Money Saving Mom®

Welcome to my weekly post I share a peek into our lives, talk about things I’m loving, share links to interesting articles or helpful ideas I’ve collected throughout the past week, and just talk about whatever is on my heart! ?

Kaitlynn and I did bubbly masks that I got in my FabFitFun box to unbox. These were kind of weird, but fun to do!

We took a hike and picnic to Stillhouse Hollow Falls with friends on Saturday.

This is pretty normal life around here — we’re trying to get a picture of the two of us and we get photobombed. 😉

Our family got there around 5:15 p.m. and it was the perfect time because almost everyone was leaving and we pretty much had the entire waterfall to ourselves! Read more about Stillhouse Hollow Falls here.

We had our Community Group over for a Bring Your Own Lunch get together on Sunday after church.

One of the families also brought brownies and ice cream to celebrate the recent birthdays in our group.

We hadn’t been together for a few months (we take a break from regular get-togethers for summer), so it was SO nice to get to hang out again — and it was so fun that everyone could make it!

I just love having older kids! Love it, love it, love it!

Sure, they are moody some days. Sure, they sometimes make wrong choices. And yes, sometimes they drive me batty.

But don’t we all do the same things? None of us are perfect and when I stopped expecting a ridiculous level of perfection from my kids (that *I* can’t even live up to myself!) it opened the door for me to just love them and enjoy them.

I love seeing their unique, crazy, and amazing personalities blossoming. I love that they are so different than me in many ways. I love that they teach me new things and push me outside my comfort zone.

I love learning how to motivate them and when they need me to just get out of the way. I love seeing them grow wings and learn to fly. I love watching them develop close friendships. I love seeing them excel and learn from failure.

I love our deep conversations and our ridiculous jokes. I love their sarcasm. I love making them laugh. I love it when they make me laugh.

I love their hearts for Jesus and others. I love that they know way more about pop culture than me and are always introducing me to new songs that they can’t believe I don’t know.

I love our long talks about their futures. I love listening to their dreams and hopes. And I love seeing them become more and more independent… and I love that they still want to hang out with me.

We’re in such a sweet season right now. I know that things are going to be changing in big ways in our home in the next five years (Kathrynne will be 18 and probably just leaving for college or some other big adventure!), so I’m seeking to just soak up every moment in my mama heart.

Speaking of which, as our kids get older, they have become more and more independent. They don’t need me to help them get dressed or clean their room. They can pack their own lunches and fix a snack when they are hungry.

But they still need their mom. It just looks a lot different than it used to.

I’m learning that the best thing I can do in this new season is to just make myself AVAILABLE to them — whether that’s to help them with a writing project, to take them to run an errand, to look at funny memes on Pinterest with them, to watch their favorite YouTube videos, to play Fortnite with them (this has won me mega cool mom awards!), or to just sit and listen to them.

One big change we’ve made to our schedule this year is book-ending our day with time together. We start our mornings all driving in the car to school drop-offs together (I read a chapter book to them while Jesse drives). When they come home from school, I make sure my schedule is cleared so we can just be together and I am available to them for whatever they need from 4 pm to 5 pm. Then, we sit down and eat dinner together at around 5 pm.

Even if we have things going on in the evenings, it means we’ve started our day with time together and we’ve “ended” our day with time together.

To achieve this…

• I make sure that I don’t over-pack my work day so I can get most everything done from 8 am to 4 pm.
• I make sure that dinner is planned and ready before 4 pm (either in the crockpot or ready to pop into the oven. We often make enough for two nights so that it saves dinner prep time on the second night).
• I communicate with the kids in the morning about what the plan is for the afternoon and evening (if we have plans after dinner, etc.) so that everyone knows what to expect.
• We also plan something fun to look forward to when they get home & have their homework done. (It could be as simple as planning that we’ll play a game of Fortnite before dinner.)

On the nights when we don’t have activities after dinner, I schedule one-on-one time with each child and they get to choose what we do! It’s the BEST!

On My Heart…

It’s so easy for me to feel stressed, worried, or frustrated about situations when things aren’t going like I’d hoped.

Maybe my kids are struggling or there’s tension in our marriage or a blog sponsor is being really difficult and demanding to work with or I’ve gotten a slew of hate mail or our website is having major issues or there’s miscommunication with a friend or that blog partnership we worked so hard to make happen fell through or it’s just one of those weeks when I have a really long to do list with a lot of pressing things…

Your list of things that can make you feel stressed or frustrated or worried might look really different than mine, but I’m sure you could write your own.

I’ve been challenging myself to put the energy that I usually would spend stressing over a situation into praying about it instead.

There’s something really life-impacting and freeing for me to just vent it all out to God. And then to ask Him for whatever it is I need for that situation. Sometimes, I don’t even know what it is that I need.

So I’ll just pray and say, “God, please help me. I feel so frustrated about this. It feels overwhelming and impossible. I need your help because I don’t have what it takes.”

Laying my burdens at the foot of the Cross means I can stop carrying them around and feeling stressed by them. He wants me to give them to Him. He wants to carry them for me and carry me through the very rough patches of my life. But He’s waiting for me to stop trying to pull myself up by my own bootstraps and to instead hold my hands out and say, “I need You. I can’t do this without You.”

2018 Goals Update

Personal Goals

1. Read 100 non-self-help books that will build me up/encourage me/inspire me/recharge me. (Fiction/story-driven/biographies/inspirational living books/devotionals.) See the list of 44 books I plan to read this year.

**Progress: 51 books read so far this year

2. Read through the entire Bible.

**Progress: I’m using the Robert Murray M’Cheyne plan and am all caught up— yay!

3. Write one handwritten note to someone every week.

**Progress: 33 notes written so far this year

4. Run 500 miles.

**Progress: 315 miles run so far

Marriage Goal

5. Go on an overnight trip with Jesse without the kids.Jesse and I went to NYC together in January.

Family Goals

6. Read 10 books aloud with the kids.

**Progress: I’ve finished two books so far and we’re almost finished with a third.

7. Take the kids to South Africa. We took this trip in July. What a memorable experience!

8. Go on a family road trip.

**Progress: We’ve been researching some options for this and are planning to make this happen over Fall Break. Stay tuned!

Financial Goals

9. Save up to pay cash to finish off an office for me and workout room for Jesse and me in the basement in our new house.

**Progress: The workout room is DONE and the office is getting close to being done!

10. Replenish our Emergency Fund (we dipped into it to replace my car when it got totaled because of the carpet beetle infestation.)

Business Goals

11. Increase our gross income from the business by 8%.

12. Launch 5 new courses.

**Progress: We launched 4 Weeks to a More Productive Life launched in January, Content Creation 101 in February, 4-Week Blog Coaching Program in March, Email List Setup 101 in March, Make Over Your Mornings LIVE in April, the Facebook Live Masterclass in May, and we launched Build Your List 101 in June!

Welcome to my weekly post I share a peek into our lives, talk about things I’m loving, share links to interesting articles or helpful ideas I’ve collected throughout the past week, and just talk about whatever is on my heart! ?

I flew back from India on Monday evening/Tuesday (I’ll be sharing a few posts in a few weeks about my time there — once I finish sharing the posts from our South Africa trip!). Many of you asked me questions about the airplane bathrooms since I said that I wash my face/brush my teeth/take my contacts out, etc. on flights.

I try to choose a time when the lights are out and most people are sleeping so that I’m not “hogging” the bathroom when others might be waiting. And then I bring my bathroom bag in and my nose bottle and water bottle and do my nightly bathroom routine (wash face/take contacts out/brush teeth/do the sinus rinse) before getting ready to sleep and then my morning routine (wash face/put contacts in/brush teeth) when I wake up.

I then moisturize my face and put on my makeup when I’m back in my seat and we’re about an hour from landing. This helps me feel a little fresher when getting off a long 15+ hour flight! 🙂

After 25+ hours on flights and in airports, it was SO good to be home!

And we jumped right back into life because the kids had already started school when I got back!

Every year, we pray and talk and research and decide what schooling option is best for each individual child based upon their needs and where they are at both emotionally, spiritually, and academically.

Last year, we started the year with one being homeschooled and two in the same Classical school. For a variety of reasons, we ended the year with one in a new-to-us Classical school, another in another new-to-us Christian school, and one in the original Classical school.

Was it unconventional? Yes. But it ended up being exactly what each child needed and they were so happy we chose to go the routes we did.

This year, Kaitlynn and Silas are at the little Classical school that we fell so much in love with last year when Kaitlynn switched to it mid-year. Kathrynne is going to the same Christian school that she switched to mid-year last year. It has been such a good fit for her!

We’re excited to see what this year holds for each child and are so grateful for the teachers who come are walking alongside us in this journey and pouring into and investing in our kids.

Note: Kathrynne started this week with back-to-school camp, so she got to dress super casual, including sporting Jesse’s college sweatshirt! ?

How I Stay More Organized as a Business Owner

One of the best ways I keep my life and blogging/business work organized is by writing a time-blocked to do list every night before bed.

Yes, this takes some thought and effort, but it means that I am 150% more productive, focused, and calm the next day.

I look at my Google calendar (aka my “brain”) to see what appointments and events and meetings are scheduled for the next day + what projects and tasks I’ve assigned to that day to complete or work on.

Then, I sit down and hand write out my schedule for the day. I always leave buffer time in the afternoons and evenings to just hang out and be with my kids/husband. But now that the kids are back in school, our morning routine and my work time (from 8 am to 4 pm every day) is pretty regimented.

Having a time blocked to do list not only means that our mornings run much more smoothly, but it also means that I know exactly what I need to focus on in what order when I open up my computer for the day.

If you don’t have a plan, there’s a good chance you’ll spend most of the day going around in circles just putting out “fires”. And at the end of the day, you’ll probably not have a lot to show for it.

Whether you have 30 mins a day to devote to blogging or it’s your full-time gig, I encourage you to consider writing out a simple plan for how you’ll spend your blogging time. Put the most important priorities first on the list and the lesser pressing priorities at the bottom. That way, if you only get through half your list, you’ve at least spent your time tackling the projects that mattered most… and you didn’t just waste it scrolling through endless posts on social media!

From My Heart…

Earlier this week, one of the kids was struggling with their homework. I was working alongside them and they kept expressing their frustration, “I can’t do this! This is too hard! I’m going to fail all my projects!”

This is our perfectionist child and we’ve had to learn over the years that statements like, “Do your best! That’s all that matters!” don’t do anything but serve to further frustrate them.

In the past, I’ve even snapped at this child and said things like, “would you just stop being so frustrated?!? This is not that big of a deal.”

But in their world, it IS a big deal and they want to know that Mom cares and hears them and is there for them.

So instead of saying any of those things, I came up with a plan… because I’ve learned that a simple plan speaks this child’s language. I said, “This is a LOT that you’ve been assigned, but we have all evening to work on it. So let’s do this: We’re going to set a timer: 20 minutes to work on homework. 10 minutes to do something fun.” And back and forth between work and fun we went.

This made all the difference! This child went from feeling stressed to feeling motivated. We broke the projects down into small pieces and just focused on that one piece at a time. And then we took a break to have some fun. Then, we were back at it.

Within 2 hours, the projects were done and my child felt happy and satisfied. And I was so grateful… grateful that I didn’t just try to slap a platitude onto their frustration like I used to or, worse yet, shut them down by expressing frustration over their frustration.

This last year of changing how I parent and slowing down and really learning to listen to what my kids are actually communicating and then taking time to speak words of life to them has completely changed our home.

Often, our kids don’t need us to preach sermons at them; they need us to get down in the trenches with them, look into their eyes, let them know that they aren’t alone, that their frustration is heard, and then help them devise a plan of action to walk through the tough assignment.

2018 Goals Update

Personal Goals

1. Read 100 non-self-help books that will build me up/encourage me/inspire me/recharge me. (Fiction/story-driven/biographies/inspirational living books/devotionals.) See the list of 44 books I plan to read this year.

**Progress: 48 books read so far this year

2. Read through the entire Bible.

**Progress: I’m using the Robert Murray M’Cheyne plan and am all caught up— yay!

3. Write one handwritten note to someone every week.

**Progress: 33 notes written so far this year

4. Run 500 miles.

**Progress: 300 miles run so far

Marriage Goal

5. Go on an overnight trip with Jesse without the kids.Jesse and I went to NYC together in January.

Family Goals

6. Read 10 books aloud with the kids.

**Progress: I’ve finished two books so far and we’re working on a third right now.

7. Take the kids to South Africa. We took this trip in July. What a memorable experience!

8. Go on a family road trip.

**Progress: We’ve been researching some options for this and are hoping to make this happen over Fall Break. Stay tuned!

Financial Goals

9. Save up to pay cash to finish off an office for me and workout room for Jesse and me in the basement in our new house.

**Progress: The workout room is DONE and the office is getting close to being done!

10. Replenish our Emergency Fund (we dipped into it to replace my car when it got totaled because of the carpet beetle infestation.)

Business Goals

11. Increase our gross income from the business by 8%.

12. Launch 5 new courses.

**Progress: We launched 4 Weeks to a More Productive Life launched in January, Content Creation 101 in February, 4-Week Blog Coaching Program in March, Email List Setup 101 in March, Make Over Your Mornings LIVE in April, the Facebook Live Masterclass in May, and we launched Build Your List 101 in June!