I've been a career woman for the past seven years. For a couple of years after giving birth to my first daughter, it was really tough for me to work and take care of her at the same time. So I know how necessary the babysitting service you're providing is. And I feel really grateful for the service too. There is, however, one thing I'd like you to consider. Currently, a babysitter is taking care of my second daughter for eight hours from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. For me, it would be much more useful if the service were available from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Could you be more flexible with your service? I'd really appreciate it.

People often don't consider purchasing boats, renting a beach house, or taking care of pool maintenance during the winter, but that's exactly when you should be looking for good deals on these things. Providers of those items or services are often less busy at those times. So you'll get a warmer reception than you would during the busy season when there's more demand. That doesn't mean you have to plan your vacation at the beach in December. But you are more likely to have a fruitful negotiation if you begin the discussion in the off-season.

Sports involve your brain as much as your body: you have to understand plays, see the field and know your next move, block out the crowd, and concentrate on your performance. You also need to control anxiety and negative thoughts. It takes practice to develop these mental skills, which is no different from the development of physical skills. Dr. Alan Goldberg, a sports psychologist, says that most performance problems that athletes struggle with are not a result of inadequate coaching or a lack of physical skills or technical ability. When the heat of competition is turned up, the individual performer or team that falls apart most often does so because of mental factors like poor concentration, negativity, lack of confidence, or an inability to let go of mistakes.

If you've ever visited a fortune-teller you probably came away amazed at the things they knew about you - things no one else could possibly have known. So it must be a supernatural power, right? Research into the fortune-telling business shows that fortune-tellers use a technique known as cold reading, which can produce an accuracy of around 80 percent when reading a person you've never met. While it can appear magical to some people, it is simply a process based on the careful observation of body-language signals plus an understanding of human nature and a knowledge of probability statistics. It's a technique practiced by tarot-card readers, astrologers, and palm readers to gather information about a client.

A 17-year-old patient sat in my counseling office some time ago and said, I'm so tired of my father telling me that I don't live up to my potential. He says it about once a month. This young man is a typical product of a high-achieving father. His father is a physician who has a terrible time with both his employees and his children becausehe expects the same sort of drive in everyone else. He is trying to inspire his son, but the result is defiance. Here is why. If the father says, You have great potential, it is a compliment to his talent, but it is quickly spoiled with the remark, You don't live up to your potential. In the process he has attacked his son's character.

Whenever I look into my daughter Emily's face, I think about the power of fatherhood. Her face reminds me that I have given her more than just my name. Like me, she has freckles stretching across the bridge of her nose almost like a Band-Aid. The skin around her eyes forms small and thin lines, and the lines match mine. When Emily smiles, my mother tells me, she looks just like you. Other things in her are reflections of me. I see myself most clearly in her eyes, the windows to her soul. Like me, Emily has a drive to succeed and will try anything. Who needs to wait for instructions? she used to tell herself as she attempted to do the high bar in gymnastics class; more than once, she failed. Also, more than once, she succeeded.

It was once considered an amazing achievement to reach the summit of Mount Everest. It was even a national honor to have a climber waving a national flag there. But now that almost 4,000 people have reached its summit, the achievement means less than it did a half century ago. In 1963, six people reached the top, but in the spring of 2012, the summit was crowded with more than 500 people. Then what makes it possible for so many people to reach the summit? One important factor is improved weather forecasting. In the past, lack of information led expeditions to attempt the summit whenever their team members were ready. Today, with hyper-accurate satellite forecasts, all teams know exactly when the weather will be perfect for climbing, and they often go for the top on the same days.

It is important to remember that a misunderstanding is never ended by an argument but by a sympathetic desire to see the other person's view. As Buddha said, Hatred is never ended by hatred but by love. Here is an example: Pat Duffy was selling cars for General Motors. If a buyer made a negative remark about the car he was selling, Pat would get upset at the customer. He would talk back to the customer and win lots of arguments, but he didn't sell many cars. Finally, he learned to handle the customers and here is how. If a customer said, This GM car is no good! I would rather buy a Ford car, Pat, instead of arguing, said, Ford cars are good, and it is a fine company. This made the customer speechless. There was no room for argument. Now instead of wasting time arguing about Ford cars, Pat got off that subject and concentrated on the GM cars he was selling.

The graph above shows four schools with the most extra-inning games at the College World Series Games and their records of wins and losses. All the teams had more wins than losses in the extra-inning games at the College World Series Games. Three of the four schools had more than ten extra-inning games. Arizona State and Texas had exactly the same record with seven wins and five losses. Of the four teams, Southern California had the most wins while both Arizona State and Texas had the largest number of extra-inning games. Oklahoma State had less than ten extra-inning games.

The brothers Howard and Theodore Lydecker were responsible for the wonderful special effects in movie serials made by Republic Pictures from the 1930s to the 1950s. They specialized in creating extremely realistic effects on very low budgets. Among the qualities that made their effects so believable were carefully constructed models and an insistence that their effects be created in camera. This means that they were achieved during the original filming. Because the effects were shot simultaneously on the same film stock, the image quality was very high. The Lydeckers developed a technique for flying model aircraft that produced very realistic results. It gave them complete control over the movement of the aircraft and is still used today.

《Holiday Skating Party》 Saturday, December 13th, 2014 4:00 p.m.-6:00 p.m. This free community event will give you the opportunity to enjoy an afternoon of winter fun while socializing with your family and friends. Location: Acrofax Metro Center, 1606 Gyle Street All levels of skaters are welcome! And if you don't skate, feel free to come out and enjoy the holiday music. Please note that there are no rental skates available. Children 14 years old or younger must wear helmets for their safety. For more information, please contact Morgan Leslie's office at 912-526-8771, or visit www.morganleslie.com.

The biggest trap many family gardeners fall into is creating a garden that is too large. Even though you may have the best of intentions, over time a garden that is too large will become a maintenance nightmare. My family, like many others, eagerly planted large gardens only to cut back slowly on the time devoted to gardening. Sometime in September, we ended up with a garden full of overripened fruit and out-of-control, overgrown plants. This situation is not enjoyable for adult gardeners, let alone for children. Most children (and many adults) won't enjoy spending their warm sunny days tending an overgrown garden plot. When thinking about the size of your family garden, be realistic. Plan the size according to the time your family can devote to the garden.

Compared to past generations, we are quite well off. In the past fifty years, the average buying power has more than tripled. We own a lot of electronic devices that are designed to make our lives easier, but still, as sociologists are eager to point out, there is no end to the list of things to do in our daily lives. We work as hard as our grandparents did, and the result is flawlessness but not freedom. The curtain edges are free of dirt, the picture hooks on the wall are firmly in place, and our eggs come out just the way we like them. The more we have, the more we want. The result is an apparent scarcity of time, a dilemma that seems to grow with each passing year, even though there is plenty of time to go around. Feeling pressed for time is the price we pay for an abundance of options.

For the last 20 years, some educators have believed that children should not be allowed to experience failure. Educational situations were structured so that every child could be successful nearly all the time. It was reasoned that the experience of failure would discourage students from future study. In the field of science, however, finding out what does not work is as important as finding out what does. In fact, real advances in science tend to occur whensolutions do not fit the predictions. Although students should not be constantly faced with frustrating learning situations, a positive attitude toward failure may better serve them in developing problem-solving skills. After all, in much of scientific inquiry, there are no right or wrong answers.

A miser tries to save his money. But he is failing to utilize what he owns. If he were to realize how he is limiting his true wealth, he would hasten to find some worthy person or institution that would benefit from a portion of his fortune. The part that he gives away might seem to diminish the size of his fortune. However, in reality what he gives away remains his eternal possession. And the true size of his fortune is calculated by what he gives and not by what he keeps. Some people use the expression, He is worth 'X' amount of money. They usually refer to a person's money and property that has not yet been given away. The expression would be more accurate if the calculations includedwhat one has donated to others.

Anyone who has ever achieved any degree of success knows that nothing in life worth having comes easily. Success is borne on the shoulders of commitment, discipline, and persistence. Yet our popular culture conveys a very different message to children: success doesn't have to be difficult or time consuming. Popular culture is full of stories about overnight successes, pills to lose weight fast, and breakthrough products to look ten years younger. Children see young actors such as Hilary Duff and Haley Joel Osment and musical geniuses like the violinist Sarah Chang, but they don't see the many years of determination, practice, and sacrifice that got them to the top of their professions. Children don't realize that overnight successes are usually ten years in the making.

Suppose that you can choose only one item from a selection of desserts that includes pecan ice cream, doughnuts, chocolate chip cookies, and cheese cake. Select one of these at random - say, pecan ice cream. Then, out of all the other desserts, identify the one that you like best out of that group. In my case, it'd be chocolate chip cookies. My decision about which dessert to eat now is made by simply comparing how I feel about pecan ice cream with how I feel about chocolate chip cookies. To select the ice cream means not being able to eat the chocolate chip cookies. I'll do that only if the pleasure from eating the ice cream exceeds the loss of giving up the chocolate chip cookies.

You can do a number of things to keep the air in your home clean. Most of them don't require much effort. Houseplants are by far the best way to filter indoor air. For example, spider plants love to absorb carbon monoxide and dioxide, and they're easy to grow. In fact, they're so prolific that you'll have a thousand little baby spider plants in no time, whether you like it or not. Not only can some types of plants reduce air pollutants, but they can also convert carbon dioxide back into oxygen. However, be aware that poorly maintained plants can provide excellent breeding grounds for harmful bugs. If you want plants, be prepared to take care of them.

I'm not sure which one of us did the talking, but it must have been pretty convincing because Mr. Montague agreed to audition us the very next day. We couldn't believe it. We were shocked. Rehearsal was over for the day. After we stopped screaming and hugging and dancing around Jean's basement, I ran all the way home to tell Mom about our lucky break. She was delighted, and she insisted on going with us to the audition, as much for support as to make sure everything was going smoothly. I felt like a little kid on Christmas Eve. I didn't sleep even an hour that night. That was probably why the next day seemed like a dream.

In general, there are two major styles of practice when it comes to medicine. In the past, the relationship between the doctors and patients was mostly paternalistic. In other words, doctors acted in a father knows best fashion. In this type of relationship, the doctor told what needed to be done, and the patient followed it without asking a lot of questions. This style of medicine allowed only for one-way communication. The other style of medical practice can be described as informative. As the paternalistic style slowly goes out of favor with the general public, the informative style is gradually taking hold as the more common type of doctor-patient relationship. The doctor's task in this case is not to tell what to do but to educate the patient about various treatment options. Ultimately, the doctor allows his patients to reach an informed decision about their own health conditions.