In nearly 11 years of blogging, I’ve never talked about matters of spirituality or religion. Today I am excited to dive into it a bit as part of the next installment of our Real Talk with Real Mom series. Today we’re all chatting about religion, spirituality and how it relates to parenting. Are you raising your kids with religion? I am not and I thought I would share a bit about why.
When I saw the topic for this month’s installment of our Real Talk with Real Moms series I’m pretty sure I actually laughed out loud. As a point of order, I have about zero tips for children and sleep these days, but surviving toddler sleep regression? That I can speak to! So buckle up. It’s about the get real.
Emerson had the flu last week. When she spiked a fever on Wednesday I pretty much knew our fate since she’d been exposed on Monday, so I immediately scooped her out of the house for a flu test. While she sat on my lap in the waiting room, crying to go home, she complained about how her eyeballs felt like they were fire.
Some of you may remember a couple of years ago when I was part of the Real Talk with Real Mom series along with a bunch of my favorite ladies in the blogging community where each month we would share our personal experiences related to motherhood and parenting. After a long hiatus, the series is back and I’m so excited to dig into some of the really tricky topics we all think about so often as mothers and parents. Today we’re dishing on growing families – going from one kid to two or more or, in our case, an unexpected addition to your cub pack.
Today my sister is 27 weeks pregnant with her first baby, a little girl who is already loved so very much. I was pregnant myself at this time two years ago (Emerson turned 18 months a couple weeks ago), so naturally we’re talking a lot about babies these days, and the things you need for babies and all the crazy large and small ways that babies change your life. One thing that has come up more than once is Ash saying, “I have no clue what I’m doing!” And that honestly just makes me laugh. Because no one knows what they’re doing when they have a baby, am I right? I sometimes still don’t feel like I know what I’m doing and my baby has quickly morphed into a tiny toddler girl with an abundance of spitfire and sass. So today I’m joining up with my fellow mom friends to dish on finding confidence as a mom.
As soon as I found out I was pregnant, my thoughts almost immediately turned to childcare and how on earth this little babe of ours would get fed and diapered during the day while we were working. Almost as quickly, I knew that at least for the first year I wanted to try really hard to make it work without any kind of full time childcare. Call me crazy, but knowing she would be my first and my last all at the same time, I wanted to have that time with her and I thought I’d regret shipping her right off to daycare. Also, I was really really worried about the finances behind paying for childcare, which is where the “real talk” part of this conversation is about to come into play.
Guys, I am so excited to be joining up with an insanely talented group of moms for the Real Talk with Real Mom series spearheaded by my friend Jen of The Effortless Chic. Most of these ladies have been blogging together about motherhood for a year or more now, and I’m really looking forward to being part of the pack. I’ll be using this as an opportunity to talk more about about the various issues, large and small, surrounding motherhood (and how I try not to screw up my kid) on a monthly basis in a way that is hopefully an interesting read for you. My monthly posts will also link to each of the other participating moms so you can read their stories and perspectives, too. This month we’re all dishing on friendships and, quite honestly, this could not be a more timely topic for me.