

He wasn't listening to me, so I screamed at him. She was ignoring me, so I hit her. He didn't talk to me like I was important, so I cursed at him and told him I would never do business with him again. She was fooling around, so I ordered her to the hallway and then asked her if she would rather go to the principal's office. He looked at me like I was stupid, and so I cut him down with my words. Or worse.

These are, in most cases, not what is actually happening to us, but what we perceive is happening. In other words, we see things through our own filter, our own story, our own unmet needs and old sore spots. That goes for everyone, parents to Presidents to professors to pastors.

Far-reaching implications for how to approach conflict resolution, violence and self-destructive behaviors in our kids--and ourselves. It paints even nail-biting in another light--a compassionate light--where we can see our kids' habits or reactions as potential clues for where the first seeds of shame may be growing.

And then, as David Boulton said to Nathanson, "use our shame as a lamp."

I just got back from a weekend in NY where WYSH was an exhibitor in the New York Baby Show. www.wearyourspirit.com

The boys came along, and while I was at the show during the day, my husband trekked around Soho and various spots with them in search of the Fascinating Tidbit of the Day. Tidbit du Jour in French. Yesterday, it was a 500 million fossil in a test tube from a cool shop called Evolution. Our 7 year-old son came back to the Baby Show sporting a hematite ring that he claims has magical magnetic healing powers.

"It got rid of my headache, Mom. It's true."

Which reminds me, as I write about this magic, that I never downloaded my photos from when my brother visited us in Central Park (on his way back from the US Open en route to California) a few weeks ago. And while in the Park, we had captured some magic, as well.

A tribute to Rio de Janeiro...if you really squint...

A tribute to tonsils...

The magic of hugging your gorgeous, kind-hearted, magically goofy brother...

The magic of a child's eyes--not just the innocence, but the hope.

Look at this hope! Is it not palpable?! I can HEAR the hope in his eyes.

Magic, I tell you.

And so, with all this magic in our daily mundane lives, why and how do we big folk get so depleted and drained by the deficit and scarcity thoughts that circle like black crows over a picnic? How do we lose that magic in all of our fear and worry about how to cope or survive a circumstance?

I think, from a child's perspective, if I take a walk on the child side, I can "see" that survival mode precludes magic. If I'm trying to stay alive, afloat, tethered, then...how can I thrive? I can only focus on breathing, remembering to breathe, worrying that something is blocking my breathing. I can only tell myself not to suffocate.

Taking a walk on the child side sounds like my 7 year-old in a momentary hurricane of distress this morning, announcing, "I feel so stressed right now! I need to eat and relax and fulfill my needs!" And he did. And he was the wiser for it. When a 7 year can center himself in the eye of a storm, an adult can learn a thing or two from this formidable recipe for Humble Pie. Delicious and crispy, warm and sweet. I'll have a slice with my Love coffee. (see I Heart Sweating post.)

This is the 21st Century Child reminding us distracted, mentally cluttered, feverishly freaked out adult-type people, to be/feel aware, awake, attuned and assured. In his eyes, I remember to find magic in the mundane, to climb big rocks, and to not dwell on distress but instead state it, maybe on top of New York's tallest perch, arms extended, as if to say, I am here.

I AM HERE.

So this moment is the one I know best.

After wrestling myself to the ground in a headlock, I have begun walking. I have been resistant to the Morning Walk, but all that changes when you have an accountability partner in the form of a friend who lives around the corner who won't do it without you either.

We have begun walking a few miles 3 X week. We walk and talk and spew (mostly, I do the spewing and she listens very well) and shake our fists at illogical things, and slip on acorns like they were marbles on the sidewalk.

It feels like a huge deal for me, and so I need to riff on how important self-care is in any form. How self-eroding it is to avoid it. And how confounding it is that we don't heed our needs. It's all so deeply complicated (the why part) and so insanely simple to remedy (the how part) and the difference for me was largely in doing it with someone else.

The other piece is that I have never before felt such a weight of stress in my whole life. I have been through some tight passages in my life, some losses and disappointments and sorrows and betrayals of trust and the rest of it. But, most of that was before I ever entered the pearly gates of motherhood.

Lately, the stress of observing my older son as he struggles with uncomfortable symptoms has begun to "get to me".  Maybe it's the decade marker. Maybe it's mid-life. Maybe it's color of my shirt or what I had for breakfast or the wind chill factor. I do know that I've grown weary of trying to "fix" all of it. (As if I could somehow.) Tired of trying to sort through everything without a group of sunny people behind me cheering me on. Trying to make it better. Trying to fill in the blanks. Trying to advocate to others in such a way that I don't have to explain anymore...

And any parent whose child has unique needs knows this fatigue. That insomniac thing with the cursor and the mouse after midnight, seeking, searching, scrolling... a-ha! Bookmark that! Call her! E-mail him! Interview them! And now, these days, millions of kids share traits and symptoms that bear such uncanny resemblance, yet the differences are great, because the lifestyles and families and relationships differ so much and our ways of perceiving, defining, and treating can bring about different outcomes from one family or therapist or teacher to the next.

So, the Morning Walk has done three things for me in short order:

1. Made me sweat--in an entirely different way than vacuuming a house.

2. Raised serotonin in my brain...the "happy hormone."

3. Empowered me to take care of me.

Eureka. Self-care is good. But self-preservation is really, really...good.

Pour me one of those please....

So, I've been a little out of it lately.

Our dear friends and their three sleeping kids are buckled in and flying over the ocean right now as I type the word A-t-l-a-n-t-i-c. On their way to a life in England for a year. About to inhabit a refurbished barn on 40 acres, a short drive from Stonehenge.

A totally life-changing adventure is unfolding for them and I think about how their faces will change by next year, whether they'll have any hint of an accent, whether they will come back at all. (They will, oh yes, they must.)

And I think this: saying yes to this kind of opportunity takes guts. They didn't have to do it. They could have refused the offer. They embarked. This takes unbridled courage in the face of a lovely terror.

I traveled a lot in my career in television. In my 20's, I hosted a travel show, and was on so many flights during a particular period that when I went to a movie back at home, I reached for my seatbelt in the theater.

I love traveling. Especially to Europe. I wish every person on earth could see the world as other people live, regularly, in intervals, for a year, a day. It's not only enriching for us...it's restorative. I once wrote a NY Times piece in which I mused that traveling builds connective tissue and can goad us into a complete paradigm shift.

There are a million reasons we can find for why certain opportunities seem too difficult, too much trouble, too far-fetched. We can feel so...tired.

Just fatigue itself can talk us out of a good thing. We can be too tired to think of anything but our fatigue.

We can resist change, even if it means we'll get to see the Louvre or Trevi or Stonehenge on the side of the road. We can put off that trip thinking we're not ready yet.

So, saying yes to the old barn on a pastoral countryside sounds like a dreamy proposition, but it took more courage to say yes and pack up a family and say goodbye to aging parents and plan for a new life---for 12 months--than we can imagine.

I close my eyes and see you all sleeping across the aisle with those scratchy blue blankets. Sleep tight tonight as the black sky blankets you.  Soak it all up. Eat crumpets. Make friends. Make another life. And come home.

73 degrees. Partly cloudy. Scattered butterflies in the stomach. Backpacks filled with new supplies.

The boys got up at 6:53 am.

"It's the first day of school!" they whispered.

They're excited. In six minutes flat, they're dressed in their new school duds.

New shoes. My older son is in size men's 7 now. Gulp. Here's where my mind (and my camera) went this morning...

Eight years have come and gone. And here we are.

I called my friend and asked her how the transition went for her two boys.

"It was fine," she said. "I worried for nothing."

And I thought, Uh-huh.

I met her at Whole Foods five years ago when our boys were 2 and 5. And I said to her on the phone this morning,"Can we even remember 2 years old? Can we smell their little heads anymore? Do we hear their voices, tiny and innocent? Where did they go? We were so busy worrying....did they eat enough greens? Did they sleep enough? Did they poop enough?!"

Sure, we laughed like over-caffeinated mothers who haven't had any coffee yet. But, then we paused and kind of sat in the dead air silence for a few seconds. We do worry. And that worrying didn't grow them up any better or happier or healthier. They're all such wonderful children. Great people. Kind, big, open hearts. Inquisitive, creative, earnest, joyful, secure, and compassionate kids. So what good did the worrying do? It made us crazy. And it probably worked its way into the water so that the kids occasionally soaked it up.

"Let's not worry today or this week or this whole month, OK?" I said to her.

She laughed. I don't think she thinks I'm serious.

I'm SERIOUS. I am consciously choosing to worry less and replace that worry with surrendering to the larger picture, to get my "grubby little fingers" as Annie Lamott writes, off the "control panels," and...trust.

The process. Myself. My kids. Their teachers. The Universe. Nature. God. Jack Nicholson.

Wha?

Yes, I remember the Oscars a few years back when Jack Nicholson sauntered up to the stage to accept his golden statue for his role in A Few Good Men. In his inimitable style, he looked up at the audience (camera) and uttered this Jack-ism:

"Everything counts."

It hit me between the eyes. I think I may have contemplated putting it in my wallet and writing it in lipliner on my bathroom mirror at the time but settled for remembering it and calling it up in moments like these. When my boys walk off into the linoleum horizon on the first day of school...and when I imagine all the things that will knock the wind out of them, the nasties, the disappointments, the ugly stuff of cliques and the weird way that life tests and dares your true self to stand firm and not buckle like a bargain beach chair...

...these moments, I tell myself these two words: EVERYTHING COUNTS.