Simple Meals + Honest Book Reviews + Practical Living
Today: Meal Planning 101 — the meat-and-potatoes (pun very much intended) of having calmer, smoother weeks at home. Don’t let Meal Planning intimidate you, it’s simply figuring out how many nights you need to cook for, and what meals you will be making each night. It’s as simple as that.
Today is a little bit of a love letter to a book that absolutely swept me off my feet: The Wedding People by Alison Espach. I read it slowly… then deliberately… and then all at once in a blur because I could not put it down. You know that rare feeling when a book is so good and so true that you want to savor it and devour it in one sitting? That was this book for me.
I laughed, I cried, I thought about it constantly. I already know it’s going to be one of those books I think about fondly for years — the kind where you periodically wonder how the characters are doing, as if they’re actual people. It’s that magical.
A few months ago I recorded Episode 151 about our morning routine, and it became one of the most downloaded episodes of the year. So I figured… maybe evenings are worth sharing too. 😉
Parenthood has pushed me into a version of myself I never expected. If 20-something me saw this, she’d have said, “Absolutely not. Impossible.” And yet — here we are.
Today’s episode is part confession, part pep talk — and 100% solidarity if you’re also buried under too much stuff. Not just any stuff: kid stuff. Stuffed animals, tiny plastic creatures, broken trucks, and one very specific, hideous plastic Belle doll that has become the symbol of my boundary battles with overindulgent grandparents.
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This summer, just like last, I curated a list of ten books I wanted to read. All of them are fiction, a mix of contemporary, dystopian, and lovely character driven stories, or so I was promised by the reviews as I made this selection.
Starting solids is one of those parenting milestones that sounds adorable in theory but quickly transforms into a chaotic reality of food splatters, persistent stains, and the bewildering discovery that a 15-pound human can create such an impressive mess with just a few spoonfuls of pureed sweet potato. Even as a mother of four, I still find myself slightly overwhelmed during this beautiful yet incredibly messy phase of development.