I want to be a "yes mom"

The past little while I have felt some contention in my home and I've wondered why, and how I can keep it from getting to that point where I am so angry I could turn purple. Today while I was doing my regular blog checking I was reading a friend's post about life, communication, yelling and being a "yes mom." It totally gave me the gumption to try harder and remember that in the end my purpose here IS my family and I want to be happier with them. Just wanted to share some (well, most) of her post...maybe it will encourage you to be better too...

"A "yes mom" is the one who wants her kids to be able to do lots of fun activities and play with their friends and eat ice cream for dinner once in a while and play in mud and go to the movies and just enjoy being a kid. It is the mom who does not say no just for the heck of it, but finds a way to give her kids many different experiences and enjoys it with them. She picks her battles, and doesn't expect perfection.
One of the biggest obstacles to overcome in becoming a happy family is learning effective communication. Yelling is a huge part of this. Many studies show that yelling can be just as harmful as physical abuse, especially from adults to children, but the results are similar in child to child and adult to adult cases. We tend to think that by yelling, people will respond by paying attention and learning to behave as we want them to. When we repeatedly yell, the child or spouse or whoever is repeatedly knocked down emotionally, but does not learn the desired lesson. We trigger a negative reaction in them, so they often want to rebel and do something to punish us back. The lesson learned is that situations are dealt with by getting angry and emotional. We have a world full of people who automatically get angry and defensive because just like physical abuse, it gets passed down through generations. "