Home Development

Create beautiful memories for your family and friends with help from Katie Jacobs, a stylist for Reese Witherspoon's lifestyle brand Draper James. In this essential guide to entertaining, Katie reveals her secrets for throwing fantastic parties for any occasion, from a casual backyard movie night to a lavish holiday party. Using Katie’s inspiring ideas and make-ahead tips, you will be so organized that you can minimize the fuss, enjoy the time, and celebrate too!

In The Long Journey Home, their mother, Margaret Robison, finally gets to tell her side of the story, which is more nuanced and poignant than one would ever imagine. Beginning with her childhood in southern Georgia, with its façade of 1950s propriety masking all sorts of recognizable demons (alcoholism, sexual repression, misogyny, suicide, and disease) up until her mental breakdown and, in recent years, her recovery from her massive stroke, The Long Journey Home is Robison's attempt to make sense of a complicated, often tortured, and complex American life.

A name is destiny...or is it? Young Vicky is reeling from the loss of her old horse Joe, but eager to help the flighty, impossible to ride young mare, Witch. Unpredictable and dangerous, Witch's future is bleak. In her first moment with the horse no one trusted, Vicky changed Witch's name to Gidget, a hopeful benediction. "If only changing her name is all it took to change behavior," the farm owner laments. Despite her new name, Gidget, the horse formerly known as Witch, struggles to abandon old, unstable habits.

From the writers of acclaimed blog Pen & Palate, a humorous coming-of-age (and mastering-the-art-of-home-cooking) memoir of friendship, told through stories, recipes, and beautiful illustrations. Getting through life in your 20s isn't easy - especially if you're broke, awkward, and prone to starting small grease fires in your studio apartment. For best friends Lucy Madison and Tram Nguyen, cooking was an escape from the daily humiliation that is being a 20-something woman in a big city.

Uncover the true importance of the Honey Do list and its impact on your daily life. Discover the joy of accomplishment as you cross tasks off your list. Tackle repairs efficiently with expert tips. Say goodbye to never-ending lists and find solutions for couples struggling with a growing Honey Do list. Understand how success with the Honey Do list can positively impact relationships and self-worth. Learn essential DIY skills to become the hero of your household.

Soldier Girls follows the lives of three women on their paths to the military. These women, who are quite different in every way, become friends, and we watch their interaction and also what happens when they are separated. We see their families, their lovers, their spouses, their children. We see them work extremely hard, deal with the attentions of men on base and in war zones, and struggle to stay connected to their families back home.

As a former Yelling Mom, I know the cycle: ask nicely, remind, nag, then finally EXPLODE. If you’re stuck in this pattern, you’re not alone. I used to feel so GUILTY and helpless. But when I discovered BETTER, guilt-free ways to get my kids to listen, my life CHANGED. Do you feel like you lose control too easily? Have you tried countless other solutions with no lasting success? If so, "Master Anger Management for Parents Without Losing Your Cool" is for you.

This is a story of hope. In this emotionally vulnerable audiobook, Marci Brockmann was raised by an undiagnosed bipolar mom, who was also narcissistic and, for most of her life, a prescription drug addict. Digging deeply into her heart and memory, Marci reveals, how growing up under the strain of mental abuse caused her to create a toxic relationship template and an equally toxic self-image which influenced almost all of her subsequent personal relationships. She didn’t know how to do anything different.

Minimalism is not just a series of actions but also a total mind-set shift. It recognises that modern-day abundance has not increased our level of happiness - in fact we are less happy than generations before despite having more - and it argues that embracing less will allow us to live more fully. This handbook gives us the tools to achieve this complete life-changing mental shift, teaching us how to search for items and thoughts that add value to our lives and how to get rid of nonessential physical and mental clutter.

Llega el momento de elegir el mejor camino en la educación de nuestros hijos, ¿qué hacer? Ante una pregunta tan importante, el método Montessori ofrece mucho más que un sistema pedagógico tradicional. Montessori es un estilo de vida y una forma de enseñanza que busca respetar los ritmos de aprendizaje de cada niño, y que centra su visión en el desarrollo integral del ser humano desde el nacimiento.

101 Things You Should Do Before Your Kids Leave Home is packed with ideas and advice designed to help parents prepare their children for life out in the world while making sure that both parents and kids enjoy every precious moment. From staging a food fight to serving in a soup kitchen, from planning a "tour de neighborhood" bike race to telling family stories, some suggestions are fun, some challenging, and others practical - but all will inspire parents with ideas for family time before their kids leave the nest.

By Heart shares the surprising story of one family's journey from compliant public schooling to radical home-based learning. This literary homeschool memoir takes readers from the tundra of Bethel, Alaska, to the placid farm country of Wisconsin, all the while exploring the homeschool lifestyle. Daring and compassionate, it portrays homeschooling as a progressive choice and thoughtfully examines classic homeschool tensions – homeschool decision, schedules and curricula, socialization, and the economics of co-parenting.

When Kim de Blecourt and her husband decided to adopt a child from Ukraine, they knew that the process might be challenging. Nothing, however, could have prepared de Blecourt for the twisted nightmare she would endure. During her year-long struggle to extricate her newly adopted little boy from that post-Soviet country's corrupt social service and judicial systems, de Blecourt was insulted, physically assaulted, and arrested. Worse, her months of loneliness, worry, and fear drove her to the brink of spiritual despair. But God had no intention of abandoning de Blecourt or her family.

Letters from Home lays out a bold, no-nonsense approach to raising grateful kids who aspire to something higher than behaving badly on a reality show, actually talk to you in person instead of texting your phone, and understand that the world revolves around something other than them.

Women in today's advanced capitalist societies are encouraged to "lean in." The media and government champion women's empowerment. In a cultural climate where women can seemingly have it all, why do so many successful professional women - lawyers, financial managers, teachers, engineers, and others - give up their careers after having children and become stay-at-home mothers? How do they feel about their decision and what do their stories tell us about contemporary society?

In a perfect world, our dreams would have kept us together. "You are my dream," he said to me... But in our world, dreams tore us apart. I ran away from that life. I threw us away... And my choice broke him. A message from beyond the grave would obliterate my world: "You chose wrong." These words would haunt me, telling me that everything I'd worked so hard for was wrong. I chose independence. "You chose wrong." I chose a career. "You chose wrong." And now, how do I keep running...when all roads are leading me home!

Kathy Izard was a graphic designer, wife, mother of four daughters, and volunteer at Charlotte’s Urban Ministry Center when an unlikely meeting with formerly homeless author Denver Moore changed the course of her life. Inspired by Denver’s challenge to do more than serve in this soup kitchen, Kathy quit her job to take on what seemed like an unimaginable task in her second half of life - to build housing for Charlotte’s homeless.

When Michael and Cheryl Morse slowly drifted apart amid an empty nest, her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, his symptoms of PTSD, and the grief of losing their two beloved dogs put down on the same day three years prior, it became apparent their lives were in need of a little joy. Enter an energetic, white ball of fluff known as Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson's story begins in Arkansas, where he was left in a leaky, drafty barn for days.

At 17, Rachel Pope lost her dad to cancer, and eight years later, her eldest brother in a tragic car accident. Little did she know that her grief journey would come full circle with the death of her husband, at the same age and from the same cancer as her dad. Why do we have such a hard time talking about grief and what can we do, as a society, to cope better? As a grieving person, how do we make sense of our new life, post-loss, in a culture that expects us to "move on"? In this book, Rachel Pope dives into those important conversations through her own years of facing grief head-on.

Author, lightworker, mother, and wife, Kelsey Domiana knows all too well what it means to feel unsupported and exhausted with raising a family. As her husband, a professional basketball player, is often traveling, she realized that she needed to reclaim her joy and find a support system. Kelsey knows that it’s not impossible to feel empowered when one’s husband is away. In Help! My Husband Is Hardly Home, she shares her truth of feeling the overwhelm, isolation, and frustration that come with having a partner who works away from home.