Married with Children

5 Creative Stay at Home Date Night Ideas

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Life is busy, and while we totally believe in prioritizing date nights, sometimes getting out of the house is just not that easy. Let alone affordable- after paying for a sitter, dinner, and a movie, you could easily be out $200 or more! Just because we’re home doesn’t mean we … Read More

How Following My Passion Made My Marriage Stronger

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When Jaymi and I were first exploring the idea of starting a blog, we did our research. Not about the “important stuff” like Pinterest strategies and Search Engine Optimization, but stuff like what colors we liked, what topics we could cover and what vibe we wanted. During this phase I came across a cautionary tale about a woman that blamed her divorce on her devotion to her blog. I paused, re-read it, and sent it to Jaymi. We decided then and there that priorities included staying friends, maintaining a strong marriage, and enjoying this gig.

Even with all our new goals and dreams, I never once imagined that the blog could make me a better friend, a better Mother, and help me build an even stronger marriage.

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5 Ways to Make Date Night a Priority

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From the moment you have a baby, people will start giving you advice. One of those helpful tips is to make date night a priority. Everyone tells you that you need to not just be “Mommy and Daddy” but need to find a way to remain husband and wife, or to some degree, boyfriend and girlfriend. When this happened to us, we’d smile and nod and agree in theory. And then every Friday and Saturday night, we’d be on our couch, in sweatpants, watching some crap on TV before sloughing off to bed. Now, I’m not going to lie. That’s borderline my perfect night. But at some point it got to be so routine and so impersonal. It was then that we started to understand why date night is so important.

It was one thing to make date night a priority in theory, but it was time to make it a priority in practice. Here are 5 ways you can.

#datenight #datenightforparents #fundatenightideas #cutedatenightideas #romanticdatenightideas #fundateideas #romanticdateideas #mommydaddydatenight

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My REAL Feeling About Our “Surprise” Baby

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#momlife #feelings #complicatedfeelings #unplannedpregnancy #whoops

Confession: Our third child was a big, fat, whoops.

Let me back up a minute. We wanted three kids. Heck, we are still planning to go for four. Five? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. In a very much planned event, our first two kids are 18 months apart. In retrospect, getting pregnant when my first was nine months old – still SUCH a baby himself – was a little, uh, crazy. So, immediately after our daughter was born, I put the kibosh on all baby conversation. I’d only taken a nine month break the first time, but this time I was going to go BIG. I adamantly proclaimed to anyone that would listen that we were taking a WHOLE YEAR OFF this time. For a year we wouldn’t even TALK about that next baby.

During the year, we made our master game plan.

We’d enjoy our first two children. We’d get the swing of things. We’d find our groove. And then, when the kids were older, maybe in school, we’d decide that the time was right. We’d tuck in our kids – maybe 5 and 6 by now – and look at each other, both thinking about how we missed the sweet smell of a little baby, the weight of them in our arms. We’d go for #3 and then quickly after #4. We’d have two sets of two, our perfectly planned family.

But you know what they say about plans. I think I can still hear the heavens chuckling…..

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What I Learned About Myself During Spring Cleaning

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#springcleaning #selfare #Momlife #Momfashion

Every once in a while, my husband gets it in his mind that we can’t possibly go one day longer without getting rid of some stuff. A lot of stuff. All the stuff. We go to Costco and come home with bins and bins and shelving to hold the bins and off we go. I mentally prepare, grab trash bags for what we’ll toss, the bins for what we’ll keep, and have dollar signs in my eyes for the stuff I’m going to sell. 

I start in the kids rooms and secretly clear out some old toys, because Lord knows they won’t miss them. Then I retire the clothes that they’ve grown out of. Planning to have more kids, I get to keep all their clothes without much argument. Chad is great about getting rid of clothes. He sometimes goes TOO far in my mind, deciding that he only needs five t-shirts, one sweater, two casual polo shirts and one suit. Then I remind him about all the other times he might want to be dressed and we find a happy medium.

Then there’s me. And my bureau. And my walk in closet. And my bins of extras. In truth, I wear about one tenth of what’s easily accessible. And, walking Mom cliché that I am, it’s lots of leggings and casual shirts. My closet features lots of things with names you may recognize like Irma and Randy….but the rest hangs unworn, though not unloved. What transpires next is always like an episode of hoarders.

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