Mom Hacks, Tips & Tricks

I don’t know about your kids, but mine wake up starving. Maybe it's because they refused to eat the healthy and delicious dinner I made the night before? Maybe they are secretly out fighting crime all night like their favorite cartoon trio? I’m not really sure which is the right answer, but here are a few of my tried and true make-ahead breakfasts that my kids devour. Overnight Oats In its purest form, it is just yogurt, milk, and oatmeal. Simple enough. I use a 1-1-1 ratio for the main ingredients  Main ingredients: 1 cup milk (unsweetened vanilla almond milk in our house) 1 cup yogurt (whole milk yogurt) 1 cup old fashion rolled oats After you have your base, you can add...

Everyone warned me "nesting" would occur and I would feel the urge to renovate my whole house. I thought, well, this is my natural stage at all times, so it will not affect me. Wrong. Daydreaming about every detail pretty much happened every time I took any break, including 4 am bladder breaks. My brain starts racing and no sleep occurs. It is all a little bit worse because my dark pit of information and possibilities on the renovation topic is deep enough that I can get forever lost on gaskets, a/c grilles, and threshold details. It is a bit exhausting. Also very exciting. Seeing a project unfold before my eyes is absolutely fulfilling. As a pregnant-architect, I learned...

“Leave the mess, they’re only little for so long!” “Let them be little, they’re only that way for a little while!” “Messy house, happy family.” Do these phrases sound familiar? I am sure at some point on your motherhood journey you’ve heard at least one of those phrases. While I do agree that babies don’t keep, and we do need to make the most of the time while they are small, I propose an idea that will probably be an unpopular one. What if cleaning the mess is more important? Hear me out. What if the mess causes one to feel unproductive which causes mental tension? What if it creates so much anxiety that one cannot effectively parent? What if one...

We’re knee deep in the New Year! If you’re anything like me, that means spending this time getting your house in order. For my household, that looks like going through every drawer, closest, nook and cranky to reorganize and donate what we no longer use. So needless to say, I’ve been in that organization state of mind. Even in the grocery store. I was in the store for just a few things (biggest lie ever, right?) when the cutest box on an end cap of an aisle caught my eye. It caught my eye because the boxes were arranged in rainbow color and I’m a softie for the rainbow! In my mind I said, “that’s so neat” and kept...

Our current life consists of a Monday-Friday schedule of leaving the house by 6:30 am and not returning until at least 6:00 pm. We have ZERO time in the evenings before bed to get all the normal things done - to cook dinner, eat dinner, do homework and have any sort of family time. Most nights in the past, we ate way too many instant meals and hit the drive-thru at Chick Fil A at least twice a week. At the beginning of the school year this year, we reevaluated our priorities. We cannot give up much of our weeknight routine; however, we decided to try meal planning for our family. This initially made me laugh … you see, I...