Oh, hi, friends! I’m back! (Does anyone even read blogs anymore? Possibly no.) I’d apologize for the long hiatus but I’m not really sorry, so I won’t. I will say it’s nice to be writing again. I took a break because I lost someone very close to me, and my grief required me to take a break from a lot of things. If you have ever been impacted by grief I’m guessing that might resonate. Here is the one and only positive thing I’ll say about grief: it is an excellent teacher. Whether you want to learn or not (and probably you do not), grief shows you all kinds of things about yourself, your family ..read more

I sat down to write a post about back to school prep, because as much as I don’t want to face reality, we are only three weeks away from school starting again. Then I decided nope, I really don’t want to face reality, and I’m going to post about something 100% fun instead. Guess what? I got to take my kiddos to a premiere for Teen Titans Go To the Movies! And it was an absolute blast to see our favorite Titans on the big screen. (Yes, this is an actual movie in theaters – it’s not just new episodes of the TV show.) Go To the Movies is absurd, fast-paced, and really, really funny – my kids repe ..read more

Like many women, I shoulder the majority of the “mental load” for my family. To be really clear what we’re talking about, the mental load refers to planning and project management, not chores. So while my husband is great around the house – he does all our grocery shopping, pays all our monthly bills, and folds laundry without being asked – I handle the vast majority of our planning, cataloging, and administration. As just a small sampling of what I’m talking about, even in two-parent, heterosexual families where both parents work, moms usually handle things like: Researching and booking extra ..read more

This post is sponsored by Lincoln; all opinions expressed are my own. Heather and I had been doing pretty well with self-care (Yay foam rolling! Yay drinking lots of water!) when things took a swift downward turn: my three children each went down with the flu, one at a time. Luckily everyone is fine now, but the plague that blew through my house pretty much derailed everything for nine full days. Nine. No work, no exercise, no self-care…just hours spent dosing children with ibuprofen and taking temperatures and rubbing backs and looking for new shows for them to binge on Netflix. Poor babies ..read more

We are a little over a week into our experiment with self care, and as promised we’re reporting back. It’s been interesting so far! (If you want a quick recap on what we committed to trying, you can find it here.) Some of it is going very well and some of it is going terribly.  Enough preamble; let’s cut to the chase. Here’s what’s working. Using less social media: We both took social media apps off our phones. It is almost embarrassing to admit what an immediate, big impact that created. It turns out we each have a habit of opening up Facebook or Instagram and sort of mindlessly scrollin ..read more

I dropped the ball on something big in my personal life. Like, really big. (This is Erin writing today, just confessing my sins to all of the internet.) Luckily my family is made up of kind, forgiving people, so it’s probably all going to be OK, but I made the kind of mistake that’s caused me to lose sleep for weeks, feel sick to my stomach, obsessively think about the issue way past the point of it being productive…the whole nine yards. If there’s a silver lining to this situation (and I’m trying to convince myself there is), it’s that it caused me to take stock of the fact that I’ve been run ..read more

One of the best parts about this time of year is that people spread a little more kindness than usual. They give a little more generously. And we are in love with a new site that helps parents and their kids do just that: Daymaker. (Hat tip to Cool Mom Picks for putting it on our radar.) Here’s the 30,000-foot view. Daymaker partners with local, high-impact non-profit organizations to create descriptions of every child they serve. Those child profiles include wish lists of items, everything ranging from clothes to toys to books. You can log on, view profiles of children, and decide which wish ..read more

According to the internet, the average adult makes 35,000 conscious decisions every single day. And some of those decisions are more mentally taxing than others, including this biggie: choosing what to wear each morning. Seriously. Erin’s biggest client is an entertainment company staffed primarily by savvy, fashion-forward twenty-somethings. Heather works at a start-up full of guys in skinny jeans. These environments are tricky in terms of daily wardrobe, particularly for the two of us, who are 40-something moms of three kids each. Neither of us has read Vogue or InStyle in months, and most o ..read more

*I received a complimentary copy of this book to provide this review, but no other compensation and all of the opinions here are mine! Much to my dismay, my two oldest children are both in the teenager-zone (one is 14, the other is 12).  And in spite of all of the chatter about teenagers in the media and basically everywhere, I’m finding that navigating the challenges of raising teens is wayyyyyy more complicated than I expected. This is in fact so true that I now absolutely RELISH the relatively minor challenges that come with raising my littlest – he is in the first grade, and where yea ..read more

Our friend Nina, founder of the Ries Law Group, is one of those women who has it all together: great kid, great job, engaged in her community, plus she usually seems to be in a great mood. She frequently sings the praises of her “working mom uniform”, and has said time and time again how it improves her day. We asked her to tell us more about why she started wearing the same thing every day, and she kindly obliged. Read on and tell us in the comments: would you ever adopt a uniform?  It often seems that, if you’re a professional women and a parent, time is not your friend. We all struggle ..read more