Hello Friends!
I’m Olya, and welcome to my online “playground”. Here, I unleash my artsy, creative, ambitious, and messy sides and bring a wealth of experience and a relentless drive to excel to my blogs. I’ll cover posts on:
🌱 Personal growth and education
👨👩👧👦 Lessons I have learned as a parent
🍎 Kid-friendly, school-safe, healthy recipes
💡Miscellaneous hacks and tips
💪 Various health and fitness topics
♟️ Chess stories
📝 C’est-la-vie creative writing
🤱 And my motherhood stories – some of which, I hope, will be a source of encouragement to you, while others will make you laugh with me
Who I am in a nutshell
👑 Former Canadian Girls Chess Champion (2001) ♟️
🌍 Two-time representative of Canada at the World Youth Chess Tournament (check out my ♟️ bio below)
📚 Published writer
🏆 4x Chess.com’s Blog of the Month winner
👩👧👦 Mom of two
💼 One driven, ambitious, loving, fun gal
A Little More About Me
Following a decade-long career in Finance, I decided to stay home to look after my children. In that fleeting, transformative time, I became an avid writer! My work has been published in The Globe And Mail, in The New York Times, and on Chess.com where I’m currently a Top Blogger! (And this probably means I need to re-write most of my blogs written prior to 2021)
I am crazy about living a healthy lifestyle that is filled with ambition, creativity, and aspirations.
On parenting: I am inspired by the Conscious Parenting movement pioneered by Dr. Shefali Tsabary and authors such as Daniel J. Siegel, Tina Payne Bryson (Whole Brain Child), Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlich (How To Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk).
On nutrition: I have read dozens and dozens of books and articles on nutrition and various diets including Vegan, Vegetarian, Paleo, Keto, Fully Raw etc. And I have tried them all! I have also tried and experimented with hundreds of recipes, if not more, and am always using my imagination and knowledge to come up with new ones. My children are quite picky eaters so I always have to come up with ways to make them eat healthy foods.
On my The Edge Corner: Being a competitive chess player in the past I have always had a great interest in real-world psychology (not so much textbook stuff), ambition, inner drive, motivation … and more importantly, now – how to inspire and motivate our children to grow, learn and participate in various educational activities. I’d like to write about what I’ve learned while climbing the chess champion ladder, how I taught myself two foreign languages at home with no tutor, and lots more … and I hope that my lessons learned will apply to parents and children who are pursuing any other extracurricular fields or interests.
On Health: I love to exercise and try different workouts, eat nutritious meals, and lead a healthy lifestyle, and I wish more people would be motivated to do the same.
My Chess Journey
I’ve been playing competitive chess since I was five years old. I was one of the strongest girl- players under 10, in St. Petersburg, Russia and I won the Canadian Girls Chess Championship in 2001. In 2020, after a decade free of chess, I came back to the game and never looked back! You can read about some of my chess journey in The Globe And Mail article here and follow my ongoing chess adventures on my Chess.com blog.
And check out this sweet, short article written about me in The Globe and Mail 🙂
Happy reading, cooking, parenting, and chessing!
