Parenting with Love & Logic and Women2Women group

At our church's Relief Society women's conference on Saturday we had the opportunity to choose from several different classes to attend.

I chose a class the first hour about Parenting with Love & Logic, which has really helped Michael and me to be motivated to focus on improving how we interact with our kids, and since we talked about it yesterday and decided exactly what we are going to work on right now, we had a really great day with the boys yesterday.  We've been working on showing empathy when the boys have a problem, being kind, not being emotional when they do something we don't like (not yelling or acting mad or frustrated), letting the kids take responsibility for their problems, giving the kids choices (and giving them 30 seconds to make a choice before making the choice for them), and not giving reminders or making "I told you so" kinds of comments.  It's amazing what a difference it makes, when we just change some of the ways we act with the kids, how much it makes us feel better about our parenting (and how the kids often react better when we change how we interact with them).  Now we just need to keep working hard to keep at it.  Anyway, I was just looking at some little youtube clips of Parenting with Love & Logic videos, and I thought this one was helpful with outlining some specific steps for how to help kids think of solutions for their problems:



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At the relief Society conference Saturday the second class that I went to was by a woman from Rancho Santa Fe named Randie Reinhart, who has a group that she and her family started years ago called the Maya Relief Foundation to help people in Guatemala and Mexico to improve their lives and become more self sufficient.  They go monthly to help with the work there, and she gave a really cool presentation about the service they have done.  Their two biggest projects are helping to get water filters and stoves for people.  I guess most of the people in the poorest state in Guatemala have open fires in their homes that they have to spend all day long collecting wood and burning fires just to be able to cook their food and boil water for each day.  She said that the rain forests are even being depleted because of the shear amount of wood necessary for every family to keep fires going just to boil their daily water.  Plus the highest cause of death is breathing problems, many of which are caused by inhaling smoke in the homes throughout people's lives, and many people get burned with the open fires too.  So this group subsidizes the cost of the stoves and the water filters and makes it possible for the people to get a micro loan to pay back the subsidized cost so they are contributing (and she said they've never had a person default on one of these loans), and it only takes about an hour to get a home set up with a stove and water filter, which changes the family's health for the rest of their lives.  The cost of a water filter is about $30, and a stove is about $110.  And their group also has other projects they've done, including building a school, distributing prenatal vitamins, and installing solar panels so they could have light and teenagers and adults could also go to school at night.  And most of their projects use these micro loans so the people are contributing too.

Anyway, I thought it was a really cool presentation -- I've always thought it would be so cool to get involved in something like this, and someday to be able to go somewhere with our family and help people.  So I was interested when Randie said she always has so many people ask her how they can help, so she is starting a group called Women2Women where they will meet every other month and come up with ideas of how to help with these projects, work on fundraising, and even have opportunities to go and help, and get our families involved too.  I think it sounds like a great idea -- just the kind of thing I've been wanting to find for our family to get more involved in meaningful service.  The website for the group is women-2-women.org.  This is a pretty cool video from the website that explains more about the work they do:

(If the video asks for a password, it says to use the word "eko").