My name is (not) Matt Foley and I am a motivational speaker.

I have been on the go, go, go since I got home yesterday morning. We flew home from a wonderful twelve days in Maui, on the red-eye, and I’ve basically been in a whirl of somewhat dull but very necessary activity since then. Well, not counting last night after the kitchen had been cleaned up, when […]

An obstacle is an unrecognized opportunity.

I’ve come a long way throughout the years, and I’ve learned a lot from my mistakes. A person who never made a mistake is a person who never tried anything new was displayed on the wall of Jake’s old classroom, and I think that’s inspirational. I regularly tell my children that mistakes are learning opportunities, […]

NEVER AGAIN

My husband has taken three consecutive weeks off of work this summer. Such a thing has never happened before. The result was we spent five days at the lake with my parents – during which we left the kids for a night and road-tripped to Jasper, just the two of us – then after less […]

Summer Love

Here we are, on day three of summer vacation, and it kind of feels like we’ve been on vacation for a month already, in the best way possible. It’s been unseasonably warm and beautiful, and we haven’t yet had a moment of missing-school-or-friends angst that typically happens in the first few days of unstructuredness. The […]

Just June

After today, there is only one and a half days left of school, and excitement is mounting! Is it me, or did June fly by? Maybe it’s my life that is flying by and I should just lie down and sing “Cat’s in the Cradle,” “Landslide,” and “Sunrise Sunset” over and over for a while. […]

Animal Kingdom, or maybe Pet Semetary

I think there’s a robin’s nest in my neighbour’s spruce tree which grows beside our shared fence. All during the spring, I would see robins busily gathering dry grass and little bits of garden debris, and flying importantly towards the tree. Whenever I would walk to the garage – which is quite often, during the […]

Scaredy Nicole Wears Blue. This Was Not Part Of The Plan!

This weekend I got on my bike for the first time since 2003. I know! It felt like quite the undertaking. I stopped going for bike rides when I was pregnant with Mark, and then I never started again. My husband rides with the kids, but the truth is I’m not a strong rider, I […]