Monday, February 3, 2014

Book: Hands Free Mama

About the book:
If technology is the new addiction, then multi-tasking is the new marching order. We check our email while cooking dinner, send a text while bathing the kids, and spend more time looking into electronic screens than into the eyes of our loved ones. With our never-ending to-do lists and jam-packed schedules, it’s no wonder we’re distracted.

But this isn’t the way it has to be.

In July 2010, special education teacher and mother Rachel Macy Stafford decided enough was enough. Tired of losing track of what matters most in life, Rachel began practicing simple strategies that enabled her to momentarily let go of largely meaningless distractions and engage in meaningful soul-to-soul connections. She started a blog to chronicle her endeavors and soon saw how both external and internal distractions had been sabotaging her happiness and preventing her from bonding with the people she loves most.

Hands Free Mama is the digital society’s answer to finding balance in a media-saturated, perfection-obsessed world. It doesn’t mean giving up all technology forever. It doesn’t mean forgoing our jobs and responsibilities. What it does mean is seizing the little moments that life offers us to engage in real and meaningful interaction. It means looking our loved ones in the eye and giving them the gift of our undivided attention, leaving the laundry till later to dance with our kids in the rain, and living a present, authentic, and intentional life despite a world full of distractions.

So join Rachel and go hands-free. Discover what happens when you choose to open your heart---and your hands---to the possibilities of each God-given moment.

My thoughts:
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and felt it was very eye opening to me as a mother.  We know that time goes quickly, and before we know it our children are grown.  When they are grown will we truly know them? 

The author realized she was missing out on things that mattered most in life because of her constant distractions and the ways she was over committed.  She offers honest, painful stories of things she realized through her journey.  She offers some amazing realizations that happened for her along the way and shares these through her creative writing style. 

I think the message of this book is one that needs to be heard by our society that is constantly attached to a phone or to-do list.  It's important to realize that becoming hands free wasn't something that happened overnight, it is a continuing process, and we can't live in guilt when we do mess up.         
I appreciated the ideas she shared on ways to help readers become hands free based on things that had happened on her own journey.   

I hope others will read this book and realize the need to pay attention to the most important part of life instead of letting life pass by without meaning and value. 

This is the Hands Free Mama website.  Be sure to check out this book. 

This book was provided to me through the BookSneeze reviewer program for my honest review.  Thank you.

Have a day of blessings!

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