whole parenting family
I loved writing my little advice column for me and myself when I was in my 20’s and single and I absolutely LOVED all your responses!! Go read the comments!! Then tonight I got to thinking about what it’s like up here in the mid-thirties, married, with kids. My oldest featuring a tee from his favorite CD: Cake for Dinner. Despite being fraught presently with the blur that double pink eye can bestow to moms dropping eye drops in the moving target of kids’ pupils, I am cogent enough to look around and see my insecurities in this state of life that looks all well-assembled from the outside. I have a loving and hardworking husband. Bonus points that he’s handsome. I have three cute kids. Cute when they’re not ripping each other’s lego creations apart. I have this fancy old house, oh, and I used to practice law so somehow that means I’m smart (except my house is very dusty as is my brain). The insecurities in our married, kidded 30’s are very real, even if not apparent to the naked eye. On a daily basis, my brain twirls through these first-world problems: 1) Did I explain that properly to my kid or am I completely bluffing my way through parenting? First born kids get all the practice hits, right? (baseball analogy, really? wow, mothering a baseball fanatic has changed me.) If I don’t show compassion and exhibit love constantly, will my children feel unloved and under cared for? Are my…
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I had the great privilege of being a guest on the Jennifer Fulwiler show on the Catholic channel on Sirius XM radio the other week. Afterwards, I felt so chagrinned. We were talking about living out the Pope’s latest encyclical, Laudato Si, and I totally lost my notes beforehand and experienced major mommy brain during and couldn’t summon up all the thoughts I’d had about the topic. Jen, will you ever let me back on the air??? But we did confirm that despite not compost toileting, you’re probably holier than Haley, right? 😉 The reason I wanted to talk with her in the first place was that upon reading the encyclical, I felt panicked. I need my heat! I need my a/c! Pope Francis seems to ask things we can’t do as normal American moms of many! So after thinking about it, here’s my list of ways to live out environmental stewardship as a midwest mom of many who can’t live out the beautiful organic farmer life that I pine for secretly in my dreams. (But then I’d have to give up our ancestral home and I don’t think I can do that!!) 1) Recycle. I’m pretty sure everyone does this. At least, I thought everyone did before I went to law school and met so many people who simply didn’t. Maybe their city didn’t collect it without a fee. Maybe their county didn’t promote it. Maybe they simply hadn’t given it much thought. Paper. Cardboard. Glass. Certain plastics. The greatest city…
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a few new things up in the shop this week. My mind has been so preoccupied with the suffering of my dear friends Laura and Franco and the loss of their twin baby girls. Please keep this beautiful family in your thoughts and prayers as they navigate this breathtaking landscape of love and loss. So the whole week has been a bit of a wandering. SuperBoy also has had a persistent cough/phlegm attack so he hasn’t been to his three times a week afternoon nature school. BabyLoves was up a few nights coughing (is there anything more sad than a toddler’s coughing?) so everything felt sideways. 1) Day in the Life linkup at Simple Homeschool. Link here. I LOVE reading how other at home homeschooling mamas’ days go. I’m kinda a faker as he’ll go to Catholic school next year, but I’m still in the category technically! One of the big perks of blogger life is that your days are exposed in an intimate way (can be intimidating) that connects your hearts with other moms sharing those burdens and joys. 2) Inheritance. I’ve NEVER ever ever listened to Christian music. Sorry, bad Catholic here. Just not my thing. Ever. But this album by Audrey Assad, whom I’m privileged to work with at Blessed is She (Catholic women’s daily devotional ministry): wow. It’s called Inheritance and it’s on repeat. The kids love it and my heart throbs along with How can I keep from singing? especially. Buy // download // support a mama…
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I have read a few articles lately about gender inequalities at home–where moms, including working moms, foist the bulk of household work onto their capable shoulders either due to lack of cooperation from spouses or their absence. It got me thinking about how we divvy up household work so that my sons and daughter see mama and dada working together. When we were first together, before we got married, we talked about how we envisioned our lives in the actual day-to-day. As we were both working, the days were filled with motions, appeals, and paperwork. The evenings were divvied up with cooking and tidying and errand running. We fell into a pattern of who liked to do what, and who hated doing something the least, and who was good at what. We also did almost everything together because we were newlyweds without kids. Add three small kids and me eventually staying home and the paradigm shifted. We are in a pattern now that’s working. Maybe you’re in flux of juggling work & little babes and tots and household duties are ready to break you, as they have been me. (a few snaps from instagram.) 1) list out what you love & what you hate. You know I love a good list. We broke it into things we loved and things we hated. I love cooking. He hates dealing with anything technological in the house. Once we had basic allocations of hates and loves, we knew we were in the ballpark…
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I feel like a broken record. Didn’t I just write a post about finding satisfaction right where I am? Did I? I wrote about making where I am awesome. Maybe that’s what I’m thinking of. But with every few months in the lives of parenting littles, times change. I even chatted with Brigid and Elise on the Caritas Podcast about how something as basic as how I approach Lent as a Catholic has changed since I had kids. Listen to it here and read the show notes here. As being a mom is already challenging (yes, I still give up treats as is our family tradition), I no longer have to find things that are penitential haha (mass with small kids. enough said). I’m dissatisfied with a number of things about my life. And I was even more sick of hearing me b*tch about them, over and over again. My house is untidy, I’m out of shape and compulsively eating fudge <<before lent!!>>, I don’t sleep enough, often dinner isn’t made or made well. So I drew a big ole list up. What I want to change Followed by another list. How I am going to do it I did have to face the reality that somethings got crossed off. I’m just not going to get to them. And that’s okay. I tackled what I could and made a plan. Reading Better than Before is really helping me with making new & better habits, too. 1) Cluttered House. We planned…
Read MoreMy baby really isn’t a baby anymore. He’s 21 months and talking, running, slapping, laughing, and as of the other week, no longer nursing. This is the first time since I was pregnant with my oldest (over six years ago now!) that I haven’t been nursing or pregnant. There’s a bittersweetness there. Kathryn wrote about her youngest weaning and I nodded along with all her musings. Nursing doesn’t work for everyone. Some people don’t want to breastfeed, for others it doesn’t work out despite their best attempts, and still for others, they do a little of both bottle & breast and it works for them. I fully support FED IS BEST. Yup. For me, nursing has been deeply, achingly wonderful. My daughter had a tough time starting out at it, but the boys have been pretty fine, and dare I say, after BabyLoves was born at a whopping 10 pounds and I was so out of it with endometritis (uterus infection) and bad tearing, that when he latched and it didn’t hurt I thought, maybe an excruciatingly large baby has its pros? People asked about weaning as he was the first I *tried* to actually wean. My oldest self-weaned at 14 months and my second at 19 months. But this little man was about 18 months when I went on a “sistermoon” with my sister Molly. That’s when you abandon your children and husband and go live it up on the beach with your sister (or sleep in a LOT and eat food…
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