Olivia @ Crossing Bridges: My husband and I are looking at houses, and have found one we really like that has a beautiful pool in the backyard. Can you tell me a little about your pool maintenance, and the costs associated? Thanks!
Leah: How far apart are Bean and Gracie? I went back through some old posts to try and figure it out but it's easier to ask :-) I just found out I'm preggers with my second. Excited but a nervous wreck. They'll be 19 months apart! EEP!!!
Christina : Is your sister still trying to have a baby? I've been thinking about her since your post about their miscarriage. I hope they are doing well and are expecting now or soon. : )
Amber@ClassyConfessions: Katie, could you maybe do a post soon with the blogs that you visit most commonly? I just finally got a time to watch the Live Chat and I heard you say that there are a few you visit commonly. I would love to know what they are?
Heather: Does Bean walk to timeout on his own?
Sarah R: Would you ever consider taking Bean & Gracie to Magic Kingdom on Easter? The Mobile Azalea Trail Maids will be there greeting and in the parade and I bet Gracie would love to get her picture with the girls in big antebellum dresses ;)
Brittany: How long have you guys been together? What made you feel that your life was interesting enough to start a blog?
Kristen: Following up on your post about your dogs, can you do a post about them as puppies? I may just want to see puppy pictures of Big Molly! Also, would love to hear funny puppy/dog owner adventure stories.
your BIGGEST fan. not fattest.: why are you so awesome?
Crystal: Just wondering if you found it harder to loose the baby weight with the second child then the first? I am pregnant with my second now and am noticing that I am gaining weight faster this time then my first pregnancy. I'm nervous about loosing it :(
Shanonn: When you found out that your were pregnant with Gracie how did you prepare from going to mother to 1 to mother of 2?
Halston : I read a while back that you were not a "hoarder", neither am I...to the extreme. So I was wondering how do/will you deal with keeping Bean and Gracie's projects, colorings, holiday artwork they make at school, things like that? I have about 3 boxes right now for one child, I feel guilty throwing it away but I dont reminisce over old artwork now that I'm grown, so will my children? Am I saving all this stuff for nothing?
Alexandra: Hi Katie, I remember a while ago you wrote about starting to toilet train bean, and now he seems to be trained...I was just wondering how you went with getting him to do 'number twos' in the toilet? I have just started with my 2 year old, and he is fine with wees, but not good with anything else, and I am worried about him getting constipated....how did you find this with your little man?
Marriage Confessions: Bean was ready for potty training long before Chris and I were ready! He loves everything about the potty - underwear, the stool he gets to stand on, flushing, etc. He's all about the potty. I think we just got lucky in that he was so ready and excited about going potty, that it didn't bother him at all to do #2 on the potty. One problem we did have at first was getting him to sit on the toilet long enough to actually GO potty. If he didn't go right away, he wanted to get up and go play, then five minutes later he'd have an accident. And, let me tell you, #2 in underwear is AWFUL! Quite possibly the worst part of parenting! To get him to hang out longer until the urge struck him, we started bringing books and toys to the potty with us. Then, he could sit there and play a bit while his body...um...worked stuff out... :)
Meagan: Hi Katie, I was wondering if your Mom was going to make more items for her etsy shop? When I go to her website, there aren't any products listed. I loved them when she first started the site and now that I'm pregnant, I'd love to buy a few things.
Marriage Confessions: Hi Meagan -Thanks for asking! I'll mention it to her. I know she slowed down at bit for the holidays because of family and travel, but I'll see if she has plans to kick it up again soon. She'll love hearing that someone was asking about her!
Lee: I think I remember reading a long time ago that your family adheres to dave ramsey's teachings and his financial peace principles. Do you guys still follow his teachings? Do you recommend them for organizing family finances?
Marriage Confessions: Hi Lee - Yes, Chris and I read Dave Ramsey when we first graduated from graduate school before we had kids. We wanted to learn a strategy for saving and planning long-term. We read his book "Financial Peace" and it taught us basic, solid skills for financial plans. We still use his basic principles in our planning today and I definitely recommend him for organizing family finances. He makes paying off debt and saving see very doable.
Sunny: Not sure if you'll get to this in time, but do you do gifts for Bean and Gracie's teachers for Christmas? I'm looking for ideas....
Marriage Confessions: Hi Sunny - I gave Bean and Gracie's daycare teachers each a box of chocolates with a Christmas ornament attached. The Christmas ornament said, "I love you, Miss _____! Love, Michael (or Gracie)." Then I put the date on the back of the ornament. I like the idea of something sweet and something to keep.
25Jan
Did you miss the LIVE MC Video Chat last night? No worries! We recorded the chat session for anyone who couldn’t be there. You know, cause you might have been busy watching, like, the President on TV last night.
(Poor planning, on my part. That’s what I get for not watching the news…)
Click here to watch the chat session and be sure to join us next time!
16Dec
I haven’t been too good lately about answering the questions on the Q&A page. I went on last night to answer a few and found so many waiting! I decided the most efficient (i.e. easiest and fastest) thing to do was answer them on video. Saves my hands from carpel tunnel, you see.
So, here we go…
Part One:
Part Two:
14Nov
I get asked pretty often about life as a working mom. How we do it, what’s hard about it, what I like about it, what I don’t like about it, etc. To new working moms (or moms-to-be), this topic is especially frequent because it’s such a drastic lifestyle change from working while not having kids. I could get all philosophical on you and tell you my theories about working parents and kids who grow up in working parent homes and all that, but I think what’s more helpful is just a straight-forward post on how we make it work in our house. A reader (posting as “VV”) asked this week all the questions that I think most people want answers to, so I’m going to use her question as my guide. Here we go…
Question #1: How do you cope with all the sickness when your kids are in daycare? Are they sick all the time?
In a word, yes. Yes, at least one of my kids is sick most of the time these days. It is especially bad now that we have two kids in daycare because when something goes around one class and that child brings it home, they pass it to the other child who then takes it up to their class (though Gracie seems to have a much stronger immune system than Bean; poor Bean Man has a tough time with his respiratory system and it makes him prone to sicknesses a bit more). As much as possible, we try to keep the kids separated when they are sick so that the cycle doesn’t continue, but it’s really tough. I used to feel awful every time one of them was sick. I still do. I feel really, really guilty because I feel like it’s my fault they are in daycare and so it’s my fault they are sick. But I remind myself that I have to work and so daycare is just a necessary evil in our house.
I hardly ever blog about my kids sicknesses. Mostly that’s because I try to keep their health issues private for them. It’s a blogging boundary that I’ve set for our family. But I also keep it private because so many people have so many different ideas about medication and dealing with sickness in children and, quite frankly, I just don’t need anything else to make me feel guilty about my kids being sick. I already feel guilty enough and so I really don’t like opening that topic up for criticism from strangers. But I thought I’d put that out there today because I know that a lot of moms who work (and some who don’t) struggle with how to balance sickness and health in their family.
Question #2: How do you handle time off?
I am super lucky in that when Bean was little, I had an amazing Dean that I worked for at Yale. He was one of the kindest people you’d ever meet and, having two grown kids himself, he understood the demands of having a small baby. He let me work from home a lot when Bean was sick and couldn’t go to daycare, which really helped with my time off.
(This picture is from my going away party that the faculty and staff threw me at Yale when we moved back to Florida. That’s my Dean standing there with us. Check out Bean’s comb over…)
Now, I still work for really nice people, but I’m much more regimented in how much time I can take off since I work for the public school system. Truthfully, this questions goes hand in hand with the sickness question because 95% of the time I take off of work is for sick kids.
The hardest part is that when a child is getting over something, their immune systems are weaker and so they are more likely to pick up something else right away. This happens a lot with Bean. Usually, he gets sick right after he gets well because his immune system is weak from fighting the first sickness. It’s a brutal cycle for him and for a working mom because every time he gets sick, I have to stay home from work.
Before I had kids, a lot of my identity came from my job. It’s who I was and how I recognized myself and so I put everything I had into making sure I was ALWAYS 100% above and beyond. When I had kids, it’s not that my work ethic changed – I still want to be good at what I do – but my priorities changed a bit. Now, my job is what pays the bills. True, I want to love my job and to do well at my job, but my family is my first priority. So while it is really frustrating to have to call in a substitute because someone at my house is sick, I drop the work guilt a lot quicker than I drop the family guilt. I work to take care of my kids, so if I need to take a day off of work to take care of my kids, then that’s what I do. But it is frustrating in ways that only a working mom can truly understand.
Question #3: How do you handle sleepless nights and going to work the next day?
I’m pretty lucky because both my kids sleep through the night just about every single night. But there are the occasional nights when I’m up – again, usually with a sick kid. Two weeks ago, Bean woke up in the middle of the night throwing up. It was awful. He started around 1:00am and it continued until 5:00am. I laid down at 5:30, Gracie woke up for the day at 6:00, and my alarm went off at 6:30. It was a rough night. But, life goes on. My sweet dad came down to stay with Bean so that Chris and I could go to work, I dropped Gracie at daycare, and my day went on as usual. There’s nothing really I can do different when I’m tired like that. I can’t take a nap. Gracie still has needs. I still have obligations at school and outside of school. So, usually, I try to go to bed early the next night and just pray that the kids sleep that night. If we have a stretch of days like that (which we did two weeks ago), we usually cancel all our plans that weekend, even if the kids are better, just so we can all rest up from the week.
Question #4: How do you handle cranky babies when they get home from daycare?
This is a big problem Chris and I deal with on a daily basis. From 5:00 until bedtime, the kids are a mess. They’re cranky, hungry, tired, and just no darn fun. Unfortunately, though, the only time we get with the kids during the week is from 5:00 until bedtime. We have tired a few different things to make our time in the evenings with the kids enjoyable and we actually have a pretty nice schedule now. Granted, even on the most routine days, there are periodic outbursts from both kids throughout the evening, but with our current routine we see the outbursts a lot less.
5:00 – 5:30 – I pick the kids up from daycare and we head home. I have a snack waiting in the car for Bean to eat on the ride home every day. This keeps him from melting down when we get home because he wants dinner right away. I bring Goldfish or pretzels and an apple juice box.
6:00 – Once we get home and everyone is settled with an activity (Bean usually plays at the kitchen table and/or moans at my feet and Gracie hangs out in her high chair playing), I start making Bean’s dinner. Bean eats at the kitchen table while I feed Gracie her dinner (baby food and pieces of whatever Bean’s eating that she can have).
6:15 – Chris gets home and sits down at the table with us while the kids eat. Normally, Bean has a complete meltdown because he doesn’t want whatever I’ve made him for dinner that night, but other than that, this time is actually a nice time for us all to hang out together and catch up on our days.
6:30 – Chris and I take both kids upstairs and give them their baths together (if Chris is working late, then I put a movie on for Bean while I give Gracie a bath and then I do Bean’s bath after I put Gracie down for the night). I love bath time. It’s all four of us in there and the kids LOVE taking baths together. We usually let them play until the water is cold and then they sit in the tub until the water drains. They love baths!
7:00 – I put Gracie in pajamas while Chris puts Bean in his pajamas. We all meet in the hall to say goodnight to each other, then I take Gracie to her room and give her a big bottle and read her a book, while Chris reads books with Bean.
7:30 – Both kids are down for the night (though Bean will cry and yell for us for about 20 minutes, but we don’t respond, so we count it as if he’s down for the night…we’re off duty!).
7:45 – Chris and I cook dinner together while we finally get to catch up on each others days.
Question #5: How can I be a good employee if my kids are sick all the time and I’m always tired?!?!
Good question and so totally honest! I love that! The truth is that I am a good employee, but I’m not as good of an employee as I was before I had kids. I meet all my deadlines, I show up when I’m supposed to, I follow through with all my responsibilities, my co-workers and administration like me, I love my job, and I’m pretty darn good at it, too. But my expectations for a work day have definitely shifted since I’ve had children. Being a “good employee” to me on a day when my kids have been up sick all night is showing up and giving the best effort I can give. Would I necessarily teach that way every day? Probably not, but a day every now and then when I let the kids do group work instead of direct instruction or having my students read out loud instead of me reading to them isn’t going to kill them. Just like with everything else in parenthood, working and having kids is all about balance. And it’s okay if the scales sometimes tip more in one direction occasionally. As long as I have more centered days than I have tipped days, then I’m doing okay.
19May
By far, the most common questions I receive are about blogging – how I got started, how I put up boundaries, what works, what doesn’t, etc. Rather than try to blog on each question, I thought I’d answer them all in one shebang.
How do you handle the negative comments and feedback you get on your blog? Does it bother you? How do you not take it personally? And how do you let the negative stuff go?
That is one of the hardest parts of blogging. It took me a little over a year before my skin toughened up. I think a lot of letting it go comes with my confidence in my decisions. I could never have handled all the negative feedback I received about choosing not to breastfeed if I hadn’t been 110% comfortable and confident that I was making the right decision for myself. It’s easier to shake those comments off if I’m confident. Once I learned that part, I changed a little bit about how I blogged. I only blog about things that I’ve already come to peace with in my own mind. I don’t really work through things in my blog posts anymore and that helps me to feel comfortable with my own choices. When I receive negative feedback, I just tell myself that everyone is entitled to their own opinions and that person’s just happens to be different than mine. I also try to look for the good in the nasty comments. True, some are just out and out mean just to be mean and those people have issues within themselves to work out that has nothing to do with me. But sometimes people who disagree with me actually have valid information. They may present it very rudely or harshly or with a tone of judgment, but I try to look past that part and listen to what point they are making – not necessarily how they are making that point. In the end though, it really comes down to being comfortable with who you are and what you are writing. The times I write on issues that I’m not sure of my own stance on are the times when I really get bothered by negative comments. But the times that I write about something I’ve come to terms with on my own, I am able to let the negative comments and feedback slide right off my back.
How do you decide what you’ll blog about and what you’ll keep private?
If it were completely up to me, I’d share everything. I have no filter. But I try to remember that this blog is about my family, so there are other people’s lives being represented here, too. Keeping that in mind, I think the most important rule I have about my blog is that every post I write gets read by Chris before I publish it. I don’t make anything public before he gets a say. It wouldn’t be fair. As for my kids, I have a general rule for myself that I don’t blog too much about their health issues. I don’t go into detail when they’re sick or how we make them better. I feel like that’s not my business to share. Another way I draw a boundary – for my family and for other people – is to try to blog how I speak. Would I say what I am writing to their face? Would I care if that person read what I wrote? If the answer is no, then I don’t post it.
How long did it take to get an audience and how did you attract readers?
It took about a year before I saw any kind of steady readership (other than my Grandma…she’s my longest running fan!). And even after that, it’s been a slow, but steady climb in readership. More than numbers, I pay attention to my percentage of new readers though. I’d rather grow slow and continuously than have one or two big spikes in readership that never really stay. Building your readership slow and steady means you’re growing a community of readers and that’s really what bloggers should strive for. In the first two years, I attracted readers by going out and commenting on other blogs and leaving my URL in my comment post. But once the balls gets rolling and your readers start to increase steadily, you really don’t have to do much to grow. It happens organically. The best way to grow your numbers, in my experience, is to blog routinely and often. Blog readers are fickle (no offense, Imaginary Friends…). They come to blogs to be entertained. If there’s no one there to entertain them, then they’re going to go somewhere else and be entertained. The more consistent I am with my blog posts, the steadier my readership is.
Which blogging platform do you prefer? WordPress, Blogspot, etc.
I started out using WordPress and I loved it. It was free and easy to use. I also really liked that they promoted their own blogs and occasionally my blog would get picked up as one they profiled and it really helped grow my site in the very beginning. As I got more experienced in blogging, I moved my site over to WordPress.org. This functions a lot like the standard WordPress.com blogs, but it is for more advanced bloggers and allows you to do things like alter or write your own code. That way you can customize your site even more. Once that was going well, we moved over to our own domain (www.marriageconfessions.com). We still use WordPress.org as my back end platform. I always recommend WordPress for new bloggers because it makes it easy to start without any prior knowledge about blogging, but it allows you to grow into a much larger site as your numbers increase.
Do you make money blogging? How?
I do make money from my blog. I use BlogHer as my advertising company and I love it. You apply to be part of the BlogHer advertising family and, if you’re accepted, they make it really easy. You complete a survey about what kind of ads you’d allow or not allow on your site and then they give you the specification for advertising space on your blog. I get paid per pageview on my site. So, every time you guys click around, I make a little more money – so, thanks! I like using an advertising company like BlogHer as opposed to doing my own advertising because they do all the hard stuff. They find advertisers, negotiate rates and contracts, and then once a month they send me a check. For someone like me who has a full time job and a young family, using BlogHer saves me time and makes the process so much easier.Â
