• Dominate Dinner,  Food,  Holidays

    5 Simple Tips to Dominate Thanksgiving Dinner!

    Hosting Thanksgiving is exciting for some, and stressful for others. I’ve found that the key to keeping it low-stress (regardless of the size of the gathering or how many dishes you’re preparing), is having a plan! Doing the things that can be done ahead of time prior to Thanksgiving day will go a long way towards lightening the load! Here are my 5 tips to help you dominate Thanksgiving dinner! Tip 1 – Decide What Kind of Gathering You’ll Host– Size: Small and intimate or large and feisty?– How Formal: Will you be eating on paper plates or the special China?– Who’s Cooking: Is it a pot-luck or are you…

  • Dominate Dinner

    The #1 Meal Planning Mistake

    Implementing a weekly meal planning routine has the potential to save you tons of time, reduce your stress and anxiety around cooking, and make family dinners an achievable goal. But sometimes, your meal plan is a bust and you’re left feeling just as overwhelmed as before. I think the culprit to most meal planning flops is that people try to do too much. When folks approach meal planning with the notion that they need to cook every night and find all new recipes, it can quickly turn into a recipe for disappointment. Being all extra right out of the gate is the #1 meal planning mistake. And coming from a…

  • Kids,  Me

    Managing the crazy

    Sometimes I feel like being a mom is like running a factory. It takes strategy and efficiency and planning and meticulous execution to keep it all running on time. And by on time, I don’t really mean on time (because that rarely happens anymore), I really just mean running… barely. Oh yes, motherhood, one of my two full time jobs. Just because I’m not home with my kids during the day doesn’t mean I shirk any of the other mom responsibility. Nope. The daily housekeeping, laundry, dishes, meal planning, grocery shopping, hauling in and putting away all the purchased groceries (as I was reminded of this weekend when I brought home a…

  • Kids

    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…