Shayla and Andrea discuss creating easy and fun memories without burning out. Women are often driven to create memories for their families and friends, but the last thing we need is more stress to be a magical memory-making machine. Andrea is a married mom of two boys; family time means everything to her. She is a published author, speaker, and online content creator who loves to help women make their days easier and a lot more fun! Andrea embraces joy in everyday moments, whether preparing an easy meal, planning family travel, or sitting on her front porch. In this episode, she’s helping us all lighten up, say yes, and have fun. 

We discuss everything from the Updykes’ adventure of traveling the country in their travel trailer during COVID-19 to planning easy family vacations, keeping food simple without sacrificing fun, and more.

This episode will warm your heart, lighten your load, and hopefully invite you into a stress-free holiday season.

For more great ideas and delicious recipes from Andrea, you can find her on her website: https://justisafourletterword.com
TikTok: @justisafourletterword 

IG: @andreaupdyke 

X: @andreaupdyke

Facebook: Just Is A Four Letter Word 

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Why women are tired and what we can do about it. 

In today's episode, Shayla talks about how many women are tired and have a heavy mental load. She talks about the biological and hormonal reasons why women are wired to care for others and how our female brains are wired to be more aware of everything around us. But this often makes us so tired. So how do we combat this exhaustion, this female fatigue?  
Shayla talks about learning to rest and how an antidote to female fatigue is female friendship.

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Barbie mania has taken over the nation! But what exactly are the messages of the film? What does the Barbie movie say about women? Or about men? Shayla chats with two young women, Zoe and Joslyn,  about their thoughts on the movie and its messages. Shayla wraps up with her thoughts on Barbie, gender equality, and the tightrope women walk on and how we can make it wider.

Oh! And a podcast announcement.  

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Shayla invites Carrie Mullins to join her as they react to episode 8 and what it meant to them. Carrie shares how it impacted her and reminded her that she brings more to the table than her body. Carrie shares some of the messages she received about women's bodies and how it has affected her body image. She also shares a little about her weightloss journey and learning to be confident in any size. Carrie shares how she's raising her boys to think about women's bodies and what a woman is. 

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Gen Z daughters and their moms talking about womanhood, body image, and empowerment. 

Continuing with intergenerational conversations from Episode 2, Shayla sits down with her daughter Bella Grace and another mother daughter pair, their friends Quin and Joslyn to talk through the messages we've received throughout our lives about womanhood, our bodies, and what empowered womanhood looks like.  Hear different perspectives from Gen X, Millenial, and Gen Z generations.

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In this episode, Life Coach Vanderly Cillo joins Shayla for an incredible conversation on how we can connect to ourselves and others to unlock joy & wisdom. Vanderly is a down-to-earth certified life coach who helps women and moms go from stuck to satisfied in their personal and family life. She empowers women to rediscover their unique lane and learn how to thrive there, Helping women become connected, confident and free.  She also happens to be one of  Shayla's very best friends, and a true treasure. 

Shayla and Vanderly talk about why we get stuck and find ourselves feeling overwhelmed or hopeless and the steps we can take to get unstuck and move out of overwhelm and towards joy and wisdom and becoming a more wholehearted woman.

She explains brain science and how we process life through our brains and how it affects our lives in an understandable way, she breaks down how to connect to yourself in a meaningful way and we talk about true self love being glad to be with yourself just as you are. And how this helps you connect better to others. Vanderly shares some exercises we can do to create emotional habits that bring true joy into our lives. 

There is so much to chew on from this episode, I hope you found it as helpful as I did.

You can find vanderly at @VanderlyLifeCoach on Instagram or on her website at www.vanderlylifecoach.com

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In this episode we are talking about one of the most feminist things we can do. 

Continuing our series on motherhood, but this episode is not just for moms, it's for all of us because we are talking about how we can make space for motherhood and why making space for that in our culture and honoring mothers and motherhood is the most feminist thing we can do.

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Continuing our series on motherhood, this episode highlights one of the ways women mother, by being a foster mom.

Shayla shares a few statistics on the foster care system and interviews Liz Aguero who mothered over 19 children during her 10 years as a foster mom. We also learn about different ways to support foster families.

9 ways you can get involved with foster care without being a foster parent from Foster The Family Blog 

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Every single person who ever lived, called the womb of a woman their first home. 

This episode is the first episode in a new series on motherhood. May is the month we celebrate Mother’s Day and take time to honor mothers. So for the month of May we are doing the same on the podcast. Part of the purpose of this podcast is to highlight what makes women different from men, to honor the uniqueness of the female. One of the most brilliant distinctions is in a woman’s ability to bring forth life, to carry and birth new humans. Every single person who ever lived, called the womb of a woman their first home. 

Shayla starts out reading a brief scene from her book. Then over a dozen mothers share a bit of their motherhood journey with us. What motherhood means to them, their favorite part of motherhood and the hardest part. Each one of these women brings so much to the table and to the conversation. There is no one way to mother and as we hear their varying approaches to motherhood… the through-line is that they all love their children fiercely… like a mother. 

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In this episode Shayla takes a deep dive into part one of the history of menstruation education from the earliest records up until the 1940s. Exploring myths and misunderstandings about menstruation and how the development of menstrual pads led to advertising that gave most women their menstruation information. This epidsode exposes the messages those advertisements sent to women about their bodies and their periods.  

Sources:

Dirty, Bloody, Money: Menstruation Education for Young American Women in the 20th Century by Amelia DeFrancis 

Feminine Hygiene, Fashion and the Emancipation of American Women by Fred Schroeder 

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