Greetings from the newborn bubble! I am a little over a month postpartum with our second daughter, sitting at my computer with a snuggly newborn wrapped up against my chest, listening to her sweet little breaths as I type.

I’ve put off this post for a bit, mostly because I’m newly postpartum, underslept, and I didn’t have the energy for much, let alone gathering my thoughts, but I’m determined to get back to it in hopes of helping that fellow postpartum mom who was in a similar mindset as I was, early postpartum with my first.

With having a baby, a lot of the same questions come up: Is she sleeping? Are you breastfeeding? How’s breastfeeding going? And generally, a bunch of questions around sleeping and eating. In those early days, there is very little sleeping and eating happening, especially if you struggled with breastfeeding as I did.

When I had my first daughter, I went into motherhood with high hopes of being able to breastfeed, while managing my own expectations, telling myself, “I’d like to, but if it doesn’t work out, that’s fine.” For context, I had breast surgery when I was either in high school or newly in college. It was an elective surgery, one that I still don’t regret, by the way, but at the time they told me that I may or may not be able to breastfeed down the road. As someone who was single, still a teenager, and just ecstatic that I had finally rid myself of one of my biggest insecurities with the surgery I had, I basically was like, “Cool, don’t care. That’s forever away anyways.”

Well, now here I sit in what at the time was “forever away” and dealing with the question of whether or not I’d actually be able to breastfeed. Even with me managing my expectations and not expecting to be able to breastfeed, I was still hopeful.

When entering into motherhood, there are a lot of expectations put on you, whether intentional or not. You’ve gone through 9+ months of carrying a child, delivering them, and then enter into the first few hours of motherhood and are just expected to figure it out and somehow naturally know how to feed your child from your body with no classes, courses, or manual on how to do so, just a nurse walking you through trying to shove half your boob into their newborn mouths.

With my first, I gave up on breastfeeding pretty early. With my surgical history and not expecting to be able to, the second things got hard, my boobs engorged, nipples bleeding, and feeling this unnatural feeling of dread every time I went to try to latch my daughter, I quit out of fear. In my postpartum delirium, I was afraid of getting an infection—or the extremes of my thoughts, getting sepsis and ending up in the hospital or worse. So I threw in the towel and went to formula feeding.

Even though I tried to own that decision and believe that I knew my own body and what was best for me, really I was just scared and then proceeding to go on Reddit late at night, trying to make myself not feel like a horrible mom for not being able to breastfeed my baby. It’s not a great way to start your motherhood journey, already feeling like you failed at it.

Going into giving birth to my second daughter, I tried to have a much more thoughtful approach. I found a practice that I felt supported by and arranged to meet with lactation prior to giving birth. This time I could tell them of my history, have them assess me, and get all the knowledge I could to hopefully have a better experience breastfeeding this time around. Even if it didn’t work out, I knew having an expert confirm or deny whether I was able to actually breastfeed would give me so much more peace of mind.

The plan I built with my lactation consultant was to try to breastfeed from the beginning, have her help me with latching, and to pump around the clock in hopes to get my supply up. In the first few days, my hopes were high, my daughter was latching and confirmed swallowing, and I had been properly fitted for my pump. I made sure to get the blue Spectra so that I could have the best tool and be set up for success.

The same things started happening as they did the first time around. By the fourth day, my milk started coming in, my boobs got extremely engorged and painful, and both my nipples were cracked and bloody, but I was still determined. My daughter wasn’t gaining weight, so we had to supplement with formula, but still I wasn’t letting myself give up without seeing things all the way through. I was latching my daughter to both my breasts, formula feeding her, and then pumping for 15–20 minutes every three hours. So basically, I was stimulating my breasts around the clock and giving it my all.

After a week of this, I noticed that still no changes were happening. My daughter started refusing to nurse, getting extremely agitated or just putting my boob in her mouth and not even attempting to nurse whatsoever. I went into every pumping session praying that I would finally see my milk come in, but every time all I would get out was maybe a single drop.

I met in person with lactation, did a weighted feed, re-checked my daughter’s latch, and had her watch me pump to make sure I was technically doing everything correctly. With the weighted feed, my daughter essentially got no volume from breastfeeding and still nothing came out while pumping. We crafted a plan from there to give it one last college try and attempt to latch and pump around the clock to see if everything would finally click into place and my milk would come in.

To my extreme disappointment, that never happened. I was feeding her every moment I could, oftentimes tears streaming down my face, and doing my best to ignore the shooting pains from my very overstimulated and cracking breasts. Pairing this experience this time around with a toddler also vying for my attention was honestly one of the more difficult experiences I’ve ever gone through. After attempting this for almost two weeks, my lactation consultant and I came to the very disappointing conclusion that I was not able to successfully breastfeed. Likely as a result of my surgery, my ducts were cut, and though some of them may have regenerated to produce milk, not enough of them healed and there was not a real way for milk to be extracted. My boobs had also gone from fully engorged to back to normal despite me pumping and stimulating them nonstop, so it was clear that the journey was just not meant to be for me.

In a way, being told that the thing I had been trying so hard to make happen wasn’t actually possible was a relief. I was relieved that I didn’t have to continue killing myself to try and make something happen when it clearly wasn’t working. It was also a relief that I didn’t just give up with my first and I was actually not able to. But paired with that relief flooded in all those same emotions I felt the first time around and deep sadness for myself that I would never be able to experience this incredibly “natural” thing that so many moms are able to do.

I’m so grateful that there are other options and I live in 2026, where I can successfully feed my daughter with formula and for her to be healthy and growing, but you can’t help but feel like less of a mom if you’re not able to do this thing that everyone is supposed to just be able to do.

Whether you’re like me and are not able to breastfeed or even if you’re just a low supplier, you can find yourself filled with shame. Shame around not being able to do this “natural” thing, around giving in, or just by feeling like not enough as a mom.

If you’re in a similar mindset, I’m happy to report that I have gotten to the place of acceptance much quicker this time around. After one final cry, we moved on to completely formula feeding, and now we know if we plan to have more kids that formula is the best option for us. Things became much easier from there with my husband now able to help, and I realized that things don’t have to be hard for me to know I’m doing enough.

You don’t have to be a martyr to motherhood.

If you’re like me and deep in some Reddit thread, endlessly searching the internet to feel like you’re not alone or to give yourself the permission you need to know that it’s okay to have a different motherhood journey than everyone else, I hope you realize that just because you’re not able to do one part of motherhood, it does not mean that you’re not worthy of the role or that you’re not a good mom. Just by how much you care for your kids and how much energy and effort you’re putting into doing everything you can for them means you are. There’s enough you have to worry about without adding the comparison trap on top of it.

Things I’d go back and tell my early postpartum self struggling with breastfeeding:

Seek professional help and don’t think you have to go at this alone.

I wish I had found more lactation support with my first. The results would have been the same, but breastfeeding is hard whether you’re a super supplier or a non-supplier like myself. I felt so much better with help the second time around.

It’s not easy for everyone, even though the internet makes it seem that way.

Every day I went online, after making the decision to stop breastfeeding, all I kept seeing was beautiful, aesthetic images or stories of moms breastfeeding their babies. All I felt was envy and disappointment in myself. From my own journey and from talking to other moms about this, it’s not easy for everyone, and it’s likely that people aren’t talking about the negative experiences because they’re like I was, so afraid to admit that they were struggling.

Lean on your partner if you can.

It was difficult for my husband to see me struggling. He likely felt helpless, not being able to help me feed our daughter, but the more I opened up to him about what I was experiencing, the more he found opportunities he could help in other ways.

Once your hormones settle, you’ll likely feel better.

Early postpartum is a fog of insane hormones and little to no sleep. It’s okay if you feel crazy, sad, angry, or any wave of emotions you might be feeling. Let yourself go through all of them and be kind to yourself as you figure things out.

You’re a good mom, stop telling yourself you’re not.

You love your child, you’re doing the best you can, and that is more than enough.

I hope this post finds the moms it’s meant to. I hope by reading it you are able to accept whatever type of mothering journey is meant for you. Once I did, and the veil of postpartum hormones finally lifted, I was able to be present and actually enjoy this beautiful moment in my life.

You just had a baby and you were chosen to be their mom for a reason. Trust in that and trust in yourself!

Popping in for this month’s roundup of things I’ve been loving! I’m currently 37 weeks pregnant, fully in nesting mode, summer is here, and I’m prepping our home and my two-year-old daughter for the big transition of welcoming her little sister into our family. It’s consisted of lots of cooling, stretchy outfits, transitioning my daughter’s room into more of a big sister space, and adding the finishing touches to baby sister’s nursery. My sprinkle was this weekend, so I’ve also included some must-haves and things I added to my registry for anyone expecting a baby soon. Exciting times and so much on my to do list, but these are the things that have been helping me make it through!

Summer Style

Our vacation to Hilton Head:

We were lucky enough to take a family vacation to Hilton Head this month that I pretended was also our baby-moon! Planning what to pack and figuring out what to wear was no easy feat, but I’m really happy with how everything came together. These were some of the outfits that helped me feel good, even at the end of my third trimester in the summer heat. I rented most of them, so I’ve included links to both the rentals and where you can purchase them.

• My bump friendly vacay outfits that felt good even in the third trimester!

• where to go on your Hilton Head vacation!

Dresses I’m living in!

• This bump friendly dress that I want in every color!

• The most flattering dress pregnant or not

Maternity Photos

I actually got around to taking bump photos this pregnancy! Here’s the perfect outfit for photos, plus a few other options to help you recreate a similar look.
Shop our maternity pictures look!

Baby sprinkle

My mother-in-law hosted the cutest Café Bébé–themed sprinkle for me! It was such a fun theme and super simple to put together—perfect for a second baby shower.

• Shop the party

• More dress options that would be perfect for a baby shower!

Big Sister Prep

What we’ve done to help my daughter transition to a more big-kid space in her room includes a new play sofa that has already been the BEST purchase, the prettiest, well-made dresser, and some décor for a reading nook I’m creating for her.

• Here's a peak at Remy’s big girl space!

• The couch search that sparked the idea for this reading nook

Current Toddler Favorites

• baby/toddler jammies my daughter has been living in! So soft and lots of opportunities to match baby sis.

• The toddler blankets + sleep sacks most recommended to switch my daughter to after she outgrew her Nanit Sleep sacks

  Subscribe now

Baby Wearing

I’m so excited to baby wear again and plan to do it often with having a second baby soon. I did a full breakdown on all of my baby carrier faves + a review linked below!

• fave baby carriers!

• my full baby carrier review

Baby Sister’s Nursery

I haven’t shared a full nursery reveal yet because I’m still waiting on a few final details, but the space has come together so well and I’m so happy with it. Here are some of the things making the space so cute!

• sneak peak of baby sister’s nursery

• The stencil we used to create a wallpaper look

• the perfect yellow paint color

Registry Favorites

Nothing is more exciting/stressful than planning out your registry. Below are some links to help you get started, if you have a baby on the way! Plus a helpful list if you’re wanting to lean into the granola mom lifestyle! I try to take more of an 80/20 approach rather than going all in, but it’s been a great resource for choosing the non-toxic swaps that matter most to me.

• My recs for building a baby registry

• Branch basics registry essentials

Current Discount Codes

• Mabē baby carriers use code SYDNEYW10 for 10% off

• Perelel health—the best prenatals! love their trimester packs and their cellular hydration! use code SYDNEYL20 for 20% off

• Current body—the best red light masks! use code SYDNEYWEHBY for 10% off

• Salty Face— the best non-toxic self-tanner use code SYDNEYWEHBY for 10% off

• Camp Snap—screen free digital and video cameras! use code SYDNEYW7 for 7% off

I’ll be back soon with more pep talks and another roundup of favorites as we head into July. It’s going to be a big month around here—my birthday, my daughter’s birthday, and baby sister is due any day now. There are so many exciting things ahead, and I can’t wait to share them with you.

I hope June was good to you, too. Thanks for being here, and I’ll see you soon. 🤍

As a mom, I find myself obsessing over every new milestone and big transition for my daughter. I am currently 35 weeks pregnant with our second and in full nesting mode, and I am finding myself getting overly attached to the things I’m buying for my kids.

Before the baby is born, it feels like you’re last-minute buying everything. Whether it’s committing to a stroller purchase, buying and installing the car seat, buying the last-minute things to finish the nursery, or all the multitude of things that you need to buy to feel prepared for this huge life change, the last few days of pregnancy are a lot of “adding to cart.” Yes, your baby needs lots of things, and the things help you feel “ready” to bring this new life into the world, but lately, as we go from one to two babies, I’m finding out just how attached I am to all of these random things.

I tend to obsess over things in general. I like to overthink, over-research, and feel like I’m buying the most informed and correct items, especially when it comes to my family. I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself as a mom to make the right decisions, mostly so that when the item finally arrives, I’m not having second thoughts or cursing myself for buying the wrong baby item when we’re eventually up in the middle of the night changing diapers, feeding her, or doing all the things you do in the newborn bubble.

As we are making the big leap from one to two babies, I’m finding myself being pulled in two directions. One where I feel like we have all the things that we need for the new baby’s arrival, including the things I wished we had the first time around, and the other in finding ways to still make our firstborn feel special and cared for during what is about to be a HUGE transition for her.

My current obsession is over what to do about the nursery rocker. Realistically, yes, it’s just a chair that serves its purpose as a space where you can rock your baby to sleep, feed them, and read them books before they go to sleep. We are planning to move the rocker from my daughter’s room to the new baby’s room upon her arrival. Logistically, it’s no big deal. It’s just a chair, and my daughter is old enough now that we don’t really need to sit in it together or rock her to sleep anymore. But symbolically, it’s so much more.

It was our safe space when we brought her home from the hospital. It’s where we rocked her tiny self to sleep as I studied and gawked at every beautiful feature of hers and admired the sweet sounds she made. It’s where I struggled with and attempted to breastfeed her in the early weeks and broke down in tears when things were just not working. It’s where I sat trying not to doze off as I rocked her to sleep, my eyes heavy from lots of consecutive nights of no sleep. It’s where we took her monthly photos as I watched her grow and did a full performance to get her to smile for the camera and hold up her monthly sign. And it’s currently where we sit together and read all of her favorite books and say our prayers before she goes to sleep every night.

So yes, it’s no big deal that we’re moving a chair from one room to another, but I’m finding it brings up so much more than I was prepared for.

As a mom, you always want your kids to feel like they’re the most special people in the world because they are. As I sit here approaching my due date, my head is starting to fill with thoughts of,

“But how different is life really about to be?”

“Can I fully give the love that I want them both to feel equally?”

“What if it takes longer than I expect for us to adjust to being a family of four?”

“Are we actually ready for this?”

I’m thinking back to how I felt before having our daughter and all of the excitement and nerves I felt going into giving birth. I had organized and cleaned every inch of our home. I was up late taking a last-minute course on how to actually care for a baby and triple-checking my hospital bag to make sure I had everything I needed. This time around, I find myself feeling that same excitement and anticipation, but it’s paired with a lot of procrastination and, if I’m being honest, freaking out about all the change that’s about to happen so fast.

Physically, I’m so ready to give birth and to not feel like I’m waddling around the house with aches and pains all day, but mentally, I’m all over the place. The truth is, no matter how organized, how prepared, or how researched you are, you will never truly know how you will feel or what to expect until they place your newborn on your chest after you’ve given birth. It is truly the most magical experience in life and one that makes all the prep and all the ruminating so worth it.

Realistically, I know just how much capacity I have to love and that with this new life coming into the world, it will only bring that much more joy and happiness. But when you’ve experienced the magnitude of love and joy that you do with your first, you find yourself having a hard time fathoming that even more is possible.

So yes, I’m obsessing over things like rocking chairs and what new chair to get my daughter for her room so it still feels special for her once we embark on this new chapter in our lives. But more than just things, I’m trying to control and process all these big emotions I’m going through by placing them on the physical items we’re buying for this big change.

At the end of the day, it’s just stuff, and what actually matters is this exact and fleeting moment in time where we are about to go from a close-knit family of three to a whole new life and family dynamic of four.

I will eventually decide on all of the “things” I need to buy. My hospital bag will be packed, and our nursery organized, just like I did with our first daughter. But I’m having to accept that things are going to change. Life as we know it will be different, and all I can do is hope that it only gets better and sweeter as we welcome this new life into our family.

Until she’s actually here, I’ll just obsess over what brands to choose, what chair to get, and hope that being physically ready will prepare us for what’s to come mentally. And if nothing else, we’ll at least have a comfy, loving, well-thought-out space to welcome our second daughter into our lives with open arms, right?

Sincerely,

A freaking-out soon-to-be mom of two obsessing over inanimate objects

P.S. here are the things that we have in our nursery and some chairs I’m currently obsessing over for those who are curious!

the Nursery Chair Saga

I started social media back when I got off The Bachelor, which was back in 2019. So I’ve been at this for over 7 years now and I think I’ve made every “mistake” you could possibly make on social media.

I have always had a creative side to me and often use social to scratch that itch, but I’ve learned over the years how much I enjoy connecting with people from all over the world. I owe a lot to social media, I mean it’s literally how I met my husband, but in doing it for so long I’ve definitely had my ups and downs with it and like to think I’ve gotten to a place of good balance with how I show up online.

So if I were to offer any advice for people especially moms entering the space, this is what I’d tell them…

For the People Getting Started

If you’re just starting out, but you have a desire to express yourself online or use the multitude of platforms to connect with people, my advice to you would be to just start.

I feel like with the algorithms and the constant change that social media offers it can feel nothing short of overwhelming to get to the point of actually hitting post. Especially when starting out, it’s a lot of figuring out what you want to share, how you want to go about doing that, and then developing the courage to actually press post.

Your desire to express yourself has to be placed above all of that fear of being judged or perceived by others.

I feel like what stops people from getting from the desire of showing up online to actually doing it is the fear of how that is actually going to be perceived.

Some people may fear:

• What their friends from growing up might think

• What their family might say

• Being judged online by random strangers

I think I’ve experienced all of the above and yes it’s terrifying, but your desire to express yourself has to be placed above all else.

The truth is, those people will judge you, they might accidentally send you a post of your own talking crap about something you posted, or you may get weird questions at family reunions, but again your desire or your ‘why’ for starting has to be stronger.

Those things may happen, but if you have something you want to share, that has to outweigh all the fear of the potential judgement from others.

Finding Your Why

To develop a thicker skin with posting on socials I find it helpful to figure out the “why” of why you want to start in the first place.

Your why could be:

• That you just want an outlet to express yourself

• To get more comfortable speaking publicly

• That you have a story that you want to inspire others with

Whatever your WHY is, has to be the root of why you’re choosing to show up publicly.

It can be, but I wouldn’t recommend letting your why be to get some need met from social.

If your why is just to get tons of likes and try to go viral so that you can feel validated in some way, you may make that happen, but I promise you it won’t feel as fulfilling as you may be hoping it does once you get there.

Whatever your why is for showing up, I’d write it down and refer back to it whenever you need it.

So when you’re feeling shy about posting, whenever something you put up didn’t perform how you’d like, or if you just start to get lost in the every day highs and lows of showing up on social media, you always have your why.

I keep my why in my notes app and refer back to it whenever I’m having one of those days or I feel like nothing I’m creating is actually making a difference, or if I just start to lose my path for why I’m even showing up in the first place.

Your why will ground you back into what it is you’re wanting to say and help you remember the reason you started in the first place.

To help you get started in figuring out your why, here is a piece of my mission statement for why I’m showing up on social media myself:

You can write down your mission statement, your why, or just a phrase that helps you keep going.

Keep it with you and refer back to it whenever you need that encouragement to keep going!

Once you have your why the next part is just getting started and to keep going when it gets hard.

Finding the Balance Especially as a Mom

Once you’ve gotten things off the ground and a cadence for posting or showing up online, the next step is finding your balance especially if you’re going about this while also balancing being a Mom.

Your first priority is obviously your children, but if your why for showing up online is to have a creative outlet or somewhere you can show off your passion project or just so you can connect with others during the day to day of mom life, it’s important to find the right balance of showing up for your online self and your kids fully.

What tends to happen especially when starting out, you feel like you need to constantly be engaged, responding to messages or comments right away, or actively checking things.

You often get fed this message on social media that in order to grow, you have to post 20 times a day and engage and be constantly innovating and just plugged in.

Well that’s just not sustainable and especially not if you’re a Mom.

My number one priority is: my role as a Mom.

I have set some boundaries with social media that have helped me show up to my capacity without it taking away from my role as a Mom.

I’m not perfect at this by any means, but these little rules for myself have helped me remain present and not letting time on social media drag me away from my day unless I am making a conscious decision for it to do so.

The Boundaries That Help Me Most

1. I Removed All Notifications

“Nothing is that urgent for it to take away from what’s most important in life, being present.”

I removed all notifications from social media off of my phone.

The DMs, comments, likes, etc can wait and nothing is that urgent ever.

I found shutting them off completely helped to keep my phone from dragging me away from the now throughout the day.

Once you do that, your phone isn’t the one deciding when you log on.

From there, it’s breaking the urge to check things constantly now that you don’t have the phone reminding you to do so.

2. I Never Post in Real Time

I started doing this as a safety precaution, but it also is helpful to keep you from not being present in what you’re doing.

Throughout the day I just take pictures and videos of things that I like or I maybe want to share later and then at the end of the day or when my daughter naps I go through whatever I documented to post to stories etc.

3. I Don’t Let Myself Go on Social Media Before Noon

If I go on anything it’s Pinterest, because I find that doesn’t drag me out of my day like other apps like Instagram or TikTok.

This takes practice, but it makes a huge difference in your day when you’re not starting it off by opening up your energy and your time for the world to take from it and instead

you’re the one in charge of your morning and how you spend your energy for the day!

4. I Only Edit When My Daughter Is Asleep

I find that editing videos takes up the most time and focus so I don’t let myself do that while my daughter is awake.

I try to save editing for naps or bedtime.

If I film something I make sure to do it quickly or I have it as background like if I’m filming a day in the life video for example and I’m not letting it take me out of my day with my daughter.

5. I Keep a Running Note of Ideas

Whenever I get inspiration, an idea for a video I want to film, or just something I know I want to share I jot down a quick note in my phone.

It allows me to not forget an idea when it comes to me and it gives me something to refer back to when I get stuck in a content rut or I don’t know what I want to share.

In general with mom brain I have to write everything down, so I keep a pinned note of “content ideas” for me to add to whenever inspiration strikes.

How I Manage Brand Deals

If working with brands is one of your goals for social media, here is what I’ve found from doing it over the last 7 years.

I initially started with brand partnerships back when I got off The Bachelor.

It’s a very exciting time, but also terrifying because you are given zero guidance on how to operate what was a completely foreign world to me at the time.

You get offers or things gifted, which is obviously exciting, but it’s paired with deliverables, executing brand messaging, and multi-page very intimidating contracts.

1. No matter what the money is, don’t accept a partnership that you aren’t aligned with.

My rule of thumb is that if I’m not already using it, not excited about the product, or it’s not something that I would naturally use in my life already, I have to say no.

I’ve had to learn this the hard way, as I’m sure many people do, but no amount of money is worth sacrificing your authenticity and your true voice for.

If you want to just get started with brand partnerships and take what you can get as a way to gain experience, by all means. But I’ve found that anytime I moved forward with working with a brand where my initial voice in my head said, “This probably isn’t right for you,” it always ends up being something I regret in the long run.

Whether it ends up being a bad working relationship, I run into a creative wall, or I just end up feeling like I’m dragging myself to create the content, it’s just not worth it.

Although this test comes up for me often, no amount of money is worth compromising your integrity for. From my experience, any hard no or boundary I’ve had to set with the brand work I’ve done has always found a way to come back to me better after making a tough decision, no matter how difficult or tempting it was at the time.

2. Nothing is really ever “free.”

It is true that when you become an “influencer,” you have the ability to receive lots of gifting from different brands. Whenever a brand reaches out for gifting, it is usually via email, Instagram DM, or on affiliate platforms like ShopMy.

They often state that there are no strings attached or that they’re not expecting anything for the gifting, but I find that is not fully the case. Generally speaking, they are gifting an item in hopes that you like it and will share the product with your audience, which essentially is doing something in trade.

Because of this, I try to limit what gifting I actually accept, knowing that if the expectation is there, I don’t have a problem sharing about a product because it’s something I would genuinely use or am excited for, and I don’t end up giving myself a bunch of content work to do for free.

Plus, my husband does not appreciate having too many boxes to break down at the end of the week, lol.

3. It is important who you align yourself with.

When you start doing brand partnerships, you’ll often get offers to work with managers or agencies. I’ve worked with large agencies, small agencies, worked in non-exclusive and exclusive fashions, and on my own.

It’s important who you align yourself with because they are the people representing you, speaking for you in meetings and correspondence that you don’t get to see, and representing you and your “brand.”

Even if you’re just starting out, your reputation and what you’re building matter, so it’s important that you find the right people who care about that and actually want to do more for you than just get you deals.

If longevity is something that you’re looking for, then it’s important to have the right people around you to make that happen. Don’t be afraid to work with people on a trial basis or to regularly check in with them on what they’re building for you.

As a representation of you, it is important that you have the right people in your corner making things happen for you.

4. Read everything and ask questions.

With brand partnerships come extensive contracts. Even if you don’t know what you’re reading, read through everything, and if something is standing out to you, don’t be afraid to question it or ask for things to be elaborated on.

I feel like in the past, when I was starting out, I would just assume things were all good, or I didn’t want to rock the boat because I was so grateful for the opportunity. But that’s a fast way to get taken advantage of or to end up signing something that you didn’t realize you were agreeing to in the first place.

Tools I Like to Use

There are tons of apps and editing platforms, but these are the ones I always go back to!

Video Editing

• InShot- an easy starter app and inexpensive

Photo Editing

• Tezza- the best filters and she’s constantly updating things

Graphics and Carousel Text

• Canva- just the best!

Taking Photos

• Lens Buddy- It’s like a Photo Booth for your phone. Great for when you don’t have someone to take photos of you.

Affiliate Platforms

• ShopMy-personal fave and great for gifting

• LTK

• Amazon Storefront

My thoughts on AI

This is controversial, but it’s reality: I like to use ChatGPT to edit the things I write, but with a caveat.

Whenever I’m having AI edit my work, I ask:

“Can you edit this for spelling, grammar, correct word usage, and paragraph breaks only without changing what I wrote?”

This way, what I am creating is my voice, and ChatGPT is just acting as an editor would.

The only other time I use AI with content help is when I’m searching for the correct text overlay or if I’m trying to figure out how to say something for a brand partnership, for example, in a way that is in my voice and still covers all the correct talking points that a brand is asking me to.

I also filter things through my voice and never just input things into ChatGPT to create work for me. It’s a great tool, but you can tell when someone is using it or relying on it too heavily.

For me, content creation is about human connection, and relying on a chatbot is not going to replace that ever.

What I Choose to Share

Not everyone has to know everything for you to share successfully on social media.

Sharing your life is exciting and such a great way to connect, but I’ve learned over the years that not everyone has to know everything for you to share successfully on social media.

I tend to be a pretty open book and like to connect with people on things I experience in life, but not everything has to be for public consumption.

I feel like when you share so much online, it’s easy for your life to just become about content and how something you’re living could make for good content.

It’s this mindset that starts to have you propping up your phone constantly “to get the shot” rather than just being present and living in the beautiful moment of your real life.

I have my own boundaries of what I choose to share, which is most of my life, but I’ve learned that it’s important to keep a few things for yourself.

This became especially apparent when getting into a relationship and now having kids—how much I want to share with the world and how much I want to keep for just us.

This also becomes an interesting balance when you have people in your life who may not want to be as open as you are on the internet.

I’m not going to tell you what you should and shouldn’t share. I feel like that’s something that will come with experience and learning what feels good to post about and what doesn’t.

But something I do find helpful is regular check-ins with my partner about what they’re comfortable with and ideas I have for content that I want to make.

With the ever-changing space of social media, how you show up will also change and shift, and regular check-ins with the people in your life you care about will help you keep that balance.

Final Thoughts on Social

Like I said at the beginning, if you have something on your heart that you’re wanting to share or your own burning desire to show up online and create, do it.

It will not be perfect, and often messy at times, but some beautiful things can come from you sharing your gifts and passions with the world.

So here’s to sharing, connecting, and having the courage to show up in whatever capacity you’re feeling called to do so!

I don’t know about you, but I feel like the twenties were romanticized in every show I watched growing up. It seemed like the coolest time in life, where everyone was doing cool things, had the coolest friends, the perfect relationships, and just had life figured out. Even if they were broke, it seemed like they were having the time of their lives.

So when I ventured into my twenties, living in New York City as a new college graduate with a dream of making it as a professional dancer or in the entertainment world, I too saw the adventure through rose-colored glasses.

I’m sure I’m not the only one, but almost immediately my rose-colored glasses cracked, and I realized I was heading into the big wide world very unprepared for its reality. I remember those first few months post-graduation being at a loss for how I was supposed to even structure my day with no one telling me what to do and wishing I had some manual to follow step by step from how to get from point A — where I was on the couch binge-watching Sex and the City — to point B: all my dreams coming true. Heck, I wish I had that manual now.

So if you’re currently in your twenties and have newly gotten your rose-colored glasses removed, I hope this can help guide you and provide a little pep talk to get you through what was, for me, a very difficult decade.

It’s okay if you don’t meet “the one” in your twenties — or anyone, for that matter.

I’m a self-identified hopeless romantic. I loved Disney Channel growing up, romantic comedies, and happily ever afters. I always wondered when the day would come when I’d have my perfect “meet cute” and all my problems would be solved if I just met the right person.

I looked for Prince Charming in every date I went on, in every ridiculous back-and-forth on a dating app, or in every little situation-ship I found myself in where, realistically, I was just getting strung along. I found myself often making up backstories for the people I was swiping left and right on and writing my own personal fairy tale for how things would end after every single date I went on.

Some might call this pathetic, others may feel seen, but in reality I spent my twenties with my heart wide open, getting crushed left and right by constant letdowns.

I did what I could. I built up walls, I kept dreaming of my own personal love story, and envisioned myself as the lead of every rom-com I watched, and I just waited.

Long story short, it took all of my twenties to finally meet someone when I met my now-husband at 29. We met via Instagram because I took one of my romantic leaps of faith and went on The Bachelor, a season that he happened to watch, and the rest is history.

So if you’re in your twenties dealing with heartbreak, disappointment around dating, or just overall frustration about not meeting the person you’re looking for, this is what I’d tell you: Do not give up on your true north of wanting to meet the person you’ve been waiting for and hoping exists, but do not waste your twenties or your time being single by looking for them everywhere.

I found myself doing this on every date I went on, every time I went out with friends, anytime I was strolling through the grocery store — I was always looking. I was constantly wondering, What if this is it? What if today is the day?

It is great to have hope, but it’s not great to waste your precious time always waiting for someone or something to save you.

This can be especially difficult if you feel like everyone around you has what you want, is getting married, or has the relationship you’ve been searching for. Use those people as a reminder to yourself that what you want exists and that you are just as deserving of having it too, but in the meantime, enjoy your life exactly as it is now.

I wish I had spent less time romanticizing the things I didn’t have and more time romanticizing my everyday life as a single girl. I can say from experience that the time when you are single is precious. This is the time you get uninterrupted, where you really get to know yourself — where you get to learn what you love, what makes you happy, and what you need in life and out of your everyday routine.

So if you’re sitting there in your twenties still in that relationship waiting room, do your best to actually enjoy it by trusting that all the things you’re looking for will find you at the exact right moment they’re meant to and that your job is to just learn how to enjoy your own company.

The more you can fall in love with yourself and your own life, the better the person will be that you attract into your life. You won’t have to go on a constant search for it, looking for Mr. Right in every corner of your day. Instead, you can go about your day enjoying life and really soaking up this time that you will likely not get back — a time when you get to, and should, be selfish.

Learn a skill, get a hobby, sign up for something you’ve always wanted to do, and don’t let yourself just sit around waiting for someone to come put all the pieces of your life together. Have your puzzle mostly complete so that extra piece — your eventual relationship — will find you, and it will be exactly the right fit.

Don’t put a deadline on when you have to and “should” meet the right person. Because when you’re running down your five-year plan expecting your person to be waiting at the end of it, you may miss out on all the other twists and turns you could have taken along the way — the places life was actually meant to lead you.

So to my surprise, I didn’t meet my person until the last few days of my twenties. He was my first real relationship and ended up being exactly what I was looking for. If I had met him any sooner, I’m not sure things would have worked out the way they did, or it would have taken a lot more work for us to actually end up together like we are now.

So my hope for you is to trust that your own perfect situation will find you and that you won’t just sit around waiting for it until it does.

Stop overexercising.

As an aspiring professional dancer, I saw my body as a tool and a means to my career and my dreams coming true. You would think that I would have treated it like a temple, given it everything it needed, and praised it for all it did for me.

Instead, I treated my body as my own personal punching bag, often willing it to do things it didn’t want to do, pushing it harder than I should have, and a lot of the time picking it apart over and over in my head. I spent hours in the mirror, whether in dance class or at home, pointing out all the things it wasn’t and all the reasons why it wasn’t where it should be.

Anytime I’d leave an audition disappointed that I didn’t get the gig or had my photo taken for a dance shoot, I’d pick myself apart.

Most of my days revolved around when I was going to work out and whether that one workout would be enough to prove myself or deem myself worthy of the life and body I was after. It was an endless cycle of obsessing over my body and all the things it wasn’t and then doing things like overexercising or working out multiple times a day in an attempt to combat my self-perceived shortcomings.

Sitting here in my thirties — aside from the fact that I’m seven months pregnant, lol — I can confidently say that I was going about achieving my body goals in all the wrong ways. I spent most of my twenties hovering around 15 pounds heavier than I do currently in my thirties (when not pregnant, of course). I now work out a quarter of the amount I used to and at a fraction of the intensity. I hardly ever do cardio and rarely find myself working out for more than 40 minutes at a time.

It was like once I let go of the control and the strain I was putting on my body, it finally relaxed and healed. It took doing so much less for my body to get to exactly the place I spent all those years pushing and forcing it to try to get to.

If you find yourself overexercising or obsessing over your body goals in an unhealthy way, oftentimes the opposite is the medicine. If you find that overworking and overexercising isn’t working for you, it may help to loosen the reins on your goals or your plan and see how things may change. Sometimes it takes not forcing things for them to unfold exactly how you were hoping they would.

Your body tells you things. Listen to it.

I feel like I lived my twenties in a constant state of stress. I was often over-caffeinated, under-slept, and overthinking everything. I questioned myself in every situation and found myself mentally analyzing all the ways I thought I was falling short or doing things wrong in almost every room I walked into.

At the time, I was a professional dancer for the Knicks. To the outside world, I’m sure my job looked glamorous and like a dream and that I was living my best life, which in some aspects I was, but internally I was a freaking mess.

My first year on the team, my hair was falling out in clumps, I was underweight, and I would get a debilitating stomachache every day around 5 p.m. — usually when I was on my way to rehearsals. My second year, when I had some experience under my belt, I started randomly breaking out in hives. It would originate in my armpits and spread to my back and chest. It happened almost anytime my heart rate would increase, which, as a dancer who did cardio for a living, was not ideal.

This was another moment in my twenties where my body was screaming at me, but I ignored it. It can also be extremely frustrating because often when things like this are happening to your body, no one can really give you a diagnosis as to why.

I went to a gastro doctor, and they basically told me nothing was wrong with me and to keep a food journal to see if anything I was eating was causing the stomachaches. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that most of this was rooted in stress and the constant state of anxiety I was living in.

I thought I had things under control, but clearly my body was screaming at me to tell me I didn’t.

If you are dealing with any sort of chronic stress like I was in my twenties, what helped me was instead of tackling the symptoms — the stomachaches and rashes — I instead figured out the root, which for me was chronic stress, anxiety, and the consistent story I was telling myself that I wasn’t enough.

This is ongoing to this day, but I found my own mindfulness practice to help me deal with the stress and realize that the story I kept repeating in my head daily — that I wasn’t enough or that I was doing something wrong — was not true.

It took a lot of mental gymnastics and discovering my own mental health practice that worked for me, but if you are in a similar boat, I urge you to find your own version that works for you. I try to meditate and/or pray daily and consistently check in with myself and my own emotions so that it doesn’t have to get to a place like it did for me in my twenties, where my body was screaming trying to tell me something was wrong.

I let my ruminating thoughts and extreme stress run the show in my twenties so much that it affected my body when really I just needed to get ahold of my thoughts and learn how to believe in myself.

If you’re wondering if you may be in a similar boat, your body may be sending you signals. Do not ignore them. And when you start listening to them, try to figure out what may be the root cause rather than just trying to fix the symptoms.

Learn to get quiet. You may be missing something with all the noise.

I lived in New York City for basically all of my twenties. I went to school in Manhattan and stayed after I graduated, so I lived there for a total of nine years. I always took pride in the fact that I “did it.” I moved out of my hometown in Virginia, took a chance on myself, and was making it in the big city.

If I’m being completely honest with myself, I’m not sure if this was my own goal for my life or one that was put on me that I just adapted as my own, but I spent nine long years trying to prove to myself or the world that I was making it in Manhattan.

It wasn’t until I got cast on The Bachelor and found myself one day sitting outside the mansion in the beautiful California weather with not much to do that a light bulb went off and I was like, Oh… I actually hate living in New York. What am I even doing?

It wasn’t all bad. I made incredible friends, had awesome opportunities, and it definitely helped toughen me up, but when I took a step back, I realized that this was the opposite of the type of place I saw for myself. I did not love the hustle and bustle. I craved nature and the ocean, and I actually didn’t love the hardened lifestyle of not saying hi to people on the street or always feeling like you had somewhere to be that I was so proud of myself for adapting to.

What I would tell my twenty-something self is to actually ask yourself questions and take time to really get clear on what you actually want out of life. Take a step back and try to remove the lens of what your parents see for you, your teachers, or what your friends are doing, and actually ask yourself what it is that YOU want.

When I finally let myself do that, I realized that I didn’t really love anything I was doing and was confused about how I had gone so long without seeing it.

It can be really scary to ask yourself these questions and to get really honest with yourself, but the sooner you do that, the easier it will be to make the big changes that become necessary after that realization.

Once you understand what you truly want and value out of life and how different that may be from the life you’re currently living, you can’t unsee it. It’s always a good time to find a life that authentically makes sense for you, but it’s an even better time to do it in your twenties, when making big life shifts can be easier because you’re usually the only person you have to think about.

Not everything has to be so hard.

I don’t know whether I learned this in school, from growing up dancing, or just from my general way of being, but I always had this deep-rooted belief that for me to have success, it had to be hard. It’s great to have a good work ethic, but it’s not helpful to go out of your way to make things more difficult for yourself or feel like you always need to prove something.

You overwork, overthink, overanalyze, and convince yourself that struggle is somehow proof that you’re deserving of the life you want. It’s this headspace that makes you self-sabotage opportunities or relationships because you somehow convince yourself you didn’t earn them in the first place.

I spent so much of my twenties believing I had to exhaust myself in order to earn good things when, really, a lot of momentum came the moment I stopped fighting so hard — the moment I stopped trying to force doors open that clearly weren’t meant for me.

So if I could tell my twenty-something self one final thing, it would be this: You do not have to prove your worth through struggle. You are already worthy. Work hard, yes, but don’t forget to leave room for ease, joy, rest, and trust.

Sometimes life gets better not when you push harder, but when you trust that you’re deserving of the success or experience you’re after just because you’re you — not because you had to overcome a million real or self-created obstacles to get there.

Sending love to all the twenty somethings out there! I hope this decade is easier on you than it was for me and that you are able to find your perfect authentic version of the life you want whatever age you are!

I don’t know if it’s pregnancy and my constantly changing body, the start of the third trimester and my nesting instincts kicking in, or all of the above, but I’ve been really into things lately. I feel like this month has been all about further curating my home and finding items that help me feel good, despite how much my body aches and how little I recognize myself in the mirror as I approach the end of pregnancy. My daughter is also at such a fun age—we’re starting to do craft projects together, and she’s becoming much more vocal about her likes and dislikes as her personality begins to shine through. So here is this month’s roundup of all my favorite things for family, home, pregnancy, and everyday feel-goods!

Home

Bathroom Redo

I usually wait for my husband to think it’s his idea to do a home project, and then I come ready and willing with a fully prepared Pinterest board of my ideas. We did a fun hall bathroom redo this month, somewhat inspired by watching the Masters and all of the greens and golds. We painted everything Dried Thyme by Sherwin-Williams and added some vintage-inspired touches, and I love how it turned out! Here are all of our: hall bathroom links!

Nesting Mode

Some other things helping me fully enter nesting mode! including Target runs, my toddler’s big girl dresser, cozy items, and all things cleaning!

1. This week's target run

2. Things simplifying our home like this dresser I found for my daughter’s room!

3. the blanket we’ve been living under! use code SYDNEYLOU for 35% off!

4. all things cleaning products including our favorite air purifiers!

Front Door Refresh

And last, but not least we redid our front door last month and I added some cute new decor to make it pop! If you’re in Cincinnati, we used Carden Door Company for the redo! Here are some links to: our front door refresh!

Pregnancy

Even with the third trimester just starting, I’m already feeling the return of fatigue and some not-so-fun aches and pains. I’ve been reaching for these things the most to support me during this season of life!

• My belly band + comfiest pants I’ve been wearing constantly!

• The electrolytes keeping my nightly leg cramps at bay

• My pregnancy pillow that’s fully worth the money!

• My belly oil that helped fade my stretch marks in a month!

The pregnancy-safe workouts I’ve been doing!

I’ve been fully letting myself indulge in sleep lately, which means I’ve fallen off my early morning workouts. But I’ve been doing these easy, pregnancy-safe workouts while my daughter is awake. She loves dancing around to the music with me, and I get Remy her own set of “weights” to make it fun for both of us!

• Here’s my at home workout routine Use code SYDNEY for 25% off!

Outfits

With my growing belly, I’ve been an outfit repeater—here are some items I keep reaching for lately including the shoes I wear every other day!

• bump friendly faves + shoes

• pregnancy swim

Toddler

It’s so fun getting to experience things you love through the eyes of your toddler. We’ve recently been very into coloring and, as always, lots of books. I set her up with the cutest and very reasonably priced bookshelf, and got a protective mat and coloring supplies for both of us to enjoy!

• our toddler book tent

• our crafting silicone mat to protect the kitchen table

• our crayon organizer

• my toddler’s favorite bubble wands that we use daily!

• the chalk that we use— Bluey themed!

Here are some cute toddler clothes I’ve found for her recently!

• our new favorite pajamas!

• the cutest and softest outfits and pjs from Kyte baby

• outfits from our recent Target run

• toddler swim from Target!

• baby girl clothes from Nordstrom

What’s coming up in May!

Hopefully, lots of nursery prep and getting the ball rolling! Here’s what we have so far, along with some other inspo I’ve been loving!

1. what we have so far for baby girls nursery

2. Nursery inspiration pieces

3. the inspiration items that started it all! Including this sweet blanket!

April faves:

What people loved from everything I linked this month!

• all the April favorites

—I’m sure I’ll be back this month with lots more favorites! Happy start to May!! <3

Every milestone with kids feels daunting, whether that be transitioning from the bassinet to the crib, putting your baby in their own room for the first time, dropping a nap, dropping the bottle, or our most recent: weaning the pacifier. Of course, it means a big change for your child, but I feel like most of the anxiety came more from me and my fear of what it would mean than from my daughter. Maybe it’s the actual process of teaching them the new habit, or just all the double meaning it has, with everything being rooted in the reminder of how quickly your child grows right before your eyes!

I remember staying up sobbing one night when it was time to transition my daughter to her crib. You could blame postpartum emotions or just my overwhelming fear that something bad could happen despite the completely safe sleep environment she was being put in. You just feel things so deeply as a mom, and every new milestone and big transition is another reminder of that.

When we decided to start weaning her pacifier, I was definitely nervous. I would say this one was less emotional for me, but I honestly felt bad taking away her most prized possession thus far—her pacifier, or “bubby,” as she liked to call them. My husband and I made a point from the beginning not to let her have them outside of her crib, other than on long car rides or when she simply would not go in the stroller for a walk. Every morning, we put her “bubbies” back in her crib, and she had no problem going about her day without them. I even got her an adorable jewelry dish to keep her pacifiers in when she left them each morning and waved goodbye to them. We were fond of our bubbies.

We sleep trained our daughter using the Taking Cara Babies technique. I know sleep training is controversial, and that’s for a different post, but it was the best thing we ever did. It was not as daunting as I thought it would be, and for us, it just gave us tools to lean on to help her become the great sleeper she is today. Through that method, you’re not supposed to replace the pacifiers in the crib if they toss them out at night. This was probably against the rules, but I found my own workaround where I gave her multiple pacifiers to sleep with so she’d never run out.

It was her only vice, so I didn’t have a problem letting her have multiple. We also got a kick out of watching her play with them in her crib. She always had one in her mouth and one in her hand that she liked to tap her forehead with to help her fall asleep—adorable. We’d call it “squirrel mode,” where she would gather them all in her lap and then lay on top of them at night or to entertain herself when she got up in the morning.

I remember the early days when she was first learning how to put them in her mouth herself, and my husband and I both sat cheering her on, watching her on the monitor as she fought to figure out the mechanics of it. All that to say, all of us were quite attached to our bubbies, so I dreaded the day we would have to take them from her, but I knew it was only for the best.

These were our favorite pacifiers! They glow in the dark so you can find them in the middle of the night!

I’m currently pregnant with our second baby, so I wanted to try to tackle weaning before I gave birth to our second daughter. I wanted her to get to a point where she didn’t even miss them anymore or thought of them as something babies used, so she wasn’t trying to take them from her sister when the time came. I know the recommendation is to drop the pacifier by 2 to 3 years, so with my daughter also turning 2 in July, I thought it would be a good time to get ahead of it.

She was around 18 months when we decided to start the process. I don’t like to give advice because this is my first rodeo, but the only thing I will suggest is to make sure you check when sleep regressions are happening before you try to make any big changes. I, of course, did not do that and found myself trying to make this big transition and dropping her pacifier exactly when a sleep regression hit us—and hard.

So we began the journey of weaning her pacifier but were hit simultaneously with her refusing to nap at all, taking hours to fall asleep at night, or waking up in the middle of the night screaming because of that beloved sleep regression. I didn’t figure that out until I was already in the process, so I thought she was just struggling with dropping her pacifier when, in reality, we just had horrible timing.

The advice I got from others, mostly other moms online, for pacifier weaning was:

• Just go cold turkey

• Cut the tip of her pacifiers so she didn’t want them anymore

• “The Binky Fairy,” which is essentially when you tell them the Binky Fairy is coming to retrieve their pacifiers and the child gets a toy in exchange for them

For us, I knew the cold turkey method would be too harsh, especially because of how attached we all were to the pacifier. I was afraid to cut the tip of her pacifier incorrectly or have pieces falling off (cue anxiety), and I was afraid she’d just look at me sideways when I mentioned a Binky Fairy.

So I went with a fourth option and bought the Frida Baby pacifier weaning kit. The kit is designed more for younger babies and is meant to be used over the course of a week. To wean your baby, you’re supposed to start with level one—a full pacifier—and then wean down each night until they’re essentially left with the applicator and no binky.

Here’s a link to the pacifiers we used to wean our daughter!

I decided to go really slow and swap out her pacifiers for the next level once a week. I also bought two kits so I could cheat and give her four pacifiers to use. I know, I know—I’m an enabler, but it was much better than the original 10 pacifiers she was working with before.

So we started our pacifier weaning journey with level one. She definitely looked at her new bubbies with a keen eye but didn’t think too much of it and was happy to still have her pacifiers. We were doing pretty well until the inevitable sleep regression hit, and it felt like all hell broke loose.

Like I said, my daughter was sleep trained, so she was a great sleeper—until she wasn’t. During what we believe was the 18-month sleep regression, she started completely refusing naps altogether. She got super clingy, especially around nap time, which I secretly loved because all she wanted to do was cuddle.

For a two-week period, she would not take a nap unless my husband or I went into her room and let her sleep on one of us in her rocking chair. Again, not ideal, but it’s kind of nice when you’re so far removed from the newborn stage and chest naps are a thing of the past.

We decided to soldier on once we realized we were in a sleep regression and continue to wean the pacifiers, essentially tackling both at the same time. I think with the sleep regression combined with how slow we were going with our pacifier weaning system, it took us about a month to completely break the habit.

The only thing I didn’t like about the kit was that once we got to level five, the last pacifier in the kit, she was still trying to use them as if they were real pacifiers and chewing on them in her crib. It made both my husband and me nervous, so we decided to just go cold turkey from that point on and remove all of them from her crib. I made sure to remove all of the old pacifiers from her room and anywhere she was so it would be out of sight, out of mind.

Each night before she went to bed, we would tell her:
“Okay, you have your big girl pacifiers tonight. You’re going to do great. We’re so proud of you.”

When it got to the point of no pacifiers at all, we would say:
“Okay, you’re a big girl now. You don’t need bubbies.”

Once she was completely weaned from the pacifier, she’d look at us and say:
“No bubbies.”

And we’d repeat, “Yeah, no bubbies—you’re a big girl,” and she’d just keep saying, “no bubbies, no bubbies,” almost like she was reassuring herself.

So I’m happy to report that after a long, drawn-out process—mostly because of me—we are completely free of the pacifier, a.k.a. bubbies. Again, my only advice is to make sure you do it when you’re not simultaneously experiencing a sleep regression or some other huge transition and to go about the process in whatever way makes sense for you and your family.

We are officially bubby-free and back to sleeping normally! I’m sure you can see with all of our dramatics that if we can do it, you definitely can—and likely in a way less drawn-out process than we did. One milestone down, so many more to go! Wishing you luck on your own bubby-weaning journey whenever you decide to tackle the endeavor!

I didn’t get into my first relationship until turning 29. For some people that feels young, and for others that feels old—it’s all relative—but for me, it took a lot longer than I expected it to.

When going into the dating world, I didn’t set out to be the girl who had never had a boyfriend for so long. I just wanted to be intentional with how I dated and not get into relationships with just anyone. I am typically a shyer person, and it can take a bit for me to open up to people, so knowing that, I went into dating with a shield for myself. A shield that said I’d only date someone if it was something real. What I didn’t realize was just how long that quest for “real” would be.

I spent my twenties, during the peak of my dating and trying to meet people, living in New York City. It is true when they say it is not the easiest place to meet someone, but you’d think with a population of 8.48 million that there would be at least a couple of good prospects.

Even though dating scared me and I had a ton of fear of what being in a relationship would actually mean, I didn’t want to just sit on my hands and expect Prince Charming to come whisk me away from my apartment window—though that would have been nice. I was on just about every dating app that you could be on. We’re talking Hinge, Coffee Meets Bagel (I doubt this is even still in business), Match, Tinder, Bumble…I could keep going.

My wind-down each evening was putting on a show and scrolling through my many dating apps. What’s interesting is that although I felt hopeless that I would meet someone anytime soon, I always found myself wondering, “what if this is it?”with each new “Hey, I’m so-and-so” or conversation that lasted more than just a couple of messages.

I went on awkward in-person dating app dates, tried to have friends set me up, and even attempted to go up to people I was interested in in public, but nothing was ever really that exciting. So throughout my twenties, I continued to be “the girl who’s never had a boyfriend before.” Sometimes I wore that title like a badge of honor; other times I felt embarrassed when people would look at me sideways after finding that out.

Sometimes I felt like it made people not take me seriously or write me off as someone who wasn’t ready for a relationship because I hadn’t been in one before. But with any new experience, isn’t it just about getting that first opportunity, or for someone to take a chance on you, for it to change everything?

I realize this is making me sound like I spent my twenties going from date to date waiting to be chosen, but in reality, I was very picky, and I wasn’t about to go that long just to settle for someone who wanted to date me. Deep down, my lack of relationship experience stemmed from knowing I was worthy of what I was looking for and that I was willing to wait as long as it took to find it.

Oftentimes, people are relationship-avoidant because they maybe came from an unstable home or didn’t have strong examples of a loving relationship to model what they were looking for after. I was the opposite—I came from a loving home, my parents are still together, and I had plenty of good examples in my life of stable relationships. But even with that strong foundation, I did have a deep-rooted fear of being in a relationship.

I think when you go for so long without something, or wanting something, you start to put it on a pedestal. I did that with relationships and my idea of what life would be like when I was in one. When you pedestalize something like that, you’re putting it above yourself and what you believe is actually possible for you.

Because of that, I spent much of my time dating so scared of the actual goal of being in a relationship. So likely, with every date I went on, I was subconsciously pushing it away because I was so scared of it, or continuing to protect myself by wearing my comfortable armor of being the girl who had never been in a relationship before.

Because I went so long without a real relationship, I often get asked how I was able to know how to choose the right person for myself when I chose my now partner.

If I were to break it down, I believe two key things helped me know when I met the right person and be able to trust it without having been in relationships beforehand.

First, I tried to take away something from every date or dating experience as a learning experience of what I liked and what I disliked.

Second, I realized how to own my shortcomings in relationships rather than see them as something to be ashamed of.

Every relationship we have is a mirror. I’ve heard this often in talks of psychology and spirituality—that the people in your life reflect or represent the qualities you either have or those you’re wishing to see in yourself. It’s often why, when seeking relationships, we seek out what is familiar—what we grew up with, either through the dynamics we saw from our parents or from other close adults in our lives.

Because of this, I believe that every relationship we have can act as a lesson and a reflection of how we see ourselves. This can be true for romantic relationships, friendships, and other relationship dynamics as well.

It is true I had never been in a relationship before meeting my now husband, but I’ve had many relationships in my life. I have relationships with friends, family, coworkers, and people I interact with daily. Just because I didn’t know how to be in a romantic relationship doesn’t mean that I didn’t know how to be in a relationship at all.

If you’re in a similar boat right now and are looking for a relationship without prior experience, my best advice to you would be to reframe how you see yourself around the topic of relationships. When I was unsuccessful in dating, I went into dates thinking that I was less than or not capable of a successful relationship because I was inexperienced. I went into each date thinking that I was starting from a deficit when really I had so much to offer.

If you’ve never had a relationship before, yes, you don’t have romantic experience. But what you do have is no baggage and no hang-ups around relationships. You haven’t been burned by an ex and aren’t destined to repeat those same patterns in your next relationship. You don’t have difficult exes or a longing for “the one that got away.” What you have is a clean slate and, hopefully, an open heart, which is actually an ideal place to start a relationship from.

Once I saw myself as a catch because of my lack of experience rather than “not enough,” everything changed for me. I no longer went into dating experiences feeling like I needed to apologize for who I was or for having a lack of experience. Yes, some people did write me off or didn’t take me seriously, but none of those people were actually right for me. I decided to own my lived experience and be upfront with it as a badge of honor rather than something to be ashamed of.

The right person will not care if you’ve had a lack of dating experience. This was actually a positive for my husband, as someone who came from past relationships where he had been cheated on.

What I did differently when meeting him was saying,

“Hey, this is me. I don’t have a lot of experience, so all I ask is that if along the way there are some unwritten rules that only people who have had relationships would know, let me know, because I’ve never done this before.”

It turns out there was nothing I didn’t know or needed to learn. Yes, things were new and a little foreign at first, but like I said earlier, I had been in relationships before. I had lived experience of being in successful relationships with friends, family, etc., and now I was able to take that experience into a romantic relationship and create that same success.

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Some people will need to have lots of relationships to know if something is right for them. Others, like myself, will go into dating knowing exactly what they’re looking for and seeking it in each new person they meet.

What is helpful, if you are someone who hasn’t had a lot of dating experience, is to seek out what you’re looking for in the relationships that you’re able to witness. If it’s helpful, you can keep a list of the qualities that you’re looking for in a person. These qualities are less about them being 6’3” with washboard abs—those are nice—but you want your list to focus on the true core values you’re seeking in a person.

Attraction is great, but deep, meaningful relationships that last are built on shared values and a similar vision for how you want to live your life.

If you really have no idea, think about the relationships that you witness every day. They could be your parents’ relationship, your friend’s relationship with her boyfriend, or even relationships you see through social media. You can even do this by watching your favorite shows and noticing what qualities draw you to certain characters and how that applies to the type of relationship or person you are seeking.

Ask yourself:

“What is it about my parents’ relationship or my friend’s relationship that I love? What do I know I would never want for myself?”

You can start gathering information through these close relationships and gain insight into exactly what it is you’re looking for so that when you meet this person, you’ll know. You won’t have to second-guess yourself and think, “Well, I’ve never been in a relationship, so I don’t know what’s right for me.” You will have observed exactly the type of relationship you’re seeking and noted the qualities you want by looking at the relationships already around you.

The last element that helps when going into a relationship without prior experience is to work on the relationship you have with yourself. Like I said earlier, relationships are mirrors. When you don’t have a romantic relationship to work on, the best relationship to nurture is the one with yourself. I did a lot of inner work while going through my own experiences with dating and continue to do so now while in a relationship.

I worked on becoming the best version of myself, learning to love the qualities I have—both good and bad—and truly getting to know myself. When you know yourself, see your value, and trust what you have to offer, no one can tell you otherwise. You won’t go into your first relationship after waiting so long and lose yourself in it. You will be grounded in who you are and able to meet someone who truly aligns with you.

I’ve used this before, but I love the quote from The Perks of Being a Wallflower:

“We accept the love that we think we deserve.”

What I want for you is to spend the time you have while seeking a relationship to truly understand what you deserve. Get to know yourself deeply so you can trust what you have to offer and recognize someone who is worthy of that.

The time you spend being single is incredibly important. Work on your relationship with yourself, learning to trust your worth and your deservingness of the love you are seeking. It’s not about becoming a cocky person or creating an inflated sense of self—it’s about knowing yourself on the deepest level. It’s about understanding your value and what you want so that you can enter dating with clarity and confidence.

So the next time you go on a date or start developing feelings for someone, don’t begin by self-sabotaging or assuming you’re starting from a deficit. Don’t let the fear of the unknown stop you from experiencing something you truly want.

At the end of the day, every single one of us wants to be loved. What sets you apart is trusting that you are not only good enough for a relationship, but that you deserve to be loved for who you are.

When you approach dating with that belief—paired with an open heart—you create space for something real, no matter your level of experience. And when the right person comes along, they won’t love you for your experience—they’ll love you for you.

Everyone reading this wants something. Whether it’s a job, a relationship, a family, or even just a nap, we are all in a place of wanting or waiting. I think that’s what makes life beautiful, but also extremely frustrating. We are all after something, and if we look around, we can see so many examples of people who already have it. It makes us turn the finger back on ourselves and wonder, “Why not me? What do I not have that they do?” We start to think maybe we’ll just never have it.

I feel like this all the time, but it’s paired with self-judgment: Why am I always wanting more? Why can’t I just be happy with what I have? It seems to be the human condition, but why does it seem like, for some people, it’s just easy?

I don’t have the answer to that. For some people, things may be easier. But what I’ve realized is that just because something comes easily to others doesn’t mean you’re not meant to have it at all.

The longest wait of my life thus far was finding a relationship. I met my now-husband at 29. He was my first relationship and my first long-term dating experience. It’s interesting to see people’s reactions to this, because it’s either, “Oh my God, I feel like that too—I’m (insert age) and single,” or it’s the other side, where people say, “29 is not even long. Get over it.” The internet is funny that way. But whether you think 29 is a long time or a short time, to me it felt like an eternity.

I didn’t set out to be the girl who had never had a boyfriend before; it just sort of happened that way. When entering the “dating world,” I set out to find something real and a committed relationship. But if I’m being honest, I didn’t expect it to take as long as it did. Deep down, I knew I was too sensitive to experience a lot of breakups and invest in multiple serious relationships. I also had a strong sense of the type of person I was looking for, and until I met him, I was willing to wait.

And because this always pops into people’s minds—no, I did not wait for marriage, and I wasn’t waiting for a relationship for religious or external reasons. I was simply waiting for something to feel right, and for me, that waiting lasted until I turned 29.

I did an earlier post on my dating history—or lack thereof—so I’ll spare you the details here.

What I want to do with this post is reframe the wait. If I try to come up with reasons for why my wait was so long, I can only do that by looking backward. The biggest lesson I’ve gathered from looking back is that I wasn’t being punished or held back for having to wait so long. I was actually on a very specific timeline—I just wasn’t aware of it yet.

There were many nights I spent while single, staring at my ceiling and asking God, “Where is he?!” Sometimes I was quite dramatic about it, like I was living in my own personal version of a romantic comedy—just with less romance and more comedy—feeling like I was the butt of the joke. It seemed like everyone around me was getting into long-term relationships, easily meeting “the one,” or at least having great dates and dating experiences. Meanwhile, I was meeting people who tried to buy me designer shoes without knowing my shoe size so I would like them (LA is an interesting place), talking about how much fun we were going to have together and planning our future, only to ghost me and never be heard from again, or string me along claiming they wanted something serious when they did not. The wait can be frustrating and downright exhausting, but looking back now, it all makes sense.

When I met my now-husband, my life completely changed. That’s not to say that when you meet “the one” you should change yourself in ways you don’t want to. But so many events unfolded after meeting him that only made sense for the period of life I was in.

I “met” him in 2020, right at the start of COVID. He had direct-messaged me on Instagram a few times, so I was familiar with his handle. But it wasn’t until the world shut down that I paid attention to who I was actually talking to on the other side of the phone. We first messaged via Instagram, then texted, and eventually I cold FaceTimed him one day after a late-night happy hour Zoom with friends. We were in two different states—his being one I had never been to—building a relationship through technology while having never met in person. After a few months, I finally worked up the courage to meet him, convincing my parents it was a smart plan to fly and meet a stranger in the middle of a pandemic. Long story short, that leap of faith worked out. I am now married to him, living in Ohio, and the mom of our soon-to-be two children.

Timing is everything. If I had met my husband at, say, 26, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today, or the road to us ending up together would have been much bumpier. If I had met him any younger, I likely would have ignored his messages, talked myself out of taking that leap of faith, or done something to self-sabotage what I now see as the best thing that ever happened to me. Though they were frustrating, I learned something from every single dating experience I had. I became my own person. I learned how to live on my own. I took chances, tried and failed at things, and figured out what I was truly looking for in someone to spend my life with.

When you’re in that in-between waiting period, you don’t care about lessons or enjoying the process—you just want the thing, right now. But my reframe for you is this: What would it mean if the thing you’re waiting for dropped into your life this second? If it’s a relationship, would you feel ready, worthy, and prepared to run off into the sunset together? If it’s a job that requires moving to a different state, would you be willing and ready to do so? If it’s an influx of money you’ve been hoping for, would you know what to do with it, or would you spend it quickly and end up right back where you started?

If I’m being really honest with myself, if all the things I wanted happened right this second, I likely wouldn’t feel like I had done enough to earn them, or I would feel overwhelmed and unsure what to do with them. The reframe is to remember that timing is everything—and it’s unique to each of us. Can you trust that you are on your own very specific timeline, created for you and you alone? Can you hold onto faith and not settle for a quick fix just because your friends already have the thing you’re looking for?

In my case, every moment of waiting was worth it. My life unfolded in such a beautiful way once I met my husband that no plan or timeline I had created in my head could have come close to how it actually turned out. So if you are in that wait, try to hold onto the faith that when the thing you’re asking for inevitably finds you, it will make so much sense. Your life will be ready to unfold in a way that feels perfectly meant for you.

Trust that one day you’ll look back and see all the twists and turns life led you through to take you exactly where you were meant to be. And while you wait, gather every good experience, every lesson, and every opportunity to grow into the future version of yourself who will be fully ready when your wait finally ends. Because life isn’t just about the big moments—it’s about all the little ones that lead you there.

I hope your thing finds you soon, and I hope it’s more beautiful than you can even imagine when it does.

I’m currently 18 weeks pregnant with our second baby, due in July! The double-edged sword of being pregnant for the second time is that you know what to expect—and you can also anticipate how you’ll feel as you move through each stage of pregnancy, the good and the bad. As you can imagine (and as many know firsthand), the first trimester is brutal. It’s even more challenging this time around with a toddler to take care of simultaneously.

I go into detail in an earlier post, but because I had such a hard time during the first trimester, I was determined to make the second trimester my time. I constantly repeated to myself during the throes of first-trimester sickness, “Just get to the second trimester. Everything will be so much better, and you know it!” It felt like an actual lifetime to get through those first few months of pregnancy, but now that I’m finally here, I don’t plan to take a second of it for granted.

During what I like to refer to as the “first trimester uglies,” I made a vow to myself that I would create my own personal glow-up in the second trimester. Once I had the energy, I swore I would start exercising again, restart my early morning routines before my daughter woke up, wear something besides sweatpants, and help myself feel better overall as my body continued to go through the many changes that pregnancy brings.

Now that I’m five weeks into the second trimester, my glow-up has officially begun. If you’re a pregnant mom-to-be or just need some pick-me-ups during the winter slump, I’ve put together some links to things I’m doing and collecting to help myself feel my best throughout the many transitions of pregnancy. Some things are new, and some I’ve used for years, but everything is something I’m using, wearing, or doing to help me feel the best I can during this big life stage I’m currently in.

So here are all my favorites for my second-trimester glow-up!

Skincare

I generally know when I’m pregnant because my skin starts to do weird things. During my first pregnancy, it would peel off in sheets, I got dark spots the second I even thought about the sun, and I had random birthmarks show up out of nowhere. Those strange skin changes are already happening again, so here is my current pregnancy-safe skincare routine.

Stretch marks: I was lucky enough not to get any belly stretch marks during my first pregnancy, and I’m determined to have the same results this time around. I currently use a combination of belly oil and unscented lotion at least twice a day. Unfortunately, I wasn’t as cautious as I thought because I recently noticed I’ve started to develop stretch marks on the backs of my arms near my armpits. It seemed to happen overnight—I had matching marks on both sides. So, a note to self: moisturize your belly, breast area, and, if you want to be extra cautious, even the backs of your arms near your armpits. Who knew that was a place stretch marks could pop up?

Sun protection: If you’re newly pregnant, another thing I urge you to do—if you don’t already—is wear face sunscreen. Even if you’re inside on the cloudiest winter day, put it on. Melasma is no joke, and I wish I had taken it more seriously the first time around. I plan to apply face sunscreen daily this time and am doing my best to wear a hat whenever I go outside. I sometimes have to argue with my toddler because she has decided she doesn’t like me in hats, lol, but it’s necessary. It will save you a lot of work postpartum trying to fade new dark spots that appear from hormones and sun exposure. Here are some of my current sunscreen favorites.

Wellness

If you’ve seen my pregnancy cravings series on social media, you might think I’m the opposite of wellness since all I seem to crave is sugar. But here are some of the things I’m taking to support myself this pregnancy, including my prenatal vitamins and other supplements.

Fitness: I’ve finally gotten back into a good workout routine now that my energy has returned this trimester. I like to focus on low-impact strength workouts during pregnancy and postpartum. I try to avoid jumping or excessive cardio, but that’s mostly a personal preference. I always recommend the Sculp Society’s prenatal and postpartum programs. They break everything up weekly and are so great for pelvic floor and getting a better understanding of coordinating your breath with movements that are supportive to your changing body.

Mindfulness: I find that pregnancy can be just as mentally taxing as it is physical. I’m someone who needs to maintain a consistent mindfulness practice in order to feel my best—especially during big life changes like pregnancy. Meditation has been the only thing that consistently helps me fall asleep these days, and it’s something I’ll lean on even more once pregnancy insomnia hits. I went into detail in an earlier post about my manifestation process, which I continue to use as a way to support my nervous system during pregnancy. The program I mentioned in that post is To Be Magnetic. I’ve also enjoyed using meditation apps like Calm and Headspace for quick audio sessions.

Here are some other wellness favorites that have been supporting me during pregnancy—like a pregnancy pillow that’s actually worth the cost and a new self tan that I’ve been loving that’s clean!

Fashion

I grew up in a household where my mom always put an outfit on. Even if no one was going to see her, she would do her makeup and wear a real outfit for the day—even if she didn’t get ready until the afternoon. I try to live by those same principles because it genuinely helps me feel better when I’m wearing something comfortable that still feels like me. Here are some maternity-friendly pieces I have or have started collecting!

Makeup

I’ve also found that when I’m not feeling my best, having my makeup done helps me feel more put together. I know that might sound superficial, but it makes a difference for me. Here is my current clean makeup routine, including a few recent favorites.

The Girl Shower

Whether you’re already a mom or about to become one, the shower will become your sanctuary. Whenever I had pregnancy insomnia, the shower was the first place I would go to calm my body and reset. Here are my current hair and shower essentials that I’m loving.

I’d love to include a monthly roundup of all the things I’m loving or collecting to support whatever stage of life you may be in. If there’s anything you’d like to see in next month’s roundup, let me know. And if nothing else, I hope you find something here that helps you feel good—especially if you’re going through this incredible pregnancy journey alongside me.

Until next time. 🤍

So, the secret’s out! And thank goodness it is, because I’m not someone who likes to keep secrets—unless it’s not my secret to tell. I’m pregnant with our second child, and our second baby is due in July!

As a July baby myself, it feels like we’re starting a July baby cult, as my friend joked. It feels like the kind of cult that wouldn’t actually be that scary to join… or maybe that’s how all cults start. Anyways, I’m partial, but I have a love for summer birthdays, so my husband and I wanted to start trying in hopes that we could add to our summer birthday celebrations. Sitting in this chair typing this while locked inside during winter snowstorm Fern is making me want to speed up to summer as we speak. I’m fifteen weeks pregnant and newly in the second trimester, so we have a ways to go, but we are very excited to be growing our little family.

Before I continue, I do want to be mindful of the fact that pregnancy and getting pregnant is such a sensitive topic and send love to those who are struggling or having a much harder time than we did trying to conceive. I hope this post is something you find helpful, but know that it’s always okay to set boundaries with content like this to protect your heart and do what you need for yourself during a sensitive time.

I’m going to discuss our journey trying to conceive, some of the anxieties and fears around miscarriage, and some experiences related to the mental and physical aspects of pregnancy, so I want to call that out before you proceed in case this is something you don’t wish to read further. Know that my heart truly does go out to you if that is your experience, and I’m sending a lot of love your way.

Our two children will be exactly two years apart. Many have asked if we intentionally wanted them to be two years apart, but really, I just wanted to give my body and myself at least a year of not being pregnant.

Since I’ve already experienced the joyous, exciting, and up-and-down experience that pregnancy is, I admit that it took some time to amp myself up to get ready to do it all over again. Pregnancy and children bring nothing but more love and all the excitement life has to offer, but the memories of restless leg syndrome, the daily struggle of moving, the insomnia, and basically the entire hell that is the first trimester can be hard to hype yourself up for.

So yes, all of that took some mental gymnastics to get ready for, but it is all outweighed by that incredible feeling at the finish line when they place your baby on your chest. That unexplainable feeling is why, since the dawn of time, women have been having and continue to have babies over and over again. That beautiful, indescribable, incredible moment where time stands still and you get to meet the being you’ve spent months growing—the being that makes every part of it worth it.

But since that beautiful end goal is still a ways away, let’s talk about the first trimester and how I survived it this time with a toddler by my side.

First, it’s true what they say—the first trimester is HARD—but nothing compares to doing it while also taking care of other children. There is nothing worse than trying to show up as your best self for your kid when you yourself have 1% to give. There were multiple times during the first few months of pregnancy that I cried to my husband, admitting, “This is so much harder than I thought it would be,” and feeling like a complete failure of a mom because I felt like I was giving so little to my toddler.

It felt like anytime I wasn’t up getting her food, drinks, or changing her diaper, I had to be horizontal. It was like having the flu for three months straight with nothing that provided relief. At least with the flu, you can take medicine or knock yourself out at night with some NyQuil. But no—with the joy of pregnancy, you get to experience and be present for it all. No drugs, no outs, just pure willpower and the hope that soon you’ll cross the goal line into the second trimester.

The second pregnancy is so much different than the first. We felt this way from the moment we saw the two lines on the pregnancy test. My husband and I had just started trying, so we were shocked to find out that we were pregnant so quickly. I did, however, make a point of going into trying to get pregnant again this time around with a more easeful mindset.

The first time we tried to get pregnant, I put so much undue pressure on myself. I was obsessed with tracking my ovulation and even more obsessed with taking pregnancy tests. I don’t even want to know how much money I spent on boxes and boxes of tests. I had a bad habit of obsessing over every sensation in my body and often testing far before a missed period “just to see.” I was constantly giving myself unnecessary disappointment.

The first time we tried getting pregnant with our daughter, it probably took us about six months to have a successful pregnancy. I had gotten two positive pregnancy tests before the one that was actually me being pregnant with my daughter. The first positive was likely because I was testing way too much. I got a positive pregnancy test, was overly excited, and I kid you not—minutes later, I started to get my period.

The second, I believe, was a chemical pregnancy. I had a positive pregnancy test and got to celebrate and enjoy it for about a week until I started to bleed about a week or so later. That one was really tough and, at the time, devastating to both me and my husband. It was such a short time to be pregnant, but any time you get a positive test, you’re filled with hope and possibility, and it feels like your whole world comes crashing down when that doesn’t come to fruition.

There was an added challenge with this one, as my sister-in-law was also pregnant with her third. We told them shortly after we found out we were pregnant. We were excited at the thought that the cousins would have been not even a week apart, but it just wasn’t meant to be.

Those experiences were in the back of my mind going into trying to conceive our second child, but I really wanted to approach things differently this time around. What’s nice about trying again after already having a child is knowing that you can get pregnant and that your body is capable because you’ve done it once before. That was the shield I armored myself with this time around.

My approach to trying to conceive baby number two was to not track my ovulation, but instead to have a general idea of when my period would be and when I might ovulate. I didn’t use tracking apps or ovulation tests, and I tried not to overly force the frequency of the act, if you know what I mean. Essentially, I wanted to have more fun this time around and allow myself to re-evaluate after a few months if we needed to. My only rule for myself was to not take a pregnancy test until I actually missed my period.

This was a huge shift of control for me based on our last experience trying to conceive, but I felt so much lighter and more at ease this time around because of it.

To our disbelief, we got pregnant with baby number two after our first month of trying. Even in the first few weeks, I was mentally preparing myself for something to go wrong because surely things couldn’t be so easy for me. My parents were in town when I took the first test, so I came downstairs with the positive test and immediately showed my husband and my parents, who were also in the room.

I just handed the test to my husband and said, “Look at this.” My parents looked at it and both said, “Wow, that looks positive.” It is so different with your second—obviously you’re so excited, but there’s just a calmness to it, like, “Okay, here we go again.” The first involved much more of a to-do—balloons, surprises, and big reactions. The second was just like, “Okay, cool—yay, baby number two!” Both beautiful and filled with joy, but funny when you compare the reactions.

With my first pregnancy, after having those two almost-ones, I constantly felt like I was sitting on the edge of my seat, hyper-aware of every symptom in my body. I remember being desperate for morning sickness or symptoms to make it all feel real. I was often plagued with over checking everything—from taking multiple tests throughout the first trimester to constantly (TMI alert) checking for any signs of blood or things going wrong. It felt like I was in a constant state of paranoia for three months.

Now that I am pregnant with our second, I was happy to put off those first-trimester symptoms for as long as possible and didn’t allow my mind to drift to those dark places as it did with my first pregnancy. Pregnancy is just as much mental as it is physical, and I really wanted to get ahold of my mental state this time around.

I leaned on the mantra that “this is real, my body is capable, and this pregnancy is meant to be,” and if the mantras didn’t help, the multitude of first-trimester symptoms definitely did the rest of the heavy lifting.

So, how was this first trimester different with a toddler? I’m not going to lie—it was extremely challenging. I knew what to expect, but I wasn’t prepared for how that would feel while also taking care of my daughter.

When I was pregnant with our daughter, Remy, I was nauseous all day long but rarely got physically ill. I was tired and often needed to lie down and take a nap on the couch with our bulldog, Dixie, by my side. I had lots of food aversions and physically could not drink any water that wasn’t fresh from a water bottle. Coffee gave me the ick, and my skin was doing weird things, like peeling off in sheets anytime I put any product on my face.

my pregnancy skincare routine

This pregnancy, I was also extremely nauseous all day long, but especially at night. Like clockwork, every day at 5 p.m., I would get so incredibly nauseous that I had to physically lie down and be in darkness. That would have been fine if I could actually do that, but generally the second I shut my eyes, my daughter would be poking me in the face saying, “Mommy, mommy, uppa, uppa.”

I also got physically ill almost daily this pregnancy. I’d like to say that went away by the second trimester, but I found myself gagging right before I got my daughter up from her crib this morning at 15 weeks. My getting sick also ramped up at 12 weeks, where I got sick every day at 10 a.m. like clockwork. I’m crossing my fingers because I believe the nausea has finally subsided, but you never can be too sure.

I managed all of these symptoms this time around by essentially powering through or just doing what I had to do to get by. I was on such a great streak of waking up in the morning before my daughter every day, but the second I found out I was pregnant, I immediately turned off all my alarms and tried to get as much sleep as I could.

I was so physically exhausted this pregnancy that my body would shut down and needed at least a 15-minute nap once a day. I did the only thing I could think of and cuddled my daughter while we watched a lot of TV. I napped while holding her so that if she moved, I would wake up. Her show of choice these days is Trash Truck on Netflix.

I don’t love screen time, but you truly have to do what you can, and for us, that meant way too much screen time.

I honestly felt like such a bad mom during those two months of first-trimester sickness—especially knowing that a new baby brings tremendous changes, not just for your life but for your child’s as well. Soon, it will no longer just be me and my daughter all day, but her sibling too.

Knowing that, and the fact that I physically wasn’t myself, was really hard for me to rationalize during the first trimester. I did my best to take her on outings and entertain her as much as I could, but most of our time was honestly spent cuddling while she watched her shows. She was obviously having the time of her life, but I felt like such a failure of a mom during that time.

I know we’ll soon forget about this once the second-trimester sweet spot hits and eventually when her sibling is here, but in the moment, you can’t help but feel so guilty and wish you could will your body to feel normal again.

As far as products or things I leaned on to help with nausea, there were a few that offered some relief. My doctor wrote me a prescription to help with nausea, but our pharmacy didn’t carry it, and I was never able to get it transferred, which was disheartening—especially during the throes of sickness.

I never went anywhere without ginger chews, nausea lollipops, “just in case” crackers, and nausea bands. Whenever I’d get afternoon headaches or need to be in darkness, I used my headache hat that I keep in the fridge. I’ll link some of the things that “helped,” but honestly, the first trimester is just a bitch. I’m so sorry if you’re currently in the thick of it—I truly know how you feel, and I’m cheering you on.

first trimester saviors

As far as movement and prenatal workouts go, I completely gave up my workout regimen the second the nausea and morning sickness began. I did the same thing during my first pregnancy, but that was rooted in fear that I’d do something to harm the pregnancy. This time around, I didn’t have those same fears because I saw how much regular movement helped me during my first pregnancy, but physically I just wasn’t up for it.

I tried going on walks when the weather was nicer, but I’d always come home and get sick from the change in smells from outside to inside. Now that I’m starting to feel better, I’ve been slowly incorporating workouts again. I don’t do anything longer than 30 minutes and focus on strength training.

One app I highly recommend for pre- and postnatal workouts is The Sculpt Society. Megan Roup has an incredible program that breaks workouts down by pregnancy week, so you can tailor your movement and energy as you progress. I also did her postnatal program after giving birth, which was extremely helpful in rebuilding pelvic floor strength postpartum and finally getting myself back to a point where I didn’t pee every time I sneezed.

One other thing I felt this pregnancy was what I like to call the “first trimester uglies.” Maybe it was because I felt so ill or because it lined up with the winter uglies, but I was NOT feeling myself these past few months.

I really want to feel better in my body and my clothes this time around. It’s so exciting to watch your bump grow, but it can be really challenging when your clothes don’t fit and your body doesn’t feel like your own. Everyone experiences this differently, but I remember really struggling with these feelings the first time around.

It was also the first time in my life I had real boobs, and I honestly did not know what to do with them. I remember packing for our babymoon and panic-buying bikinis at the last minute because I didn’t have a single top that would cover my newly developed breasts. It seemed like the second I got a positive pregnancy test this time around, my boobs returned with a vengeance, like, “Did you miss us?” So I’ll link some clothes I’ve started collecting so I have pieces to turn to as I progress throughout this pregnancy, if you feel the same.

maternity friendly clothing I'm shopping

I’m so happy to say we’re pregnant again—and even happier to say I made it through the first trimester while taking care of my toddler. I’m sure there’s no perfect way to handle it, but if you’re currently going through it, or especially if you’re beating yourself up for not being able to show up as your best self because of sickness, consider this your permission slip to let that go.

I won’t say it will be over before you know it, because it felt like an eternity to me. But what I will say is that you are already a good mom, your body is doing incredible things, and you will make it through to the other side just like I did.

And if this is your first pregnancy, please—for the love of God—if you can, indulge in every second of rest, binge-watching reality TV, and afternoon naps on the couch. You’ll cherish that time forever, and it will be where your mind goes if you go on to have more children and experience a very different version of the first trimester the second time around.

It may have felt like I physically dragged my body over the finish line of the second trimester—because I did—but I can say that I’m proud of myself and feel a little bit stronger because of it. And as far as the methods you lean on to get through first-trimester hell—like how I utilized television—despite the millions of social media clips claiming screen time is the worst, you have to do what you have to do.

My toddler got to watch lots of new Disney movies she hadn’t seen before, and she loved every second of it. I’ll never be able to watch another episode of Trash Truck without feeling queasy, but at least I’ll always have something that reminds me of this time—when it was just me and my toddler at home during the day, making it through before our family of three becomes a family of four.

Thank you to everyone who sent me kind words of congratulations. I love sharing our lives with others because it makes me feel connected to so many people whose stories are similar to my own. So from my family to yours—thank you. I’m so glad to be going on this next journey of motherhood alongside you.

Cheers to the second trimester!

Each year, I try to take inventory of the previous year before wrapping things up with a bow around the holidays. This time of year is the most exciting and wonderful time of the year, but it’s easy to get wrapped up in the shopping, the cooking, the traveling, and the pressure of getting everything done before the end of Q4. The hustle and bustle can make it easy to rush through everything and feel like you need to take a two-week nap by the time Christmas rolls around. Once my last thing for work is done or I cross that final to-do off my list, I always try to take a moment to pause, reflect, and look back on my year.

A lot of people make New Year’s resolutions or the cute lists on social media of what’s “in” or “out” for the next year. I like to look back on the lists I made the previous year to see what goals I met, what I still want to work on, and what I actually don’t even care about anymore going into the upcoming year.

Looking back on 2025, I attempted to implement a lot of healthier habits. Some were physical, some mental, and some spiritual, but they all had an underlying theme of trying to make myself feel just a little bit better that year. I like to take inventory to see what actually worked for me, what I’m excited to keep doing, and what seemed to really help others but didn’t make any difference for me at all. It helps me prioritize what matters, what actually makes a difference, and where there’s room for more growth and betterment in the new year.

I made a list of the five healthier habits I implemented in 2025 that I want to take with me into 2026. So here it goes!

1. Waking up before my baby

I have a 17-month-old who, through sleep training and learning to fall asleep on her own, is now consistently sleeping through the night and waking up each day around 6:30 a.m. I’m mostly a SAHM, so my days are usually spent at home with my daughter, with my schedule revolving around when she’s awake and when she’s asleep. She now takes one nap a day around noon for two to three hours if I’m lucky, which is the window where anything and everything I want to get done has to happen.

I quickly realized this year that this window, although really nice to have, is very small. Only the main priorities get done, which usually consists of me resetting the house from whatever my toddler got into in the morning and prepping for whatever she plans to get into in the afternoon. “Me time” was scarce and didn’t really happen unless I did what I like to call adult sleep training—teaching myself to become a morning person.

I can say I’m still not a morning person, but learning to get up 30 minutes to an hour before my daughter made such a big difference in my day. It helped me show up better for her once I accomplished one thing in the morning just for myself. If I have time, it’s a workout. If I’m short on time, it’s a quick meditation, shower, or simply stretching on the floor alone before the day becomes hers. It’s a habit I began in 2025 that I definitely want to prioritize in 2026.

2. ARMRA Colostrum

I was seeing people talk about ARMRA everywhere—on podcasts, from my friends, and from influencers I follow online. I felt like I was seeing it EVERYWHERE. I only learned what colostrum even was when I gave birth to my daughter in 2024. Colostrum is the first nutrition we receive in life, often referred to as “liquid gold.”

ARMRA consists of over 400 bioactive nutrients and has tons of benefits for health, beauty, energy, and immunity. I started taking ARMRA, usually in the mornings, to jumpstart my day and noticed such a big difference in my energy and how I feel overall. The extra beauty benefits are also a plus—I definitely noticed a difference in the feel of my skin and how fast my hair was growing, which was especially important to me postpartum.

I take two to three scoops a day, usually with water, or I’ll dry scoop the unflavored version. If you’re wanting to try it out, you can use my code SYDNEYW for 15% off. I highly recommend it for an easy health boost to add to your new year. I will link it HERE!

3. Making more non-toxic swaps

I watched the documentary Not So Pretty a few years back, and it literally made me sick to my stomach. It exposed many of the highly toxic chemicals that women, especially, are using in their everyday routines—from makeup to hair and beauty products. It sent me on a downward spiral of tossing out most of my makeup and hair products and spending way too much time shopping for replacements while reading every ingredient.

This documentary led me down a path of trying to implement healthier habits where I can. It can be more than overwhelming, so I try to take it one category at a time. This year, I tackled cleaning products. I find it easier and more digestible to make big changes by focusing on one brand I like and sticking to it.

After throwing out most of our cleaning products, I landed on Branch Basics. I listened to a couple of podcast episodes with their founders and was hooked ever since. They are a non-toxic, fragrance-free, plant- and mineral-based concentrate that you mix with water. I love their concentrate and use their all-purpose spray multiple times a day. It also makes me feel so much better cleaning around my daughter and wiping down surfaces she uses, knowing I’m using something non-toxic.

We have cleaning ladies who come once a month, and I noticed I always got headaches and had to air out the house after they cleaned because I had become hypersensitive after switching to Branch Basics. After a couple of cleanings, I asked them to use my cleaning products instead, which they were more than happy to do. Now, I no longer get post-house-clean headaches.

4. Turning my phone red

We all know our phones are bad and that blue light is harmful, etc., etc., but sometimes it’s just hard to avoid using them in the technological age we live in. I would love to be the type of person who sleeps with their phone in the other room and doesn’t see a flicker of blue light once the sun sets, but I’m just not.

One swap I made to help was turning my iPhone screen red at night. I find that it helps me avoid endless scrolling at the end of the day, and if there’s something I have to do before bed, it doesn’t jolt my energy or wire me awake. Looking at a deep red, low-light screen makes it much easier to wind down.

If you’re curious, here’s how to do it:

Step 1: Configure the color filter

Go to Settings > Accessibility.

Tap Display & Text Size.

Select Color Filters and turn the toggle on.

Choose Color Tint.

Move the Hue slider all the way to the right to get a pure red.

Move the Intensity slider all the way to the right for the deepest effect.

Step 2: Set up a shortcut to toggle the filter

Go to Settings > Accessibility.

Scroll down and tap Accessibility Shortcut.

Select Color Filters from the list.

From now on, you can triple-click the side button (on newer iPhones) or the Home button (on older iPhones) to turn the red screen on and off.

5. Going out of my way to be nice on the internet

Let’s face it—we spend a lot of time on our phones and a significant amount of time scrolling and taking in other people’s lives. As a content creator, I like to think I spend more time contributing to the algorithm rather than consuming, but I do fancy myself a good scroll here and there.

I noticed myself scrolling mindlessly, liking things here and there, so I gave myself a silly challenge this year to leave comments more often. Yes, it’s nice to comment because maybe the algorithm will favor you or it helps you work the system, but what I really noticed was how good it felt to simply write something nice on other people’s profiles.

I’d leave comments on the work of people I know, but often it was complete strangers or videos that weren’t viral or wildly popular. I challenged myself to comment on at least ten people’s posts every time I opened Instagram or TikTok. After a few comments, I started losing count, and I found myself getting joy from actively thinking of nice things to say to others. It became my silly little challenge that left me feeling good and with a much fuzzier feeling in my belly—versus the dirty, gross feeling I used to have after getting lost in a deep, dark scroll.

With 2025 coming to a close, I’d like to add a couple more things to my list of what I want to be better at implementing in the new year.

1. Leaving my phone in the other room

Nothing makes you feel worse than realizing you’ve unintentionally lost yourself in your phone while your sweet baby is on the other side, wondering what you’re looking at or why they’ve lost your attention. I started leaving my phone in the other room anytime my daughter was around and turning the volume up in case someone needed to reach me. I found that hiding it in the same room was too tempting—it truly had to be in another room for me to resist the urge to pick it up.

I started this habit this year, but I know I could be so much better about it. I’m hoping to make it more consistent so I can be more present, especially in the moments I get to spend with my daughter.

2. Reading

I’m embarrassed to say I don’t think I made it through one entire book this year. Life with a child can make it difficult to do things like escape with a good book, and often I’m just too tired at the end of the day to get lost in one—let alone keep my eyes open. Still, I know I can do better in the new year. My 2026 goal is to get through at least one freaking book, and I better make that happen.

So that is my list! If you’re wanting to make your own, I love writing mine out in a journal or somewhere I know I can easily refer back to at the end of the following year. I find that it helps ground me in my intentions, lets me pat myself on the back for what I actually did, and helps me envision how I can make the new year even better for myself.

So, what are you taking with you into 2026?

I used to wear “being busy” as a badge of honor. If I slowed down or stopped moving at any point during my twenties, I felt like I was falling behind. I don’t know if this need came from living in the height of the “boss girl era,” living in New York City, or just my own fear of what would happen if I stopped pushing and actually sat with myself, but I never stopped chasing this moving target of what I thought would make me happy. You would think with all the “hustling” I did that I would be thriving, at the top of my game, or making tons of money, but I was actually just running on adrenaline—broke, my body full of inflammation, and constantly on the edge of burnout.

I was fed this narrative that the more you push and the harder you work, the more successful you will be. If that were true, then why—when I was at the height of my hustle era, at my most tired, my most “hardworking”—did I feel like I was getting nowhere? It felt like the promise that effort would equate to outcome was actually just a lie we were all fed.

I went to college in Manhattan, where I majored in dance, and continued to live in New York City after graduation, working toward and auditioning for my dream jobs. I always had to work one to two jobs to make ends meet as I attended auditions or castings throughout different hours of the day.

A typical day for me post-graduation, trying to make it as a professional dancer, looked like waking up at 4:30 a.m., literally rolling—sometimes sprinting—out of bed to make it to midtown to teach my 6/7/8 a.m. fitness classes, then rushing across town, eating on my walk or subway ride, to sign into that day’s audition. I’d wait in a muggy dance studio with a sea of 100 other girls until it was my time to audition, then go home, collapse for a short time, and go over Knicks City Dancer routines before attending rehearsal in the evening from 6–10 p.m.

Every day was some variation of this, but I was certainly keeping myself busy throughout my twenties and my time living in New York City. “Hustling” is part of the culture of that city. They likely call it “the city that never sleeps” not because everyone’s out partying and having a good time, but because everyone is just trying to work enough and make enough money to cover the high cost of living and expectations of that city.

Don’t get me wrong—I loved that period of my life: living on my own, figuring things out, betting on myself. But what may have looked from the outside like a flashy, fabulous life was really just a lot of me running around trying to stay as busy as I could so that I could tell myself I was doing New York “right.”

The other dynamic that played into my constant doing was my need to fit into a certain body type as a dancer and as a girl trying to make it in Manhattan. There is—or at least was when I was working as a professional dancer—this unspoken need to look a certain way to succeed. The height of this for me was when I became a Knicks City Dancer.

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The team and my coaches never said anything to me about my weight or needing to look a certain way physically, but internally, I had such high expectations and standards for myself that they didn’t have to. Every time I put that teeny two-piece costume on, I would cringe, so aware of every part of my body that I disapproved of or felt like I needed to improve. I was constantly comparing myself to the beautiful women around me, wanting to feel like I matched up to their fit and trim bodies.

To attempt to achieve this, I worked out seven days a week, sometimes multiple times a day. The time my overexercising reached its peak was when team auditions came up every summer. To prepare for auditions, I would literally do an hour of cardio in the morning, go teach class and take a fitness class, then go and do four hours of dance auditions in the evening. It was not healthy and not sustainable, but I felt this constant need to fit this mold by constantly doing and pushing. The work never stopped, and this need to force myself into my idea of perfect was all-consuming.

When you’re on a hamster wheel of constantly doing or working, often you don’t get to decide to get off—you get forced off. Hustle energy is an inherently masculine one. I’m not saying women can’t be hustlers, since everyone has both masculine and feminine energies, but I was doing my damnedest to exist in my masculine energy by shoving any feminine parts of myself down, seeing them as weak or not enough.

Instead of this masculine energy getting me success and achievement, I got burnout and inflammation. During the height of my hustle era, my body started to burn out. There was a period of time when I was dancing on the team where my hair was falling out, I was constantly breaking out in an unexplainable rash in my armpits, I had chronic stomach pain, and my body—although thin—actually hovered at 15 pounds heavier than it does now. All I did was work out, eat healthy, and “work hard,” but my body could not sustain it, and I was actually getting the opposite results.

I just want to go back and hug that version of myself and tell her that if you just let go and learn to love, accept, and go easy on yourself, everything will happen for you—and it will be so much easier and so much more sustainable. I would tell her the world is not going to end if you slow down.

My moment of being forced to slow down, much like everyone else’s, was when COVID hit. We all had to be away from our work environments, working out and eating at home, with not much to do other than just hanging out all day. I, like I’m sure many did, had a really hard time doing so much less.

When you put your worth into how much you can accomplish in a day, how many hours you can force yourself to work out, or how hard you can push yourself, doing nothing feels horrible. I was putting my worth into extenuating circumstances that I felt like I could control, and when I could no longer describe myself as the professional dancer, the list of accolades, or how much I could accomplish in a day, I didn’t know who I was.

When we identify as doers or hustlers, a slower-paced life is less of a luxury—like how it feels now—and more of a form of personal torture. I had to relearn how to do less and seek new ways to find value in myself other than what I did. I had to learn the art of slowing down.

The first change I noticed when slowing down was how my body changed. This happened over a period of a year, but what I noticed overall was how much less puffy I looked and felt every day. I was working out about a quarter of the amount that I did normally and eating the same, if not less healthy than before, and still I looked better. Instead of doing my normal long hours of high intensity, I shifted to doing lighter, shorter workouts using weights or my own body weight and walking when I could. I was putting so much less strain on my body, allowing it to finally do the healing that it needed to.

I think I was living in a perpetual state of fight or flight living on my own in Manhattan. Anxiety, adrenaline, and caffeine were the trifecta that I lived off of. I lived in a constant fear of messing up everything that I had worked so hard for that I was actually making myself sick. Every evening before I had a big Knicks City Dancer rehearsal, I’d get this debilitating knot in my stomach and horrible acid reflux. I thought it was something I was eating or something wrong with my stomach. After going to a few GI doctor appointments, I learned that there was nothing actually wrong with my stomach and that it was all in my head. I would wake up in the morning on game days with crippling anxiety knowing all that lay ahead for me that day. I got this same anxiety, funny enough, on the mornings that episodes of The Bachelor would air and I knew I would be scrutinized later that evening for anything I did or said on that night’s episode. Basically, I had created such a pressurized life for myself that, from the outside, might have looked cool and exciting—and it was—but on the inside I was a nervous, anxious wreck.

So during COVID, when my biggest fears were realized and all those accolades I was so fearful of losing actually did go away, what I was left with was just myself. When your “self,” as you know it for so long, is the titles you describe yourself as, you have to go through a period of figuring out who the hell you actually are without all the fluff. I did a lot of soul searching during the pandemic, and luckily, with the combination of slowing down, doing less, and finding ways to be happy that weren’t outside of myself, I was finally able to quiet all the noise in my head. The chatter went away, and with it my stomach aches, my anxiety rashes, and my fear of what would happen if I actually slowed down.

Slowing down for me meant doing so much less. I exercise less, I worry less, I schedule out my day so much less, and I actually just overall do less. What happened for me when I made this shift was that all the things I was trying to accomplish by doing actually just fell into place. I was no longer trying to control the outcomes of my life, and to my surprise, they manifested for me anyway. Going easier on my body allowed me to have the body I longed for in my years of overexercising. Worrying less in my mind allowed me to stop gripping and controlling and actually opened up my life for magic to unfold. It was during this time when I finally met my partner after being single for most of my life. I moved out of the big cities I lived in, like New York and Los Angeles, and ended up in Cincinnati, Ohio, where my now-husband is from. Doing less opened up my life for wonder and finding joy in the true alchemy of life. In time, doing less actually led me to making more money. It’s a phenomenon I’m still trying to wrap my brain around, but it allowed room for the right opportunities to reach me and the energy for doing the things that really light me up in life.

Life isn’t about how much you accomplish or how much you do; it’s about the moments of presence you have and the people you spend it with. If you’re looking to find ways of slowing down in your life, look at where you’re overexerting or what in your life drains you the most. If it’s work, it’s finding ways to delegate certain tasks or how you can give yourself breaks throughout the day. If it’s numbing or scrolling social media, it’s putting a timer on for yourself to stop yourself from spending so much of your day doom scrolling. If it’s doing a workout you hate or that doesn’t feel good on your body, it’s finding something that you actually enjoy or something less draining like Pilates, walking outside, or yoga. Oftentimes, when doing the same thing over and over isn’t working, the opposite is the medicine. When hustling and pushing isn’t working for you, maybe it’s time you try slowing down.

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The art of slowing down is not going to look the same for everyone. I found moving slower, or the “grandmother-like lifestyle” I live now, in a roundabout way. It found me at a time when I was at my most exhausted, speeding down a one-way road toward burnout. In slowing down, I opened my life up to all the things I was wanting. It allowed for things to unfold for me rather than me trying to force or control an outcome that often wasn’t meant for me. Moving slower allowed me presence in my life, for my body to heal, and for me to get my life to a place that actually feels right for me.

If slowing down sounds like a nightmare to you, it may mean you should give it a try. I live a life now that looks so much less flashy and fast than my former life did on the outside, and I’m happier, healthier, and better for it. In slowing down, my life unfolded. Maybe the medicine you need isn’t more—it’s actually so much less.

I like to consider myself an amateur interior design enthusiast. I have no training and no credentials, but what I do have is a love and appreciation for the home and pretty things. Home for me feels like a sacred place. A place of retreat and coziness where I get to be and feel the most like myself. I grew up in a home that felt that way, full of cozy moments, color, and beautiful design. I remember longing for that feeling once I left home and went to college, living in concrete boxes or very old and tiny New York City apartments. No matter where I go or what conditions I’m living in, I always search for that true feeling of “home.”

My husband and I moved into a new build last year. It was such an exciting time and an opportunity to explore design when picking out the materials that would make up our future home. We have what is referred to as a builder grade home. So, the home we live in is a form of new construction that allows you to choose the elements of your home, but instead of dreaming up your idea of a home and designing it from top to bottom, it consists of a series of picking items from a list. Don’t get me wrong, I still loved every second of it and could have sat in our design meeting for hours going through all the possible finishes, but as far as personalization goes, the options were limited.

I did my best to feed that need for design in the choices I made for our home, but there’s not much room for nuance when you’re designing between a cabinet on Level 1-4 and between options A-D, which is basically choosing white, black, brown, or navy or choosing tile that looks like a couple different shades of grey. With the process of designing a builder grade home, you are given a somewhat blank canvas, which does leave room for one to explore incorporating elements of coziness and personal touches, but not until after your home is fully built.

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One big point of contention for us was our fireplace. I had gone into our meeting with my heart open, Pinterest board at the ready, and a vision for exactly how I wanted our house to look and feel. I had a list of all of my finishes and options chosen and questions at the ready to see where I could push the limits of builder grade. I made a few strides and was able to do things like remove a cabinet in our master bathroom so I could have my own space to do my make up and moving the sink in our kitchen island to the exterior cabinets so that I had space for prepping meals (highly recommend by the way), but things came to a screeching halt when it came to deciding on our fireplace. With our builder and home that we were building we had two different options. Option one was a stone fireplace with a wooden mantle and option two was a white mantle one more traditional and one more plain with tile. I showed up to the meeting ready to choose a stone fireplace, but instead of stone that went from floor to ceiling, I was hoping to request a fireplace with stone going up to the mantle and adding trim going the rest of the way up. I was left with a “We’ll ask the builder and get back to you.” And in my head I heard So, you’re saying there’s a chance?!

With builder grade homes you go through two design meetings usually taking 2 hours long where you go room by room and choose flooring, lighting, and confirming layout. In our second design meeting I had my answer and was told, that I could have the fireplace that I wanted, but that it would cost almost the same as adding stone all the way to the ceiling. I would have been jumping for joy, but the real reason why we wanted to go with the half stone fireplace was to hopefully save on cost since we were already nearing the top of our budget. When going into these meetings you usually decide on one to two rooms where you are going to utilize most of your budget and scale back on the rest. Unfortunately, we had already done that with our bathroom and kitchen so I had to make some adjustments with our living room and fireplace. We ended up choosing the more modern plain white mantel and tile. Since this was not my first choice, I chose material that seemed ok, but I was not in love with. I was just hoping that once it was built it would all come together and I would just forget about my dream stone fireplace.

Moving into your home after it’s finally built feels like Christmas Morning on crack. You wait so long with giddy anticipation jumping for joy every time an item on the builder list is checked off and you get closer to moving in. I was so ready to finally call the home we built ours. I’ll always remember that feeling when we first got our keys. My excitement was palpable. I felt like I floated through the hours of moving our things from our old house to our new. I had boxes to unpack and things to organize. I was a new homeowner and I saw everything through rose colored glasses. You can pretty much ride that feeling for a year or so after moving in, but if you’re someone like me who loves design, loves a good HGTV or Magnolia binge, or just spends most of her time at home staring at their four walls, you can find things that you want to change or add to pretty quickly and the first for me was that dang fireplace…

Our fireplace was fine, but I knew she had so much more potential to be great! If you’re thinking of building I would recommend not making the fireplace an afterthought because it truly is the center of your entire home. With most of your day being spent in the living room while watching tv, or just spending time with your family It ends up being where you spend the bulk of your time. I found myself just staring at the fireplace wishing I had made a different choice. It started to drive me insane.

When it comes to home projects, since I’m not the one with the actual skillset to build, paint, or construct things ( I consider myself more of visionary lol) I usually just wait for my husband to bring something up that he thinks we should change and I come ready with a Pinterest board of inspiration. One day we were sitting around the living room and he asked “Should we paint the mantle?” and my whole body perked up. I said “yes I was thinking the same exact thing”, but tried to play it cool like I wasn’t completely obsessing over wood and tile for weeks. We both agreed that the room just felt flat and like a wall of beige and cream and we thought that sprucing up the fireplace mantle would help. So off to the hardware I skipped to pick out some paint so my husband could get to work on painting the mantle. We went with the color Sherwin Williams Black Magic, to give it some much needed contrast. I watched my husband do the best paint job of his life that day as I kept encouraging him and telling him how great it looked from the kitchen. Once he was finished we both stepped back and said “Ya it’s better” but unfortunately that nagging voice in my head still said, but it’s still not my dream fireplace and the obsession continued.

As you can guess, my husband was not pleased that I was still not satisfied with the fireplace after he labored for an entire day beautifully painting our mantle black. I was extremely apologetic, but I still knew that it would drive me insane if I didn’t find a way to fix it. So I started on a journey of redesigning our fireplace with no professional skill or knowledge of how fireplaces work other than a picture in my head of what I wanted it to look like. My husband was done with doing any more DIY after I cheered him on painting the fireplace a different color and still ended up not liking it in the end. We decided it was time to hire a professional.

The first hard lesson I learned on my journey with hiring a fireplace mason to help me decide how we would reface our fireplace, was not asking the very important question of whether or not I would be charged for getting a quote. I had called out to a couple of local masonries and heard back from one who was available for an appointment the following day, which aligned perfectly with my urgency and my now full blown fireplace obsession. I was unpleasantly surprised to find out that I would be charged $150 dollars for this man to come and take two measurements and give me a completely overpriced quote without any warning in our calls, texts, or emails we had prior. I was at home alone with a newborn at the time feeling vulnerable and dumbfounded that I just handed over my credit card and smiled. So if you’re looking to do any sort of work on your home or outside hiring of any kind, alway ask them ahead of time if they offer free quotes of not. I had to learn that lesson the hard way.

After a couple more weeks of obsessing and doctoring up Canva images of what I wanted the fireplace to look like, I finally found my guy. I had gone to a local shop that sold building materials and asked for a recommendation and in walked Jerry Garcia Masonry into my life. To not continue to bore you with all the little details, I wanted to give you a breakdown of everything we changed on our fireplace to go from the builder grade that we had, to the beauty that she is now. I’m going to jump into a breakdown of everything we did, in case you want to go on a similar fireplace journey. So here is what we did to take our fireplace from boring to beautiful in just two days of work from Jerry and his incredible team.

All the fireplace details:

Fireplace style: the type of fireplace we had in our home was a flat fireplace, which is typically a wall-mounted electric or ventless unit that protrudes minimally, without needing a traditional hearth or chimney. We wanted to go from our flat fireplace to a built in/insert style fireplace that generally requires a vent. The issue from going from the flat to the insert style is that you would essentially have to rebuild the wall, which was very much out of our budget. My guy Jerry figured out that you could install what would be a faux insert style by adding flame retardant material so you weren’t building a fireplace on top of drywall, which would obviously be a fire hazard. So he was able to give us the appearance of a fireplace with more depth without all the added costs of doing so.

Stone: I chose an El Dorado stone in the color Autumn leaf and requested that they over-grout around the stone to provide more of a German Schemer appearance. German Schemer is a decorative brick or stone finishing technique where a watered-down mortar mixture is applied to a brick surface and then partially wiped away before it dries, leaving an uneven, textured, and aged appearance. I had the team mix the mortar with sand to give it more of a cream finish rather than grey, white, or black.

Mantle: We were able to further save on costs by ordering our mantle from Amazon! The finish options were a little more limited, but it was a great way to save money! We loved the size and look of the mantle we chose and luckily the risk of ordering one online paid off.

The Trim: I showed Jerry a photo of the type of decorative trim I was wanting to add and had an example drawn out on paper. The stone makeover was incredible, but the trim work really brought everything together and helped to draw the eye up with out all the extra cost of stone from floor to ceiling

Paint: After what was maybe ten different swatches, we went with Benjamin Moore Revere Pewter a perfect greige tone! Highly recommend swatching paint in the room you are deciding to paint and observing it in different lighting throughout the day before deciding.

So that’s our fireplace makeover! I know I sound insufferable throughout that entire process and I absolutely was, but I am never one to settle for something less than exactly what I want when I set out to do something. I would say with the cost of materials and labor we came in around the same price as what it would have cost for doing the half stone fireplace originally, but I was able to have a lot more say in the stone, mortar color, and finish so it ended up being worth it for me in the end. Some people love designer bags or shoes, but for me I love and obsess over things like fireplaces or wall finishes. It’s my thing and if it’s yours too I say never settle for less than exactly what you want no matter how much time, effort and saving up that it takes to do so. It’s so worth it in the end!

If you’re wanting any links to items like our mantle, frame, or lights linked them here!

I feel like manifestation is really buzzy lately or maybe it’s just me who keeps getting served the “psychics” on TikTok who tell me that “the algorithm brought me there to hear this” all the time. A lot of people see manifesting as woo-woo or write it off as being witchy or made up for social media, which in some ways I agree with. I also understand the side that feels that if you are religious you can’t also manifest or that the two have to be kept separate. Even my husband pokes fun at me when I say I’m “manifesting” something, but for me it’s my own personal practice and connection to spirituality and my self that also helps me connect closer to what I believe in, which is God.

I grew up going to church only on holidays as my dad was raised in a strict Catholic household where he attended Catholic school and was hoping to break free from the confines of religious institutions. My brother and I were raised to believe in God, but we were also encouraged to find our own versions or places where we felt connected to the idea of a higher power. So I like to refer to myself as spiritual and find my connection to God in nature, in moments of unexplainable beauty, and in spaces that feel like home. We were taught to be “good people” and to have our own relationships and connections with what we believe in. So for me, manifesting is less about being witchy or superstitious and more about co-creating a reality in my life that I believe is aligned with what God sees for me. So it’s less about making a vision board, lighting a candle, or rubbing a golden lamp and making a wish and for me a way of connecting with something greater than myself.

I first fell into the whole manifestation thing when I was a senior in college in 2013 when I was desperate to find some sort of control of my reality. Moving away from my home in Virginia to a big city like New York was not an easy feat and I often searched for ways where I could ground into a feeling that there was something out there bigger than myself. I tried going to a few churches here and there, but didn’t quite find the right fit. I think I felt the most connected to God walking through Central Park where I could feel like I wasn’t just in an overpopulated bustling city that never slept and I could actually take a breathe and ground back into myself. There was a big audition coming up in the dance program I attended that had never happened prior. The audition brought with it, the opportunity for 5 men and 5 women to travel internationally to perform across cities in China. I remember seeing the announcement being pinned up onto the bulletin board in the warm up room of our college and feeling something shift for me in my mind. I always wanted to do well, but for some reason this opportunity was a must happen for me and I needed to be apart of it. The odds were slim, but not impossible, but I knew without a doubt that I had to be one of those five girls, so in walked my journey with manifestation.

I had just watched the Secret on Netflix and was eager to give it a try and the audition felt like the perfect opportunity to dabble in the whole manifestation thing. The secret was a self help book written in 2006 by Rhonda Byrne that made the “law of attraction” popular. Essentially it teaches that if you keep your thoughts positive, you can draw in opportunities and create the outcomes you want out of life. I was like a dog after a bone with this audition and the Secret was going to be how I made it happen. I created the mantra, “I am getting this opportunity and I am going to China” in my head and I repeated it over and over , “I am going to China” “I am going to China” on and on and on. I would not let up until it became my reality. Well long story short, it worked and I got the opportunity to travel to China my senior year of college with 9 other dancers to perform like professionals in venues across the country. Whether it was luck, talent, manifesting or a mix of the three I made it happen, and from then on out was hooked on this whole manifestation thing.

Soon after “manifesting” that China trip, I unfortunately learned that the Secret was not a full proof method. I was able to make the opportunity happen, but I found that it didn’t work all of the time and I was often left feeling discouraged and desperate to recreate that energy of my first go at manifesting. What I also noticed was that even when I was on that incredible trip I had manifested, I often found myself second guessing in my head, speaking negatively to myself thinking “I didn’t actually deserve this” or “It’s all going to fall apart any second now.” The secret got me the trip, but it didn’t change anything about my belief in myself or create unwavering faith that I could make anything happen that I wanted to in my life. I had to go on a much longer, deeper, and uphill journey with manifesting before I could really start getting close to the life I was after. The desire to create a better reality for myself never went away, but the method in which I made it happened did.

I’ve always been a seeker, whether that be for knowledge, growth, understanding of myself and the world around me, or just seeking better for myself in life. I dabbled in and out of “manifesting” after my success with the Secret, but didn’t really start to see much change until I eventually landed on the work of Lacey Phillips. This next part may seem like I’m sponsored, which I promise you I’m not, but I truly did not see my reality start to shift until I fell upon her work and started to really understand the deeper work in manifesting. I was listening to a podcast a few years after I had graduated college, still living in New York City, trying to make ends meet and pursuing my professional career as a dancer. As you can imagine you hear NO all the time in that line of work and I found myself again so frustrated and desperate to find some sense of control of my reality. Lacey’s work found me at the perfect time and I remember hanging onto her every word as I heard her speak to her manifestation process. She too had started with work like the Secret and had found small results, but none that ever lasted or really shifted how she thought about herself. Lacey found that manifesting was less about magic or positive affirmations and more about figuring out your true authentic self and shifting your beliefs around your worth to create the life that you desire aka manifesting. She believes that we were all brought onto this earth as our most whole, worthy, authentic selves and that the journey of manifesting is bringing us back to that truth. The truth that we are all worthy and deserving of our own versions of our most magnetic and abundant lives.

To break it down, Lacey’s work as known as ‘To be Magnetic’ is the process of reprogramming our subconscious beliefs through deep imaginings, which are audio meditations that help you to change your thoughts, which inevitably help you change your everyday reality. Her process involves, deep imaginings to reprogram anywhere we hold shame or trauma from our upbringings, expanding through people in our circle or that we know of that we aspire to be more like, and taking ‘aligned action’ to make those realities possible. Long story short, her work is a process of figuring out what you truly want to manifest, reprogramming any doubts or beliefs you may have as to why you’re not capable of making that happen, and inevitably helping you to manifest whatever it is that you want in life. What I found different about her work, is that it’s less about just making a pretty vision board on Pinterest and just replaying a mantra over and over again in your head and hoping it shows up and more about shifting your reality by shifting how you view and believe in yourself. Ultimately it comes down to shifting your thoughts and developing your self worth so that you can feel and be worthy of the life that you desire.

Lacey’s work helped me to manifest my husband, my home, my work, and helped hold my hand through crazy life shifts and different directions life has taken me in thus far. I’m going to break down how I manifested my husband Nick to help you see how the process works and hopefully help you if you’re trying to currently manifest something in your life. It can work for small or bigger things and really gets fun when you start to get the hang of things. It’s not surface level stuff so definitely go slow with the process if you decide you end up wanting to try out To Be Magnetic yourself. They recommend going through the work in tandem with a therapist if you ever need more support in something that you’re reprogramming. The method involves a lot of deeper work and facing hard truths about your life, which is always helpful to experience with support.

So when I wanted to “manifest” Nick I started out by writing down a list of all of the qualities I was looking for in a partner. I feel like a lot of people make this list when they’re looking for the one, but there are a few key elements that helped me meet him sooner. When writing this list it’s less about the superficial things like “I want him to look like Leonardo Dicaprio and have perfectly white teeth and washboard abs”. Those are nice, but not helpful when we’re talking core values or trying to call in your life partner. You can write down things you’re attracted to yes, but it’s more about getting to the core of what you really want in a life partner, if that’s what you’re manifesting. So below is an example of what I wrote down when I wanted to manifest my partner:

-6 foot 3 *an example of what not to write lol

-light eyes

-great smile

-close with his family

-has a dog

-independent & lives on his own

-has strong values

-athletic

-really funny

-we spend a lot of time laughing

-doesn’t make me question how he feels about me

-wants marriage and kids

-loves my family too

-we’re best friends

-works on himself

-growth seeking

-adventurous but also likes to be home

-confident

-can be anywhere with him and he can adapt and have fun

There’s more, but you get the gist. What’s crazy to me is that looking at this list he is literally every one of those things (well except being 6’3 sorry babe), but he literally hit every one of these things and more down to having a dog. Maybe it’s crazier to me because I went SO long looking for him, but to me it’s proof that manifesting does work. If you don’t know what I mean here’s an earlier post about me trying to meet my person after never being in a relationship before. When getting clear on your core wants and writing down the values that you want in a partner, the list does work! What’s key is making sure that it aligns with your core values and besides some superficial traits thrown in there is authentic to what you see for yourself and what you’re worthy of in this life!

After making the list, Lacey’s work says that you may experience what she refers to as ‘tests’ and boyyy did I. For her, tests are the almost versions of your list that the universe, God, or whatever you believe in will send your way to see if you truly believe you’re worthy of this thing you’re manifesting. Tests will be that ex that all of sudden pops up out of nowhere when you decide you’re ready to meet the one, the date you go on that seems to be exactly what you want, but he doesn’t want anything serious, or the guy who seems perfect for you, but he ghosts you and literally disappears into thin air. Sound familiar? So essentially the universe is testing whether you will fall back into an old pattern and go back with your ex or the unavailable guy or if you’ll say no thanks and choose to wait or trust that the thing you’re really desiring is actually on the way. Often tests will challenge your deepest fears or your most triggering beliefs that you have that you’re trying to outgrow or overcome. The tests will be checking in to see if you’re actually ready for that thing you’re looking for or if you will feel safe settling for second best because you didn’t actually feel worthy of it in the first place.

During a long an endless testing phase is when Lacey recommends finding “expanders”. Expanders are the way to show yourself and your subconscious that what you want actually exists and further iterates that you can have this thing that you’re searching for. You can find expanders in relationships for example in your close friend’s relationships, people you aspire towards online, or even in famous relationships that you’re able to see into their dynamic. Essentially it’s showing yourself that the thing that you want exists and if those ‘expanders’ have it, then so can you. What to take note of here is that when you find these expanders, if you find yourself thinking well that exists, but I can’t have it because that girl is so much better than me or she has xyz more than me and that’s why I don’t have it or if you see that expander and find yourself full of jealousy and envy. That feeling of envy or jealousy is actually a great aha moment of you being shown what you truly want in life and a moment where you can hopefully see that it’s possible for you too.

While crafting your list, and seeking expanders you are also doing the deeper work that comes with manifestation. The deeper work involves reprogramming any limiting beliefs or reasoning that you create in your head for why you’re not able to have what it is that you’re manifesting. During my process of manifesting Nick, I was working through my limiting beliefs of not feeling ready for a relationship because I had never been in one before, not feeling worthy of one because I was so afraid that I didn’t know how to be in a relationship, and just not feeling like I was worthy to have my full package because I wasn’t seeing myself as someone who was that full package before meeting Nick. This is when I took my limiting beliefs through Lacey’s audio meditations and slowly chipped away at my beliefs that I wasn’t worthy of the relationship I wanted. That deeper work helped me to finally see myself as worthy and deserving of the relationship and the partnership that I was seeking and helped me to develop my own belief in my ability to be loved without conditions.

The process is not linear and unfortunately not just picturing what you want in your head and poof there it is. Sometimes it’s very repetitive and most of the time it’s extremely frustrating, but I promise you it works. The last step of this process is what Lacey refers to as ‘aligned action’. So after you’ve created the list for the thing you’re manifesting, you’ve reprogrammed why you thought you weren’t worthy of it, you expanded to show yourself examples that it’s possible, and you started receiving tests around the manifestation you’re calling in, the last step is taking action towards whatever that thing is. In relationships for example, it would mean cutting off communication with your ex, or stopping that random hook up you have with some guy that you know you don’t want to be with long term, or putting yourself out there and actually signing up for the dating app. It’s putting yourself in a position where you are getting closer to whatever it is that you’re calling in. It’s often terrifying and involves fully trusting yourself and the universe and showing you’re ready and in full trust that you are worthy of your manifestation. For me this looked like, going on horrible dates, getting ghosted often and deleting that person’s number off my phone so I couldn’t reach back out to them ever again, and eventually going on reality TV and unsuccessfully trying to meet my person. After years of this and working to further develop my trust in myself and God that I was ready and worthy of the relationship that I wanted I eventually met my whole list and now we’re married and have a one year old daughter together.

So that is the process that I use when manifesting. I have used this same process in manifesting moving from New York City, a place that I no longer felt aligned with to Los Angeles and now Ohio, to moving into the house that I’m currently sitting in and typing these words to you in, and to even help me feel ready and worthy of becoming a mom like I am now. Again it’s not linear or easy and for me it’s ongoing, but I have seen such tremendous changes in my life because of it. I love the idea that we are all born as our most whole, worthy, and deserving selves and that the process is just finding our way back to that. I have seen that first hand in my daughter Remy. Seeing life in its most pure form as she is, so full of joy, lightness, and pure goodness is such a blessing. Seeing how good and beautiful we all are or are capable of being through her fresh eyes is something that I will forever cherish. She is my true expander for how beautiful we are and how worthy we are meant to be in this life. Through her, I can see that no matter what life may bring, how we grew up, or what challenges we endured, that we are all worthy of better and our truest most authentic and beautiful versions of life. Working on myself is ongoing and a process I continue to come back to sometimes daily in hopes for that connection to a higher power and further reinforcing my belief in my value and self worth. I have manifested so much, but I feel that I’ve only scratched the surface of my journey with manifestation. Life is hopefully long and for me I want to make it the fullest best version that it can be. Maybe it’s delusional, maybe, it’s magic or maybe it’s just truth, but either way I will be manifesting a better version for myself and my family and hopefully this will help you do the same. I will link some resources that help me with my process if you are wanting to dive deeper into Lacey’s work, but no matter what, I hope you find ways for magic to show up in your life and a revived thirst for more after reading this. However it ends up working for you, I hope you manifest the life that you want!

more on manifesting here:

to be magnetic

the to be magnetic book!

I feel like every new day that I get to spend with my daughter is a gift that gets more and more fun. That moment when we first see each other in the morning is my most favorite part of every day. It’s moments like those that I know I will long for when I’m in my eighties. I love seeing her reaction when I first open her door, pop on the lights and say “GOOD MORNING”. She usually looks back groggy, squinting, hair a mess, but with the biggest smile on her face so happy to see her mommy and my heart bursts again and again every time.

Seeing how she seems to change with each passing day fills me with joy and nostalgia for yesterday. She shows up each morning happy to be there, sometimes with a new skill that she somehow unlocked overnight, sometimes looking bigger, and sometimes she wakes up with a whole different personality some more cranky than others. Each day she brings something new and exciting, but what doesn’t seem to change is that it can feel like living out the same day every day. Whoever wrote the movie Groundhog Day had to have been a parent. I don’t know if it’s the regimented schedule you live by, the meeting of all their needs that stack up one after the next, or just that you’re at home so much in the same place doing many of the same things day after day. Sometimes the days fly, sometimes they drag, but ultimately they tend to blend together so much that I can’t remember if a memory I have came from today or a Tuesday months ago because they all feel eerily similar.

We have all heard that saying, “the days are long, but the years are short”, but what they should have added was that the days are long *and monotonous, but the years are short and full of life. I am on a mission to shake up the monotony by working to romanticize my every day mom life. There is nothing romantic about changing diapers, wiping food scraps off the floor, tantrums, and constantly saving your baby’s life from climbing on things they shouldn’t, but I have found my own way of doing so through rituals. I’ve broken up my own days through a series of mom rituals and I’m going to help you find your own. Because if it’s going to feel like groundhog’s day we might as well find a way to romanticize it.

My mom rituals consist of three different pillars. It is hard to find any time for yourself in the busy life of being a mom, but what helps is simplifying your rituals and focusing on exactly what elements fill your cup up the most. Asking yourself, in a perfect world, where every thing went according to plan without any hiccups, how would I spend my day? Letting yourself day dream, visualize, and feel in your core what your idea of a perfect day would be. If I were to guess, it would include a slow morning, maybe somewhere on the beach watching the sunrise feeling the breeze on your skin with no care in the world, joy filling your belly for what the day would bring filled with laughter, maybe some good food, time in nature, and building memories with your family. Now that you have your vision, it’s figuring out how we can sprinkle in pieces of that feeling into our daily lives so that instead of feeling the need to escape the every day monotony we find our own way of infusing that perfect day feeling into our every day lives.

My three pillars for my mom rituals are self care, curating my home, and joy. You can take them any which way, but to help you figure out your own I’m going to walk you through my day of mom rituals and how I find ways to include elements of each of them into my busy mom schedule. I have found that my first pillar of self care is easiest to include into my morning routine. I have an earlier Substack post on how I trained myself to become a morning person, which has now become my most necessary part to every day. Not to be dramatic, but waking up earlier has basically changed my life. Even if it’s 15 mins of alone time, it makes such a difference when you start your day with the intention that you matter and you deserve to take care of yourself. To walk you through my morning routine, my alarm usually goes off around 5:40 am where I groggily head into the bathroom splash cold water on my face, brush my teeth, and dress in the clothes I laid out for myself the night before. If I’m working out I usually grab water and head straight to the basement to do a 30 minute workout or I’ll head into our front room downstairs and do some type of meditation. It’s generally 30 mins of connecting with myself either through movement or clearing my head and thoughts for the day. Despite how I start my day, I always make myself my morning drink using ARMRA Colostrum. It has been the biggest game changer for me as a mom. I originally started taking ARMRA Colostrum because I wanted support for my sluggish digestion and afternoon slump/headaches that I was getting consistently and to have more energy to chase after my very active toddler, but there are so many other benefits to taking colostrum. If you don’t know what colostrum is, it’s the first nutrition we receive in life, often referred to as “liquid gold” and benefits include, strengthening immune health, gut microbiome improvement, increased energy, better recovery, and tons of beauty benefits including hair and skin! I will add a link to what I use, but it’s been such an easy addition to my mornings that encompasses so many of my self care needs. I sip my morning ARMRA Colostrum while I unload the dishwasher, start my coffee maker, and prep my daughter’s bottle until she usually wakes up between 6:30 and 7 am. This is just my morning, but I find ways of infusing self care throughout that day using simple rituals. For me self care can be picking out an outfit that I feel good in for the day, putting some make up on, making sure I do my skincare routine, or frothing my milk for my coffee instead of just pouring it cold from the fridge. Simple things can make such a huge difference in breaking up the monotony of mom life!

If you want to try ARMRA Colostrum use my code SYDNEYW for 15% off for new customers and subscriptions! Thanks to ARMRA Colostrum for sponsoring this post!

My second pillar is curating my home. I don’t know about you, but I spend a LOT of time in my house. You could call me a homebody, but I feel like as moms especially if you work from home or are a stay at home mom you can spend an exorbitant amount of time within your four walls. Because I spend so much time here and because I genuinely love a curated home, I make sure to include home into my daily rituals. If home is one of your pillars, you do not have to spend a lot or be living in your dream home, to make it feel good for you. The key for spending so much time there is making it feel more like a retreat and less like a prison. I have found my own ways of doing that by including Homegoods runs or Target trips down the home aisle into my regular outings with my daughter. I will link some of my recent Target favorites , but you don’t have to spend much to make your house feel more like home. Sometimes if I’m trying not to spend the extra money I can accomplish this by making sure that I make the bed every day, that I clean my kitchen every night, picking up some fresh flowers from the store, or by simply rearranging things that I already own. The amount of times I’ve pushed a piece of furniture that would normally take multiple people to lift from one end of my home to the other… Curating your home can be simple, but I find that it helps ground me and allows me to wake up feeling happy to be spending so much time within my same four walls every day.

links to our bedding!

My third pillar is joy. By just looking into my daughter’s eyes or seeing what shenanigans she decides to get into throughout the day fills me with joy, but finding ways to prioritize feeling it makes such a difference. Some ways I incorporate joy into my monotonous days are by making sure to sit down and eat with my daughter, by writing posts like this to hopefully help other moms out there, by putting on music throughout the day so the house doesn’t feel so quiet and taking my daughter’s lead and breaking out into a silly dances, or popping on a funny podcast while I deep clean the kitchen (lately my favorites are the Toast or Giggly Squad). I feel like when you choose to seek out joy it finds you. Whether it’s something my daughter did that day that I can share with my husband when he gets home, seeing a funny video online during my 15 minutes of allotted rot time that I give myself when my daughter takes her nap, or just seeking the joy in the mundane of life, if you prioritize it, joy will find you.

So those are my silly little mom rituals that help me “get through” the monotony of the average day. If you’re wanting to find yours, take ten minutes to close your eyes, think about your perfect day and how you can infuse that essence into your own little rituals. So that when you wake up to what feels like the same day each and every day, you can start with the joy of saying good morning to your baby and keep that feeling going throughout all the ups and downs that a day with kids can bring. Hopefully, you can leave this ready to find your own pockets in your day for rituals that will lead you to your own perfect version of a fully romanticized mom life.

When my husband and I were deciding we were ready to have kids, we knew that as long as we were financially able, I would be the one to stay home with them. There is no right way to do parenthood, except in the way that makes sense for each and every family. I was no corporate baddie and really never had a “normal” job so me not going back to work just made sense. For context, I was a professional dancer, who then went on reality TV and my life obviously took a lot of twists and turns from there. As a professional dancer I always had to have a side gig. Living in New York City and Los Angeles was NOT cheap and it took me balancing a lot of odd jobs for me to make sure my rent was paid each month. I always taught fitness on the side of my dance career, but had to mix in babysitting, working as a hostess, the occasional modeling job, and that short stint I had as a cater waiter where I dropped more than one plate on a guest… So I preface this by saying I never really had a “normal” job, so the decision for me to not go back to work was a pretty easy one to make. Any money I would be making working outside of the house would likely just cover the cost of daycare so yes we decided I would stay home. I also am very fortunate in that I am able to contribute financially to our home through my work in social media, but we had to make that decision based on whether we were comfortable living on one income if my ability to make money went away. So for all encompassing purposes I am a Stay at Home Mom.

Despite that backstory and the fact that I am fortunate enough to still make money on my own while staying at home, I can sometimes get in my head about “not contributing enough” to our family. When you lay it out on paper my role as a stay at home mom is to watch my baby, cook, clean, organize, and tend to all of her needs while my husband is at work. If you were to pay someone to do this job you’d likely be compensating them nicely as they’re taking care of the most precious person in your life, but for some reason when you’re the mom doing it, you feel like it’s never enough. If I can look at it from an outside perspective I think we feel this way because there is not data or financial representation of the work you’re actually doing. You know it’s important, you know it’s making a difference, and you know there’s no where else you’d rather be, but sometimes you still feel like it’s not enough or you can feel like a burden to your partner since he is doing so much financially. I’m sure this is especially tough if you aren’t like me and a were actually a corporate baddie, a doctor, lawyer, or someone with a “real job” and decided to put that on pause in order to care for your children. When your life goes from all of your accomplishments and the career that you worked for to being “just a mom” it can challenge your identity and your worth. So whether you made the tough decision to leave a career or were always planning to be a stay at home and find that you sometimes get in your head about it like I do, here is how I tricked my brain into no longer feeling like a “burden”.

One other element that definitely plays a huge role on how we moms view ourselves or we unintentionally gather data to compare how we’re doing as moms is social media. There are so many examples of super moms out there who seem to be able to do and have it all. I feel like whatever side of motherhood you’re on whether you’re the stay at home mom or the working mom, you can see so many examples romanticizing whatever is on the opposite side of the fence from you. I feel like as a mostly stay at home mom I am fed so many examples of moms who are able to beautifully manage being a present, embodied Mom while also being a founder of some budding business or an overnight success in something. If you’re the working mom there are so many examples of women romanticizing motherhood and the slow paced life of being a stay at home mom. We all know that there is more to the story and that social media only represents a speck of someone’s actual life, but it’s so easy to scroll past these examples and feel like you have nothing figured out and then that “burden” thought creeps back in or you doubt your decision to be both working and a mom. It’s safe to say no side is safe and that at the core of all of this self doubt, we all just want to be good moms.

I feel like if you’re even asking yourself these questions, or find yourself comparing how you are as a mom to other moms, you’re a good mom. If at the center of what you do and who you are is figuring out how you want to balance one of if not the most important roles of your life with creating the best environment that you can for your child, you’re a good mom. So now that we’ve established we’re good moms, we’re trying our best, and we all just want to give our children the best lives and the best versions of ourselves, let’s get to the “tricking our brain” part! This is going to mostly apply to the stay at home moms since that is the role I can relate to and relate my own experiences to, but I’m going to try to tailor it to both! So here is how you trick your brain….

As a stay at home mom who sometimes gets in her head about being “just a mom” I decided to change my idea of what my role is. Instead of being “just a mom” I think of myself as the CEO or COO of my household. If you think about your day to day as a mom, you are in charge of caring for your baby, organizing everyone’s schedules when they’re napping when you’re taking them to school when you’re picking them up from practice, feeding them, bathing them, and helping them in every which way. You’re doing other tasks like making sure the fridge is stocked, the laundry is done, the supplies are ordered, that the house (aka company) is running and fully functional. Your house and their lives are functioning because of you. If you go down, the whole thing crumbles. I learned this from watching the show Scandal,“the fish rots from the head.” In this case, you are the head. If you are not functioning or you are getting down about how you’re doing at your extremely important role as a mom or the COO of your very successful company, then the rest starts to fall apart. So when you’re getting down on yourself or thinking of yourself as a “burden” just remember you are the head, you are important, and you will not rot on your own watch!

If the COO or CEO title doesn’t help you, it’s also fun to think of yourself as the personal assistant to an extremely important celebrity client: your baby. You are the Stephanie Shep (Kim Kardashian’s former assistant turned successful business woman) to your Kim Kardashian aka your baby. I don’t know what Stephanie Shep was paid as Kim’s assistant, but I’m sure it was a LOT. Unfortunately we are not also paid to be moms, but think about how important that role is and how much you would be financially compensated for all of the things you do. You are their go to girl, their ride or die, the one that helps them with all of their success. You are important, your role as a mom matters, and you have more value than you’re likely giving yourself credit for. So when you’re in the thick of it, doing task after task and living out what often feels like the same day everyday, whisper to yourself I am the Steph Shep to my Kim K or whatever celebrity personal assistant combo works for you!

To my moms who do both and sometimes question whether that is the right decision or not, I would say whatever makes the most sense for you and your family is the right decision. I also understand that for some there is no choice and you just have to do both and I have nothing but admiration and respect for those people. To go back to my earlier point, every family is unique and has its own needs, so no social media post, substack, mother in law, or influencer mom you aspire towards should affect YOUR decision. If you’re working because you need to or just want to that is the right choice. What matters is that you made the best decision you could with your partner based on what you want for you and your family and no outside force should make you question that. And even if you went into motherhood knowing you wanted to continue to work and after a couple of months or years you decide you want to change your mind, that is more than ok too. I’m not sure if there is a brain trick here, but what may help is just knowing again you’re a great mom you can trust your own intuition and at the end of the day we’re all just trying to do what’s best for our families. So whether you’re working, a SAHM, or a mix of both, you’re a good mom and you deserve to have it all in whatever version of being a mom makes the most sense for you.

So when you’re in the thick of mom-ing and that self doubt creeps in remember your are the CEO of your household, you are the Stephanie Shep to your VIP Kim Kardashian, and you can be trusted to make the best decisions that work for you and your family. You’re not just a mom you’re so much more and don’t ever let any outside force or self doubt tell you otherwise!

I am not a morning person. Nor will I ever claim to be, but becoming a mom you realize how much time to yourself is finite and how much you are needed the second your child wakes up. It’s the greatest gift of my life, but you can sometimes lose yourself when your every day all day is dedicated to only caring for your child. You try your best to find little pockets to breathe or to reset throughout the day, but even when your baby is napping, you are playing catch up, each task getting pushed to the next nap. There are also those days when you go to to start a chore or reset from a wake window just to find that your baby is awake and it’s time to do everything all over again. So if you’re in that boat, here’s a little pep talk for becoming a morning person, especially if you are far from one like me!

When I say I’m not a morning person I mean it. Sleeping in and being tardy for school was the only thing I ever got in trouble for, well that and when my skirt was too short, but it’s not my fault I have longer arms. Anyways, it’s something I always struggled with and no matter how much I tried to break that habit in high school and college, it never became that necessary until having a baby. My baby is 14 months old now and is down to taking one nap a day. If you’re a mom you know how precious the time is when they’re napping and you get to catch up, but we also know that one day they won’t take a nap anymore or there will be more kids in the mix and that mid day reset will no longer be possible. This is why I wanted to get ahead of my schedule and see if I could overcome my disdain for the morning. This is why I decided to do what I like to call adult sleep training.

It’s controversial, but we loved sleep training our baby. I had a lot of fear around it because I didn’t want to let her cry and you just want to make sure that you’re doing the best job you can as a mom, but it got to a point with our daughter where it was clear we needed to try something. That four month sleep regression will get you! We waited until she was 7 months old because it took me a while to be ready for her to be sleeping in her own room. We used the Taking Cara Babies method. Again I know sleep training is controversial, but we were pleasantly surprised that there was minimal crying and it only took my daughter a couple of nights to get the hang of it. After sleep training, she became such a great sleeper. She now wants to be left alone after her night time routine and puts herself right to sleep. We could not be more proud of her and learned from sleep training our daughter that you can be taught to be a better sleeper and with some discipline and repetition it can become second nature. So here is what helped me adult sleep train myself.

The first step is figuring out your plan. With any habit I have found it easiest to work backwards. If something is daunting or overwhelming or if I set an unrealistic goal for myself, I’m quick to want to give up. For example, if I had decided I wanted to become a morning person by just setting my alarm for 5 am the next day, that would not work for me. I would hit that snooze button SO fast. After googling I saw that it takes around 66 days to form a habit. I gave myself 2 months to figure it out so that I could slowly work my way up to my goal. After sleep training my daughter her general wake time became 7 am. So for me to get some good me time in the morning, I wanted to be up by 6:30 am and eventually 6 am to spend my me time however I pleased before we started our day together. So here are the steps I took!

1. Setting my goal wake time, which means I also had to set my goal bed time. I learned from listening to Mel Robbins, that in order to get up earlier in the morning you have to also edit the time you are going to sleep. It is not about losing sleep or feeling tired all the time. It’s about getting a full night’s sleep so that you can wake up earlier the next day. So per her advice, if you want to wake up at 6 am you have to get 8 hours of sleep, which means you should be asleep by 10 pm. The trick to this is not just climbing into your bed and passing out right at 10 *I wish. It actually means that you need to be done with your day and climb into your bed by 9 pm to be asleep by 10 because it takes humans 20 mins on average to fall asleep. So my bed time goal was 9 pm so that my wake up time could be 6 am!

2. Having a wind down routine. I love to clean the kitchen. That is another phenomenon that I have developed as a mom. I despised cleaning before becoming a mom, but there is just something about resetting and putting your home back together after a long day of your toddler turning your living room upside down. My night time routine usually consists of me cleaning the kitchen, locking all the doors, doing my skincare routine and then climbing into bed and either watching a show with my husband or reading a book, and then I usually have to meditate before falling asleep (the only thing that allows me to turn my brain off). The one thing I know I can’t do, but is so tempting to do, is go on my phone and scrolling social media. I still do occasionally, but I know that it’s bad, especially if it’s TikTok. There is something so stimulating about TikTok where if I’m on it even for a short period I’ll find myself still wide awake at 2 am afterwards. So once I’ve done my full routine, gone to the bathroom a million times, and meditated myself to sleep its lights out by 10 pm!

3. Planing out your morning the night before. This mom me-time in the morning is about doing something for yourself before doing all the things you need to do to care for your baby. I don’t know about you, but I wake up groggy and I can wonder around like a zombie if I don’t have a plan for what I’m actually doing with myself. So whatever my plan is for my me-time in the morning, I decide on it the night before. So if it’s working out, I lay out my workout clothes and I pick out which workout I am doing the night before so I don’t have to think at all the next day. If I start to have to think, all I’m going to be thinking about is going back to bed. If it’s journaling or praying, it’s making sure to have that set out beforehand. Whatever it is, it’s so helpful to decide on it the night before so again you don’t have to think during the start of your early morning.

4. Working my way up to an earlier alarm Like I said before, I have to set a goal and work backwards. If I want to wake up an hour earlier each day I can’t just lose an hour of sleep, I had to slowly inch my alarm clock 15 mins earlier each day so I could train myself to becoming more of a morning person so that earlier alarm didn’t feel so jolting.

5. Staying consistent even on weekends This one might be the hardest for me because again I love to sleep, but I noticed it makes such a difference if my wake up time is consistent. So even on weekends I try to keep my alarm at 6 am because even with the extra help I get from my husband when he doesn’t have to go to work, it’s still so nice to have that time to yourself.

6. Managing hiccups along the way I don’t know if babies just have a sixth sense or what, but during the first week of me trying to get up earlier, so did my baby. It’s like the second my feet hit the ground, she was up. That can be very frustrating especially with being more tired, but eventually we were able to get more consistent and I was able to have that me time again, but we had to work through it. I’m definitely not perfect at this and ever day seems like I have to wake up earlier to get enough time to do the things I want to do. Even this week, I forgot to charge my phone and it died in the middle of the night and I woke up to my baby crying and me having to play catch up the entire morning. So when the inevitable hiccups happen always go back to why you started. Always remember, that it’s important to take care of yourself and your needs and it will only make you a better mom. You’re worth it!

So that is how I adult sleep trained myself. Now that my baby is down to one nap a day, I try to wake up consistently at 6 am and on the days where I want to work out I wake up at 5:40 am before my daughter gets up at 7 am. I can’t say I’m a fully reformed morning person, but I can feel it on the days where I slip and it does’t feel good to let yourself down. I hope they work for you and I love thinking about all of us moms waking up early together and having our me time before our babies wake up. It doesn’t have to be much that you do, but so much can change when you prioritize your needs and start each day with the intention that taking care of yourself matters, especially when you’re a mom!

I haven’t stopped thinking about this question. Maybe because I have a daughter now and all I can think about is what I want to teach her and how I can lead by example. I get asked this question often because I went through most of my twenties having never had a boyfriend, constantly struggling trying to motivate myself to go on endless bad dates, and wondering to myself as I ate alone in front of the TV every night If what I wanted even existed. Well I’m happy to report that I did get there, but it took me until I turned 29 to meet my now husband. So those bad dates, the looking up at my ceiling asking myself if I was ok with being alone forever, and what felt like endless waiting eventually paid off. But if I’m being honest, it took a lot longer than I thought it would.

Let’s get this question everyone asks in their head out of the way. No I was not waiting for marriage (and didn’t). I didn’t set out on a quest to never be in a serious relationship or for religious reasons. I just wanted to wait to commit to dating someone once it felt real. I think it comes down to knowing yourself and for me I’m a very sensitive person. I knew that I couldn’t handle endless heartbreaks or continuously opening my heart up to just anyone so instead I waited…. and waited. I don’t think there is any right or wrong way to date. I also don’t subscribe to the notion that you have to be in a ton of relationships to know when you have met the right person. I mean we’ve all heard the phrase, when you know, you know, right?

So I went through my twenties without a boyfriend. I went on plenty of dates, but none of them went past a funny story to bring back to my girlfriends. I was on all of the dating apps (some I doubt even exist anymore) we’re talking hinge, bumble, tinder, the one that I made a linked in for just to join…coffee meets bagel, grouper shall I continue? I mean I really tried my best to not just sit on my hands and wait for the right guy. Looking back now it’s funny to think about those horrible dates. Where you’d show up after romanticizing some guy you spent a day messaging and telling yourself his whole backstory and what he would be like only to show up and find out he sounds like Kermit the frog or that he lied about his height. All irrelevant, but I did put in the time. What was most frustrating about dating as someone who had not had a real relationship was that I always felt counted out or like people didn’t take me seriously. They would just be looking for a hook up or just wrote me off because in their eyes I didn’t know how to be in a relationship or that they would have to teach me. This could have been my perception, but I just felt nothing but frustration.

I’ve obviously done some reflecting and now that I’m an older married lady, I can see that people weren’t taking me seriously because deep down neither was I. I had a deep rooted fear of being in a relationship. It was new and unchartered territory and that terrified me. I come from a very stable household and two loving parents who are still together today, but because I had never been in one myself, I was terrified I’d be horrible at it. I think we do this a lot. We hold ourselves back before we even try, we are afraid to put ourselves out there, or fear that we will disappoint people in some way so we play small and we count ourselves out before anyone else can do it first. This doesn’t just have to be in relationships it can be in career, opportunities, anything. It’s exactly what I did when dating. Deep down on every bad date I was so afraid of what could come after, or what would happen if I actually fell for someone. I was afraid of being out of control or no longer myself if my heart belonged to someone else. It may sound insane to you, if you have had a lot of relationships or had an easier time of dating than I did, but I just felt so unsure of myself and that’s exactly what was reflected back to me: people who weren’t sure about me.

To get comfortable I continuously did my best to put myself out there. I would go on dates with strangers, be set up by friends, but it eventually led me to getting fed up and applying for the Bachelor. I knew that I had to put myself in situations that were scary in order to overcome my fear of dating and dating on national television for the world to watch felt like the most extreme way to do that. Go big or go home right? Well to make a long story short, I didn’t end up with the bachelor and to my disappointment did not catch feelings at all. So my experiment to see what it would be like to get close to being in a relationship fell short. What I did learn was that I can do scary things like going on the Bachelor, so maybe I could do the thing I feared and actually be in a relationship.

Things started to change for me once I staring believing that not only was I worthy of the relationship I was looking for, but that I was fully capable to be in a one. What I realized was that even though I had never had a boyfriend up until that point, I still had plenty of successful relationships. I’ve had best friends that I met as a 3 year old, I have relationships with my family, and relationships with people at work. Just because I hadn’t been in a romantic relationship did not mean I didn’t know how to be in a relationship. Once that clicked for me, my fear subsided. I realized that I didn’t have a lack of experience and that I was just as worthy as anyone else. Plus I’d be going into a relationships with no baggage or hang ups over exes. All marketable qualities if you ask me!

So if you’re in a similar situation, no you do not need to go on reality television to date, but there are some helpful things that you can do to get comfortable even if you haven’t had a relationship before. First you have to have unwavering faith that what you are looking for is out there. This means NEVER SETTLING. If you settle it’s ok, but when it goes south try to utilize it not as a failure, but as a lesson that you can apply to what you want in your next relationship. You can keep the faith that what you want exists by looking to other relationships and getting really clear on what it is you’re actually looking for. You can do that by looking at your friend’s relationships or people you know personally. Get clear on what dynamics they have that you’re drawn to. This doesn’t just mean a cute instagram relationship that looks perfect because they take great pictures together. Look at how they treat each other and how they interact to help determine what it is you want in your future relationship. If you don’t have people you know personally, look to television shows you enjoy or relationship dynamics on social media or podcasts that allow you to get a deeper picture of a couple’s dynamics. And if you can’t find what you’re looking for from that, you can instead get really clear on what it is you want by figuring out what it is that you don’t want. Make a list, a vision board, whatever it is, but show yourself that what you want actually exists, so that you can believe that if your friend, that person online, or even a character in a show found it, then you can find it too.

While you’re waiting and doing all this research in your 20s or really anytime when all you have to focus on is yourself, really work on making yourself the best possible version of you that you can be. I love the quote from the movie The Perks of Being a Wallflower “We accept the love we think we deserve”. You have to know that you deserve the best possible version of a person and that starts with becoming the best possible version of yourself. Take yourself out on dates, learn, read books, try new experiences, whatever it is that’s going to make you a better version of yourself so that you can be proud of who you are and can meet someone who is worthy of you. So that when you meet Mr. or Ms. Perfect for you, you will have no doubt or imposter syndrome around whether you are worthy of that relationship. You are worthy, and you have to believe that you are down to your core even when it’s challenging to do so.

To answer the second part of this question about “figuring out what your’e doing with your life". I feel like we humans ask this question to ourselves all the time at all ages. I think with social media and the ability to edit, people are only showing the versions of themselves that they want you to see. Sure a lot of people do have it figured out, but unlike how social media makes it seem, there is no specific timeline that you have to have it all figured out by. For me, my 20s was about making mistakes, climbing different mountains, and figuring out what it was that I actually wanted out of life. I think that journey is ongoing and it is what makes life beautiful. From my 34 years of experience, I do not have it all figured out, but in the times that I have reached a goal, I learned that the process was actually the fun part. I think that if we were just handed everything we want out of life in a pretty package without having to learn some lessons or trying and failing in the process, it would be boring or we would reject it because we wouldn’t feel worthy of it. So I would reframe this time of figuring it out by trying to appreciate it and enjoy it while you’re in it. Believe me if I were in my 20s I’d roll my eyes and say “easy for you to say”. From what I can gather, there are seasons in our life and I feel like in the end they will all make sense or at least I’m hoping that’s true. If you’re in the ‘figuring it out’ season, how can you take the pressure off and find ways to enjoy it and be in the moment? Can you trust that you will one day have all of those things that you’re asking for and that you will look back and appreciate this version of yourself that you are right now. You’ll smile at the person you were and all the work you did to accomplish what it is that you are seeking. How can you make the future version of yourself proud, by the being the person you are now?

So here I am admitting I do not have it figured out, but I hope I can support someone who is in any of these phases. If you’re single, frustrated with dating or feeling hopeless trying to meet your person, I hope you can take my story and trust that it’s possible for you too. I met my husband because he watched me on the Bachelor and just had a good feeling about me. During a time where I felt so unseen and counted out, he managed to see me. We connected right at the start of Covid because he would make me laugh when he responded to random things I’d put up on social media. We started talking via FaceTime from two different states while the world was shut down. I had zero hope that it would go anywhere and just chopped it up to a funny story or a fun way to spend quarantine. Well I was luckily very wrong, but what I did do was remain open. I was open to the possibility of how I could meet my person, open to what a relationship would be like, and open to the possibilities that even in the darkest of times that there can always be a silver lining. Meeting my husband was that silver lining. What was different about him was how easy things seemed even when the odds were stacked against us. He didn’t leave me questioning whether he was going to text me back or make me guess how he felt about me, he just told me himself. Meeting someone who was so open helped me to let down my walls when it was so scary for me to do so in the past. Instead of being ashamed of the fact that I had never been in a relationship before like I had prior, I just owned it. I asked him to let me know if there was something I was missing or something that I hadn’t figured out yet because I hadn’t been in a relationship before. What I figured out was that there was no secret, there was nothing to fear about being in a relationship. I learned that falling in love isn’t scary, but the most beautiful thing we can do in life. So I did what I thought was the scariest thing in my twenties, I fell in love

I hope you can take my story and apply it to whatever transition period you are experiencing. I hope that you can find joy and possibility in the in between and keep your faith that what you’re looking for or waiting for does exist and that it will be more than worth the wait. Whether it’s a relationship, a job, or anything you’re seeking, that it will find you in its divine timing and you can be proud of the person you became in the meantime. For me it was about trust, failing, and running towards something I feared rather than away from it. It was about trusting in the process and finding my silver linings along the way. So I hope that you find it and soon and that you don’t shy away from it when the thing you want arrives. I hope that you know you’re worthy of what you want and settle for nothing short of exactly what it was you were seeking in the wait.

yes that’s cabbage in my sports bra….

I kind of hate the phrase newborn trenches. Because yes, the first few weeks when you just give birth are quite rough and it feels like up is down and down is up and you’re so sleep deprived and have no clue what you’re doing. But I still, I would love to go back and have those sweet snuggles, the endless chest naps, and the little newborn coos again. The time is just so precious and it really does fly by.

What I would go back and say to myself is to actually soak it in. I feel like I was so overwhelmed with not knowing what I was doing or just so uncomfortable with lack of control of my new normal that I wish I would have actually slowed down and taken it all in. I was so determined to have things figured out. I was stressed about trying to formulate our schedule or that I needed to be laying her down more or that I just needed to have everything perfect. My baby wasn’t born to have perfection, but still I felt like I had to meet some unwritten standard.

The biggest point of contention for me like so many moms was breastfeeding. I went into motherhood knowing I likely wouldn’t be able to breast feed. Without going into too many details, I had surgery when I was younger and the likelihood of me being able to breastfeed was low. My doctor said I wouldn’t know until I actually tried to breastfeed. Hearing that as a teenager I was like “who cares?” “that’s so far away and there’s formula, whatever”. Obviously my teenager self did not understand the gravity of breastfeeding or how much pressure and societal standards are put on new moms to breastfeed. I had no idea how much I would sob or feel inadequate because of it when I actually became a mom.

So, I went into motherhood knowing I likely wouldn’t be able to breast feed. When people would ask what I planned to do regarding breastfeeding before hand I would say “I hope I can, but I’m not going to put pressure on myself if it doesn’t work out.” Even with the clear headed mindset I entered into motherhood with and the out I gave myself, I was still devastated when reality hit and I actually wasn’t able to or it was clear it was not working for us. If I heard “breast is best” or “how’s breastfeeding going” one more time during those first few weeks I was going to scream. I actually may have. That time is a blur lol.

I consider myself a hard worker and someone that doesn’t quit easily, but the writing was on the wall. There was one afternoon where my daughter was screaming her head off, I’m trying to get her to latch to one of my both bleeding and scabbed nipples as tears are rolling down my face, and I’m writhing in pain from her trying to get milk. I looked at my husband and said maybe we should try formula…? He was like “ya think?”

This was yet another moment where it was clear we didn’t know what we were doing. After googling ‘how much formula should babies have’? And ‘is it safe’ or ‘am I horrible for giving her formula’? We finally got the 2oz ready and gave it to my daughter while both of us held our breaths. Her tears immediately stopped and after she downed the bottle she looked up at us like we had just given her liquid magic. It was the first time she fully opened her eyes and actually looked at us. Calm and finally satiated.

It was clear that the path forward for us would have to be formula. She finally went from constantly crying to the calm and easy going girl that we have now. It would be great, she would get what she needs, my husband could now help feed her, and my body could finally begin to heal. Yet still I felt like a complete loser and that I was already failing at being a parent and I was just getting started. Even when we both agreed that we would transition to fully formula feeding I would constantly second guess and go back and forth on whether that was the right thing to do. I would start the process of trying to dry up my milk, but then an hour later would get the pump out to see if I could get anything or see if maybe all of a sudden our problems were fixed.

The feeling that I especially hated while breastfeeding was dread. It felt completely backwards to dread the experience that was marketed to you as bonding. The feeling of dreading feeding your baby felt so wrong to me. When I stopped breastfeeding the dread finally went away, but it was replaced by anxiety and doubt. I found myself constantly googling or deep in some Reddit thread trying to reassure myself that I wasn’t a complete disgrace for formula feeding my baby. If you’re wondering if it helped, it didn’t! Deep down you know that you know what’s best for you and your family, but the crazy hormones circulating your body, the lack of sleep, and the newness of it all makes you question everything.

I’m happy to say that if you’re in the so called “newborn trenches” or in the depths of struggling with breastfeeding or lack thereof I can say that yes it does absolutely get better. It took me months to finally accept the fact that my baby would be formula fed and that I would have to own the fact that I threw in the towel after just a couple weeks of trying. I was afraid to even say it out loud for weeks I was so full of shame. I often do questions with my community on instagram and of course the number one question was “how is breast feeding going?” and I avoided it like the plague. It wasn’t until one day that I decided to open up about it in hopes to help someone else that was deep in their breastfeeding shame spiral or deep in some Reddit thread trying to make themselves feel better that I finally owned it. To my surprise, I received nothing but positive feedback or “thank you so much for sharing this” "I felt the same way too”. It was one of the biggest responses I’ve ever received from something I posted online and I was shocked by it.

I feel like you go on social media and see nothing but positive breastfeeding stories, the beautiful aesthetic photos of super moms breastfeeding with ease, the freezers full of excess breast milk, or just women so beautifully bonding with their newborn babies. To be clear, I think they’re amazing for it especially after going through my own breastfeeding journey or lack there of, but because my experience felt so different, it left me with nothing but envy for those people.

I think the truth of becoming a mom is that it is different for everyone and you’re not wrong or bad for needing to make choices that work for you and your family especially when it comes to things like feeding your baby. The truth is emotions are high, hormones are crazy, and we’re all just doing our best. So I would go back and tell myself: Sydney you’re doing amazing. You have a beautiful perfect little baby and you’re not perfect, but you are exactly perfect for her. Trust your instincts trust your heart and your baby and everything will be ok. I started praying a lot when I became a mom. You’re so in your head and so worried about their safety and if you’re doing anything right. For me praying helped. Trusting that you didn’t just become a mom by accident. That you were meant to do this and that you with your partner and the help of God created a life and you are more than capable of taking care of it. So this post is for that fellow mom out there who feels like she’s doing it all wrong or that just needs to know like I did that it can and will get better. I hope you have the right people around you and that you know you can trust your instincts and that you’re meant to be a mom. If you’re in the thick of the newborn trenches, know that once the hormones finally settle and you get a full nights sleep and actually start thinking straight, you may end up missing it. Even if you don’t, there’s a lot to be proud of yourself for! I believe in you and I hope you believe in you too!

Once I finally owned my formula feeding journey here are some of the products that helped me!