love your everyday mom life
There is an infamous 4 month sleep regression that happens sometime around when a baby is 4 months old. Coupled with typical postpartum exhaustion and/ or depression, it can be exhausting and overwhelming for even the seasoned mama. You can help your baby through this sleep regression and I plan to offer some explanation and […]
Confession: I’ve use to think Aldi was gross. I thought that you would only shop at Aldi if you had to. And if you could possibly afford to shop anywhere else, you obviously would, because ew, Aldi. I don’t know why I thought that, and seeing as how I’ve done most of my grocery shopping […]
Our zero-degree-freeze-the-snot-inside-your-nose midwestern winters are in full swing, and we are officially hibernating. I bought 3 months worth of food and we’re not leaving the house until April. The freezing weeks of winter here cause us to get a little bit creative with our indoor activities. And by creative, I mean, my kids play with our trash. […]
Have naps gone cray-cray at your house!? We had 4 babies in 5 years and they’ve all more or less followed the same general pattern. When they were newborns, they slept all the time. Eventually, they went from 4 naps to 3 naps to 2 naps to 1 nap to just an afternoon quiet time. […]
There’s an ongoing poll in my mom-friend circles about which transition is the hardest: Having your first kid, going from 1 to 2 kids, 2 to 3 kids or adding more kids after 3. Each transition is different but going from 1 to 2 kids is REALLY REALLY HARD! If the first child is a […]
After having 4 babies with totally different personalities and varying levels of “easy baby” to “hard baby,” (is that a spectrum??) I’m convinced you can get almost any healthy baby trained to sleep through the night and on a predictable schedule during the first few months (even weeks)… if you want to. I’m also convinced […]
We had 4 kids in 5 years, and the hardest part of every newborn (after the first) was always the toddler. The clingy, confused, barely verbal, highly active toddler who does not understand why it takes you 45 minutes to feed the baby or why he can’t thrust his elbow into your chest for leverage […]
This list won’t be the universal must-have list for every parent because everyone has different preferences. Although we are not hard-core minimalists, we’ve lived in a relatively small space with all our kiddos & just had to keep baby stuff to a minimum. #tinyclosetproblems Plus, there is so much out there, it’s just silly. And […]
When we had our first baby, I read all the sleep-training books. I tried so hard to get my baby to follow an exact schedule. And when baby got “off” from the schedule I’d determined, I felt stressed and like a failure. In hindsight, I realized rather than aiming for an ultra regimented “schedule,” it […]
I googled “simplify your life mom” as I was writing this, and got over a million results. So why one more post about simplifying life? Because, I read a few, and they weren’t simple! The top result had 72 tips to simplify your life… 72! 72 isn’t simple. Here’s the hard truth. You might have […]
There are a million articles, books, and blog posts about sleep training on the internet. With a million different thoughts and opinions. Much of parenting boils down to personal preference, and our personal preference has been to sleep train our 4 kids from birth. We recommend sleep training your newborn! (Good thing we did… because […]
There is a lot of advice about how to sleep train out there… everything from “dictate your baby’s life down to the minute” TO “my baby sleeps whenever they want and I never know what to expect.” We have taken what we call a holistic, parent-led approach in our sleep training. The philosophy of a […]
One of the most common sleep-training problems I encounter is moms wondering how to get a baby to nap longer. I hear a version of this naptime problem a lot! “My baby only naps for 30-45 minutes. And they wake up screaming.” “I try to keep them awake for 2 hours or so because they […]
Okay, are you ready? This is probably going to be the world’s shortest blog post, but I finally decided to write it because I get this question a lot! How do you transition toddler out of their crib? Don’t. There. The end. (Just kidding – I’ll flesh our our theory on moving toddlers to big […]
It seems like moms would do almost anything to get their babies to sleep more. Getting your baby to sleep for 12 hours straight at night is the holy grail of baby sleep. But, maybe you’d even settle for getting baby to sleep for even just 4 or 6 hours without feeding. There are so […]
I have been pregnant 5 times in the past 5.5 years. One of those pregnancies ended in an early miscarriage, but all 5 came with varying degrees of morning sickness. With each pregnancy, I had more other small children at home to take care of (because that’s how that works… ha!) Thus, I had to […]
One of our goals for our kids is that they develop a love for reading and maintain it throughout their entire lives. To that end, here are 10 specific ways we encourage reading in our home: 1. BECOME LIBRARY NERDS We go to the library almost every week. When the girls were 1 and 3 […]
I thought I deserved me time. Everyone told me I did. “You should get your nails done.” “Just buy yourself a cup of coffee.” “Just do a little shopping.” “You’ll feel better if you can have a night to yourself.” And all those things are nice and were said by well-meaning people. Sometimes even by […]
It seems like everyone and their mom wants to know how to cut your grocery bill down. Whether you’re trying to stop overspending on credit cards or want to spend less on groceries so you can hit a savings goal, this grocery-bill-cutting process works. If you stick to this, you will learn how to cut your grocery […]
Mommas, I see you at the park (and the zoo, pool, checkout line, library,…) snapping a zillion phone pictures like a boss. I do it too. And then a month later, you start getting the dreaded YOU ARE ALMOST OUT OF STORAGE notifications. What’s a girl to do!? If you have an iPhone like me, Apple wants you […]