My daughter started kindergarten this year, and because we wanted to ease her transition, we left her in her normal daycare for before-and-after-school care instead of putting her in the program run by the public school system. Even though it cost $200 a month more.

Balance can be extremely difficult to achieve especially if you are a control-freak perfectionist.  Unless of course, you choose balance itself to master.  Over the years, I have strived to "have it all", from work, to personal life, and finally family.  Once the kids came however, everything was thrown out the window.  Now that my oldest child is nearly nine years old, I have finally found a sense of balance in most areas of my life, although it sometimes comes crashing down like a house of cards.  Here are some of my tips to help achieve balance.

This question, if applied every day will radically shift your life and your results. While at first glance it might seem a little "fluffy" for the business realm, if you've been buying into the recession, waiting for someone to save you, or letting the job climate hold you hostage, it's time to put this question into your decision matrix arsenal.

It's almost here: flu season, swine or otherwise. As always, the media is seizing on the opportunity to scream PANDEMIC WE WILL ALL DIE, but the truth beneath the hype is this: 'Tis the season for a virus.

In less than twenty four hours I will have my kitchen back and my quiet mornings with tea and the newspaper and my voice. You see I lost my voice as I do every summer yelling at the kids to get ready, turn of the TV, stop Facebooking, Tweeting, IMing, texting (didn’t know those were verbs), clean up your room, pack your suitcase, don’t forget your bathing suit, unpack your suitcase, go outside, and have fun god dammit!

I can still remember my first workshop with Debbie Ford when she looked out at the room and said "No one is coming to save you." While it doesn't seem that profound, it was indeed a revelation. I had been hating my job and career path for years and complaining about people and circumstances, wondering why I wasn't seeing the pot of gold and rainbow promised to me while in school.

At 7:30 this morning, kids began to line up along the street, their faces bright with excitement, their backpacks fresh-new and not-yet-lost. Moms and dads and dogs were along, this being the first day of school, a day to anticipate, to remember, to make special. A school year creates a rhythm for a family, dictating what time the morning alarm goes off, who cooks breakfast and who packs school lunches, who goes where after school, what time supper is cooked. Is there any reason why that rhythm can't be replicated? Let's think about "going back to school" -- for grown-ups.

In his memoir-cum-novel, The Periodic Table, Primo Levi wrote this of his twenty-fifth college reunion:

351. That is the number of unread emails in my email inbox. 10,196 is the total number of messages. And that's just one inbox. I have others. During the BlogHer conference and associated travel I did not have access to email. This despite bringing my laptop, my iPod Touch and my BlackBerry. The BlackBerry I bought specifically to be able to check my email on the road. Nothing worked for me and so I just had to let the messages pile up for days. And since I've returned I cannot seem to get below 351 unopened messages.

For all its passivity, promise is a loaded word. It requires belief, faith, even hope. We have the promise of peace, the promise of the recent graduate, and the promise I made to you and have yet to keep. All are potentialities. All assume the best of humanity. As I sat on the green of Dartmouth College below the tower of Baker Library, I looked at my classmates here to celebrate our 25th reunion and wondered, have we lived up to our promise?

It has been a summer of adults getting themselves into trouble verbally or socially. And no, I’m not necessarily talking about Crowley, Gates or Obama. Here is the deal. I became angry with myself. In one social situation where you would think I’d blow a gasket I was calm and rational. In another situation two days later I acted in anger at the mention of two words.

Former General Electric Co. CEO Jack Welch left women shaking their heads at the Society for Human Resource Management's annual conference when he said: "There's no such thing as work-life balance," Mr. Welch told the Society for Human Resource Management's annual conference in New Orleans on June 28. "There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences."