Organizing for the holidays

Spending time at home with family and friends during the holidays is a welcome respite for many of us. It’s a chance to spend quality time together, recharge, and reflect on our many blessings. As 2021 approaches, it’s a convenient time to think about how we can start the new year off on a good note and be more organized in all aspects of our lives.

This holiday season is a bit different. Our homes have become our classrooms, workspaces, and exercise areas. Designating “zones” in your home can help you stay focused on the task at hand.

Set up a “zone” in your home for work, school, or other activities that allow you to concentrate. Use a room divider to partition an open space to gain some privacy.

Stay focused with a timer. Distractions are inevitable whether you are at home, at the office, or elsewhere. A timer allows you to stay on track and get things done within the allotted time without being interrupted.

Declutter your home “hub” by setting reminders on your devices and committing to putting away toys, electronics, paper, and other items on a daily or weekly basis.

Donate unused, unwanted, or out of date items such as clothing, toys, or dry goods to your local charity or faith-based organization to make room for holiday gifts and purchases. Recycle obsolete consumer electronics such as cell phones, computers, and printers at your local electronics superstore, office retailer, or local recycling center.

If all of this feels overwhelming, enlisting the help of a Professional Organizer can help jump-start the process and provide you with the motivation, strategy, and expertise to tackle your home organizational challenges.

Organizing your life isn’t just about organizing the space in your home – it’s about accomplishing the goal of making your life simpler and easier so that you can spend more time doing the things you enjoy.

A Professional Organizer can provide you with a tailored and personalized organizational plan to accomplish your goals.

Consider the services of a Professional Organizer in 2021. Put your best foot forward and start your year off right.

Happy Holidays to you and your family from the
Lisa eOrganizer team!

Lisa Haubenstock is LisaTheOrganizer, a Professional Organizer and the owner of LisaTheOrganizer, LLC. Serving Broward, Miami-Dade & Palm Beach counties. She is a member of NAPO and serves on the board of the South residential organizing. Email Lisa at Lisa@lisatheorganizer.com.

Try a ‘good enough’ parenting style

Everyone wants their children to grow into well-rounded, healthy, and connected individuals. Looking back, your parenting style has probably changed since the spring. Screen-time, playdates, and having food delivered were probably looked at a little differently. It may sound odd, but as a therapist, I help families build a “good enough” parenting style to help support children. The concept was created by English pediatrician Donald Woods Winnicott to help push back against the rise in striving for a perfect, flawless parent. These impossible goals are something we can start to let go of in 2020.

Break the on-demand cycle
Remember when you scheduled every after school moment with stimulating activities for your family? Do you recall that sinking feeling that you were failing as a parent? Well, you are good enough, just not perfect. At the start of the pandemic, you rallied resources and filled your kids’ lives with baking, board games, and Pinterest-worthy fun.After a while, you realized that you were beyond exhausted from the added demands of scheduling every single minute seven days a week.

Then the whining began with the dreaded, “I’m bored!” Here’s the beauty of the good enough parent: Your job is to offer a safe foundation for your child to explore their environment. In plain terms, that means THEY have to fi nd the fun activity (Within limits!). Once we help our kids learn that their free time is theirs to craft, they learn how to play independently. That might mean they discover a love of reading, gardening, swimming, painting, music, or astronomy. The opportunities are endless.

Grow closer by fostering independence
Parents strive to provide their kids with a safe, happy childhood. We often fall in the trap of creating only fun, successful times for them. When children are too afraid to fail, they struggle to find their place in the world. Being a good enough parent means that we create an environment where children are allowed to try things with the possibility of failure. By learning how to fail, we support children in building good sportsmanship, ethics, compassion, empathy, and most of all-motivation to keep trying. Let’s all strive for a good enough school year!

Marla Berger is a licensed mental health counselor, registered art and play therapist. Her practice, Berger Counseling Services, is located in Parkland.

Coral Springs man speaks, writes on family’s triple tragedy

Limelight – an intense white light created by heating a cylinder of quicklime, used for dramatic effect in 19th century theater.

As an actor and producer, Coral Springs resident Joseph Velez, 57, never expected that one day his own family would be the focus of such an unforgiving glare.

With film credits ranging from Robert De Niro’s 2019 “The Irishman” to the
2010 locally filmed A&E TV series “TheGlades” to the hit Netflix show “Stranger Things,” Velez was used to seeing himself on-screen playing fictional roles.

But in a kind of twisted triple indemnity motivated by insurance fraud, Velez found himself in the middle of three very real deaths — one his own mother — all allegedly plotted by his half-brother.

They were deaths with a gun, a plastic bag, and the killer’s own two hands. They were deaths with a common motive — insurance money. They were deaths of people all known by the suspect, the half-brother, who is now serving a life sentence, but only for one of the killings, that of his own 15-month-old son, Prince.

Velez, a former Marine who served three tours in Afghanistan during Operation Desert Storm, is writing a book and producing and hosting a podcast about the cases.

The story unfolds over the span of a decade, beginning on Mar. 19, 2003, when a young mother, Shawn Katrina Mason, was shot and killed in her Manassas, (Prince William County) VA., condominium.

Five years later, in Nov. 2008, an older woman, Alma Rosa Collins, also of Prince William County, was found dead with a plastic bag over her head. The death was ruled a suicide but Velez doesn’t believe it.

Alma Rosa Collins was his mother.

Police had one person in custody after the killing of Mason, the half-brother of Velez, Joaquin Rams, born as John Anthony Ramirez. He was released for lack of evidence.

Prince Elias McCleod Rams was found dead in Manassas in October 2012, at the home of his father Joaquin. Rams and the boy’s mother, Hera McCleod, were divorced and a court had granted Rams unsupervised visits.

Rams was Mason’s ex-boyfriend. He was the son of the second victim and the father of the third. It was later learned Rams had life insurance policies with his name as the beneficiary of all three of the victims.

Hera McCleod, now an activist for children’s rights in Seattle, wrote in a
blog, “Trusting the Virginia police ended up being one of the biggest mistakes of my life. Instead of helping to keep my family safe, they helped my abuser.”

It’s inconceivable to Velez that authorities ruled his mom’s death a suicide. Velez and his mother’s sister, Elva Carabello, strongly dispute the finding.

In the death of Collins, Rams collected insurance of more than $150,000. He had taken out three policies totaling half-a-million dollars on his then, new-born son, and was receiving Social Security benefits from the death of Mason, the mother of his first son, Joaquin, Jr.


Rams, now 48, was arrested in 2013 for the murder of his son, Prince. After a 12-day bench trial, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. He is serving time in the Red Onion State Prison, a supermax facility in Virginia. Authorities are taking another look at the other two deaths.

For Velez, writing a book and producing the podcasts has been a journey tougher than his three tours in Afghanistan.

The book is titled, “Shadows Of My Soul – Objects in the Mirror are Closer Than They Appear.” The podcast for iHeart Radio, Spotify, and Apple iTunes is called “The C.O.D.E. (Cause of Death Explained) of Silence.”

Velez also founded The B.A.R.E. Project (Butterflies/Angels/ Rescue/Echo) to honor his mother, Alma Rosa Collins, Mason, and Prince McLeod.

“We must honor them and the countless other innocent lives that have been taken that never had a chance to speak out for help,” he says.

Visit Shadows of My Soul on Facebook to stay up-to-date on the latest news. The book will be available on Amazon.com. The podcast, “The C.O.D.E. (Cause of Death Explained) of Silence” will be available on iHeart Radio, Spotify, Apple iTunes, and other streaming services.