Hello everyone, sorry for the double post today but I would really like to invite anyone near Telluride, Colorado to join in a celebration of International Women's Week.

I just received this invitation and I wanted to pass it on!

I believe….

That we can live in a more equal and fair world

That we can significantly decrease violence---against women, men and children.

That to make change we have to be vocal, visible and hopeful.

Phenomenal Woman, a celebration of international women’s week in Telluride, is coming up March 9th-13th. The aim of this week’s worth of events is equality. I would like to ask you to check out the attachment of the schedule of events, to participate where you can and to forward the attachment on to friends who you think would like any and all of the events. Remember, everything is free and open to men and women, young and old (except the yoga class, which is just for women).

Be Phenomenal. Join in the Celebration of International Women's Week in Telluride

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Our children are our gift to the world. The first step in making the world a better place. Parenting is the most important job most of us will ever have, yet we often place them lower on our list of priorities than jobs, money, friends, fun.

Most people who have met my kids notice fairly quickly that they aren’t like other kids. It isn’t hard to notice. They talk and act very much like adults, they care about the world around them. About how other people feel.

My youngest finds her greatest joy in donating money to the various local funds. My son has never been in a fist fight, but he stands up for the smaller and weaker kids. My oldest has been described as a "quiet leader" by more than one person.

I made the decision years ago to raise peace centered kids, and for the most part it has worked. Yet, there are always challenges, and I suspect there always are with any decision towards peace. First of all I didn’t start out that way, I started out like any other parent, not having a clue what I was doing, or how I was going to do it.

When my son was five he was sitting at the coffee table coloring a picture. I asked him what he was drawing and he held it up for me. “This is daddy yelling, and this in mommy crying...” My heart broke for him, and for the girls then ages 8, and 2 1/2.

This wasn’t the life I had planned for them, this wasn’t the way I wanted them to view their family. This was supposed to be a safe place for them, and I was failing miserably at my most important job.

What our marriage was doing to the kids wasn’t fair to them, and what we were doing to each other wasn’t fair to us. We arranged for a very respectful divorce, where one rule applied. We would always love the children more than we hated each other.

After that I had to reconsider my views on everything. Why was I telling my children not to hit, yet spanking them? Why was I mad at them for always fighting, when they were witnessing it between their father and I almost daily?

I realized first and foremost that I had to be an example to them, to show them better ways of dealing with conflict, which meant I had to not only learn them but to model them effectively. I finally had a plan!

One of the first things I taught them is that they were given a brain for a reason, and I expected them to use it. Most kids are smarter than we think they are, they can comprehend a lot more than we give them credit for.

When I found them in the middle of an argument I simply began asking them if they could think of a better way to solve their problem. Most of the time they were able to come up with something mutually beneficial, and work it out themselves without all of the yelling and screaming.

The second thing we began working on was respect for themselves, and respect for others. Respect for myself was something I had never been very good at, and it was important for me to help them avoid much of the pain this had caused me.

How do you teach respect? Once again the answer came from me. I had to model it, I had to live it, and I had to encourage them to follow. I had to stop and actually listen to my children, and I found out they had a lot to say.

When you teach your children to use their words instead of their fists, they develop a tremendous capacity to not just observe their own feelings but the feelings of others. When a child is safe enough to say to their parent, “that really hurt my feelings,” they grow in ways you can’t imagine.

You end up with kids who help another child to the nurses office, who stand up for a child when the other kids are picking on them, a teenage daughter who bring friends with troubles to the house and say “Here, talk to my Mom, she’s really cool.”

I see them now, stepping ever closer to their real lives. I was never raising children in the first place, I was raising adults and I had so few years to do it in. I don’t know that they will be doctors, or lawyers, or anything the world defines as success.

I know I am proud of them, and I am glad that I made the decision to place my kids first in my life. My kids did not ask to be brought into this world, that was my decision, and the least I can do for them is fulfill my part of the parent - child obligation.

To be there when they need me, to listen to them, to make time for them. To do my best to give them a safe world to grow up in. To allow them to tell me anything without overreacting, or putting my feelings about something before theirs.

No, I have not raised perfect kids, nobody does. No, I have not been a perfect parent, nobody is. We all make mistakes, but mistakes can be corrected. I just made the decision to parent with love instead of anger.

Our kids really are worth it...

Our children are our greatest gift to the world, help them shine and they really can make a difference.

When I wrote about the common enemy, I said that nothing joins a divided group quite like a common enemy. I've been reading a lot of books on war, I apologize. It took a friend pointing something out to me, and a few more days for me to grasp what it really meant, but I was wrong.

While it may be true that a common enemy can unite us, what if we take the focus off of the word enemy, and place it on the word common?

Our differences in nationality, our differences in skin tone, our differences in political choices, our differences in religion. When we disagree with someone personally or globally, our differences take center stage.

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