Parenting
as a
Friend

Start with Yourself

In order to be in a position to connect with your kids you first need to be on touch with your self. Do not be too hard on your self expecting everything to be perfect, or worry too much on the material stuff. Just relax and stay healthy, learn to take quick cold showers in the morning while letting the water run mostly below your belly because there is were a lot of nerves are; at night take a warm shower with soap, and also massage your back while the warm, almost hot, water runs through you lower back then go right to sleep. First thing in the morning drink a glass of water to recover the liquids your body did not have at night.

Regarding exercise, the secret is that it does not take time away from you, but it rather buys you more time, as your mind and body is less cluttered the rest of the day. Running is the simplest, Tennis is great for taking your mind off things and the best is probably yoga (I highly recommend All day Yoga with Rodney Lee). If you really want to slow down your stress nothing like watching baseball.

And let music be part of your life, a digital mp3 device and an Internet connection is all you need. We have a CD player/alarm clock with Beethoven music next to our kids beds, works like magic at bed time, my kids are sleep before track 4 everyday, they have developed some kind of unconscious reflex.

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