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The Raw and The Cooked

Simple Meals + Honest Book Reviews + Practical Living

Peaks and Valley’s by Spencer Johnson

This winter has been a lot. Between the endless snow days, the ice, the pneumonia and flu outbreaks, and four kids rotating through sickness after sickness… life has felt heavy. If you’re also living somewhere cold, juggling little ones, and watching school closures pop up like wildfire, you probably feel it too.

Today I wanted to share a small-but-mighty book that has really stayed with me: Peaks and Valleys by Spencer Johnson. It offers a simple parable about the highs and lows of life, and honestly — it’s exactly the kind of grounding encouragement I’ve needed in this season.

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Episode 160: Breastfeeding Is Not Free (and Other Lies)

It’s almost shocking how often I’ve been asked by strangers if I breastfed my baby. The follow up statement is usually along the lines of “well good! breastfeeding is free, you know.” Actually… it’s not. Not even a little bit. Breastfeeding is definitely not free and I’m here to tell you why and walk you through all the sh*t I’ve had to buy to aid my breastfeeding journey.   

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Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty

Today we’re diving into Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty — an author I’ve loved for years. So loved, in fact, that when I saw she had released a new book, I bought it instantly without reading a single word of the description. I just clicked purchase, confident I was in for another hit.

Spoiler alert: I did not love it… which is exactly why I’m excited to talk about it.

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Episode 158: Daily Goals as a SAHM of 4 Kids 6 and Under

I truly love being a stay-at-home mom. It’s a role I treasure—one my husband and I both deeply value—and I feel incredibly blessed to have the gift of choice in living it out. My children, my home, this daily work of motherhood—it all means the world to me.

But I’ve learned that peaceful days don’t appear out of nowhere. They’re built, one choice at a time. I don’t follow a rigid schedule, but instead I hold a loose rhythm in mind, with a set of quiet goals that bring order, beauty, and steadiness to the hours we share at home.

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Episode 156: Organizing Your Family Photos

If you’ve ever opened your phone’s photo app, scrolled for five seconds, and immediately felt overwhelmed—this episode is for you. Organizing family photos is one of those projects that feels emotionally loaded and logistically impossible. Thousands of images. Multiple devices. Years slipping by. And the quiet fear that if you don’t deal with it now, you never will.

The good news? This is a big task—but it’s also completely doable when broken into small, humane steps. In this episode, I walk through a realistic, step-by-step system for organizing family photos in bite-sized chunks, without perfectionism or burnout.

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3 Thrillers to Kick off Your January Reading

Snowed-In, Coughing, and Still Reading Mysteries ❄️📚

I’m writing this on a Tuesday that should have been my kids’ first day back at school after winter break… but winter had other plans. We’ve been snowed in since Friday afternoon, school is canceled, groceries are dwindling, and I have zipped/unzipped snow pants, boots, jackets, hats, mittens, gloves, and an extra sweater on three toddlers approximately 9,000 times in the last three and a half days.

I haven’t worn makeup. I haven’t left the house. My espresso pod supply is at DEFCON 2. Delivery trucks can’t reach us anyway. We are truly just existing right now.

Add in a two-week cough so violent I pulled the muscles between my ribs, and you’ve got my winter-break vibe. ✨ But while my husband plays with the kids in the snow (for the 15 minutes that will inevitably last), I’m writing this post.

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