I don't know how it is in your office, but food always seems to find a home in ours. When I'm trying to eat right, the candy and cupcakes aren't a problem (even the awesome-looking homemade donuts offered up by a parent at the last game of the soccer season this weekend). 

No, what gets me is the so-called healthy snack. "Oooo, I'd love to have some granola bars - just as an emergency snack," I think to myself as the box of Kind Bars inexplicably arrives in the mail. "This will be perfect for a day when I forget my lunch or need a little something extra."

Weight loss is not about how perfect you can be 100% of the time. It would be so stressful to think that you need to eat perfectly 100% of the time to lose weight! Most people can eat carefully 80% of the time and still have about 20% flexibility to spend consciously on some extra calories while still losing weight.

As much as a love a good spa day, nothing recharges The BadAssMama's batteries like a good old fashioned business trip.

Let me explain.

If you have a school age child, there are eight words you dread hearing.

“I don’t want to go to school today.”

It’s even worse hearing it from your child who normally loves school because you know you’re not going to adequately resolve the problem in the time it takes to finish getting ready for work.

It happens to the best of us. We just have to get out the door, finish a load of laundry, send one last email or catch our breath for one second when our kids decide that this is the perfect time to freak the F out. So what's a mama to do? For most of us (The BadAssMama included), the typical answer is to match their freakout with a mama meltdown of our own. But, nine times out of ten this only serves to escalate the situation.

It used to be that the bathroom scale determined how my day was going to go. Do I feel victorious or defeated? Like a rock star or a loser? Strong or painfully weak?

Picture this:  four
teenage girls seated at the dining room table to a feast of their favorite
foods including sushi, cheese and crackers, pizza, strawberries, mini-cupcakes,
and  lemon bars.  This is the scene I came home to last night
after work.  Being a negligent working

I read an article today called “The Wrath of a Great Leader,” and it focused on how Martin Luther King Jr. channeled his wrath and anger over human injustice into a transforming force that compelled millions to act, and ultimately changed a nation. We don’t like to talk about wrath and rage much because, too often, we see the harm and suffering caused when individuals take their rage out on coworkers, on children, on spouses, on innocent lives in the community so we work very hard to manage our rage.

10. Thank goodness someone finally noticed! I don't have a clue what I'm doing with these little lunatics.

9. I know you are, but what am I? 

You see this grainy picture to the right? It’s a picture taken of a hospital in Manila, Philippines, in the late 70’s, and this is where I was born.

That last statement is nothing short of a miracle. Because here are the events that had to occur for me to have been born in a hospital in Manila, Philippines:

• My parents would have to have the willingness to leave their home country of Vietnam.

• My parents would have to escape Communist Vietnam unnoticed.

• My parents had to assume the consequences of being arrested and thrown in a concentration camp if caught.