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Meal Planning through Thanksgiving
It’s Thanksgiving week!! For those of us who love to cook and entertain, it’s like our Super Bowl! And at the same time – for those of us who like to operate with a meal plan, it can feel like we’re drowning without our structure and routine! Meal planning through the Thanksgiving holiday can certainly feel like the wheels have fallen off! Between travel, all that cooking for the big day, and then the mountains of leftovers, it’s easy to feel like you’re out of control of your dinnertime – but fear not! Here are a few tips to help get you (and me!) through this week! Plan to not…
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My New Piece of Advice
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about the fam. It’s a combination of reasons, really. Three kids means not as much free time, a lot of my evenings are now spent editing photos, and frankly, motherhood has humbled me – all the advice that I once thought I had, well… in retrospect all seems a bit smug. I think I got a few things wrong. The reality of parenting is that there are lots of great ideas on how to succeed. However, most of those great ideas forget that most days we’re just trying to survive. Trying to get through the daily grind and salvage some sanity and happiness in the midst of chaos.…
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Getting back to normal
Dare I say it… but things are getting back to normal: Berkley finally likes people who aren’t named mommy, I get a few hours of “adult” time each evening, and [knock on wood] I’m even getting to sleep through the night again – well, sometimes. Yep, I’m getting the hang of this mommy-of-three thing. I’m feeling like myself again. A better version of myself, actually. Excuse me while I start reciting clichés, but what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. It’s true. I’m proof. In the last year, I’ve had to grow and pick up a few more life skills – how to control less, how to stress less and how to enjoy…
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Why my third baby turned me crazy
I made the assumption going in to my third pregnancy, that this third child would be easy, as if I had earned some advanced degree in babies, and this little one would just follow suit. I’m a pro at this, I thought. I’ve been through it all, I thought. Of course this baby will sleep through the night, I thought. But somehow over the last 7 months, I have lost my damn mind and forgotten everything I learned with my boys. You see, we used to be on a schedule. There was a morning nap and and afternoon nap, and nothing, I mean nothing, would get in the way of…
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Advice for my kids – Because I want you to be happy, successful and decent adults
I’ve recently been thinking about the really important things I should teach my children – the values that will help them to (hopefully) grow into happy, successful and decent adults. It’s the things that aren’t always taught in a classroom – the things that I realize may be lost on some of the present generation. Through my various interactions with adults, it has become apparent that not everyone is taking snaps from the same playbook – some folks just don’t get it. They don’t get how to be responsible and accountable and cordial. They don’t get the common sense component of how human beings should interact with each other. It’s unfortunate. But that’s one…
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We’re making progress
A really rough day with Brogan earlier this week had me and Blake looking for some new tactics to handle our “spirited” child. Blake found this article Parenting Your Strong Willed Child, and since it was pretty much the polar opposite of the approach we had been taking (which wasn’t working), we figured it was worth a try. So here’s the first status update: we’re making progress. The last 5 days, have, for the most part, gone pretty smoothly. And it was within those 5 days that Brogan took a Sharpie marker to 20+ locations upstairs (walls, doors, furniture, sheets, door knobs…). And how, you ask, is this going smoothly?…
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What five years of marriage have taught me
Five years ago, it was a cool fall day in Georgia and I married the love of my life. Like many others, my marriage is not perfect – but I don’t expect it to be. It ebbs and flows but I am lucky that there are more good days than bad. I’m lucky to be in a healthy (again, not perfect) marriage where we respect each other (most of the time), love each other and most days, really like each other. This five-year milestone has got me thinking about all I’ve learned about love and marriage along the way; advice and perspectives that have made us work, and that if…
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How to Be a Happy Parent
Parenting is hard and it’s easy to find yourself stuck in a rut with all the damn dailies. But I believe that happiness is relative to your expectations. We all have this romanticized idea of what parenting will be like before we have kids… and then we have them and realize some if it’s not so glamorous. Managing your expectations and keeping perspective is key to finding all the joy that parenting has to offer. Juggling your children, your marriage, a job (perhaps), and the stresses from the outside world (strangers, other parents, the media, the “experts”) can be downright stressful. Hey, no pressure, you’re only doing the most important…
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Making Great Sleepers
My boys are not model children. They don’t always listen, Brogan talks back, they throw fits, they scream, they hit… but, they sleep. Hallelujah, they sleep! We have gone through fits and starts with the sleeping, but overall, they have been very good sleepers. They were both sleeping through the night around three or four months. Brogan took two long naps a day until he was 2 ½. And the biggest thing for me is that they go to sleep on their own. As with most things, Brogan was better with this than Beckett – probably because we had the time to follow all of our own rules. I think…
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Bringing Home a Little Brother
When I found out I was pregnant with my second, I immediately started thinking about how it would impact my first. Little did he know that his whole world was going to be changing. I worried mostly about how he’d react without all the attention. With my world so full of him, I wondered how two would fit and where the sacrifices would be made. So my husband and I tried to be very deliberate about the choices we made when it came to introducing Beckett into our home. The first thing we had to tackle was the new nursery – Beckett was going to use the same crib and…
