Do you plan outings with your kids, ones that you both put time and energy into choosing what you'll be doing together and really look forward to? Has anything unexpected ever happened in the midst of one of those special times? If so, how did you react in the moment? Were you able to stay flexible and adaptable or does unpredictability simply knock you way off balance?    

I enjoyed planning outings with my son, Rylan, fairly regularly when he was younger, often folding them into our homeschooling program. I remember one Monday we planned to go shopping for his winter coat after going to the doctor. This day was particularly exciting because we planned to go to the Valley Mall to do our shopping! Let me share the story with you. 

Rylan took my hand in his as we crossed the parking lot to enter the mall, and as we went through the big doors he gave me a big grin saying, "I love you, Mom."  

I gave his hand a squeeze and affirmed, "I love you too, son."...

How do you deal with change? It can come in many different ways. Some of us, when change happens, especially if it’s unexpected, we get angry about it. Because, we don’t like change. We like things to stay on an even keel, we like the familiarity of things not changing at all. Some of us say that the older we get the harder change becomes because we are stuck in our ways. Well, that’s pretty true for a lot of us, because it gets uncomfortable. And, we don’t like to feel uncomfortable.

Others of us, we might get startled, feel really uneasy. Uncertainty can come up for us because it’s new territory to navigate and change means things are different. The need for predictability can come up. We get comfortable with familiarity. We think we already know things then; we don’t have to learn them all over again.

Maybe you get scared. It may come up in the form of feeling scared you won’t succeed, or that you’ll get it wrong. I know that people...