Happy National Dog Week! Well, maybe it’s not so much for us to celebrate as it is for us to be more aware and appreciative of our four-legged friends, but I’m sure they wouldn’t mind the extra attention just the same!

National Dog Week officially starts tomorrow, September 22, and runs until September 28. To kick things off, Animal Planet’s Good Dog U host Joel Silverman (with help from his pup Foster) has written a fun book titled “What Color is Your Dog?” which focuses on two main points of dog ownership: Building a trusting relationship with your dog, and training …read more

I have reached the period in my life where engagement has started to spread like the swine flu.  I am not engaged and have never been married, so the idea that all of my friends happen to be receiving proposals of marriage from their boyfriends at the same time is a little bit of a mystery to me.  Some of the couples getting engaged have been dating since the beginning of college, and some have barely been dating for a year, but yet here they are now suddenly at the same stage in their relationship.  What changes occur in our …read more

I wrote an article last month called Are You Ready To Move In Together? that addressed the serious issues that should probably be resolved before signing a lease together.  As a follow-up I would like to propose a new set of questions to answer before moving in together that are not related to serious relationship issues, but instead address the issues related to sharing space.  Before you move in together it might be helpful to discover your level of compatibility as roommates.  Your relationship could be perfect, but if you drive each other crazy just because you live under the …read more

Even if you’re not in a long distance relationship, the relationship that you and your significant other have with the phone is very important.  With text messaging and cell phones making it easy to be in contact every second of the day, oftentimes couples find themselves frequently fighting about issues surrounding phonecalls and messages.
If you are in a trusting relationship, then there is no need for excessive use of the phone to keep in contact.  Unanswered phonecalls and delayed responses to text messages can cause unnecessary stress, doubt, and worry.  It’s possible that your significant other actually loves talking to …read more

I’m sure that it’s happened in my own relationships and I see it in relationships all around me all the time.  My observations might fall into some gender stereotypes, but when I see I pattern I just need to call attention to it and find out if other people feel the same way.  I am addressing this from a woman’s viewpoint, but the same situation could definitely exist in the reverse for a man.
If you have been in a serious relationship for a long time you probably think that it is moving towards engagement and marriage.  As the years tick …read more

Every person surely remembers the great story by P.D. Eastman, about the bird who hatches and goes in search of his mother. He encounters many inanimate objects in his quest, whom he poses the question, “Are You My Mother?” to. As I read the book to my little ones, this morning, it made me think of the role of a parent and discipline. Every mom has different ways of disciplining their children. Some are against spanking, some are not. Some find time out the only acceptable form of corrective action, some have many forms. Some parents are the only ones who discipline their kids …read more

Heather, over at Inside Motherhood, has tagged Gayla and I to play an exciting round of meme tag! The topic is pregnancy questions. I will try my best to answer these without rambling incessantly, which I tend to do very often when the topic is pregnancy. That is partly why I started the Fertile Farmer blog. I love talking about pregnancy, probably because I’m a tad knowledgeable about it. Ha! Here we go:
1. How did you find out you were pregnant?
Uhhhh….which time? The first time around, I missed my period and was sleeping all the time. A test confirmed my …read more