Mom Cimorelli

The teenage years are for most people one big tumultuous hormonal roller coaster ride. Yikes! Add to that an enormous pressure to figure out what you want to do with your life, get high grades, get into a great university, and hang with the right crowd, plus a feeling that your every move is being judged, and at any given moment you could be rejected by everyone you thought was your friend. You now have a recipe for some massive stress and frustration. If you understand what'

One of my Facebook friends recently lamented that parenting was kicking her butt lately. If you're a parent, I'm sure you can empathize. It is without a doubt the most difficult undertaking any of us experience in a lifetime. It's also by far the most rewarding, and it will definitely show you what you're made of as it pushes you way past what you thought were your outer limits. Here we are with the first six of our eleven kids. This was by far the hardest time for me, as the

When I swim, I'm 16 again. Well, not really, but I feel like it. My mother taught me to swim when I was 3, and I loved it from Day 1. I've always been a water baby. If there is water nearby, I'm in it. When I was a kid, that meant falling in fountains and mud puddles, running through the sprinklers, swimming in pools, rivers, and oceans, and water-skiing in lakes. I started swimming competitively at six years old in the summers, and moved to year-round swimming when I was ten

Learn the Art of Mastery and you will learn the art of extraordinary living. If you can become a master at one thing, you can use that same process to become a master at anything. It requires interest, determination, discipline, perseverance, and lots of practice. Christina taking her mastery of physical movement to a new level on a paddle board. I have had the pleasure of witnessing mastery with my children multiple times, and I have seen them transfer the steps to multiple

When my 15 year old daughter Christina announced she wanted to start a band, I never dreamed we would be touring the world a few years later. Getting from the dream to reality was not fulfilled overnight, and it took enormous persistence and hard work, but we proved that it was possible to start from nothing in a small town with no connections in the entertainment industry and make it. Initially, Christina wanted to be in a band with her friends, but they had a hard time coor

I was pregnant with my first child in 1988, and I had never heard of homeschooling. One day when I was in my 9th month of pregnancy and in my usual spot lying on the couch, watching TV, and feeling like a beached whale, I was watching the precursor to Oprah, which was a popular talk show hosted by Phil Donahue. On that particular day, he had on the Colfax family from Northern California who had successfully homeschooled their four boys, two of whom were their own biological c

extraordinary |ikˈstrôrd(ə)nˌerēˌekstrəˈôrdnˌerē| adjective very unusual or remarkable I never thought of myself as particularly extraordinary. That seems reserved for people like Steve Jobs or Richard Branson or Mother Teresa or people like that. But when I look at the definition of “extraordinary”, I can see that my life has been far from ordinary. Sometimes it seems that when I see something “ordinary”, I automatically run in the other direction. For instance, I have 11 ki

...there was just Mike and me. We met in college in the early 80's and immediately became good friends. We had noticed each other on campus several times, and we both lived in the dorms. One day when I was in the dining commons talking to a mutual friend, Mike jumped in the middle of our conversation and said to my friend, "Do you know this girl? I need to meet her!" My friend gave me a quizzical look and said, "Do you want to meet this guy?? Are you sure?" Of course I said y