We just added a new member to our family. She adds a disproportionate amount of extra laundry for her tiny size. Ironically, she also lives in our laundry room right now. Yup. Our family is bursting at the seams and the laundry room was the one place in our house I could find for her…
If you are like me you are familiar with the day after Christmas “overwhelm”. You look around at your home with all the new “stuff”, remnants of wrapping paper, and the filth of your kitchen floor that you have been ignoring due to the fast pace. It was not pretty at our house post-Christmas this…
https://anchor.fm/ruth873 Thanksgiving: the holiday that gets smooshed by Christmas and forgotten. Let’s choose to give it its proper due and make it intentional and meaningful! After all, it is such a “pure” holiday. Uncluttered by gifts and left untouched by imaginary myths such as the Easter Bunny or Santa. Just unadulterated gratitude. And really delicious…
Choosing to celebrate Advent as a family has brought so much meaning to the Christmas season. Advent is a significant way that we keep our focus on Jesus and not on all the gifts and treats! There are so many ways to make Advent special. Perhaps you already have some family traditions or maybe you…
I like to get ahead on my Christmas shopping. It makes for a much more relaxed month of December. There are people I know very well for whom I can come up with a thousand gift ideas – like my daughters. Then, there are people I don’t know as well or who simply fall into…
“When you are behind on life, get ahead on Christmas.” This quote is from Rachel Jankovic – one of my favorite authors and podcasters. She talks about this extensively in her podcast: What Have You. Each time I have heard her say this I want to shout out “AMEN!” A few years ago I vividly…
With Halloween around the corner we find no shortage of opportunities to help our kids deal with fear. We have a neighbor who has a history of dressing antique dolls in white, squirting red paint all over them, and having them in and around dog kennels in the front yard. Another neighbor enjoys hanging a…
Over the past 7 years there have been so many times where my husband and I have felt utterly defeated by family devotions. Either we weren’t consistent, the kids seemed to check out, or the baby would start crying (sabotaging our plans!) We are still far from perfect in this discipline, but we’ve learned a…
We’ve done some sort of family tea time for quite a while. My husband enjoys Earl Gray and is secure enough in his masculinity to enjoy it in fine china so we’ve had tea together since our early years of marriage! The ritual has morphed and changed over the years into what we do today….
I have a 17 month old. She is in that ultra busy stage where she can empty all the dresser drawers, unwind a roll of toilet paper, decorate the wall with pencil, and relocate every single toy in our home during the time it takes me to use the bathroom. As cute and delightful as…
