Wish you could take better pictures? Struggle to cook dinner on the regs? Meg and Carla grill each other on their respective skills. Meg tells us how to get a great shot AND how to get it off the computer. While Carla shares low stress ways to feed yourself, your family, and even company! 

photo by Meg Messina Photography

Resources:

Meg recommends:

• Lightroom for organizing pictures
• Artifact Uprising for getting them printed
• istillshootfilm.org if you'd like to try film
• and this Canon 35mm camera

Carla recommends:

• A few great everyday cookbooks: Smitten Kitchen, Mad Hungry, and Dinner A Love Story
• Savory Spice shop for lots of great spice blends
• Bon Appetite for a good essential pantry list

Got skillz? Sharing is caring!! These gals need all the help they can get!!! comment below, email [email protected], or find them on FB and IG @kiddingcast

The gals sit down and chat about summer plans, and finally get around to sharing it with you smack dab in the middle of the season. They talk about how different summer is as an adult, especially when you have kids or a summer focused career. 

This episode is also a bit of a segment extravaganza!

Read, Watch, Listen:

Carla's picks: Salt, Fat, Acid, Eat / Master of None / Pod Save America

Meg's picks: The Bloggess / Desus & Mero / The Allman Brothers

Jelly On My Biscuit:

Carla: People with great clothes.

Meg: People who can get a tan.

Best Worst Thing:

Meg: Safeway grocery delivery

Carla: Home ownership

Don't Call It A Life Hack:

Carla: Put your kids to work!

Meg: Get yourself an accountability group!

Meg and Carla get in touch with their inner hippy chicks and explore the good and not so good aspects of pseudo-spirituality. 

On the good side they both find value in astrology as a tool for knowing themselves and others better. (FYI: Carla is a Virgo and Meg is a Gemini.) And they find both fun and comfort in things like tarot cards and crystals.

When things get dark is when too much stake is put in the mystic. They can't get down with The Secret and also warn against too much cultural appropriation. That dream catcher might look pretty, but is it cool? 

Meg had to design a meth fort out of Blue Apron boxes to trap the rat. Blue Apron, a better way to exterminate. 

In a new segment called "Storytime" Meg and Carla tell funny real-life stories that are too good not to share. Carla's worst fears are realized in one little phrase uttered by her three year old and Meg has an epic run in with a city rat. 

Here's to skipping the vision board but knowing when Mercury is in retrograde. 

In this episode Meg and Carla compare notes on sick days. As always, though their lives are very different they have found plenty of common ground. Mainly they've discovered that women have super powers, whether it's changing a diaper while battling the stomach flu or shooting an entire wedding after ripping of your toenail, ladies manage to tackle life on even the roughest of days. 

In the segment Best/Worst Thing Carla shares why baby chicks are awesome, until they aren't. And Meg is calling her boyfriend's super nice "elder tribute" for her step-dad the best and the worst thing is aptly titled "When Bureaucracy and PMS Meet."

In many ways this episode is similar to number 4 (A Day In The Life) only with more complaining, ha! It's kinda A Day In The Life XTREME Edition. Thankfully the complaint is funny and relatable and the gals offer a few helpful tips, mostly as a reminder to themselves. Carla recommends asking for help and Meg thinks if at all possible you should actually take a break and let your body heal.  

The show wraps with a favorite segment: Jelly on my Biscuit. Meg is super jelly of people with administrative assistants and Carla wants to be the kind of person who feels, or at least looks, well rested. 

If you love the show pretty please do us a solid and tell a friend! 

To be fair: you can blame some stuff on them. 

In this episode Meg and Carla discuss all the things that get blamed on motherhood. They discover that many of the complaints (exhaustion, identity struggles, libido ruts, body changes) have more to do with womanhood and aging than having kids. It turns out - BIG SHOCKER - all of us ladies are actually on the same team! 

In a new segment - Read, Listen, Watch - the gals are sharing their media recommendations. 

Carla says you should read A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman, listen (and dance) to Shape of You by Ed Sheeran, and watch Abstract on Netflix.

Meg recommends reading Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang, listening to Awaken My Love by Childish Gambino, and watching Chad at City Council. 

You Win Some You Lose Some:

Meg is winning at fun (and drinking) but losing at emails (which might actually be a win-win).

Carla won big with an awesome Harry Potter birthday but then lost spring break with zero good plans. 

We have no clue how to podcast, but we're doing it anyway.

Meg and Carla have never claimed to be experts - in anything. In episode 10 they explore the many ways it's difficult to feel prepared for adulthood and offer what little insight they can muster.

They tackle imposter syndrome, starting before you're ready, baptism by fire, and the name of Carla's next self-help book: The Amateur's Advantage. Related to being a newbie, Meg brought up the concept of a second naiveté she applies the concept more to creative endevours than religion but either way the idea is really interesting. If you'd like to explore more about this complex philosophical concept you can check out this and this. (Seriously, you will feel super smart and it will give you something fancy to chat about at your next cocktail party.)

Don't Call It a Life Hack - Tips for Efficient Adulting:  Meg recommends getting a membership to a local museum. It supports a great cause and makes it way easier to fill your creative cup! Carla recommends "mindful" (gross word sorry) media consumption. In this brave new world of constant political outrage it helps to read (reputable sources) as opposed to watch the news. Furthermore, instead of reading and feeling overwhelmed try to read with the purpose of discovering who to contact or how to resist. 

Best Worst Thing: Carla's best worst thing is playing with her kids. Half pure magic, half boring boss fest. Meg's best thing is the new sculpture on wall street designed to bring attention to the lack of women in finance. The worst thing is that the Business Insider article who broke the story forgot to mention the artist who created it. 

Three cheers for having no clue and not letting it stop you!

Okay friends, here's the bottom line: you already rock! We didn't want to add to your to-do list, but we do want to give you easy (and free) ways to live it up this year! 

In Episode 9 Carla and Meg barf a little over the term self-care while also sharing their best tips for making life more survivable, and maybe even ... enjoyable! 

As always, this isn't expert advice, but if you're looking for ideas on how to take better care of yourself, these tips might just make it feel do-able.

Know Thyself - What fuels me might deplete you.

• Don't do stuff you hate, even if you "should" like it.
• Handle or cancel the things that are weighing on you!

Connect

• Prioritize connecting with friends, family, and significant others.
• Laugh, like until you pee.
• Give real life connection your attention over online "socializing."

Get Into Your Head

• Do your best to release negative thought patterns (guilt, worry, self-loathing)
• Read poetry. (We are both currently loving Mary Oliver)
• Try to separate work and life, try enforcing business hours.

Get Out Of Your House

• Get outside in nature!! And look up at the sky.
• Work (and play) outside of the home, preferably with others in your field.
• Take a class, in something that interests you and makes you feel good.

For their Commercial Breakdown, Carla wrestles an inappropriate racy Third Love postcard and Meg calls lame on a Canon birth commercial.

Here's the postcard Carla received:

And her response:

Dear Third Love,

Young children live here and they really don't need a glimpse at this lady's taint. And quite frankly, neither do I. Please start selling bras to women, not men.

Thanks a bunch,

A Former Customer

Here's that Canon commercial:

Canon: bring the camera, and the divorce papers.

In their new segments, You Win Some, You Lose Some, the gals share their lady brags and "well shit" moments of the week.

Carla lost when she failed to recognize that her kid needed antibiotics, but won when she spent the rest of the week creating art with him.

Meg won when she seized a spontaneous opportunity to pig-sit. And she lost the battle of the deadline when she left ordering business cards to the last minute.

Want to read more about self-care and anti-resolutions? 

Check out this rad post about the frustration of social media declarations.

This one with stunning art work that illustrates the silliness of "motivational" Instagram posts.

And this article is a great read on the self-care machine.

Take care of yourselves ladies (and gents), seriously, don't forget to have fun!

... or something less depressing ... Hanging On By A Thread

Meg and Carla are back, and trying to tie together a coherent episode! Soul crushing election results, crippling anxiety, and 100 million things that need wrapping up kept Meg and Carla from recording for a bit. Nobody said adulting would be easy but DUUUUDE.

November pretty much sucked, although we hosted a FABULOUS field trip! Be sure to follow us on Facebook so you don't miss the next one!

Although this isn't a current event podcast it seemed important to discuss what we're calling The United States and the Terrible, Horrifying, No Good, Very Bad Election Results. Want to DO SOMETHING? Give your time/money to one (or many) of these causes.  Stay informed by reading REAL news. And become extremely familiar with your representatives, call and write on the regular.

For Best Worst Things this week Carla is in a serious love/hate with kids at Christmas. It's pretty much the most magical thing ever and a ridiculous amount of work! Meg recommends the film Arrival for serious dose of faith in humanity but warns that it sparked intense FEELINGS. Feeling all the feelings is pretty much the worst. 

Jelly On Your Biscuit! Meg is super jealous of people who eat bread. Seriously, if you can eat bread AND fit in your pants, the envy is REAL! Carla is abundantly jealous of Canadians. They have such a better situation and yet they remain kind instead of smug.    

The episode is wrapped up with a little holiday cheer. A gentle reminder: you're a grown ass woman you can celebrate the holidays how you want!! Make time for friends, focus on what's most important, and create your own traditions! 

Happy Holidays Friends!!!

In this episode Meg and Carla talk about what happens when you get to a place of feeling like things in life are good/fine/settled but then some unidentified discontentment creeps in. We ponder the anxiety of feeling like we need to figure out what to do "next." ... Or at least that was the idea. But then our original episode 7 got eaten by the computer and when we got to together to re-record just a week or two later we simply didn't feel that way anymore.  

So, episode 7 is a fun and funny episode where we actually got to record in the same room! We laugh about our fleeting existential crisis and share one too many drinks.  

For commercial breakdown Carla freaks out about this anti-feminist Nuva Ring ad.  And Meg calls bullshit on this crazy diet pill click bait.

Meg's best worst thing was this GD election. It is clearly the worst because: TRUMP. But, she loved that the gals from CYG called him a "sentient nacho" and "human embodiment of the poop emoji". Carla's best worst thing is having a clean house. It's totally awesome to have everything clean but it 100% sucks to try and keep it that way.

Plus, we announced our first Who Are We Kidding Field Trip!!! 

All bay area ladies, come see embrace with us on November 15th!

Info about the film: here.

Get your tickets: here.

In episode six Meg and Carla catch up. They share the highs and lows of summer's end and touch on a few hilarious segments. Meg's high was a nine day vacation to the Russian River and her low was a brutal return to reality complete with a lovely little bout of depression. Carla's summer highlight was a really nice birthday and getting to crash Meg's vacation.  Less fun was the super early back to school schedule, who starts school in mid August? Rude. Carla was bummed that summer is over and trying not to dwell on the mom anxiety that another summer with her kids is gone.  

In "Don't Call It A Life Hack" Meg shares a rad idea for getting the most out of vacation: outsource some work to be completed while you're gone. Meg had photos color corrected while she lounged by the river but you could also set up a cleaning service or hire someone to handle any number of tedious to-do's for you while you're gone. It's basically how to vacation like a BOSS. And Carla recommends finishing things. You know, like following through until a task is actually complete. Laundry for example must actually be folded and put away in order to be considered finished. Easier said than done for some of us, but simply focusing on follow through can really make this whole adulting thing go a lot more smoothly.  

"Jelly on my Biscuit" this week we both had our minds the on money and money on our minds. Meg is super jealous of people with salaried jobs, you know the kinds with paid vacation and colleges to handle shit while you're gone? Turns out, you don't get these kinds of perks as a small business owner. Meanwhile, Carla is going green over the ladies who married money. A week or two as a trophy wife sounds mighty appealing when you and your partner both have to constantly hustle.

For their "Best/Worst Thing" Meg and Carla share what is great and not so great lately. Meg's best/worst is feeling blue in the modern age. Meg shares how feeling depressed is the worst, but getting support and love from others after sharing her feelings on social media was totally the best. Carla's best/worst thing is school. Having kids in school is both totally rad and super buggin'.