Have you ever watched one of the reality shows where people have lost a massive amount of weight? They spend weeks and so much work and sweat and tears to drop it. It seems a month or two after one of those seasons ends a story comes out about how a contestant has now not only gained it all back but sometimes they gain more than where they started. I hate those stories. We all do. So much sacrifice and hard work and then it all goes down the drain. Ridding our home of excess stuff is very similar. Clutter, like weight seems to come out of nowhere and add up with such ease. Piling up on counter ..read more

My college roommate still jokes about my cleaning skills for the bathroom. She hated cleaning it and I couldn’t stand it dirty, so that job fell to me. I didn’t mind because I wanted it kept clean. An uncluttered bathroom is another story. I think of myself as fairly low key when it comes to fashion and grooming. But as a woman, we are the target audience for many advertisements and giveaways and trials. Even the low maintenance among us will probably find a variety of uninvited products that have found their way into our bathrooms. Additionally, this is one area that I was probably the worst ..read more

Two years ago, January 2017, I accepted a full time job out of my home. Before I had worked a small business from home, but for various reasons we made the change. It has been a huge change for our family because even though I’ve worked in various ways throughout the years (self-employed, direct sales businesses, part time jobs) I was still mainly home. Now a large chunk of my time is away from home. Many of our challenges as a family now come down to time. Since such a large portion of my day and week is spent somewhere other than home, EVERYTHING gets pushed to the evenings and weekends. Fir ..read more

Parts of this post were originally published in 2014 on my personal blog. Summertime is my favorite time of the year. The sunshine and heat. How everything is out and blooming and living and gorgeous. I just want to stay outside sun up to sun down and soak it all in. My kids just finished up another school year, so summer is in full swing for our family. And though it just began, I know just how fast this time can fly by. I want to pause the days of my kids sweaty and rosy-cheeked from chasing each other. I want to sit under the shade of our sycamore tree and read for hours with the summer bre ..read more

As summer appoaches, many of us will hit the roads and skies. I’ve written about packing for an overnight or weekend trip and for a month long trip abroad. I went over the benefits of packing with less there as well, but we will revisit those in this post as well. I am a recovering over-packer. This didn’t just happen when I had kids, as its pretty typical to want to be prepared for things that could happen with them. So we bring extra change of clothes, plenty of diapers, snacks, etc. But my whole life I have brought way too much stuff in way too many bags. People jokingly say ..read more

Its been six months since I started working full time. The newness is wearing off. I’m no longer feeling the daily stress of learning new processes, people, and protocols. Those first couple of weeks I was super strict about our family not taking on anything new. But now that work feels more like the norm, and we’re out of that initial survival stage, I’m feeling the strain of not having enough time. Forty hours a week is no small chunk of my time solely devoted to one thing. Before, as a stay-at-home mom, then later as a work-from-home wife and mom, I had the ability to double task ..read more

Most of the time I am a really positive, encouraging person. I love life and there is so much that I can be thankful for. I also try to encourage others. But I also know that life is hard. Life is frustrating. Things don’t go as we planned. There can be so many disappointments. Its like choppy waters when we want smooth sailing. I never had the expectations that minimalism would be perfect or fix everything in my life. I don’t want to be misleading on this site that simplifying and minimizing is a cure all. I sure wish it could be. But I KNOW without a doubt that it helps me and my family in s ..read more

Meals to cook, schedules to check, places to be, papers to sign, appointments to book, commitments to follow up on. Goals to meet, staying healthy (physically and mentally), time with friends, time with each other. These are things that run through my mind and greet me each afternoon as I return home from work. I knew starting back to work in an office would be a big change and it has certainly held true to that expectation. Over the course of our lives, its normal to go through various life transitions. These are changes that are so big that they tend to upend our normal mode of life. Fa ..read more

A few months ago I wrote a blog post in which I wrote out my frustrations as a minimalist working mom. Partly in jest, but partly truly frustrated with how hard living a simple life can be. Then it dawned on me. I wasn’t frustrated with minimalism or simplicity. I was frustrated that what I thought those looked like was not how my life was looking in that moment. I wasn’t sitting in a cabin in the middle of a lush green forest getting to ponder away the hours, make bread, and fold my clothes Kon mari style. But I don’t have to be there to live simply. That’s the whole beauty of this lifest ..read more