I'm giving away another copy of A New Earth via the Bloggy Giveaway.

Mother's Day is coming, and what better gift than to acknowledge she's more than "just your mother?"

Last night Eckhart and Oprah touched on the idea that attaching worry (anxiety, anger) to our goals will defeat them. But if we can learn to stay centered in our core self and unattached to the outcome we will have access to divine power.

I've been struggling with this issue and the mission of So Sioux Me to empower girls.

I want to inspire parents to be able to take empowering action for their daughters and especially to teach our daughters to take action for themselves.

Yet, if what you focus on expands and taking ego-centered, surface action against something only makes what you are against into bigger problems then how do I complete my God-inspired mission?

The woman from the Bodi-Tree in California asked a relevant question in regards to pursuing her mission to create a green environment.

It's a little confusing and I have difficulty articulating the complex spiritual aspects of this so I'll use an example:

- Take the war on drugs and the war against poverty, which have served to expand the drug problem and the poverty problem. The last thing I want to do is make the beauty ideal narrower, increase gender bias or further sexualize girls.

Obviously, through So Sioux Me, I want to encourage positive action and not expand the problems I aim to solve.

Because it is a new skill and a new approach, I've likely taken a wrong step or two - especially during those moments when I've reacted with indignant and shocked outrage - yesterday's Gossip Girl story might serve as an example of indignant outrage that may not be effective. From what I understand, it's the emotional indignation and shocked outrage that will defeat our cause.

Rest assured - I am doing my best to operate from my core sense of self and my core sense of The Divine and of consciousness. I do meditate and pray quite often about my mission to empower girls and parents of girls on So Sioux Me.

Rather than fight anything my divinely-inspired missions are to expand the beauty ideal, provide powerful action steps, validate parents' instincts when confronting media and marketing, expand all possibilities for girls, encourage women and girls to grow a self esteem and positive self image, educate about sexualization is and how to approach desexualization of girls, encourage responsibility and even legislation that require and allow healthy boundaries necessary for childhood.

Leave a comment about So Sioux Me's mission or A New Earth and you're entered to win a copy of A New Earth. It might change your life. I'll draw a NAME (no anonymous entries) on Friday.

Did you know that it is now common for girls to start their menstrual cycles when they are nine years old? Pubic hair and breasts begin showing up one to two years prior to menstruation, which put many girls in precocious puberty or early puberty at around age seven.

I find this shocking.

My first reaction is to find out the cause of such early development and put an abrupt and definitive stop to it before it effects my daughter.

Yet, immediately, I realize that I do not have that kind of power as a parent.

It's not something I get to decide, like how much and what kind of television she's exposed to. It's pretty much up to God and some kind of backwards evolution.

Evolutionarily speaking females are having babies later in life, as opposed to earlier, right? Marrying and reproducing later rather than earlier. Why then, would the biological event of puberty be happening sooner rather than later?

Doing a Google search on the early maturation in girls was upsetting at best. There are lots of theories, some credible and some not, and it's kind of hard to tell the two apart.

The best article I found was Growing Up Too Fast published in the Denver Post, by Jackie Avner who took the time to research the various theories.

Now, as you know I already told my six-year-old daughter Ainsley that we, females, bleed every month to explain the tampons and pads. She sees me naked nearly every day, as I can't seem to train her to leave me alone in the bathroom. So, the pubic hair and breasts are things we've discussed frequently and openly.

I must be honest though, I previously told her she'd probably get breasts and hair when she was about 12 years old, because that's when I got them and I thought it was hereditary. I had to amend that information and inform her that these things might be happening several years earlier.

Logan Levkoff, Sexologist & Sexuality Educator and author of Third Base Ain't What It Used to Be: What Your Kids Are Learning About Sex Today- and How to Teach Them toBecome Sexually Healthy Adults had this to say on the topic of early maturation of girls, I think that there are two issues to consider: the implications of early menarche and how we teach our girls that an adult body does not mean that they are supposed to engage in adult behaviors and how to we teach our girls to love their bodies (and their menstrual status), when they get so many messages about how horrible having a period is, Levkoff said.

Also, Levkoff added, we need to teach fathers to remain present and affectionate with their daughters even as they physically transition through puberty.

As a mother, I can not control the onset of puberty, however I am her primary influence about the attitudes surrounding her femininity.

If I am curled up on the couch whining and moaning about how horrible my period is or muttering against God and his blasted curse, there is not much chance she will look forward to, embrace or accept her own period in a positive way regardless of when it happens for her.

Avoiding the issue that very young girls do have very adult bodies on today's elementary school playground would very likely backfire. But, for today I have to digest this information before I can begin that dialogue. In other words - she might be ready for further discussion but I, most certainly, am not.

And her Daddy, maybe we won't tell him about puberty till she's 13 and he's prepared for it - I'm only kidding! Jeez.

Further resources:
This is a fairly recent New York Times article about different cases.
This article blames early menstruation on childhood obesity.
This article describes gonadotropin-independent precocious puberty
This article insists it might be the absence of a father and the presence of a step-father.
This article hypothesises it's exposure to unknown contaminants.
These studies link early puberty to the mother's exposure to estrogen (in creams or medication) or similar hormones during pregnancy.
This article blames it on hormones present in cow's milk and a lack of attachment parenting.

By Tracee Sioux

My two favorite family television shows just revved up again on TLC Mondays with Jon & Kate plus 8 and Little People, Big World.

Little People, Big World is about Amy and Matt Roloff. They are little people or dwarfs. They have three average height children and one dwarf child.

Jon & Kate Gosselin were a normal couple with some fertility issues. They scored some twins with their first pregnancy and Kate convinced Jon they should have "one more." They got six. Oh and this poor mother is a compulsive cleaner with 6 toddlers.

Most reality television doesn't have any relationship at all to reality. These two families are REAL. They deal how I deal - with a tone. It's the arguing and bickering and real-life family interactions that keep me rolling in my seat the whole time.

When Kate gets all bossy with Jon in the toy store and then he tells her Stop talking to me like I'm a dog I laugh my head off. They took 8 small children to a toy store and that's the worst thing that happened. Ha! I see people with one whinny brat come out of the toy store worse off than that. Or they try to get sextuplets dressed to go somewhere and and finally Jon snaps Yes! I only told you 17 freaking times! and I'm just so proud of them for actually leaving the house.

When the Roloffs take their family on a road trip in a motor home, to see where Matt proposed to Amy, and they fight the whole time. Finally Amy goes on a rant:

Look at me! I do not want to leave trash in the fire pit! This will be enough to piss me off do you know that? I don't know why I even came. My God, you people argue about everything!

As someone who is trying to get a grip on her tone to improve her own slightly less than perfect family life these two shows are like pure love and joy to watch.

We may not talk to each other so nicely sometimes, but we're still here pulling for the same cause and that's evidence that we love each other, explains Kate. Here, Here Kate.

Kate and Amy are my modern-day mother heroes. I nominate them both for Mother of the Year.

by Tracee Sioux

Kiss it. It might turn into a prince.

You kiss it!

I already got my Prince. This is what Daddy looked like when I found him.

Please steal this idea for your daughter's Christmas or birthday. I felt with all the negative media images my daughter had to face I wanted to arm her with a really, really good one. I wrote her a book, about herself, for her 5th birthday titled Ainsley, Perfect You.

I used MyPublisher.com because they have a storybook option that let me add more than a caption. When she's feeling anxious about things like the first day of school I take it down and read it to her. It's a very affordable thing any parent can do, it does take some time and planning.

It's interesting that women all want to be the same color, only not the color we are.

Dark skinned women buy bleaching products to lighten the color of their skin to be more beautiful. While white women poison their skin with sun damage and tanning beds to look darker to be more beautiful. (I'm really regretting the tanning, now that I'm fighting melasma with bleaching products so I have one skin tone.)

Does this mean that Hispanic women, who presumably have the ideal medium brown skin tone, feel most beautiful? Or do they have skin-tone issues too?

I like the Olay tag line, Love the skin you're in.

If have a great idea that will empower women you should apply to be a recipient of the Hello Tomorrow Fund.

This week's winner is Sandi Gallagher from Dracut, Massachusetts.

Sandi will use her winnings to support a free dental program for domestic violence victims. In cases of domestic abuse, offenders often strike at their victim’s mouth, whether to symbolically quiet them or gain control, causing damage to teeth and gums that many victims cannot afford to repair. Sandi is a professional dental assistant serving on an all-volunteer team at the St. Luke Dental Clinic that offers a full range of pro-bono dental services to the women, restoring self confidence as well as dental health.

Some previous winners include:

Deborah Fallon, 40, will utilize her award to support Portal to Hope, a program that directly supports the victims of domestic violence as they rebuild their lives, including a special program focused on young women in their teens and early twenties.

Linda Reszel Brice, 55, of Lubbock, Texas has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the US, as well as one of the highest rates of premature birth and related complications such as low birth weight and infant mortality. Linda, a full-time professor of nursing at Texas Tech University, was alarmed by these statistics from the perspective of both a health care provider and concerned citizen. She and her students determined they would become involved with a program that sought to curb these statistics and began working with The Stork’s Nest, a non-profit venture founded in 2000 and sponsored by the March of Dimes. The Stork’s Nest aims to provide assistance to mostly low-income pregnant women and teens in the Lubbock area, and since its inception the program has helped more than 1,200 women ranging in age from 12 to mid-30s.

Shelly Renee Brown, 43, who works at Carnegie-Mellon University, will apply her award towards a college-tour program for inner-city high school-aged girls from predominantly African-American communities interested in careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

Georgie Jennison, 24, a Chester College senior will apply her award to help fund “Girls of Opportunity,” a new creative arts mentorship program which aims to empower at-risk teenage girls through creative expression and exploration of key issues they face, including pregnancy, violence, illiteracy, and negative body image. “Girls of Opportunity” will offer its gender-specific arts-based initiative to at-risk teenage girls aged 11 to 17 in the greater Derry, New Hampshire area.

Check out some of the other ways women, like yourself, have found to empower women by reading the press releases about the winners.

I have this friend who had a chronic terrible itchy horrible nightmarish recurring yeast infection for 3 years. Well, actually she thought it was a yeast infection, but she kept going to the doctor and the yeast infection culture kept coming back negative. He ran a bunch of tests and she tested negative for all the other vaginal infections as well. She was constantly spending money to try the Diflucan and the over the counter yeast infection medicine and none of it was really helping.

She noticed that it always flared up after sex. She started to think maybe it was psychosomatic, you know maybe her vagina was just getting pissed off about the nature of its sex life or something. Like that Sex in the City episode where Charlotte’s vagina gets depressed? Like that. Her vagina felt angry and pissed off more than depressed. It would wake her in the night screaming and agitated. This problem with her vagina was really getting to her, leaking into her personality and making her more frustrated and agitated than normal. Hell, can you imagine how frustrated and upset you’d be if YOU had an incurable yeast infection for 3 years?

Finally, after a couple of years of Ob/GYN appointments the doctor tells her that he’s giving her a prescription steroid – finally relief. The prescription was called clotrimazole.

A few months later her baby got a terrible diaper rash. The nurse said to go get Lotramine AF for his rash. The nurse also happens to mention, if it’s cheaper, she should buy the jock itch cream because it’s the exact same ingredients.

So she’s comparing prices and reads the ingredients and sees the familiar word clotrimazole on the jock itch cream. The same stuff her doctor prescribed for her itchy irritated vagina.

She goes home and asks her husband, Honey, do you have jock itch?

Yeah, why do you ask? he says.

We’re not having sex again until you go get a prescription for jock itch, she tells him.

There are three lessons to this story:

*Sometimes what feels like a chronic yeast infection could be jock itch being passed back and forth between you and your partner. Try the Lotrimin isle.
*A terrible diaper rash may also be jock itch, try the Lotrimin isle.
*For some reason, even the OB/GYN, a man specializing in the vagina and used to talking about a vagina's issues, was too embarrassed to tell the woman her diagnosis.

More candid talk about the vagina can only be more empowering for women and girls.