【推荐1】Japan’s Marie Kondo is known around the world as a cleaning expert and for helping people organize their homes. Her 2014 book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing has sold millions of copies. But even Marie Kondo cannot follow all of her cleaning rules all of the time.

Marie Kondo wrote her famous book before she became a mother. At that time, she aimed for a perfectly organized home. But she now adds that she understands two important things about parenting: First, children often make a mess. And second, time and energy are limited.

Kondo says her expectations for tidying up “definitely changed” after having children. She questions her previous ideas. When things get very busy, Kondo has learned to ease her rules for order and organization. Kondo’s words may please some parents. Several years ago, she faced criticism for having no real idea how messy children can be, and how disorganized busy parents can become.

Some parents rejected the main principle of Kondo’s tidying method-a method she named “KonMari”. That principle is cleaning up a large number of things all at once. She suggested that when you organize your books, you should organize all of your books. If you organize your clothes, you should organize all of your clothes.

Tidying up, she wrote in her book, should be a special event and not something you do every day or every week. Her “KonMari” method, she claimed, would keep mess from returning under normal circumstances. However, parents said they couldn’t give so much time to one project while raising children. People without children also agreed with this criticism of Kondo’s “ KonMari” method.

After Kondo’s two daughters were born, she changed “KonMari” a little to better fit a child-filled life. She admits that tidying up one small area at a time might be a better approach for busy and tired parents. For example, instead of organizing all of the clothes, a parent might organize just the T-shirts.

【推荐2】How to Get a Great Shot

    1    “The more you understand the technical fundamentals, such as how a camera works and how lenses work, the more creative you can be,” says Brown.

Check your shutter speed. “Fast shutter speeds can freeze an action moment sharply. Slow shutter speeds can cause action to blur,” says Brown.     2     For a blurred image of a waterfall, use a slow shutter speed.

Watch your angle. Brown says, “Low angles can make a subject appear more imposing, and high angles can diminish the subject’s presence.”     3    

Adjust the lighting. “     4    Soft, warm lighting from above can make him or her appear angelic,” Brown says.

    5     “Sometimes,” Brown says, “a great photo is the result of luck.”

【推荐3】Garden goals can often be unclear. But in my opinion, not having a clear aim in mind when we are designing, creating and maintaining a garden can lead to a range of problems down the road. We must know where we’re going to determine our direction. Usually, without clear goals in mind, we end up setting out in entirely the wrong direction.

Creating our own perfect garden needs time. Waiting and failures can be dispiriting and many gardeners give up or feel disgruntled. It is always best to take our time and make progressive steps toward our overall goals.

With a clear idea of those goals, we can determine better how we are progressing toward them, even when nothing goes according to plan. We can see our success more clearly and can’t get hung up on smaller things that go wrong along the way.

Another thing clear garden goals can give us is a sense of the light at the end of the tunnel—something keeping us centered on what really matters. We need to have something to aim for to keep focus on the longer term. In a garden, it is easy to become distracted and some gardeners throw everything at their gardens in the hope that something will stick.

Buying too many plants for a garden is not only a recipe for disappointment, when things don’t end up working as expected, but also makes your efforts unsustainable. By buying only what you need, you can reduce your harmful impact and live in an environmentally friendly way.

Establishing clear goals helps us visualize our own needs and priorities (优先事项) more clearly. It helps us see what our gardens can truly provide for us and see how our gardening efforts can also help others and be of great benefit in the wider world.

【推荐1】Xing Yifan and his parents were thrilled to learn that he had been admitted to Beihang University with a score of 645 out of a possible 750 points in this (2021) year’s national college entrance examination, or gaokao. It would take most high school graduates great effort to score that high.

But the challenge for 18-year-old Xing was greater, as he was born with congenital muscular dystrophy (营养不良), a group of disorders characterized by muscle weakness and problems with the eyes and central nervous system.

After the Spring Festival in 2004, the Xing couple took Yifan to Beijing for treatment, and he was finally diagnosed with CMD (先天性肌营养不良亚型) at Peking University First Hospital.

When relatives and friends heard the news,they advised the couple to have another baby, but they were determined to pour all their love and care into their son.

“Yifan is an angel who came to our family,” the father said. “He might have broken wings, but we will never give him up.”

The young man’s health continued to deteriorate (恶化). As a result of his condition，he is unable to grow much muscle, so his skeleton (骨骼) suffers from a lack of support and protection.

“He has never walked independently and can only sit against a support,” said Xing Dacheng.

“And every 30minutes,he has to lie down to rest,even in the classroom.”

The condition has also deformed Xing Yifan’s spine and fingers, making it difficult for him to write. “His teachers and principals from primary school to senior high school never refused him. The opportunity of education gave us lots of help,” his father added.

Hou Suyun, head teacher at Xing Yifan’s primary school,carried him up and down stairs during the six years he spent at the school.

Yang Weihong, head teacher at Xing Yifan’s junior high school, gave him extra care but subjected him to the same strict academic requirements as his classmates. “I tried everything I could to stimulate his desire to study, hoping to give him more confidence,” Yang said. “I also hoped he would discover his own sense of worth.”

Yang’s methods worked. Xing Yifan got the highest score in his school for the senior high school entrance examination in 2018.

【推荐2】One minute, Peggy Lewis and her husband were watching the trees blow in the wind outside their home. The next minute, they were surrounded by pieces of glass from the house’s broken windows. The roof tore off and the walls caved in. After the 152-mph tornado had passed, it took a team of neighbors to pull the couple from the rubble (瓦砾) and take them to the hospital. “I thought we were going to die,” says Lewis, 58. It was an unbelievable natural disaster in the United States.

When the pair returned to their home three days after that awful night last June, it was clear that the house would need to be cleared out. But before that, she wanted one thing-her family Bible (圣经). Lewis bought the Bible 35 years ago at the start of her marriage. Like many folks, she’d used it to hold and keep her family’s history.

The Bible was the first thing Lewis looked for when she returned to the house. It was on top of an antique dresser in her bedroom when she’d last seen it. In fact, the dresser wasn’t there at all. When two volunteers showed up to help the couple dig out, Lewis had one request for them: “If you can find anything, please find my Bible”.

After an hour of searching, a volunteer ran up to her. She cried loudly looking at the book in her hands. The young woman had found the Bible while searching through the rubble. Stunningly, while many books inside the home had been destroyed beyond recognition, the Bible was still perfect, even though it had sat in the rain for days. “I completely broke down,” says Lewis. “I thought it was gone forever. It was a miracle.”

Even slowly, the treasures reappeared in her life. The Bible and her treasures in it actually lived through the terrible disaster.