All the demands of having little people who depend on you for survival can start to make everyday life feel like constant drudgery. But just because motherhood brings with it a load of “not fun at all” moments, that doesn’t mean that our whole lives have to stop being fun. We are designed to have fun sometimes, to celebrate and enjoy life, even in the midst of the chaos that motherhood inevitably brings.

We can be intentional about choosing to celebrate our everyday lives and not just wait for big holidays. As moms, we tend to put lots of pressure on ourselves to make big holidays like Christmas and birthdays extra special for our families. This can lead us to getting stuck in the futile pursuit of “perfect” celebrations.

In today’s episode, you’ll find inspiration and ideas for creating your own “everyday celebrations” that will be a source of enjoyment and fun for your family, without adding extra stress to your already overflowing to-do list.

Are you tired of going to sleep at night feeling bad about the way you talked to your kids?  

Our words have an incredible influence on our kids. They will hear our voices in their heads for years to come. But in the chaos of life, it’s so easy to fall into negative patterns where our kids hear us say, “Why won’t you put your shoes on?” more than they hear us say, “I love the way God made you.” 

Changing our words and speaking life to our kids isn’t always easy, especially when we feel stuck in disaster mom mode and we are just verbally reacting to the frustrating things our kids do. We can’t just change our words, because our words come from what’s in our minds and in our hearts. 

Tune in to this episode to check out how you can work on changing your thoughts so that you can change your words and start speaking life to your kids. If you want step by step guidance to developing your own daily blessings for your kids, you can go download my free pdf blessings guide at bit.ly/blessingsguide   

As moms we have the power to affect the mood of everyone in our home: “If Momma’s not happy, nobody’s happy.” But instead of focusing on our ability to sabotage the mood of our entire family, we can flip this negative saying on it’s head and dare to say, “If Momma chooses joy, everyone’s happier.”

When we start and end our days with these two simple practices, we shift our focus away from the frustrating, negative and disappointing parts of our day and choose to focus on the good, the lovely and the wonderful parts of motherhood. 

Starting our days by waking up grateful and ending our days by looking back on the happiest moments helps us to train our brains to focus on what was right in our day, instead of what was wrong. This doesn’t mean that we ignore the hard, sad or difficult moments of our day, but that we choose not to focus on them and give them power over our whole outlook on our days and our motherhood. The stories we tell ourselves about our days and our lives matter and have powerful effects. The good news is that we can CHOOSE which stories we tell!

The world gives us lots of messages about motherhood that can make us feel so discouraged, so grumpy, so inadequate and so tired. Today, I’ll be talking about the two stereotypes of “hot mess mom” and “pinterest perfect mom” which both leave us feeling miserable and the third alternative that I believe exists of choosing to be a practically joyful mom. We’ll look at how you can change your perspectives and practices to get unstuck from disaster mode and find freedom from the futile quest for perfection.This episode will leave you feeling inspired to let go of the mom life stereotypes that culture shows us and begin changing your thoughts and actions to start your own journey of living a more practically joyful mom life.

The decision to start the Practically Joyful Mom podcast was actually prompted by a recent tantrum at my house. In this episode, I share about how the podcast came to be and some lessons I learned in the process. 

We’ll discuss: 

How we can look to God for help instead of expecting our families to do for us what only he can. Why a clean sink and an empty laundry basket will never make us happy. 

Why our frustrations about laundry and dishes are sometimes about something completely different and what we can do about it. 

Action steps that you can take to change your perspectives and practices to make a shift towards being a more practically joyful mom.

Welcome to the Practically Joyful Mom podcast! Please check out this trailer and look for the first few episodes to launch on Friday August 28th.