Colleen Cook, Thrive Correspondent

What a year it has been. In the spring, when the initial stay-at-home orders were issued, once the initial shock of it lifted, I used some of the newfound free time to interview my 90-year-old grandmother (I wrote about that here). As we talked about her life, she reflected on the country’s response to the […]

I don’t usually bake many Christmas cookies. My mother-in-law makes an amazing assortment that she shares with us for Christmas each year, which frees me up to just make cut-outs with my kids. However, in the shadow of the pandemic, our holiday plans won’t be quite as normal this year, which seems to be true […]

This morning, I lost my temper. I spend most Sunday afternoons writing and catching up on work, and this week presented a few extra time-consuming projects that I needed to squeeze into the afternoon. Meanwhile, Christmas presents are piling up in our basement, I need to coordinate childcare for the next couple of months and […]

As a college senior, one of the final barriers I had to graduate was to complete student teaching in an elementary school and a high school. I was lucky to be paired with two cooperating teachers who were truly incredible at their jobs. Each was seasoned in their careers and had taken their music students […]

As a new parent, you’re given one piece of advice more than any other: don’t blink. Don’t miss it. It’ll go faster than you think. The days are long, the years are short. It’s hard not to resonate with that wisdom, because there’s truth in it: the passage of time is a constant that none […]

This morning was a mess. My husband and I both woke up with bad attitudes that quickly turned to pointless bickering. Upon retreating to our room to decompress, I inadvertently knocked one of the lattes I had just made off my nightstand, exploding the mug and spraying coffee all over our bed and the wall […]

When we think about dating, it’s almost always through the lens of a romantic relationship. If you’re single, dating allows you to get to know a potential partner by connecting intentionally as you get to know each other on a deeper level. You share meals, experiences, conversation and time together as you form a bond. […]

Last week, one of my favorite podcasts, Reply All, reported on some scientific research related to happiness. The ongoing study they reported on has found a way to quantify the overall cultural level of happiness in the English-speaking world by analyzing decades of a cross-section of all the tweets on Twitter. These researchers have discovered […]

For the past two years, our company has been renovating a historic building in Downtown Ashland to become the permanent home for our business. It’s been a long process filled with many lessons along the way, but it’s also been incredibly exciting at each turn to see the small progressions on the way to the […]

This week I took part in an annual social media challenge that I’ve participated in the past four years. The Instagram challenge called #onedayhh was started by writer and podcaster Laura Tremaine several years ago and challenges participants to share one normal day in their life, hour by hour.  Having participated the past few years, […]