Simple Meals + Honest Book Reviews + Practical Living
Hi friends! In today’s episode, I’m taking you behind the scenes of my real year of impulse purchases — what I regret, what I love, and what I’ll never buy again. From beanbags that flopped to baby gear that saved my sanity, I’m sharing it all: the good, the bad, and the downright ugly.
I’m also sharing my simple strategy for curbing impulse spending — my one-buy method — which has really helped me rein in my checkout habits and be more intentional with what I bring into our home.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.