We’ve made hard choices over the last year to change up our daughters schooling, and selected a new (private) school for her that she could, in theory, attend until 8th grade. If we flash back to 4+ years ago, before she was born, private school never crossed our minds. My husband and I are both graduates of public school education, and valued the walkability that our local public school community provides. In fact, moving, while not necessarily primarily motivated by school proximity, was motivated by remaining in this district.

Signing our child up for this new school was motivated by a few factors, but there is one most relevant to this piece. Our school board is motivated by classroom utilization to close our elementary school (which is not underutilized), and transform it into a centralized preschool. Up until we stepped into learning about the closure of an elementary school one year ago, I did not know that our district offered pre-k services to all, I assumed it was for early intervention. It’s worth noting that my daughter was 2 at the time, and as such, I’m a prime candidate for KNOWING this information. We’d also been living in Lakewood for 7+ years at that point.

When you start to investigate the preschool options available, you’ll notice that there is no 3 year old all day option. As a household with 2 working parents, half day pre-k is not an option for us. Daycare was not something we wanted to enroll in, so that comes off the table as an alternative to add to the day of care, though you’d be hard pressed to find one that’ll pick them up from pre-k let alone has availability in the next 4 years. If you do the math on a half day “nanny” to cover the rest of the work day, you’ve priced yourself well above any other all day pre-k option in the area. Yet, our school board keeps using this “affordable, accessible” language to describe their motivation to centralize a preschool.

Given no other option but to find new care for our three year old, we enrolled in a private school outside of Lakewood that offers 8:30-3:30 school and care. While 3:30 will still be a challenge for us as working parents, our other motivating factors outweighed the need to figure out our workday(s) ending at 3:30. Plus, the expense for this program ended less than the nanny coverage of a half day + the “affordable” 3 year old pre K our district offers. Happy to share the math with anyone who wants to dive deeper.

Last night, there was a board meeting, and one parent (who I know, hi Michelle!!), brought in some excellent research during her speech to the board. I’m going to heavily paraphrase to get to my point, but ultimately, changing schools affects children’s learning, puts them behind in math and reading (1 - 2 months) from their peers and also can negatively affect the classroom(s) they move into as the children already established in these schools’ routines are also affected. All that to say, now that we have found a place for our 3-year old to attend pre-k, why would we risk changing up her classroom next year, and potentially delaying her learning, just to join the full-day program our district offers for four year old’s? If you frame this around the idea that next year, when she is four, the centralized preschool transition will have taken place, she’ll be at the Pre-k building for one year for centralized preschool and then will have to move AGAIN to attend elementary school (K-4) at ANOTHER building, marking her 3rd building in three years (non-exclusive of the care we had prior to 3).

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Now, I understand our path might not be the same as others and that’s not the argument I am trying to make. As was also stated by parents who spoke out last night at the meeting, we cannot satisfy everyone all the time. Which is literally the primary function of my job and the heart of why this entire process continues to baffle me. As a marketer, I make decisions on an hourly basis based on fact, not feeling. A large part of my role involves responding to RFPs (Requests for Proposals) which are, in essence, a document a potential client sends out asking companies like ours to prove, in writing, why we deserve their business. When an RFP comes to me and says “provide your last 3 years of audited financial statements,” or “provide your firm’s revenue for the past 5 years,” or “provide your safety data,” I cannot make this up. I cannot say our safety rating is 0.0 when it isn’t. I cannot submit projections from 2021 and call them current. If I did, we would lose the business, and I would likely lose my job. That is not a dramatic statement, it’s just how the industry works: your numbers are only as good as your ability to prove them, today, with a citation. And yet, from where I sit, professionally, our school board has been doing exactly this, leaning on outdated figures, predictions from the pandemic era that the research itself now says shouldn’t be used this way, to argue a position with very little current, verifiable data behind it. Viewed through my corporate lens, this isn’t just a difference of opinion... it’s a standard of proof that wouldn’t survive past the first submission. There would be no short list, no next interview. We’d lose the opportunity and we’d be back to the drawing board wondering A. why we lost and B. what we need to do next to fix it.

Miss the mark on an RFP response, and there is no re-submission, no “let’s try that again.” Quite literally, you may never win work with that client again. So when this board was handed exactly that, a court-ordered redo from a settled lawsuit with the community, I expected them to show up like their business depended on it.. because in my world, it would!

Last night was the meeting of 1 of 2 of the boards redo. I was expecting to see concrete facts. COLD HARD DATA. An RFP response worthy of getting shortlisted. Instead we got a presentation filled with warm fuzzy opportunities, with no cost-benefit analysis, and the same non-fact based summaries I gave above about my own personal experience with schooling for our daughter. You cannot rebuild trust on warm fuzzies alone… because your warm fuzzies are not someone else’s. Your children thrived in “X” environment” is not my child’s experience. Using this as evidence isn’t so different from what I’m doing right now, writing this piece and asking you to just believe me. The difference is, I’m not the one asking a community to hand over their neighborhood school on the strength of a feeling, on a solution not backed by fact.

As my friend Kaitlin so eloquently put on her Substack Trust Issues, here, “ Trust doesn’t care about intention. It also doesn’t care about scale. It runs the same at the scale of a nation and the scale of an elementary school: erode enough trust and people stop participating, which is the precise condition that lets the erosion continue.”

We’re working on a self-fulfilling prophecy you can see play out in this article alone. Tell me my child might have to change schools two times in the next two years and I’ve already decided to not enroll my child in your programs. Please believe me, I know that we cannot please everyone! In my line of work I have a 35% win rate this year. But each loss fuels our wins. We debrief as a team. We ask what the client actually needed that we didn’t show them. And to even be given an opportunity to get feedback from the client is extremely rare, like 1% of the time, but it’s being handed on a silver platter to this board at each board meeting. When it’s time for us to get in front of the client again, we come back sharper, with better data, a tighter case, because losing a bid isn’t the end of the relationship, it’s information.

So, I’d love to see the next board meeting be about rebuilding trust. I’d love to see them start to think like an actual business with gains to win, facts to defend, success to prove. I’ve sat in enough go/no-go meetings to know the difference by the first conversation. Show me the cost-benefit analysis. Show me the current enrollment data, not the 2021 projections. Show me you understand why the first pitch lost. That’s not a high bar. It’s the bar every business I know has to clear just to stay in the room.

Read my ongoing series on community, in the following parts. I discuss what we’ve noticed about our community, our village, and what we’re doing to fix it.

Part 1: Noticing The Shift

Part 2: The Illusion of Proximity

Part 3: Loss of Neighborhood

Part 4: Still Learning

Or enjoy more of my stories and musings:

Learning or Just Looking Things Up

Hello! You’re the parent!

Growing Up Somewhere Temporary

When the Brewery Sells Out

Everyone is Miserable Except Me

I remember the conversations vividly, even though my child is approaching 3.5. How we were going to care for her after my maternity leave ended? Should I take on a new job? Should I stay home? The truth of the matter is that almost nobody’s childcare and career setup looks like what they pictured before kids. So many factors play into what we decide, not to mention how much you change once you actually have your child. I’ve been thinking about this a lot since I was featured in Nicole Price’s article, “Everyone Thinks Everyone Else Has a College Fund.” Child care is shaping a lot of who we are as parents and how we’re planning for the future, so how did we all end up with the decisions we made?

I talked to eight moms, teachers, a realtor, a nurse, a university administrator, a marketing manager, and a voice teacher, about how they actually landed where they are. Some had plans before they even had their children, some had to flex once their children arrived. Some had partners with zero job flexibility. Most said part-time doesn’t exist in their industry. In Part 1, we got into the work side of things, what these moms did before kids, and how much flexibility (or not) shaped what came next.

Read Part One

In Part 2, we’re getting into the childcare side of things, what they actually chose, what it costs, and whether any of it held up once reality set in. Read the conversation below, I bet you’ll see yourself in at least one of these answers.

About the Moms:

Haley G: I am currently a Marketing Manager at a architecture and construction firm. I have a 3 year old and another child due in September and I live in Lakewood, Ohio.

Mary W: I am a private voice teacher, freelance singer, and part-time instructional mentor for online technical programs. I have three kids; 13, 11, and 6, and I live in Lakewood, Ohio.

Meggie A: I am a stay-at-home-mom, I have two kids, ages 4 and 2 and I live in Orlando, Florida.

Ariel L: I am a stay-at-home mom, I have 2 kids, 20 months old and 4 years old and I live in Lakewood, Ohio.

Laura B: I am currently a university administrator at higher education institution. My son is 5 and a half and my daughter is 3 and I live in Lakewood, Ohio.

Haley S: I am a realtor and I have an 11 month old and one on the way and I live in Lakewood, Ohio.

Ariel K: I am a 6th grade English Language Arts Teacher and I have 2 boys, ages 4 and 2. I live in Pepper Pike, OH.

Paige H: I am a Part-time Preop Nurse (24 hours/week; 2 12 hour shifts) and I have a 5 month old and live in Charlotte, NC.

For more background on each mom, be sure to read part 1.

Question 7: Walk us through how you actually chose your current childcare situation (daycare, nanny, family, school). What mattered most to you, and was there anything you compromised on?

Haley G: I personally could not get past the idea of my child not being home with me considering I would be working from home, but knew that I would not be able to work and care for her together due to the unpredictable nature of my job. We started by asking my mom how many days she would like to commit to, asked if any of the other grandparents could commit (they could not at the time) and then decided to find a 3-day a week nanny in our home to supplement what my mom could offer. This could be an entire post but we went through a few nannies in the first year and a half and thanks to the flexibility of our jobs were able to bridge some gaps in care by doing things like spending two weeks in Georgia with our in-laws, etc.

All that to say, we are planning on doing something similar again for the first 1.5 years of baby 2. Our 3 year old attended a local Montessori school with a full day program (school 9-12, and then aftercare) from 18 months until this year, and she’ll be at a new school with a school day and aftercare program (that ends at 3:30). We’ll have to figure out how we make her day ending at 3:30 work, but we have a few more available grandparents these days!

Mary W: All three of our kids will be in full time school for the first time this fall. When My first two were young, we used care.com to find a sitter for a few year when one of us couldn’t be home with kids due to work. We’ve never had the ideal child care situation, as we don’t have family that is helping us nor have we paid for full time child care. Any work I or my husband have had to do from home, we basically handle through switching off or irregular child care options.

Meggie A: When I was working I was very particular about having a nanny come to the house. After almost losing our son, I didn’t want to put him in any care that would be outside our own home. Thankfully we found college aged girls who would be there while I was working. It was great, because you could pay slightly lower than the going rate and they have so much energy! I would compromise on the hours I had help. I would work two hours in the morning with no help, and then have someone come the rest of the work day. It was difficult entertaining a baby and a toddler and working, but I valued having them home with me.

Laura B: AVAILABILITY. I started calling daycares in May 2020 to start my son in daycare in January 2021. It was challenging because some of them were closed due to COVID and didn’t know when (or if!) they would reopen. I remember talking with folks that said they had a two year waitlist at their location. My husband works downtown and I work in University Circle so we wanted something in the Lakewood/Detroit Shoreway area so that it was convenient for the both of us. While there are some subsidized options for CWRU employees in University Circle, I would take on complete responsibility for drop off and pick up and we couldn’t do that. Cost was also a factor - there were certainly a few locations that we couldn’t afford. The location that we selected was in a convenient location, had availability when we needed it, was a reasonable price that was within our budget (included baby formula and meals for older kiddos!), had positive reviews and seemed safe. I could not have imagined a better daycare looking back - my son started there in January 2020 and was there through August 2025 until he went to full day Pre-K through Lakewood City Schools and my daughter is still at the daycare now. The staff love and care for the kids and my kids have learned so much there.

Haley S: I had a friend who was looking for part time childcare in the mornings and I asked her if she’d want to consider a nanny share. I was looking to create my “work hours” so it worked out really well. We found our nanny online on a site called Nanny Lane.

Ariel K: We originally started to look at daycares, but were approached by a family friend who said she was willing to watch our son when I went back to work. Our early morning school schedule is difficult for most childcare providers, so it was ideal that she was willing to travel to our home early. She was also willing to accommodate our school schedule (we didn’t have to pay for 5 full days if we didn’t have school for the full week). A compromise that we made was that she is a nervous driver and was not willing to transport our son anywhere. I had initially hoped she’d be willing to do outings to places like the park, library, etc.

Paige H: We are very lucky that my parents and my mother in law moved to Charlotte shortly after we moved. They also both retired so they both watch our child in our home when we are both working. My schedule comes out 6 weeks at a time, when I receive my work schedule I sit down with my mom and my mother in law to determine who is watching our child each day. It was really important to me that they stuck to the routine we had created for our child, I created a mock schedule that they could refer to when they were taking care of him.

Question 8: What age did your child start daycare/care outside the home, and how did you land on that timing? How much are you currently paying for childcare, and how does that compare to what you expected going in?

Haley G: 18 months and it became a necessity. We were struggling to find consistent nanny care in our house around 12 months and wanted to make sure she was getting in time with other children. The Montessori school we toured fit our needs and had a space for her starting at 18 months, so we signed her up. We are paying $14-$15k per year for childcare. Before parenthood I expected less than $1k per month on average but as we have learned about different programs and schools we have decided to invest more into childcare/school. Overall what we are currently paying and will be paying is much more than we expected but we are making the necessary choices to afford this.

Mary W: We started having a regular sitter come two weeks after my second child was born. She would just come for a few hours in between my husband getting home and me teaching (yes, I had to go back to work two weeks after having a baby). I’ve never been in a position to have paid maternity leave. We landed on that timing basically out of necessity. We have paid part-time sitters $13 to $18/hour. I always paid a standard rate or a little higher depending on the situation.

Meggie A: They have never had care outside the home. However my son is 4 and will be starting school in the fall. I was paying $1800/month. Now $0 because I am staying home with them. I truly had no concept for how much childcare was going to cost before having kids of my own.

Laura B: My husband didn’t have any paid leave when my son was born and had two weeks in 2023 when my daughter was born; I had 12 weeks of FMLA, 8 of which were paid leave and the rest were paid via vacation and sick time. My son and daughter both started daycare at 3 months old because my husband and I had to be back to work full time. Full time daycare for my 3 year old is $15,860 per year; Pre-K through Lakewood City Schools for my now 5.5 year old was $7,830 (full day program with before and after care); summer camp/nanny for my 5.5 year old came out to a total of $1,760. Total for the year = $25,450. While a part of me is shocked by that number, the other part of me is not surprised. For our family, it is kind of a non-negotiable so we have to make it work.

Haley S: 6 weeks old but sort of gradually. A couple hours at a time.$22/ hour but with the new baby it will be $25/ hour.

Ariel K: My child started childcare at 12 weeks when I returned to work. We landed on that timing when I decided I wanted to take FMLA on top of the 6 weeks I would have gotten from school. Based on when my son was born, it allowed me to finish out the last 2 months of the school year before summer.

Question 9: Going back to our first few questions, how close does your pre-children plan resemble your current reality?

Haley G: I spent the first year working desperately wishing I didn’t have to work. I spent year two underwater with work and the idea of wanting a second and miscarriages and life and just got through it. I’ve spent year three really thankful for my job. All that to say, it’s ok for you to flex on what you think you want vs. what works for you AND your child. And I intentionally put YOU first because it really has to work for you, and then it’ll work for your child, too

Mary W: LOL, it resembles nothing of what I expected pre-kids

Meggie A: 4 years later, it resembles the plan I initially wanted, but for a a few years, it looked nothing like I expected.

Laura B: In alignment. I think going with a daycare center has saved us a lot of headache in terms of cancellations or changing schedules that can come up with a nanny or in-home care. We have found a really amazing community through our daycare and I am eternally grateful for that - many of the parents are close friends, our kids are best friends and I can count on them as a part of our village.

Haley S: I’m super happy with the set up we’ve created. Some days I feel like I need more hours but I try to just make it work. I love having my mornings with my son and if I do have an important appointment in the AM we are lucky to have family help nearby too.

Ariel K: It matches the plan pretty closely, except there has been some conflict and drama with the babysitter that I didn’t factor in when we made the childcare plan.

Question 10: Do you feel like the “stay home vs. work” decision was really a decision?

Haley G: I think it did at the time, but now, especially after seeing some responses in this article I was featured in, I’m glad it wasn’t a decision for us. Being in control of our savings and finances and having the time and money to say yes to most anything is important to me as a person.

Mary W: I always knew going into the arts that I was not going to have the typical work/career situation. I honestly never wanted a standard 9-5 and knew I wouldn’t thrive in that environment, so I expected irregularity to a certain extent.

Meggie A: Yes. I agonized over my decision. I wanted to quit but the decision felt so big, I didn’t know if I was making the wrong choice, what would it be like to not bring in money, would I like being home all day and not having something outside of the kids, so many nights questioning this, but once I decided I had a lot of peace which made me realize I made the right choice. I do acknowledge it was a choice for me which many women don’t get. If I was forced into making it I know I’d feel differently.

Ariel L: I do feel like it was a decision, but it was a decision that was heavily weighted towards me staying home. My husband fully supported me in the decision; if I had truly wanted to return to work we would have made it happen.

Laura B: I truly cannot imagine leaving the workforce and being home full time. I love my kids but I would not be the best mom for them if we did that. I also think so much about what my children learn and gain from daycare and I don’t think my husband or I could provide that.

Haley S: For me no because I knew I could scale back but I bet that is really hard if you’re in more of a traditional work role.

Ariel K: No, I never even really considered staying home.

Question 11: Has your childcare/school choice changed as your child has gotten older, or do you expect it to?

Haley G: Yes, we just recently had to rethink our 3 year old’s schooling plan because we were not satisfied with the program at her previous school for her learning style/temperament etc. Knowing that we were giving up all day care to have to pick her up or coordinate care for her starting at 3:30pm weekdays was a big discussion, but the trade off is worth it. For our new baby we want to try and make our schedules work so one of us can be available weekly to care for her and also lessen the cost burden for us.

Mary W: Yes. I currently have my two kids in private school and my youngest will go into the public schools, as he is special needs and needs paraprofessional assistance in the classroom. With my youngest kid being special needs, nothing has looked the same as with my older two kids.

Meggie A: I always knew I wanted to stay home with my kids until they are in school and I do not see that changing. We also are choosing to do a hybrid-style school where I will homeschool them 2 days a week, and I also don’t see that changing.

Laura B: My son has already moved on from daycare and will be starting kindergarten this fall. While the costs significantly go down, there are other factors that come into play like registering for before and after care, more breaks than daycare that don’t align with work holidays, coordinating summer care, etc.

Haley S: No I think we will keep doing this until he goes to preschool.

Ariel K: Our community has an awesome early childhood center, so our son was able to go there once he was old enough (part-time). They do offer before/after care as well. Next year he will be in full-day preschool, so he will spend much less time with a babysitter and most of his day will be at school. Because of conflict with the current babysitter, we are eager to transition to more time at the early childhood center with limited need for the at-home babysitter.

Paige H: I do expect to have our child go to preschool when ready, in which we will have to start looking at different places in the next year or so.

Question 12: What’s one piece of advice you’d give a friend who’s about to have their first kid?

Haley G: Woof. I don’t know what most peoples work days look like, but if you are going to keep you job and have a child, plan to have care for them during your work day. Don’t try to take on both roles, though it might seem like a good fit or worthwhile at the time, you won’t be able to be fully present for either item and you’ll end up only hurting yourself in the end.

Mary W: Go in with as much flexibility in your mind as you can. Nothing looks the same for each kid. Be honest with your partner, it’s OK to takes breaks, and take time for yourself without guilt. Your kids will value that you did that.

Meggie A: I’d tell them that life won’t always go according to plan, and that’s okay. Some of the hardest moments and the greatest miracles happen in the unexpected. Let go of the need to control everything, and trust that you’re the right parent for your child. That’s when you’ll find peace.

Laura B: If you plan on using daycare, get on waitlists now. Additionally, I know that there can be some negative conversation surrounding daycare but the employees are not “raising your children”, they are part of your village - daycare was the best thing that I could possibly do for my kids.

Haley S: Figure out your childcare situation early! Don’t wait until the last minute. Also, being a working mom is really really hard but you CAN do both and find satisfaction in your career and get plenty of quality time with your baby. Often that means for me that I have to really think about meal prep and planning out groceries or maybe the laundry doesn’t all get done when I want it to. I sort of always feel like I’m behind on household tasks but the things that fall off are never the important ones and I’m ok with that.

Ariel K: As much as I consider myself a career woman, I would tell people to take as much time as they can afford to when the baby is born. I always knew I was going to return to work, but I do wish (especially with my secondborn) that I would have taken a longer maternity leave.

Paige H: Do not be afraid to ask for help. For someone who has a hard time asking others for help, after being diagnosed with postpartum depression, I had to start asking for help. Not only for my child but for myself, and I am so grateful for all the help and the community we have around us in this new season of life.

If there’s one thing this conversation made clear, "choice" gets used as a blanket word to describe every mom's setup ("she chose to stay home," "she chose to keep working"). These responses show it's actually covering up a lot of different realities underneath. For some of these moms, staying home or scaling back was a real, agonized-over decision, one they’re at peace with now. For others, there was never a decision to make at all: the job had no flexibility, the finances only worked one way, the field simply didn’t allow for part-time.

None of these setups are more “figured out” than the others. I’d argue none of us have it all figured out! They’re just different answers to the same impossible math, whose job bends, what childcare is actually available, what a family can afford, and what each mom, individually, needed to feel like herself again.

As I said in my advice response, it’s okay to flex on what you thought you wanted. These moms were so generous in sharing their stories, what resonated with you? What does your version of this look like? How can this community help you figure this out?

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I remember the conversations vividly, even though my child is approaching 3.5. How we were going to care for her after my maternity leave ended? Should I take on a new job? Should I stay home? The truth of the matter is that almost nobody’s childcare and career setup looks like what they pictured before kids. So many factors play into what we decide, not to mention how much you change once you actually have your child. I’ve been thinking about this a lot since I was featured in Nicole Price’s article, “Everyone Thinks Everyone Else Has a College Fund.” Child care is shaping a lot of who we are as parents and how we’re planning for the future, so how did we all end up with the decisions we made?

I talked to eight moms, teachers, a realtor, a nurse, a university administrator, a marketing manager, and a voice teacher, about how they actually landed where they are. Some had plans before they even had their children, some had to flex once their children arrived. Some had partners with zero job flexibility. Most said part-time doesn’t exist in their industry.

This is Part 1, the background and the work decisions. Part 2, coming soon, picks up with what childcare actually looked like once the plans met reality. Read the conversation below, I bet you’ll see yourself in at least one of these answers.

About the Moms:

Haley G: I am currently a Marketing Manager at a architecture and construction firm. I have a 3 year old and another child due in September and I live in Lakewood, Ohio.

Mary W: I am a private voice teacher, freelance singer, and part-time instructional mentor for online technical programs. I have three kids; 13, 11, and 6, and I live in Lakewood, Ohio.

Meggie A: I am a stay-at-home-mom, I have two kids, ages 4 and 2 and I live in Orlando, Florida.

Ariel L: I am a stay-at-home mom, I have 2 kids, 20 months old and 4 years old and I live in Lakewood, Ohio.

Laura B: I am currently a university administrator at higher education institution. My son is 5 and a half and my daughter is 3 and I live in Lakewood, Ohio.

Haley S: I am a realtor and I have an 11 month old and one on the way and I live in Lakewood, Ohio.

Ariel K: I am a 6th grade English Language Arts Teacher and I have 2 boys, ages 4 and 2. I live in Pepper Pike, OH.

Paige H: I am a Part-time Preop Nurse (24 hours/week; 2 12 hour shifts) and I have a 5 month old and live in Charlotte, NC.

Question 1: What was your job/career/role when you found out you were pregnant and/or started trying for children?

Haley G.:I was about 3 months into a new role at a small architecture and engineering firm when I found out I was pregnant. My title was Marketing Director.

Mary W.: I was a second year graduate student.

Meggie A: I was a content marketing specialist.

Ariel L: I was an administrator at a charter school.

Laura B.: I was working in the same department in a different role when I started trying for children and when I found out I was pregnant for the first time in 2020.

Haley S:. Same as it is now, self employed realtor.

Ariel K.: I was teaching, although at a different district from the one I currently work at.

Paige H. I was a Full-time Preop Nurse (36 hours/week; 3 12 hour shifts).

Question 2: When you found out you were pregnant (or started planning for kids), what did you assume your childcare/work setup would look like?

Haley G: I quickly realized a small company would not be able to provide me with the maternity leave and support I needed, especially as the sole person in the marketing role. This on top of other things led me to start looking for other roles, while pregnant. I knew I wanted something that offered a respectable leave, hopefully paid, and flexibility for me to figure out what being a mother who worked looked like for me.

Mary W: I had no idea. It was very much a tag-team effort by me and my husband (who was also finishing grad school).

Meggie A: When I found out I was pregnant I was positive I would work until my maternity leave was over and then quit my job.

Ariel L: When I was a teacher, I had always thought that I would take a few years off to stay home with my kids, then go back to teaching. When I became an administrator, I felt more passionate about staying at my job.

Laura B: I found out that I was pregnant in January of 2020 and thing shut down due to COVID about two months later. My husband and I do not have family in the area so I always knew that we would need to utilize full-time childcare.

Haley S: It was really hard because I had no clue! Being self employed and not having regular hours made picking childcare confusing. A lot of my work was often evenings and weekends which I’ve had shift a bit too. I didn’t feel like I needed full time during the day because sometimes I take time off during the day so I decided to just create set “hours” for myself with childcare and decided to do part time (Nanny share with 1 other family) in the afternoons.

Ariel K: With my job, part-time really isn’t an option, and I knew I didn’t want to stop working/teaching. I knew we’d have to figure out a childcare situation, whether it was a babysitter, daycare, etc.

Paige H: I assumed I would go part-time for at least a couple of years. It was up in the air depending on our parents’ jobs as to whether our family was going to watch our child or if we were going to have to find a daycare near us.

Question 3: How flexible is/was your job in terms of hours, remote work, or schedule control?

Haley G: My job before having my daughter preferred office time but was generally pretty flexible. I was required to track my hours and bill to projects/clients/overhead daily. However, daily no one was really looking over my shoulder. My current job is fully remote, I work from my home office and I am able to manage my day and time as I see fit.

Mary W: I worked less when I had my first kid, but now I have a combination of inflexible and a more flexible of a work schedule with the combination of part-time jobs I have.

Meggie A: My job was not flexible by any means, but it was post-Covid days and they allowed me to work from home. I still had strict hours and my teams always needed to be on green (stressful!)

Ariel L: My job was not super flexible. When you work in a school, you’re bound by the hours of the school day and the school calendar. If the kids are there, you’re expected to be there as well.

Laura B: I have been at CWRU for over ten years and in my current area/department for almost 7 years so I think that has afforded me a great deal of flexibility because my colleagues, supervisor and leadership know me as an employee and never have to question whether or not I will fulfill my responsibilities. My hours are pretty set at 40 hours a week; I am usually the first person in the office after dropping off one of my kids and then I’m the first to leave to pick up one of my kids. If needed, I will work in the evenings after my kids are asleep. I clearly communicate that I am not available from 4:30 - 8 p.m. during the week for the most part. We are allowed to work remotely up to twice a week and those days are flexible; additionally, the summers are very quiet so I typically have a bit more flexibility during that time as well.

Haley S: Very.

Ariel K: As a teacher, I didn’t feel like flexibility was really much of an option. I did get some minor schedule modifications to accommodate pumping when I returned to work. As much as I love teaching, I am envious of women who can go part-time/hybrid/etc. when they return to work.

Paige H: My manager was very flexible with letting me go part-time after I had my baby. I do believe I asked at the right time as we have since had a couple nurses leave and I am not sure if I would have been given part-time hours. Although I work 2 12 hour shifts, I do not have the ability to have straight days (such as every Monday & Thursday, etc.) I am able to switch days with other nurses if needed.

Question 4: Did you consider leaving your job or going part-time? (was that even an option?) What went into that decision, and if you stayed in the workforce, what drove that decision? (Financials, life, etc)

Haley G: Had I not found my current job I do not think I would have returned to my previous role. It was not beneficial or flexible enough to allow me to want to come back. In many ways finding my new role changed my outlook on being a working mom and I’m really grateful for that. I should note I started my current role two weeks before my due date - a story for another time!

Mary W: I knew I wasn’t going to be full-time from the start. I did have to change my expectations as to how many singing commitments I was going to be able to take when my kids were small, but that just made sense given the physical things that go into having kids for the mom.

Meggie A: When my son was born we found out he had a congenital heart defect 3-weeks postpartum, my company really did show its true colors, in a good way, and worked with me during that time. Ultimately when it came time to go back to work, 6-months later, they allowed me to work part-time hours. I always thought I wouldn’t work once I had kids, but the chaos and trauma I had experienced led me back to work, I think I used it as an escape from our real life, I worked 24 hours a week.

Ariel L: After my son was born, I fully intended to return to work after my maternity leave. However, as more time passed I felt more strongly that I wanted to be home with him. We couldn’t find a daycare that we liked that had availability, and paying a nanny to watch him would have taken up almost my entire salary. In my mind, it didn’t make sense to pay someone to watch him every day when I was perfectly happy staying home with him. Thankfully my husband’s job has great health insurance and we could afford to live comfortably on just his salary.

Laura B: Part-time would not be an option. I have considered leaving my job to pursue other opportunities but have never considered leaving the workforce. I have completed a bachelor’s and two master’s degrees - my education and work is an important part of who I am. I think that I live by example for my children in a way that is really important and valuable. My son gets to grow up with a working mom which I think will serve him well as a person, employee and even partner to someone else one day; my daughter gets to see an ambitious woman succeed in both work and life. Even leaving the workforce temporarily was not worth it to me from a personal and financial perspective and I could not reconcile giving up the earned upward mobility. Finally, financially, it would be tough for my family to only have one parent in the workforce. Related - I finished my MBA last year and many people ask me “what’s next” but it is really challenging to consider leaving my current role because I have built so much good will that has translated into understanding, support and ultimately, flexibility. While I could (potentially) go to another job that would pay more, at this point, the risk of losing that understanding, support and flexibility is not worth the reward.

Haley S: I have definitely pulled back and work less hours and am more selective about what clients to work with.

Ariel K: I never seriously considered leaving my job. I always knew when I became a mom, I was going to be a working mom. Going part-time was never an option as a teacher. It just doesn’t really exist in my field. My husband did say that I could stay at home if I wanted, but I couldn’t imagine not making my own money and not having a career. Our finances may have allowed for me to stay home, but our lifestyle and spending would have had to change.

Paige H: I decided to go part-time as my shift is 5:30am-6pm with a 45 minute drive home. I did not want to have 3 days/week where I may not see my child the entire day depending on when they went to bed. Financially, I have been able to work part-time and I pick up shifts when available.

Question 5: If you did leave a career or scale back, how do you think about that now, any regrets, surprises, or things you’d tell your past self?

Mary W: Kids were a surprise for us from the start, so things have been shaped around that career-wise. No regrets in terms of decisions that have had to be made for the sake of our family, but I think I’d tell my past self to worry less, things will work out.

Meggie A: Looking back now, I worked for 2.5 years after my kids were born, part-time. Because there has been enough time to process, I really wish I had not gone back to work. After having my second child I realized working from home was too demanding. Even though I had a nanny, I still felt like I needed to be there for my kids and work came second. I was starting to see the effects of that, in myself. I would stay up extremely late working on projects, miss meetings, feel an internal stress all hours of the day. I wish I would have figured it out to quit sooner than I did. I know I stayed at my job because I was still trying to process my own grief.

Paige H: I do not have any regrets going part-time as a nurse. I think it has helped me not burn out as quickly. I was surprised at how much I appreciate the switch up in my weekly routine, being a mom but also going to work and being a nurse.

Question 6: Does your partner’s (or co-parent’s) job have more or less flexibility than yours, and did that affect who scaled back or who handles school pickups/sick days/etc.?

Haley G: Yes and no, a lot has changed for us over the past three years and his job has had ups and downs in terms of flexibility (and his own willingness to be flexible). As of this response he works for himself so he is extremely flexible but also building a new business which requires a lot of extra time. The flexibility of my job is a good balance and we’re able to meet in the middle on what is important in a week for us to be at or skip.

Mary W: This has changed so much throughout the 15 years we’ve been married/13 years since having kids. My husband works full time remotely (with some travel), so he has flexibility to a certain extent. He does a lot of pickups/drop offs and stays at home with the kids when I teach (which is mostly after school/traditional work hours). This has changed quite a bit throughout the years and with different jobs we’ve both had.

Meggie A: Yes, my husband’s job is very flexible, he is in sales so he creates his own schedule. It ultimately gave me the freedom to quit my job because I didn’t have to work, which I know is a gift that many moms do not get. I am the “on” parent because I’m full time at home with them, I take them to doctor appointments, provide the entertainment, manage schedules, all of it.

Laura B: It depends. My husband is in the office 100% of the week so that is challenging to not have the work from home option for him. We split school pick ups - he is responsible for one kid and I am responsible for the other since they are at different daycares/schools right now (something I didn’t think about before having kids!). For sick days and unexpected closures, we look at our schedules and see who has more flexibility and it seems to be pretty balanced.

Haley S: Way less! He has ZERO flexbility (hospital physician) so I have to cover everything.

Ariel K: My husband is also in education, so his job is similarly inflexible. He also coached at the time, so his schedule was even more difficult to work with initially. He had a shorter commute, which impacted him handling the childcare drop-off in the mornings.

Paige H: My husband’s job is flexible, he has the ability to move meetings around if needed. Since I may not get home from work until 7pm, he will come home earlier to relieve whomever is watching our child. He is able to work remotely, if our child was sick he would be able to stay home as I would have to call out of work (which I only get 5 call outs a year, no sick days).

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So that’s the work side of it, the flexibility some of these moms had and the ones who had none at all, the partners who could pick up the slack and the ones who couldn’t, the plans that got rewritten the second reality showed up. Eight moms, eight pretty different answers. But honestly, knowing whether someone kept working, scaled back, or stayed home is only half the story. It doesn’t tell you who’s actually watching the kids, how they landed on that setup, or what it’s costing them. That part’s coming in Part 2.

Some of those other pieces include:

1. I was recently featured in an interview with other moms about how much we are (or aren’t) saving for college, which is a great read you can find here.

2. I summed up all my thoughts on The Digital Delusion by Jared Cooney Horvath and talked about how we ALL need to get more involved in understanding how technology affects learning. You can read that one, here.

2. I’ve also written about my observations about how Community Isn’t Automatic anymore. You can read more of that series here, here, here, and here.

Now onto today’s subject:

I have recently been gobsmacked by the amount of conversations taking place around me where I want to interrupt and go “Hello! You’re the parent!” I’ve decided to dive into the millennial parent of it all and learn more about this transition to passive parenting. This is SUCH a messy subject and I know will probably ruffle some feathers but as someone who has spent the last 5 years WORKING on herself, I want to see more people and parents do the work on themselves to level up our parenting and be the structure and meaning our children need to be responsible citizens.

To start, I found a great article from Camden Morgante on the styles of parenting, which I think is a great way to step into this conversation armed with the right information. From her article, “Connected parenting is a form of authoritative parenting, which research consistently demonstrates is the most effective style.The four parenting styles were named by psychologist Diana Baumrind in the 1960s, followed by decades of replication from others. The research ranked parenting styles by “demandingness” (expectations, structure, and boundaries) and “responsiveness” (warmth and attunement).

The four parenting styles are:

• Authoritarian: high demandingness/ low responsiveness

• Authoritative: moderate to high demandingness/ high responsiveness

• Permissive: low demandingness/ high responsiveness

• Neglectful: low demandingness/ low responsiveness

Connected parenting is authoritative, blending high warmth and attunement with moderately high amounts of expectations. It’s both/and approach that emphasizes both boundaries and validation, both structure and flexibility, both empathy and discipline. Unlike authoritarian parenting, the connection between the parent and child is always prioritized over immediate compliance.” You can think of permissive parenting as the best friend type, think Lorelai Gilmore, and authoritarian as a drill sergeant, 19 kids and counting style.

So, how do we, as Millennials, work towards Authoritative parenting and away from other styles we’ve been influenced by, whether that’s social media or our own upbringing? As adults, kids with authoritative parents go on to have greater academic achievement, with lower risk for depression, anxiety, and substance use (source). Armed with this knowledge, I have a few themes I’ve been noticing as I watch other parents, parent that I want to discuss.

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1. Talking about our children in places where they are in ways I would not want to hear myself talked about.

I see this TOOOOOO often. I want it to stop. I’ve prompted my own husband to stop. Maybe it’s the only child of me but I was VERY personally affected by hearing people talk about me and assign things about me to myself before I’d formed my own version of myself. Our children need down time, alone time, to figure out who they are and who they want to be. I see this two fold, we’re over scheduling our children and they have not a minute to be alone with themselves, this doesn’t give them the time to be retrospective. In The Science Behind Boredom, research shows boredom activates the brain’s default mode network, the same system responsible for daydreaming, imagination, and reflection. A kid can’t activate that reflective, identity-building system if their attention is always pointed outward at the next activity, or worse, at what someone else is saying about them.

AND we’re influencing it ourselves in the way we speak around our children. There’s actual research on this, a 2026 study out of Child Development followed 440 preschoolers and found that kids who simply overheard adults make positive comments about question-asking were twice as likely to start asking more questions themselves, and kids who overheard negative comments asked half as many. Half. From comments they weren’t even the direct target of.

So now flip that. What happens when the only feedback a kid gets about who they are comes from overhearing their mom say, “she has a split personality, she’s SO mean at home,” at a party? She’s not being told this. She’s absorbing it, your perception of her, becoming her perception of herself, before she’s old enough to push back on it or offer her own version.

This is basically labeling theory in action: research shows a self-fulfilling prophecy can take hold even when the label was never accurate to begin with, a parent’s own anxieties or self-image get projected onto the kid, and the kid absorbs it as fact. And once a label sticks, it’s sticky in a specific way: kids start acting in line with how they’ve been described, especially when it’s said out loud, repeatedly, by the person who knows them best. There’s a name for this in the research, a “spoiled identity”, and once it takes hold, it’s genuinely hard to shake.

I know this one personally, because I lived it. I was the shy rule follower. The Type A one. Always in control. Said about me so often and so early that I genuinely don’t know anymore where the label ends and I begin. It became true, in the sense that I built a whole adult life around it, I am organized, I am in control, I (once upon a time) followed every rule I was supposed to. But I still find myself asking, on a fairly regular basis: is this actually who I am, or is this just who I was told I was before I was old enough to have an opinion about it? I’m 30-something years old and I still struggle to answer that question. It’s taken a long time to remove my own personal bias of what is right and wrong, to let things go, let people fail, not respond to emails, build boundaries FOR myself. That’s the part that scares me most about this whole discussion, not that the label was wrong, necessarily, but that I never got the chance to find out for myself.

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2. Offering up negative stories when prompted with questions like, where is {younger child}? How are things going with {childs name}?

This one is so dangerous to me because it allows people around you to have a fully formed picture of your three-year-old’s personality before they ever spent five minutes with her, built entirely from your narration. It’s a live demonstration of the self-fulfilling prophecy! Think of it this way, every adult who hears “she’s a nightmare at parties” walks into the next encounter with that child already primed to interpret ambiguous behavior as confirming it. That’s confirmation bias doing real interpersonal damage to a toddler’s reputation before she’s old enough to advocate for herself. And the biggest problem with this is that parents could just be attributing misbehavior to fixed traits rather than situation/structural causes. An example of a fixed trait is, “she’s just mean”, “he’s just defiant”, rather than something like they were tired/hungry/under-supported in that moment. In these situations the kid’s behavior often gets worse, not better. Are we doing the work to investigate where the behavior is coming from or just assigning it to a fixed trait we’ve given our children? I work with my husband on this a lot, as he is not always intune to emotion like I am. Our child is not screaming at you to stay for another book because she is defiant, it’s because she feels like she didn’t have enough time to connect with you today.

In a study at Vanderbilt University, researchers examined the influence direct, and indirect speech from adults has on children (150 four to nine year olds were included in the study). The facilitator of the study either answered a phone call and spoke about a fictional group of people called “Gearoos” (indirect speech) or made (direct) negative comments about the group in front of the children. Comments like "their food was disgusting or their clothing was strange.

67% of children in the control group, who did not hear this negative talk at all, wanted to befriend the fictional group. Only 39% of kids in the indirect speech group wanted to befriend the Gearoos, and only 21% in the direct speech group wanted to befriend the Gearoos.

If hearing adults badmouth a fictional group shifts a child’s beliefs, what happens when a child overhears themselves being narrated this way to other adults, repeatedly, as their defining trait? “She’s a nightmare at parties” and “she’s defiant” are both stories about the child. “I haven’t figured out how to support her at parties yet” and “she needs more connection before bed” are stories about you. Only one of those gives you somewhere to go.

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3. Talking about negative behaviors in our children without acknowledging our own role in providing the structure necessary to remove them.

This one played out for me perfectly recently at a party, and literally inspired this whole draft. It’s powerful to me as an only child, married to an only child, about to embark on understanding the sibling dynamic as we bring a second baby into our home. This is more than just labeling one child, it’s labeling an entire relationship. It’s labeling your friend’s boyfriend as lazy and determining their entire relationship is not worthy of your attention. It’s saying this about your children, “He’s always been the sensitive one, she’s always been the bossy one.” That’s not a comment about a personality. That’s a dynamic between two children, narrated like it’s fixed weather, like it’s just how these two kids are, when it’s actually something happening inside a house with rules a parent is or isn’t enforcing.

Taking this back to the framework I opened with: Baumrind’s research separates parenting styles by demandingness (structure, expectations, boundaries) and responsiveness (warmth, attunement). Permissive parenting is high on the warmth and low on the structure, the best-friend parent, the one who can’t stand to be the bad guy. And the research on what that produces isn’t ambiguous. Without consistently enforced boundaries, kids raised in permissive homes show poorer self-control and are more susceptible to anxiety. They’re also more likely to be selfish or aggressive with siblings and peers, because those behaviors are simply never challenged at home. So when a parent describes one kid as the bossy one and the other as the sensitive one who can’t hold his own, what I actually hear is: there is no enforced structure between these two children, and I’ve decided to talk about the outcome instead of the cause.

This is the same labeling and self-fulfilling prophecy mechanism from before, except now it’s doing double duty. Two kids, two roles, locked in against each other. One hears himself described as the sensitive one, the one who can’t hold his own, who needs to be protected from his sister. The other hears herself described as the bossy one, the one who takes over, who can’t be trusted to play nicely. Neither of those is a fact about who they are. They’re both a description of an unrefereed relationship, repeated often enough that the kids start playing the parts they’ve been assigned.

And that’s where this entire piece gets sticky, because we have to turn the mirror around. I don’t think parents saying these things are bad parents. I think they’re tired parents. Permissive parenting often isn’t a philosophy or even something we consciously know we are doing. In a time where most parents are both working full time, it’s a symptom of running on empty, of being too depleted to hold a boundary for the fortieth time that day. I get that. I’ve fallen victim to it, too. But we need to start thinking of the behavior of our children not as a verdict on who they are but a question about what is being allowed. That was the whole premise I started this with: we are the structure. We are the meaning. If we’re not providing it, the dynamic between our kids will fill that vacuum on its own, and then we’ll stand around describing the vacuum like it was always going to turn out this way.

All of this to say I am NOT perfect either. Drew and I have worked very hard to remove our own absolute love of observing and describing the world and people around us as passive conversation. We are so used to just pointing out others’ behavior and talking about it as second nature that its real work for us to not do this in front of our daughter. I am getting better at holding my tongue and waiting to talk about things I’ve observed in other children until Drew and I are alone. I’ve cried as night after feeling like I held a boundary too strong, or that I didn’t follow though on one I should’ve. I’m not saying I’m picture perfect at any of this either, this but I’m trying. I don’t want to influence our daughters’ understanding of other people or parents. While drafting this post I received Dr. Aliza Pressman’s weekly newsletter and found this quote that sums up my own beliefs into a statement: “Watch the actual child in front of you instead of the one in the book. Repair when you blow it, because you will blow it. Everything past that is somebody selling you the feeling of control.”

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I made my registry on Amazon because everything I wanted (mainly) was on Amazon and I wanted to cash in on the completion discount to get a discount on some items like diapers etc. Plus I think they send you a sample package once you’ve hit a certain threshold (two items purchase).

Baby Clothing:

I didn’t want to ask for clothing this time around because we are having another girl and I have everything saved and sorted for baby 2 BUT we’re going to be in different seasons with the clothing we have and I’ve already noticed I’m going to need some pants to go with onesies for the winter months (that would’ve been first baby’s summer). I’m sure I’ll continue to be out of wack moving forward but I want to confirm sizing of this new baby before I go to deep here. Other than being out of season I need not a single thing - I’m honestly overwhelmed by how much clothing we own right now lol.

1. Amazon Essentials x Sofia Grainge Leggings | $16.99 / 3 pack

Diapering/Laundry:

1. Pampers Swaddlers | Sizes NB - 3 | $59

   1. With baby 1 I tried a bunch of different diapers, I even tried one that was a subscription and boy were they all either equal or annoying. We eventually just landed on the tried and true pampers, especially because you can pick up a pack just about anywhere you go.

2. Miss Mouth’s Messy Eater Stain Treater Spray | $27.99

   1. Miss Mouth’s is an influencer staple but I did feel like it worked well with baby stains, however, when you move into toddler territory good old fashioned dawn and baking soda work immensely better.

3. Pampers Wipes | $39

   1. I also never landed on a favorite wipe, the costco super size box works well but I added the pampers because they were available on the site.

Bottles/Feeding:

As of today we’re planning on formula feeding for a variety of reasons maybe one day I’ll get into but this section is planned with that in mind.

1. Momcozy KleanPal Pro Baby Bottle Washer, Sterilizer & Dryer | $299

   1. Our previous bottles we saved but I know they should not ideally be reused (at least pieces of them), and I would really like to use glass bottles this time around.

2. Dr. Brown’s Anti-Colic Options+ Glass Baby Bottles | various sizes & prices

   1. As babe got older we utilized the dishwasher for bottles but I really like the idea of a quick turnaround without running the whole dishwasher in the early days. The Momcozy KleanPal is another influencer favorite but this one has been recommended by my favorite mom friends too.

3. Muslin Baby Bibs | $15.99 / 8 pack

   1. Baby 1 was a spit upper BIG time so while I do have some bibs still, I want to add a few more to the rotation to cut down on laundry turnaround time. It’s all about efficiency here!

Baby Care / Health:

This section is pretty much all just personal preference. I went with the same pacifiers we had last time, upgraded to a non-manual aspirator this time (IYKYK), and added a repeat purchase of the humidifier we love that we have for baby 1.

1. GROWNSY Nasal Aspirator for Baby | $39.99

2. BIBS Pacifiers | various sizes, colors, prices

3. Carepod Mini | $150

4. MomCozy Smart WIFI Monitor with Two Cameras | $219

   1. As far as monitors go we still want to be able to see baby 1 and baby 2 at the same time, plus our current one has me surprised it still functions. I originally went with a non-wifi version for baby 1 after being scared someone was going to hack the signal - is that still a thing? This time I went with one that has the option to toggle on wifi. I like that if we are in the backyard we could just use our phones.

5. Slumberpod | $219

   1. We rented this from babyquip for 1-2 trips with babe 1 and really liked it but not enough to invest, we just ended up making things work and/or she wasn’t a great sleeper so this wouldn’t matter too much. However with the thought of wanting to do trips where we all stay in a hotel room together etc. I think this will be needed for this baby so babe 1 can stay up with us etc.

Other:

1. EASZZZ Baby Night Light | $29.99

2. Hatch Baby Sound Machine | $79.99

   1. Apparently the hatch was redesigned and is no longer a vessel you can move about the room. We literally read by hatch light nightly to start the wind down process and I was devastated to learn this. At this point I do still want the new version and I’ve just added on some moveable night lights for us. I really like the wake up/sleep lights with the Hatch.

3. Nursery Swivel Glider Recliner | $339

   1. Additionally we need a new glider for the nursery because we sold our last one when we moved. It was just a rocker and it destroyed our baseboards and was not that comfortable, so it was easy to move on from but now I don’t know what to order as a replacement. VERY open to suggestions here, but I really don’t want to spend $500+.

4. Montessori Book/Toy Shelf | $189.99

   1. The Montessori toy/book shelf is one we have a few of around our house including in baby 1’s room as a book shelf and its just a really great, simple, piece that we can move around as the kids grow.

5. Graco® 4Ever DLX 4 in 1 Car Seat | $319.99

   1. Lastly we need one additional car seat for our cars, the plan is to have one car with our infant seat and one with the graco so we are not investing in an infant seat for a year. We might also borrow one, but we’ll eventually land on the graco - which we did with babe 1 around 9 months.

   2. You can dive into my travel car seat recommendation to see what might be a best fit for you if you like to travel like us! There might be an additional seat you want to add to your registry. Right now we’ve just taken to borrowing a friends Way-B for babe 1 at 3 years old, and we’ll travel with the infant car seat if needed as we have the travel bag for our Nuna Pipa. I’ve debated adding the Way-B to our list.

6. Backseat Car Organizer | $25

   1. Helps keep your seats clean when they turn around, but also a great place to store toys and other things.

Items we’re re-using:

Colugo Carrier | $99

• this was a stand out favorite, especially for travel because it has storage on it so you can be hands free and bring your phone/cards without a purse. plus it’s really gender neutral so Drew really prefers this one. I don’t love that the new version is only in black right now. We have a forest green with ours which is great.

• I also got this gorgeous Wildbird Ariel Carrier from my cousin for this baby which I cannot wait to use.

Solly Baby Wrap Carrier | $88

• I know they have other options that don’t make you do all the wrapping of this fabric wrap but I honestly loved the analog nature of it, and it feels so soft all the time. I love to gift this option and I am SO excited to use this again.

BabyBjorn Bouncer | $229.99

• We were very fortunate to have been gifted this as a hand me down and it was a must have. I would absolutely repurchase this exact seat. It’s easy to move around the house, simple, and easy to clean.

All of my Strollers:

• Bugaboo Dragonfly Stroller | $1,4000 - You can dive down my stroller rabbit hole, I was obsessed with strollers for baby 1, which is hilarious considering she turned about 1.5 and did not want anything to do with any kind of stroller. I ended up with this one because we were traveling with baby at 7 months to Europe and I wanted something that laid flat and faced us. Did I need it? No. Do you need it? Probably not. However I do highly recommend a bassinet stroller if you like going for walks from your home. Soooooo much nicer than putting your infant in a car seat to go for a walk. I have a second hand Bugaboo Cameleon that I got for $75 that has a bassinet that does the trick, too.

• Colugo Compact Stroller | $299 - an earlier version of this stroller is our travel stroller and we love it, I would highly recommend this one if you are traveling post the infant stage. It fits in the overhead bin (easily) but it does not allow for a car seat connection, which is why I caution your use case. We got this around 10 months and used it consistently 12 months - 2 years.

• I also have a Bob Jogging Stroller I bought off Facebook Market Place that we loved for babe 1 and will reuse.

Guava Family Lotus Travel Crib | $249.95

• We used this a bit, maybe not as much as I expected, but we found success using it as a kind of play yard when we traveled or spent time outside too. I even got the bug cover.

Stokke Tripp Trap High Chair | $199

• Grows with baby, we used this for a while and it does become a chair at the table for them once they don’t necessarily need to be strapped in. I don’t know that I feel I would repurchase if I needed a high chair again but I’m glad we kept this.

• I do recommend a catchy! It catches everything that falls and is easier to clean up than the floor.

Other random items I kept: bath seat, clip on high chair, crib (babe 1 has been in a floor bed since 18 months), bath seat, Dagne Dover Diaper Bag (would not my first choice again), Activity table, snuggle me, Pack n’ play with a changing table for downstairs.

Did I miss anything? I’m thinking I want to do a bassinet this time but my we didn’t use it at all last time. Our house was much smaller, alongside our room too. We have space for it… did you have a favorite bassinet? What was your favorite item or most used item with baby 2?

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Some of those other pieces include:

1. I was recently featured in an interview with other moms about how much we are (or aren’t) saving for college, which is a great read you can find here.

2. I’ve also written about my observations about how Community Isn’t Automatic anymore. You can read more of that series here, here, here, and here.

Now onto today’s subject:

I recently joined a group of moms reading and meeting up about the book The Digital Delusion by Jared Cooney Horvath and I am amazed by how much this book (and subsequent discussion) has already opened my eyes. I found this a fitting topic for my Substack because I find technology has inhibited all ways in which we connect as a community, and this draws the line further down to how our kids are connecting. This conversation has SO many layers but I wanted to dive into a few of my thoughts to hopefully get you thinking about this too. The only way we can make a change is if we as parents start to understand what is best for our children and then help our schools recognize that, too.

A bit of background that I think is helpful here to understand my own unique perspective on school:

1. Since I was born in October, I started kindergarten going on turning 6. My mom had me “tested” to enter early and I was not accepted. This is relevant because I remember feeling like school was “easy” all throughout elementary school.

2. To the above point about school feeling easy, I was also tested to join, what’s probably currently referred to as the “Gifted” program, and I also did not make that cut. I was pulled out of class for intervention work a handful of times throughout elementary school but did not get the full gifted experience. I was on the outskirts of giftedness if you will.

3. In high school I was able to spend my senior year interning in the local school district as a student intern through a program at the vocational school that counted for high school credit. It was here, after experiencing elementary and middle school (5th grade and 8th grade) class rooms that I decided teaching was not for me. In general I did not like that my favorite teacher of all time was basically being scolded to get on board with teaching to the program and not continue with her wacky educational ways that made learning actually fun, and I disliked how much the elementary teachers were instructed to teach to help kids pass a standardized test, not to learn and retain information.

4. I wrote a paper in high school about how much I disliked the concept of standardized testing, despite being a great test taker myself. I think about this often because I was absolutely taught to pass a test, which I could do, until I got to college when I was no longer being taught to pass a test, and had NO IDEA how to study. College was extremely hard for me, and a very big shock.

Ok, enough background, but I feel it’s important because it informs the rest of this discussion. Since starting this book club (and also being a part of the fight to update our local school board in the last year), I’ve learned a lot of what my local district is using technology for and how the students are responding (via parent testimony).

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While my child was well cared for in the last year at her 3 year old primary Montessori program, we did not feel like her teacher was a match for her, and advocated for a change. We were not successful within the school so we started evaluating other options. Knowing that we loved, and she loves, the Montessori based education we landed on touring a local school that starts at 3 and goes to 8th grade based on the Montessori principles. It was here that we were first introduced to the idea of technology in the classroom, but maybe not in the way that you think.

Through our tour and subsequent discussion with our tour guide, we learned that this particular school does not assign computers to students. Students have access to a bank of computers (4-5 for the entire class) to type up their research papers in middle school. They are not able to access the computers FOR research, they still use books, and they do not complete any other school work on the computers. In 8th grade they have access to the computers for additional research time, and a specific math program that has replaced graphing calculators, but they still are accessing the computers from the class “bank” and do not have one assigned to themselves. What resonated most was the school's belief that technology should support learning, not replace it. Jared Cooney Horvath (author of The Digital Delusion) argues that knowledge must be stored in long-term memory before it can fuel creativity, critical thinking, and deeper understanding. Simply having information available at our fingertips is not the same as truly knowing it. Using a computer to look something up does not build knowledge in the same way that looking at a picture of food does not satisfy hunger. Information only becomes useful when it is internalized, connected to other ideas, and available to be recalled when needed.

So, it came as a very big shock to me, that my public school district, currently advocating for a very large levy and citing financial losses as the primary motivation to close an elementary school, was assigning all children starting in first grade their own computer TO TAKE HOME every day. I’m not sure why I was so shocked by this, but I figured a district intent on closing a school was likely not overspending on technology… boy was I wrong. A district is spending about $150,000 per year if it serves 1,000 students, which is about the number of students in our district’s elementary schools. . . Just saying. And this figure doesn’t include repair, software, etc.

The hardest part to swallow about the cost of this technology is that it was all sold to schools to convince them that education was broken and needed a new fix. It wasn’t and it doesn’t. As Ted Dintersmith (education advocate, author, and filmmaker) says, edtech is essentially a money grab, and districts are spending on it not because it works but because they were sold on it, and because “everyone else is doing it.” We can’t be the only school district not providing kids with computers or we’ll have a mass exodus of students because of it. However, through all this adoption time, evidence has accumulated that this promise is largely unfulfilled, despite the industry having grown into a $400 billion behemoth. If implementing technology in schools was going to work to completely reimagine education, fifty years was long enough to find out.

To make matters worse, as the conversation moved along, I’ve learned more concerning facts about how much the computers are being used within the elementary classrooms in our district. Not to mention cited here in The Digital Delusion, “over half of students now use computers for one to four hours daily in school, with a full quarter spending more than four hours on screens during a typical seven-hour school day, and less than half of that screen time is spent on actual learning, with students off task for up to 38 minutes of every hour when using classroom devices”. One local parent noted that her child could ultimately end up on the computer for TWO HOURS in a given school day if he finished his work early, something he was known to do as he was currently enrolled in the gifted program, albeit one that kept him in his home classroom and did not pull him out for enrichment (starting to sound familiar). It sounded, to me, like the teacher was using the computer as a crutch to entertain a child who was working faster than the other students, instead of providing non computer based enrichment. I also learned that most reading is taking place on screens in school, though, according to recent research, students generally comprehend and retain information better when reading on paper than on screens. Multiple studies and meta-analyses have found a “screen inferiority effect,” where readers score higher on comprehension tests when reading printed material compared to the same content on a digital device. A spot of irony for me as I grabbed the book digitally on my kindle for speed of getting started reading.

I recently listened to “America has a Moral Problem, Not a Political One”, in which David Brooks talked about how college aged students are no longer prepared for the real world (also sounding familiar). Up until a certain time in history peoples’ morality was shaped by the social roles, I’m a tailor, a solider, a teacher, a farmer, and my morality, the way I behave, my standards of decency, are fulfilled by how well I fulfill my moral role. Today, rather than sharing common expectations about character, duty, and responsibility, morality has become something highly individual and personal. This has led us to lose much of our shared language for discussing right and wrong.

In the podcast, Brooks cites Christian Smith, a sociologist at Notre Dame who went to college campuses and asked people when the last time they faced a moral dilemma was, and most young people couldn’t identify a moral dilemma. A moral dilemma is when two values you cherish clash. Brooks argues that many young people have become morally inarticulate. They often know how they feel about an issue, but lack the vocabulary and framework to explain why. What are the underpinnings of the loss of morality? Brooks suggests that schools once viewed the formation of character as a central part of their mission. Colleges, in particular, have largely stepped away from that role. Part of the reason is our increasing diversity; we are often hesitant to define what moral formation should look like. Another part is the assumption that people will somehow acquire these skills on their own.

At the same time, technology has altered how we learn to relate to one another. Many of the everyday interactions that once taught empathy, accountability, and social awareness now happen through screens, or not at all. We have fewer opportunities to practice giving criticism respectfully, ending relationships with honesty, sitting with someone who is grieving, or simply navigating uncomfortable conversations. In many ways, we have become more connected than ever while losing some of the social experiences that teach us how to be considerate human beings. What I found most compelling about Brooks’ argument is that the issue isn’t necessarily a loss of morality itself, but a loss of the institutions, language, and habits that help us develop it, and how technology itself is impacting this lack of development.

Around the same time I listened to Ted Dintersmith, also on Prof G, in “Schools Are Teaching Kids the Wrong Things.” Ted mentioned that the story of American education is we teach what’s easy to test, not what’s important to learn, which ties into the above. I think computer usage in classrooms is making this both more noticeable and also propagating the issue. One example he uses stood out to me, MIT engineering graduates on graduation day were unable to light a bulb with wire and a battery, showcasing a system disconnected from practical application.

We’re starting to see this kind of source failure in children earlier and earlier. In older students, we see this as a confusion that happens when students use AI or digital tools to produce an answer without developing the thinking behind it. In the Digital Delusion, Horvath calls this, “cognitive offloading”, where students using digital tools bypass acquiring foundational knowledge that actually builds understanding, and in doing so, they get the illusion of learning without any of its substance. We’re providing kids education on tools designed to deliver correct answers, which in turn replace the process of actually learning to think. In our younger kids, at elementary age, digital devices and screen time are displacing playtime, and with it, the cognitive development that comes from it. Children have less time to navigate the unpredictability of other people: how someone misreads them, pushes back, or simply responds in a way no algorithm ever would. A learning “game” gives a child a correct answer or a wrong answer. Another child gives them something far more valuable, and far more difficult to process.

In my time running The Cleveland Bucket List I’ve had countless interns. I’ve seen this struggle develop first hand, and I know it’s mentioned as we talk about younger generations entering the work force. Provide my intern with a concrete list of exactly down to the word what to do, and it gets done. Send them an email asking them to update a guide and it either won’t get done, failure to launch because the directions are not explicit, or it will be updated in that the closed businesses will be removed, but new businesses won’t be added, because they’ve been trained to answer the question asked, not to ask the question that wasn’t.

I write all of this because I am SO interested in continuing this conversation with other parents. How have you noticed the impact of technology on your children’s schooling, if at all? Are you the parent of a toddler, like me, who’s overwhelmed at the thought of all of this influence in the future? Is this something you’ve even had time to digest?

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If you’re a parent, an educator, or someone who’s ever handed a struggling young employee a task and watched them freeze, I’d really encourage you to read The Digital Delusion. It’s been weighing heavily on me since I started reading. Items like, the idea that students who are allowed phone access only at designated times spend so much of their day worrying about what they might be missing that they struggle to focus on learning really resonated with me. As I was reading the book outside, without my phone, I found myself distracted by the thought that I might miss the time to leave for the book club. Instead of being fully present with the book, I was preoccupied with what was happening elsewhere. The irony wasn’t lost on me. Who cared if I was a few minutes late? Why does this device hold so much power over our attention?

One of the things I’ve appreciated most about this book is how it has prompted me to think more intentionally about my own relationship with technology. While it’s impossible to eliminate screens entirely, especially while balancing a computer-focused career (or two), it’s made me consider where I can create more space for focus, presence, and deeper engagement in my daily life without a screen.

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Read my ongoing series on community, in the following parts. I discuss what we’ve noticed about our community, our village, and what we’re doing to fix it.

Part 1: Noticing The Shift

Part 2: The Illusion of Proximity

Part 3: Loss of Neighborhood

Part 4: Still Learning

Or enjoy more of my stories and musings:

Growing Up Somewhere Temporary

When the Brewery Sells Out

Everyone is Miserable Except Me

If you want to hear more about a particular area please do let me know, I’d love to be inspired to write more content outside of my community isn’t automatic series. You can read more of that series here, here, here, and here.

In late 2011, early 2012 I was voted “Most Likely to Never Come Back”. A majority of the senior class got a superlative, and each superlative had a female and male “winner”. You could campaign for votes around school and then you’d get awarded a sash with your superlative on it at the superlative ceremony one evening in late spring. My male counterpart was an exchange student from France who had the honor (and privilege) of ending up in Avon Lake, Ohio. I’m not sure that he envisioned white picket fence suburbia when he applied for his program. He was a natural fit for the award. I, on the other hand, just wanted to win something. If I look back at my time in high school I felt like I was largely on the outskirts of everything. I was not even close to winning the “popular girl” items like best legs, or best eyes (yes in 2011/12 we could still have these things on the ballot LOL). Since, by this time I had decided I was going to college at the University of Central Florida to get as far away from home as I could, I determined this was a superlative that could fit me and that I would be a shoe in to win. I campaigned, and won (apparently), and that’s where this story begins.

At the time, UCF let you pick your roommate and there were sites (almost like dating sites lol) that let you meet other people to see if you wanted to room together before applications went in, otherwise you’d end up with someone random. Of course I signed up to do this because I knew no one else going to UCF let alone anyone that had gone there. I eventually ended up meeting a few girls, one of which lived in Ohio (I think) and another from Michigan and we met up in Fort Wayne (LOL) one weekend before orientation, and then again at orientation. The girl from Michigan and I ended up being roommates and we coordinated our rooms as seen below.

We moved into the dorms in August of 2012, a week earlier than most so we could participate in sorority recruitment. She had a hand in convincing me to give it a try, alongside my cousin Amanda. Our suitemate (aka the other room we would share our bathroom with) had one girl who was also going through recruitment and her roommate (whom she went to high school with) would move in the week following. I ended up joining a sorority. It definitely shaped my experience at UCF.

The early days of college were a blur and not necessarily what I intended to write about when I started this essay, but I felt the scene needed to be set. In my first year I met so many new people, my roommate left college halfway through, and I made plans to live in an off campus house with three sorority sisters the next year. Year two, we lived off campus, one of the girls moved out halfway through the year (a theme?!), and my suitemate from Freshman year moved in for the summer. I stayed for summer school after changing my major. Orlando in the summer is gross.

Junior year I moved into the sorority house UCF built for us, it’s second year open. I turned 21 in a house I couldn’t (legally, by school standards) drink in. I stayed for the summer again. Going into senior year I found out everyone had made plans to live somewhere without me. I went home for a few weeks, tried to find a roommate on craigslist lol. Eventually found a house in this new development with three other sorority sisters I didn’t know super well. I survived a year in a house with people I didn’t know that well, with someone whose boyfriend moved in, with someone who got a dog for the house though we weren’t permitted to have dogs. A dog I ended up walking quite a lot. All of this background was intended to some degree to come to my final resting place but now I just feel like it’s babbling. My college stories are endless, it held a lot of weight for me.

Just this past week I traveled to Tampa for work. It was the second time this year flying to Florida and feeling this weird kind of nostalgia? But I wouldn’t even call it nostalgia. It’s more of a reflection. How weird it is to meet people and grow up in a state so far away from home? How one day you move back to Ohio and this HUGE piece of your life is just over? How weird it feels that you called Orlando home for four years and you haven’t been back (at least to the UCF/campus area) in 10? That 4, 5 ,6 years ago you might’ve called on someone who lived in Tampa to meet for dinner but now you wouldn’t?

I mean, one day at 20/21 I was living in a house with my best friends (one as my roommate), and my sorority big sister and all her friends, and then I blink and I know where only a few of them ended up. I truly grew up in Orlando. I became a version of myself I am so proud to know. I learned more about the world, and culture and all of my implicit bias’ captured from living in the white picket fence suburban bubble I mentioned above. Not everyone has such a profound college experience, take for instance my husband who remembers little to none about his day to day college life. Maybe half of that is a product of the times in which we graduated. I can add in a picture for almost every sentence I write here... but I didn’t because most are incriminating and do not need to live on the internet hahaha. I put a very tame sampling featuring mostly just myself below.

I mentioned it when I started writing but for me, college was the last time community was automatic. I didn’t have to work at it. Proximity did the work for me, especially living in a sorority house with 15-20 other girls. Even the friendships that weren’t that deep felt substantial because you saw each other constantly. Sometimes its nice to just be nostalgic about being 22 in a house with people who knew me then. Spending a few minutes just missing the subtle convenience of just walking downstairs and chatting with someone. Jumping in the car to run errands because you didn’t feel like studying and someone was off to do something, so why not go. Even post sorority house this ease was easy for me, our friends liked to do the same things. Someone was always ready to do a beach day, or a pool day, or you’d see each other at our favorite happy hours. Then you become an adult and we just are not able to recreate that…. I could go down a rabbit hole of reasons why, (I guess I have here on substack) but this is more just a reflection of what was, not how I can solve it. Just the absolute density of connection in those years? The way you were woven into each other’s daily lives? Just one day, gone.

I won ‘Most Likely to Never Come Back’ and I was right, just not in the way I thought. No one warned me I’d never go back to Orlando. That the place where I actually grew up, where I became myself, would become just as distant as the suburb I couldn’t wait to leave.

I don’t know that the point was ever to go back. It’s just kind of neat to me to reflect on having this town that just lives in my own mind. A place where you didn’t have to schedule connection or defend your calendar to spend time with people you loved. I had that. Most people don’t. And instead of wishing I could go back, I can wax nostalgic for a few minutes when my plane touches down in Florida and be so very grateful I got to experience what it felt like when community didn’t require effort.

Read my ongoing series on community, in the following parts. I discuss what we’ve noticed about our community, our village, and what we’re doing to fix it.

Part 1: Noticing The Shift

Part 2: The Illusion of Proximity

Part 3: Loss of Neighborhood

Part 4: Still Learning

TW: this post deals with pregnancy loss. As I announce a new pregnancy to the world, something I wasn’t sure was going to happen for me, I wanted to reflect on my journey. More so for myself, but also to share that life is so far from linear and predictable.

To begin this story I have to go back to the beginning because it needs context. It took 3 months to get pregnant with my first child (who is now 3 - what!!). My pregnancy was very easy… other than the fact that we basically skipped check ups/check ins weeks 9-15 because my first OB/GYN (who I’d been seeing since 18) delivered at a hospital I was not comfortable using for my delivery. By the time I found a new doctor and got in, we were in this weird wait where they could do an ultrasound but it wasn’t yet time for the anatomy scan, so we basically ended up having two in depth anatomy scans at 14 and 18 weeks and didn’t have to do any other genetic testing just based on those results (I promise this is relevant later). Please don’t ask me how much THAT cost, just know that I am indebted to the medical system for quite a few years after the last 3.

My pregnancy progressed easily, though as an anxious person I was constantly worried something was wrong. I ended up electing to be induced (hello type-a control freak) and she arrived less than 24 hours later. I knew once I arrived to the hospital, (what my anxious brain had dubbed a safe space) I’d be ready to have a baby, but it wasn’t going to happen before then because I was such an anxious wreck. I am forever thankful for this experience and to have a wonderful three year old daughter to enjoy every day.

Now, all that to say, when we decided we were ready to try for a second baby I was skeptical (we had some family friends and friends of friends that had been dealing with very heavy diagnosis’ in-utero), but overall figured I would have the same experience. Hellllloooo karma.

TW: this is a pretty intense retelling of a story of loss so please read at your own risk.

This is the first time I’m writing this story, sharing this story, putting the things that have lived in my head to paper (screen?) since I wrote a scathing review to the provider as a form of catharsis and therapy. Note: I never sent it anywhere, because honestly where would you even send it that would matter. I’m just sitting here watching the cursor blink trying to figure out if I can do this. But I want to because it deserves to be heard. We shouldn’t have to suffer in silence.

In August of 2024, we took a family trip to Denver and stopped to see my best friend Courtny and her husband Gentry. I had JUST found out I was newly pregnant and while we were not going to tell anyone else so soon I knew I wanted to tell her, so I got our daughter a big sister shirt and she wore it into Courtny’s house. There is no greater joy that sharing and celebrating big news with your best friend. Especially in person. This is a memory, while tainted, I’ll never forget.

On September 10th, 2024 I walked into my 8 week scan, taking place at 11 weeks because this provider/office was notoriously hard to schedule. The following except is from the review I wrote as therapy, if you notice a tone change, but I wanted to convey exactly how this experience felt in the moment. For this appointment, I waited 30 minutes past my appointment time (45 minutes past my arrival time), with no apology from any of the staff on the wait or the experience. The NP seemed incredibly inexperienced as soon as she entered my room and I could not believe she was alone in the room with me. I could tell from the second she started my ultrasound that something was wrong and yet it took her a solid 5 minutes to even say one word. After performing the belly ultrasound she did the internal ultrasound, another painful silent 5 minutes, before announcing there was no heartbeat found. From there she stepped out of the room, and left us to sit while she likely conferred with a superior on what to do next because clearly this had not happened to her before. Being trapped in an exam room after finding out at 10.5 weeks there is no heartbeat is torture.

It took over 10 minutes for her to return and (barely) explain that someone else would need to verify the results, and that they were trying to find me an appointment in the next few days. Somehow I had it together enough to say that would not suffice and they ended up getting a provider across the hall to perform the confirming ultrasound. The ultrasound tech did her best to be compassionate and kind, but the waiting felt like it took 10 years off my life. Then the overseeing doctor came in and literally verbatim said “the baby is dead”. I can’t believe I am even typing that to you. Can you imagine hearing that?

This horrible experience sadly, did not end there, the next available D&C appointment was 7 days later. I had to sit through three people over three days explain my “options” though I had picked an option on day 1. I had to live in this weird grey area for 7 days. We were not advised on why we would want to do post surgery genetic testing, which to this day frustrates me. Thankfully the nurses at the surgery center were definitely trained for this type of experience and they restored some of my faith in humanity. I was not sure I could recover from this experience, and spent a lot of time in therapy discussing, writing my feelings down, and overall just trying to process this shit storm.

At a follow up appointment post surgery it was advised that we could try again after a certain amount of time and that one miscarriage does not warrant any sort of testing, so basically good luck. I can't believe that's considered acceptable bedside manner either.

Eventually, the feeling in my soul that I wanted to have another child outweighed any negative experience and we began trying again. This time, in mid January 2025, when I found out, I was able to see a provider earlier just due to the history I suppose, and likely because I decided to switch offices. I don’t know that I could ever walk into that previous office again. At the scan for 6 weeks it was clear this was not developing/progressing as would be expected so I was back in the lab doing every other day lab draws to check HCG levels and silently hoping that I could wish a baby into existence. I was not successful, and signed myself up for another surgery while also begging the doctors to help me because surely two miscarriages would account for intervention. The clinic says no, talk to us after three please. To note: this time we were presented with genetic testing options and elected to have the testing done. The results came back abnormal, and for my fact-based brain, that did help ease the burden some.

I sat with all of this for a while, two was a lot, we had originally said two was our max… but again that overwhelming feeling that I wanted a second child overcame me and I knew I needed to explore other options. I had a positive pregnancy test (again!) in July of 2025, and anxiously awaited a scheduled appointment with my current provider at the clinic. Sadly, I began spotting in August before that appointment and my symptoms disappeared and I just knew. At this point I was embolden to make a choice and find a new provider and I called the UH Fertility Clinic in Beachwood, after hearing rave reviews, to get on the schedule for recurrent miscarriage testing. Some days the stars align, and the woman who answered my call offered me a cancellation appointment within a few days.

On August 18th, 2025, I finally met with someone (this is bringing tears to my eyes) who started listening to me immediately. She asked the right questions, was compassionate and concerned. Honestly she was so concerned no one had yet addressed my spotting and this current positive test and got me in for an ultrasound / blood work right then and there (benefits of being on the Ahuja campus). It was shocking in a good way to me that someone would move this fast and be this concerned. After two miscarriages you’re pretty much just conditioned for bad news, but with the spotting and lack of symptoms I all but knew that they would say. While they did deliver the bad news, I was met with a full on “care-team” who was dedicated to discussing my options both as a practice and with me. After deciding another surgery would need to be scheduled, I was able to speak directly with a team doctor who provided a very thoughtful response to “Can you help me understand the risks of being under general anesthesia for the third time in less than a year?" Is this the best choice for me?”. His sound and grounded medical advice was honestly freeing, I knew he was actually talking about me and not just in generalities. And so, while I was scheduled for my third surgery in less than a year in September 2025, I was also well on the way to figuring out WTF was going on with this thanks to the care-team at UH.

Knowing that I needed answers, especially after the third miscarriage came back with normal genetic results, we were able to undergo a ton of testing related to recurrent loss with the team at UH. We elected to focus almost entirely on me because at the time no signs were pointing to Drew being an issue. However, we did both finally get a carrier screening, because as I mentioned with our first we did not end up having to do that due to the timing of appointments and our general lack of understanding of the process lol. The wait for the testing to all come back was a little over a month and it was so hard because I just wanted answers immediately. Imagine my surprise when everything came back entirely normal. We met with the team and discussed some intervention options for recurrent loss with no other marking factors, and were advised that would could try again.

At this point in the process I decided to share part of this experience online (on ourgreatbucketlist) because I was so extremely frustrated to learn the UH team would’ve seen me after two losses. That fact alone motivated my to finally share a glimpse into my story because everyone experiencing a loss needs to understand how to advocate for themselves. I received so much love and had some tough but rewarding conversations with others who had experienced recurrent loss (or loss at all), that made me thankful I shared my story. It’s also why I am here writing today, because behind (some) glamorous social media announcement posts there is a larger story that needs to be written. Leaving you with just here is my triple? quadruple? rainbow baby doesn’t quite summarize the hell I’ve experienced in the last two years.

At this point, I tried to get a handle on the progesterone window (IYKYK) and also make sure to keep it from impacting my cycle (learned that the hard way), until I gave up on it for a while. Throughout this entire process I was (finally) tracking ovulation to the day and really paying attention to my cycle. I did not do that for my first pregnancy or any of the losses. I was worried I would become obsessed with the data, and I did for a while.

Eventually I tried to let most of it go for a month and then, of course, a bit unexpected but also expected, I got a positive test on December 30th, 2025. I was able to almost immediately connect with the UH team and get started on Progesterone (should’ve been doing it the whole time but its ok!) and lovenox, both recommended in recurrent loss situations. Knowing I had these options before the positive and being able to elect to sign up for them right after the positive was such a great experience in overall care. The team had me doing every other day HCG checks to confirm the progress, and my god the anxiety these provided after my previous experiences was unmatched.

After those all turned up great and on track, UH provided me with a 6-week scan, as a product of being a patient with them. Since I had been doing such in depth tracking I had an exact ovulation date which matched the development and really helped ease concern since my last period date was not aligning. After my appointment they offered a follow up scan at 7-weeks to ease my mind before my 8-week OB appointment. I’m sorry but not sorry to keep harping on it because the amount of care and compassion I experienced with this team lead me to write them a dedicated review, an excerpt of which I’ll share below.

As my journey progressed I was met with countless bright lights who always made sure to acknowledge what I had experienced and understand where I was in the process. Simple statements like, “I know you’ve been through a lot” from providers elevated my experience and allowed me to start to heal from past experiences. I am grateful for the team’s ability to understand and acknowledge the anxieties surrounding loss and infertility and their compassion in explaining various experiences in a way that relates to how a patient might be feeling in the moment. I truly hope everyone who has experienced any level of what I have is able to connect with UH Fertility Clinic and experience the world class, compassionate care they deserve.

Originally written March 3rd, 2026: This is (almost) where the story ends today because as someone who has had three losses, it’s much easier to prepare for disappointment than excitement. I was told to make my ending more joyful, because the friend who reviewed this noted that I AM so filled with joy. And I get it, but until you’re here in my shoes, it’s hard to feel joy without being scared it’s going to be taken from you. It’s hard to type things out because it makes them real. You want to be hopeful but hope can be crushed. Talking about this makes me feel like it could all just disappear. The day we started to tell friends and family I didn’t sleep that evening because my anxiety over “jinxing” it was immense. I hope to rewrite my ending one day soon, when joy feels like the only emotion I need to manage, until then, I think I’ll leave it at this, my current due date is 2 years (less four days) from the date of my first surgery. I find that poetic.

Updated May 4th, 2026: It’s taken two months to work up the courage to post this essay. It took a long time to wrestle with what I mentioned in that above ending. The finality of sharing, the anxiety. We had our anatomy scan and I’m now at a point where I am blessed to feel movement and most days it helps. I’m taking back my joy and allowing myself to have it, to feel it, to live in it. It felt fitting to share this now post Mother’s Day, because mothers day means so much more than just a single day of celebration. It’s months and years of stress, anxiety, questioning, hoping, over-thinking, AND joy, courage, bravery, love, happiness. Two things can always be true.

If you’ve reached out or shared any part of your story with me over the last year - thank you.

If you to are looking to expand your brain, connect with others, and/or stop the social media rot you’ll probably enjoy some if not all of these, too.

1. 15 Tiny Tweaks Every Woman Should Consider After 35 (That No One Told You About). Not here yet, but I love to read things like this. Sara brings the heat calling out that your appointment with your provider probably gives you about a few minutes to talk about all your issues. if you have 5? One gets 5-6 minutes and the rest get 1-2. She rounded up some great things to consider as you age to support yourself that you probably are not going to hear from your next appointment. I LOVE Magnesium glycinate at bedtime, and I’m HUGE on protein for breakfast. Going to spend some time with the other suggestions in here.

2. “I Don’t Have Enough Time” Isn’t Real: I absolutely love how the author highlighted the reframe of scarcity breeds innovation into, “Scarcity doesn’t breed innovation. It breeds clarity. Because the question was never how much time I had. It was whether I’d decided what to do with it.” Much like she writes here, motherhood has forced me to answer tough questions across home and work life, like, “What’s actually mine to do?”.

3. I Don’t Mean to be Mean But…: I love me a hot take and this is one of my current favorites. We over reward niceness. The author says it best, “The thing is, we really don’t need more niceness. We need precision. Boundaries. The ability to say no without cushioning it in apology. What we’ve been calling “mean” is often just clarity with a backbone.” I found her example of declining to be a bridesmaid fitting to my own life. We have to know where we can show up and bring the energy and love, and when we need to take a pass so that we aren’t bringing down everyone else’s vibe.

4. The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning -- And How To Help Them Thrive Again: Now, I am only two chapters in but I’ve already made a ton of highlights. The impact and usage of technology in classrooms is REALLY big on my radar right now and I am excited to keep diving into this read. Note: if you are local and interested in joining a book club to discuss this - please reach out, we’re meeting up to discuss up to chapter three in a week or so.

5. influencers are selling a delusional fantasy of being postpartum. why is it so easy to believe? Absolutely loved this read from start to finish. The content I’ve been getting fed lately is SO nuts. I had a significant amount of hemorrhaging after babe was born and I was dead behind the eyes for HOURS! Not to mention not a single thing fit once I got home. I will never be as polished as the ladies made examples in this post and that is A OK with me.

A few of my recent posts below:

Lessons from a Former Social Media Manager: When the Brewery Sold Out - are you curious what a bad job can do to your health? See my take here, and scroll to the bottom for proof!

Everyone is Miserable Except Me??? - I referenced this one above too, but it’s just a view into the mom comparison culture that is leaving us all worse off.

My 10-Month Event Planning Experiment (It Did Not Go Well) - This one cracks me up because I met a great friend at this role and she still does event planning and I very much do not.

Or read my ongoing series on community, in the following parts. I discuss what we’ve noticed about our community, our village, and what we’re doing to fix it.

Part 1: Noticing the Shift

Part 2: The Illusion of Proximity

Part 3: Loss of Neighborhood

Part 4: What I’m Still Learning

If you to are looking to expand your brain, connect with others, and/or stop the social media rot you’ll probably enjoy some if not all of these, too.

1. Social media is preventing you from achieving your goals. I liked this take, particularly the idea that if you are flooded with options on a daily basis about everything you have to choose from, it’s impossible to stick the course. It reminded me of my everyone is miserable except me?? post, because social media really does make it impossible to not fall into some kind of “trap”. I loved that she gives some ideas of how she fixed this for herself at the end. I recently edited down my personal feed immensely and I love only getting to see content from people I genuinely want to see content from and not someone I was in a sorority with almost 12 years ago and no longer personally know.

2. Are You Oversharing With Your Kids — Or Not Sharing Enough? Dr. Aliza Pressman has been a big hit for me since joining Substack. I love the deep dive into psychology/behavioral science in quick bite size pieces that are super relatable to me right now. This one was extremely powerful because I often think about how I can help my child not feel the need to be predictor of emotion. I loved the example below.

   1. Leslie described a moment when her four-year-old asked, “What’s wrong, mom?” Instead of deflecting, she said, “I feel preoccupied because I have a deadline tomorrow and I’m stressed about it.” Her son accepted the information and moved on. He did not need her to be fine. He needed her to be coherent — to have words that matched what his nervous system already knew.

3. American Has a Moral Problem, Not a Political One - with David Brooks. I loved just about every minute of this listen, but what stood out to me was the discussion that schools and colleges are no longer teaching kids how to be good people. When interviewed kids don’t even know what a moral dilemma is, much less how to navigate one. I had to pause to think if I would have an answer to that question, too! This ties right into (and was also mentioned by David) last weeks podcast I shared, Schools Are Teaching Kids the Wrong Things — with Ted Dintersmith, which I highly recommend listening to if you haven’t already.

4. How to Brand you Substack - including this because as a marketer this is anxiety inducing. I LOVE the idea of having another brand in my portfolio but branding is NOT my strength. The Cleveland Bucket List has had the same branding for 7 years and it’s… not great, lol. I always love the idea of creating a brand, but once I start working on it, I feel the need to go back to school and take a few more graphic design courses. Stay with me as I experiment here!

5. The “Reach Out” Rule - took this to heart and sent a text I had been meaning to send all week long. I loved this sentence, “We often overcomplicate what it means to be a “good friend.” We think it requires grand gestures or long-form updates.” Challenging you to reach out to someone who crosses your mind this week even if just for 2 minutes, to say I’m thinking about you.

6. The reason your fair household still doesn’t feel fair - woof, this one hit me hard. The author writes about how you won’t feel like something is fully off you plate until someone else owns it start to finish. Take dinner, if your husband says he’ll cook dinner tomorrow, great, but you still hold the weight of making sure the groceries are ordered, the fridge is full, etc. However, if he just owned groceries and dinner this week - it would (in theory) be off your plate! I am excited to take her advice and fill out the task ownership map with Drew sometime soon to see if we can make our lives feel more balanced.

A few of my recent posts below:

Lessons from a Former Social Media Manager: When the Brewery Sold Out - are you curious what a bad job can do to your health? See my take here, and scroll to the bottom for proof!

Everyone is Miserable Except Me??? - I referenced this one above too, but it’s just a view into the mom comparison culture that is leaving us all worse off.

My 10-Month Event Planning Experiment (It Did Not Go Well) - This one cracks me up because I met a great friend at this role and she still does event planning and I very much do not.

Or read my ongoing series on community, in the following parts. I discuss what we’ve noticed about our community, our village, and what we’re doing to fix it.

Part 1: Noticing the Shift

Part 2: The Illusion of Proximity

Part 3: Loss of Neighborhood

Part 4: What I’m Still Learning

So I worked really hard to follow up and land this job. Surprise, another job role for a small company that was NOT well defined. Within weeks I was back to managing social media because the other marketer didn’t want to do it. I was still planning and hosting events and helping to figure out a program and seating charts and wedding venue pricing for their newest venue, too.

I stared this role in April of 2019, and then on August 7th, 2019, I was invited to an “all-hands” meeting at the production brewery. I walked into the meeting thinking I was either losing my job and the brewery was closing or that they were looking for us to become employee investors (common at the time) and I was weighing how much I would want to invest. So, you’ll imagine my shock when I am weighing how much one invests as an employee owner in my mind and I hear the owner at the head of the room say “THE MAN”. My entire world view changed in an instant. I was a die hard craft beer fan at this point. You don’t sell out to the man!!!!!

However, back to the idea that social media was never a respected career, I found myself behind my computer in a room with assigned The man’s PR folks dedicated to managing the absolute SHIT show happening on the brands social platforms as the news came out. I literally sat in a “war room” reading people, who had the same views I had up until 5 minutes ago, complain about get angry about this “sell-out” with no PR training. As a social media manager for a small business the work becomes really personal, it’s your voice behind the posts, there is no marketing plan developed to make the brand be its own stand alone thing, so it felt like people were personally attacking me. And then that started too, lol. (Lesson 1: The disconnect between leadership and social media management is staggering.)

Catapulted into acquisition hell, I learned first hand just how bad companies manage acquiring other businesses. It quickly became clear that “the man” would not let the marketing team exist with just two 24 year old’s running it, so they hired full time a friend of the owner who had been consulting with the brand for years. He became my boss, and one thing I do think that I am good at is understanding how people function and working within whatever guide rails others need. I was able to manage working with him well, and we got along. However, my co-worker could not stand this boss, and eventually left, leaving pretty much all of the marketing tasks to me. (Lesson 2: Lesson: "We'll hire someone" is code for "you'll do it until further notice.") We were eventually able to hire a new social media manager, finally I could offload that responsibility (THAT I NEVER ASKED FOR!!!!) and I could get back to event planning.

Our first hire was comical, I don’t even know why she accepted the role, but she lasted maybe 2 months before moving on. Our second hire didn’t have a social media background, but did have a news background and the team was really into video content at the time so they said, “sign us up!!”. Things that happened when we worked there together were asked to help lay sod at the new event space. I laid over 2,000 SF of sod alone, and if you do not know, which I didn’t, each piece weights like 30 lbs!! I helped put together a sand volleyball court, (Drew supplied the net) and we ended up being the sole people responsible for managing the net and keeping it in shape over the following year (he didn’t even work there!!). (Lesson 3: If you're doing physical labor for a corporate job, something has gone very wrong.) I helped design and fill endless shipping containers with furniture and decor, and I was often the only person in this new building which was not entirely the safest place for any single person to be at night. I’m sure I am forgetting more.

I worked here during the Pandemic. I am seriously and wholeheartedly thankful that I remained employed throughout the entire pandemic. Drew was eventually employed too. That does not mean it was fun or easy. Over night we had to shift to an entirely online delivery network. I spent my days managing the online ordering system, managing any emails/inquires about orders, and then I also helped deliver in the beginning too. All the while we were trying to creatively create beer delivery content daily on social media, stay ahead of trends (like TikTok), and generally remain employed. Drew eventually even ended up delivery beer for a while. I worked almost 24/7. I’ve posted photos on my own social media of my face from 2019 - 2021 and the difference is shocking (shared at the end of this post). I was bloated and generally pretty unhealthy at this time.

Eventually the pandemic ended, we got back to some sort of a new reality in our taprooms, and the social media manager quit, butting heads with our boss for far too long. Then, the man presented us with a candidate that was willing to move from another brewery in their network to Cleveland to become the social media manager, looking for a higher title and more pay than I was receiving (why did I know this, please I don’t know), and thus my frustration grew when he was hired!!! (Lesson 4: Loyalty during a crisis doesn't guarantee equity after it, see also, don’t give your job your life.) This was likely the start of my downfall.

It really highlighted the negatives of acquisition, at this point I’d been managing TCBL for three years and felt like I really knew the Cleveland community. This brand had a lot of making up to do since “selling out”, but that wasn’t what other acquisitions had done so we weren’t given much support in that arena. Everything we were tasked with started to become things they were doing in other cities (that I believed would fail in Cleveland), and left us with little to no place to be creative. During this time I took on managing our merchandising and the website and ended up diving so far into that I grew the program by like 14% ALONE. Using my personal car and time to deliver packages to the mail etc. I also solely oversaw the 200 person membership program, which the man wanted us to grow, but had no support. I had to come up with ways to keep people feeling like their membership meant something monthly when we had nothing left to give them. All the while all of our ties to community were severing and the community was NOT interested in our BS anymore. See where I thought their initiatives would fail proving me right.

I was often the sole recipient for any complaints our GM’s had that could potentially be fixed because all other avenues resulted in dead ends, or yelling lol. I would be remiss to not mention that THIS absolute shit show happened during my tenure. The building never reopened. This was Feb 2021, in Mar 2021, I was finally “promoted” but it had to fit within the structure of the man’s other breweries and I received an incredibly minimal $ raise and basically just a list of all the things I was already doing. So, by June 2021 I again was in the same headspace where Drew said, I don’t want to be around you, and I knew I needed to quit.

I began to hear rumblings as layoffs became rampant but all was confirmed on February 22, 2023 when the brand was confirmed by the man to be closed. I want to be clear that I never wanted this to happen, my passion and love for the job was driven by the ties to Cleveland and I loved being able to help grow something so exciting. However, I’m to this day surprised it lasted as long as it did after I left, considering I left seeing the writing on the wall.

Have you ever stayed at a job longer than you should have because you felt loyal to what it used to be? What finally made you leave?

Leave a comment

If you to are looking to expand your brain, connect with others, and/or stop the social media rot you’ll probably enjoy some if not all of these, too.

1. What Is A Portfolio Career? And Why It’s More Relevant Than Ever. my husband sent me this a few weeks ago and I finally knocked out actually digesting it on my plane ride this week. I especially love the idea of energy vs financial income. As my husband works to build his own portfolio career I’m excited to see what he brings to the table for energy income!

2. How to include kids without centering them. Another one I’ve had on my to read list for a while and I’m thrilled I finally did. We are huge fans of giving our child meaningful tasks that she is capable of that are fun for her. I love the additional ideas of inspiring more life and connection across generations presented by Priya.

3. When Did We Stop Being Good Friends? my husband and I are actively trying to get back into the culture of just inviting people over on a whim, doing things last minute, saying yes because we can. As a society we’ve stopped having and being good friends because, as the author states, we started treating friendships like they need to fit into our schedules instead of making our schedules fit our friendships. Drew talked about an impromptu night we had with friends last week, and it truly was the best day we’ve had in a while.

4. Participate, don’t perform. Alex keeps writing hits and keeps making her way into my writing and round ups. After a conversation my husband and I attended this week I spent a lot of time talking to him about how community is the new way to move a brand/business forward - he’s seeing it in building his new portfolio career, I’m seeing it daily in my own work. My day to day work is layered with relationships, we’re not winning anything if we haven’t met our future client in person. I’m excited to see more brands participate in meaningful writing on substack.

5. Schools Are Teaching Kids the Wrong Things — with Ted Dintersmith. As a long time Prof G listener, they always have my number but this one was particularly poignant as we try to determine our daughters future education path. One thing I know for sure, we don’t have to have it all figured out today, but we’re on the right path in our thoughts after this listen.

Read my latest post and let me know if you agree!

Or read my ongoing series on community, in the following parts. I discuss what we’ve noticed about our community, our village, and what we’re doing to fix it.

Part 1: Noticing the Shift

Part 2: The Illusion of Proximity

Part 3: Loss of Neighborhood

Part 4: What I’m Still Learning

I got fed a video of a mom with text overlaid that said “the miserable mom trend is out. We are vibin, cleaning our houses, enjoying our spouse, staying hot. We’re not victims of motherhood.” I shared this along with my own photo, captioned with the following text, “Comparison culture is so toxic!!! It’s not cute to be miserable. You are the main character in your life!!! You don’t have to be miserable to be a good parent. I am a person with wants and needs and it’s ok for my child to see that!! Parent or not, pick yourself first, make a decision, stick to it. Watch yourself change and watch the world open up for you.”

My drive to share this all stems from that miserable mom culture we’re fed on social media, that you have to give up yourself, your job, your hobbies to be fully present for your small humans. That the more miserable you are, the better parent the world thinks you are, and I think it’s all bullshit. This culture spews more misery, these people watching feel the need to comment and one up the person’s video, “your child didn’t nap today? Well MY CHILD didn’t nap today or sleep at night!!” I HATE it. The amount of time you took to comment could be used to do something to remove a level of misery in your life.

I read the perfect article last week to sum up my motherhood experience, Motherhood didn’t make me less productive, it made me ruthless. Going back to work (see: a version of choosing myself), allowed me to be absolutely mental about MY time. I had to be to balance all the versions I needed to be, wife, co-worker, leader, mother, etc. Alex puts it perfectly, “I blocked my calendar and defended it. I stopped multitasking. I made deadlines for everything, not just the big things. I delegated anything that wasn’t specifically mine to do. And I stopped performing productivity - showing up to be seen rather than showing up to actually work.” This choice has given me the courage and also the ability to defend myself, to hold firm, to delegate. I gave up any misery over being a working mom, watching friends stay home with babies and not have to balance the corporate with the kid raising. I didn’t sit in that daily and complain, I didn’t take to social to comment on SAHM’s posts saying how they sucked for staying home (lol I would never, I don’t even have the mental capacity to know what these negative nancy’s WOULD comment).

But back to the above example of my post. A follower chose to respond to my story and try to one up me, telling me her misery didn’t allow for her to do the things that I was saying to do. Let me remind you, all I said was “Parent or not, pick yourself first, make a decision, stick to it. Watch yourself change and watch the world open up for you.” Her response was a novel about the needs of her child not allowing her and her husband to travel alone though that’s what she would choose in my “choose yourself first” advice. No where in my post did I say you needed to take a grandiose trip in order to choose yourself first. Maybe my post falling in the midst of what one quick glimpse on social media might be viewed as a grandiose trip was what inspired the response, but nonetheless it was so off-putting to me, as it was the exact example of what I am trying to negate. I was not, in fact, on a grandiose trip. I could dive into a rabbithole of what made this trip not grandiose but that’s not the point. A single snap shot into social media does not make a good comparison.

This is why the misery culture is so insidious. It’s not just annoying, it’s actively preventing people from doing anything about their situations. If you’re competing to be the most exhausted, the most sacrificial, the most put-upon, you’ve made misery your identity. And when misery becomes your identity, change becomes a threat. You can’t simultaneously wear your exhaustion as a badge of honor AND take steps to be less exhausted. The two are incompatible.

This connects back to something I wrote about earlier, in The Quiet Loss of the Neighborhood: perhaps identifying values and then having to live towards them creates too much discomfort. In social psychology, this ties to self-perception theory—we infer our own values from our behavior. So if someone says “I value being a good mom” but also performs constant misery about motherhood, they have to either (a) change their behavior, (b) change their stated value, or (c) rationalize why they’re an exception. Most people pick (c). Or they avoid stating values altogether. That way, there’s nothing to fall short of. The misery culture gives you the perfect out: “I WOULD choose myself, but my kid doesn’t nap/has special needs/is high maintenance/whatever makes my situation uniquely impossible.” The more detailed the rationalization, the more convinced you become that change isn’t an option.

This is why I’ve started choosing values that are verbs, action words that require follow-through. “Hosting” instead of “community matters.” “Showing up” instead of “being a good friend.” “Choosing myself” instead of “self-care is important.” Verbs don’t let you off the hook. You can’t perform misery about hosting while actually hosting. You can’t rationalize your way out of an action-based value. You either do it or you don’t. And when you don’t? You have information. Maybe that value isn’t actually yours. Maybe it needs to move down the list. Maybe you need to adjust what “hosting” looks like in this season of life. Maybe choosing yourself is literally just taking a 20 minute walk to start your day. But you can’t blame your circumstances for not living up to a value you never tried to act on in the first place.

In Better for Others (Not Better Than), I wrote about trying to raise a daughter who knows how to build community, to show up, to choose resilience over perfection. But I can’t teach her those things while simultaneously performing helplessness. I can’t model agency while competing in the Misery Olympics. The two are fundamentally incompatible. When my daughter sees me host pizza nights that don’t get reciprocated, she’s learning something. When she sees me fight for our neighborhood school even when we lose, she’s learning something. When she sees me make space for my own needs and defend that space, imperfectly, inconsistently, but deliberately, she’s learning something. But she’s also watching when I complain. When I scroll through social media, get made miserable, and become a miserable version of myself with no patience for her. When I rationalize why I can’t do the thing I said mattered to me. She’s learning from that too.

I know what I want her to learn. Life does NOT just happen to you, you have agency to shape it! That motherhood requires not a SINGLE PIECE of martyrdom. You can be both a whole person AND a good parent! I wrote this at the end of Part 5, and I think it applies here too: “My daughter doesn’t need to see me host the perfect gathering every month. She needs to see me send the invite even when I’m pretty sure people will cancel. She needs to see me clean up after people who didn’t offer to help. She needs to see me frustrated and tired and still choosing to show up next month. Because that’s what resilience actually looks like. Not perfection. Not having it all together. But trying, failing, and getting back up anyway.”

Performing misery teaches the opposite lesson. It teaches that trying is pointless, that circumstances are fixed, that the only thing you can control is how dramatically you can describe your suffering. So no, I won’t validate your misery. I won’t agree that your situation is uniquely impossible. Not because I’m unsympathetic, but because I refuse to teach my daughter that helplessness is a virtue.

Pick one verb. Do it badly. Do it imperfectly. But do it. Let your kids watch you try, watch you fail, watch you adjust and try again. That’s the only way out. For you, and for them.

If you want to hear more about a particular area please do let me know. I’d love to be inspired to write more content outside of my: Community Isn’t Automatic series. You can read more of that series here, here, here, and here.

My first job out of college, summarized here: Lessons from a {former} social media manager

After I quit that job and ultimately decided that being a consultant and trying to make TCBL full time wasn’t working for me, I found and interviewed for a job to be an event planner for the automotive industry. The role was interesting. According to me, again probably conflated, on LinkedIn, “As a production coordinator, I assisted with the creation, registration, and execution of events. My responsibilities included researching meeting and accommodation options, managing pre-event and on-site registration, collecting cost information and quotes, coordinating travel logistics of event staff and event equipment, and assisting with all aspects of the on-site execution of events.”

This company, at the time, specialized in the development and management of authentic public relations events, experiential marketing programs, motorsports events, and training solutions for clients in the automotive and motorsports industries.

I was drawn to this job because it involved lots of travel that seemed like it would be fun (lesson number 1 here, just because things seem fun doesn’t mean they will be). Upon starting, I was assigned to a singular client, and given a boss who was a contractor for the company working out of Portland, Oregon and yes, working on Pacific time. This will be important soon.

My general day to day was spent waiting to be assigned tasks, and then completing them within 1 hour, and then waiting around again for another task, sometimes that would come the next day. The problem here was the company had an office manager / accountant who lived by the clock. Arrive at 9am, but you left for lunch? You are staying until 6pm. Doctor’s appointment? Take PTO. I was also paid hourly, so that we could work for overtime when out on events.

In theory, this was awesome because the longer you worked on an event day the more you were paid. We were getting paid to travel. In practice, the issue lies in that if you came home on the red eye from California and wanted to take the next morning off, you’d be cutting into your overtime pay. You were not able to get the pay and also take paid time off, which I understand because they are a business after all. MY biggest problem with this was that 1. My boss was a contractor who often took a week off after an event because she could, and 2. The base pay was SO low I needed the overtime to feel better about my pay but I also didn’t want to sit in an office with nothing to do all day. (lesson number 2 I’m not good at time focused office roles)

I traveled to some incredible places with this role, my first job was at the Stein Erikson in Park City. The main events I helped plan and cover were press events in which the client identified a roster of for all intents and purposes bloggers and car fanatics that shared their opinions online and invited them out to a sophisticated location to experience a new car before its launch. We booked all of the travel for the media, including their hotels and coordinated airport logistics. We greeted them when they arrived at the hotel and had a package including name badges and itineraries for the trip. It was white glove service all around. On the particular trip above we even became childcare for some of the influencers children that came along, lol.

Now this was not all without perks, we had a few very late evening dinners that included getting to drink any of the great wine that didn’t get finished at the press dinners. I got to go into town at 6am before everything opened (at least I got to go into town???) because that was the only time I had off, and visit the Olympic park and tube down the mountain, and I got to mountain bike down the mountain on our last day, all incredible things to be able to do. However, I was doing them alone or with strangers, and packing them into the 5 minutes we had off from working. I’d grown up traveling so this was a bit disappointing to me as I wanted to be able to see and experience more of the places I was going to, not just see a hotel lobby, ballroom, and restaurant.(lesson number 3 I like to be the patron on vacation)

In the span of a few months, I also went to LA twice, and Sacramento once. I very very very quickly grew tired of the hustle of event days/weeks followed by being stuck in an office for 8 hours with nothing to do. However, I did meet my now very best friend Courtny at this job, though I didn’t like her when I first met her. Don’t worry, she already knows this! (lesson number 4 burn out shows up in lots of ways, including not liking coworkers who are good at their jobs) She started a little bit after me and was waaaay too eager - I was already burnt out and knew this travel life wasn’t for me. We bonded over a (very late) evening in Los Angeles staying at the Sunset Marquis, and the rest is history. In case you are curious, Courtny still plans events and travels all the time, and I do not.

While on a break from event planning and stuck in the office from 9-5, I found a job listing of the PERFECT job for me, it was like it was written for me, with a local craft brewery planning and hosting events, including helping them program a new building they were bringing online. SIGN ME UP!! More on that next time.

So how do we teach our kids about community, reciprocity, and showing up when we’re still figuring it out ourselves? How do we model interdependence when the world around us rewards self-sufficiency? And how do we do any of this without falling into the trap of treating it like another parenting achievement to optimize?

I don’t have perfect answers. But I’m starting to think the “mattering movement” might offer a framework that breaks us out of the perfectionism spiral.

In the article, Dr. Aliza shares Jennifer Wallace’s Mattering Movement to me for the first time. Paraphrased from the article, “The concept of “mattering” is to feel valued and to have an opportunity to add value to the world around us. The research around resilience suggests children who thrive, despite immense pressure, share a feeling that they believe they matter for who they are at their core, not just for their accomplishments.” I particularly enjoyed her ideas that “an ecosystem of mattering is built by a sturdier, more resilient adult who models the balance. It is about focusing on our roles in caring for and showing up for others to fill our own buckets as well.”

I can see this as the great foundation to the kind of parenting we value:

• giving children purpose as members of the home (ex: cleaning up after yourself, chores)

• helping children understand empathy (while knowing we cannot control others emotions/reactions, we can control ours)

• shifting to the mantra “Not better than others, but better for others”

• and seeing both parents as humans, independent from caregivers, who have needs and wants, too.

We (my husband and I) chat about this a lot as parents, and I was recently struck by this article, Well-Managed Kids Don’t Become Capable Adults, after chatting with my husband and my dad about “the olden days”. My dad grew up in the same city we live in now. In the summer he left the house at 8am to go play in the neighborhood and waited for his dads whistle (which could be heard blocks away, as he says) to come home for dinner around 5pm. If you weren’t home by the second whistle you were in trouble!! He walked to school every day. “In 1969, nearly half of American kids walked or biked to school. By 2009, it was closer to one in eight.” The walk to school was where you would gain independence, make small decisions for yourself, learn how to decern between do I have time to go back for the folder I forgot and I’ll have to deal with the consequences. The unstructured play time where where you learned to stand up for yourself, fit in among your peers (or stand out), learn from older children, teach younger children, and just PLAY.

I absolutely loved this perspective from Well-Managed Kids Don’t Become Capable Adults , “Here is the question I care about more than “how much screen time?” It’s how much free play with peers in the real world with actual low-stakes choices does a kid get each week? Not enrichment. Not organized sports. Not a playdate moderated with adult-led activities. Real life, where kids decide without adult arbitration, manage boredom, move and calm down naturally, and make mistakes that are not graded, posted, or escalated.” THIS is what we are looking for, and we’re struggling to figure out how to make this happen in todays world. I think we (my husband and I) got so stuck on this we lost sight of the idea that we can curate a life like this BUT our child also has to exist in the world others are creating too.

So how do you translate that general vibe for lack of a better term to a high quality community or network of friends who uphold your beliefs and in turn believe in taking the turns necessary to build community?

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The Community You Can’t Curate

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: I can control how I parent. I can teach my daughter about reciprocity, empathy, showing up. I can model hosting and inviting and being “better for others.” But I can’t control whether the families around us share those values.

I can’t make other parents reciprocate our pizza night invitations. I can’t force them to show up to school board meetings or join the PTA or let their kids play outside unsupervised so neighborhood friendships can form organically. I can’t curate a community of like-minded families who all prioritize the same things we do. And honestly? That’s been one of the hardest parts of this whole journey.

Because when you’re intentional about your parenting values, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking you need to be equally intentional about who your kids are exposed to. We want our children to be around adults who model generosity, who understand interdependence, who know how to build and maintain community. But that’s not how community works. You can’t build it by filtering for only the people who already get it.

Real community, the messy, resilient, life-giving kind, includes the family that always cancels last minute. The neighbors who never reciprocate. The parents who are so buried in their own overwhelm that they can’t see past their own needs. I believe our kids need to see us navigate that with grace, not judgment. They need to see us keep inviting the people who don’t invite us back. Keep showing up even when others don’t. Keep modeling what we hope to see, even when it feels like we’re doing it alone.

Because the alternative, withdrawing, protecting ourselves, only engaging with people who make it easy, that teaches them that community is conditional. That you only show up for people who show up for you. And that’s exactly how we got here in the first place.

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Breaking the Perfection Cycle

Which brings me to the other uncomfortable truth, everything I wrote about above I’ve failed at…endlessly. I’ve complained to my husband, I’ve gone on rants about how no one reciprocates, I’ve stopped inviting people who never showed up. I am not yet the poster child for community building. I’m someone who’s barely holding it together most days, who feels the gap acutely but doesn’t always have the energy to fill it. In all of my exploration and conversations since starting this Substack, I’m starting to believe maybe that’s exactly what my daughter needs to see.

Because if my goal is to raise a child who knows how to build community, the worst thing I could do is pretend it’s easy or that I have it all figured out. She needs to see the work of it, the planning, the cleaning, the emotional labor of bringing people together. She needs to see me fail, complain, take breaks, and then try again. She needs to know that building community isn’t about doing it perfectly; it’s about doing it consistently, even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.

The millennial generation was raised on achievement. We were told that if we just worked hard enough, planned well enough, we could have it all. And now we’re parenting under that same impossible standard, trying to be perfect gentle parents who raise emotionally intelligent, socially conscious, academically successful, physically healthy kids. We’re drowning in advice and research and expert opinions, terrified of getting it wrong.

But community isn’t another thing to optimize. It’s not a parenting hack or a developmental milestone. It’s the unglamorous, repetitive work of showing up. And sometimes, most of the time, it won’t look like the curated version we see online.

My daughter doesn’t need to see me host the perfect gathering every month. She needs to see me send the invite even when I’m pretty sure people will cancel. She needs to see me clean up after people who didn’t offer to help. She needs to see me frustrated and tired and still choosing to show up next month. Because that’s what resilience actually looks like. Not perfection. Not having it all together. But trying, failing, and getting back up anyway.

In Part 1, I wrote about noticing the gap where community used to be. The slow fracture that happened so gradually we didn’t even see it coming.

I don’t want my daughter to write this essay series someday. I don’t want her to look back and wonder when connection became so hard, when showing up became optional, when reciprocity became a lost art.

So we model it now. Messily, imperfectly, with no guarantee the people we know and meet will meet us halfway. We host the pizza nights. We fight for walkable schools. We show up to the boring meetings. We wave to neighbors who don’t wave back.

Not because it’s working perfectly. But because it’s the only way to break the cycle.

And maybe we don’t have to do it alone. In Part 6, I’ll share some of the quiet experiments happening across the country, small acts that are rebuilding civic life from the ground up. Because while individual modeling matters, systemic change requires all of us showing up together.

Part 1: Noticing The Shift

Part 2: The Illusion of Proximity

Part 3: Loss of the Neighborhood

8 Things We Stopped Spending Money On

If you want to hear more about a particular area please do let me know, I’d love to be inspired to write more content outside of my community isn’t automatic series. You can read more of that series here, here, here, and here.

As I previously wrote, here, I moved home post college and stuck around for lots of reasons but mainly because I became obsessed with spending time with my Oma. Unable to find a marketing job right out of the gate, I started waitressing (with literally no experience) at Rocky River Brewing Company (in June of 2016) thanks to the help of my then ~kind of ~ boyfriend, Drew. Remind me to tell you about how my first day was the Cavs championship parade day sometime soon. I truly believe everyone should have a serving job in their life, I know my child will, but that’s not the point of this story.

While the money was goooood, and I was in great shape because I was barely eating when I worked (should we consider that great???), I hated the hours, and I was constantly searching for a job. That job finally found me in February 2017. GOOD MORNING from 2017 social media - it was nothing like it is today. My official title was Social Media Manager, though no one, not even me really knew what that meant. We all just knew social media was growing and everyone needed to be on it. The company was a technology company that (going to really simplify this) sold and repaired Point of Sale systems for retailers and restaurants. I knew nothing about literally anything, let alone how to market this type of company on social media when social media really wasn’t about brands at the time.

According to a probably conflated Linkedin, I developed blog posts, email campaigns, and press releases. I also helped with the creation and editing of digital content including promotional materials. I learned about Kentico, and helped redesign and write content for two new websites. I continued to manage both websites on Kentico after their creation.

Can I please just emphasize how I knew NOTHING about anything of the things described above. Marketing as a major at UCF was about fast tracking yourself to the Professional Sales Program and then guaranteeing a job as a sales person. I was not and am not a sales person. I had an internship in college at a law firm (snoozer) and an early stage influencer marketing company (unpaid, hard to love), and was very lost on what marketing could mean to me.

At my first job I had an all male team I worked for that was challenging at times. However, I developed one of the best work friendships I’ve ever had with Max, the graphic designer I worked with… he was instrumental in my actually learning anything and becoming confident in my own marketing skills.

This technology company was family owned, and they also had recently opened a brewery. While the brewery had a sales manager tasked with overseeing marketing, it became clear it was too much for one person to manage. Six months into my role at the technology company my entire team (Marketing Manager, Graphic Designer, and me) moved over to be full time for the brewery.

Joining the craft brewery world at 22 was quite a shock, while it was newer to Cleveland, craft beer had a cult following, and social media was a very serious place for these followers to voice any and all concerns that had about any and everything the brewery was working on/sharing etc. I learned a lot about being a woman in a ~professional~ career at this role. I learned how to bite my tongue, after being yelled at a few times. Yes, yelled at. Mainly for trying to solve actual problems the team didn’t want to acknowledge. I quickly learned they weren’t looking for ME to solve these things (lesson number 1, we’ll come back to this eventually). I worked with the taproom manager on planning on hosting events which I loved (the planning and hosting) but working with someone so unable to compromise/collaborate was absolutely soul draining. I gave up hosting events eventually and let them fall to her. Learning that not everyone works the same way I do (lesson number 2).

While at this brewery I launched TCBL because we were doing a lot of stuff both for the brewery and on our own and Drew convinced me there was no harm in starting posting on a free platform (instagram). Eventually through the yelling, the constant noise on social media and the endless inability to accomplish literally anything on my own, I came home one day, full of gloom and doom, and Drew said he didn’t even want to be around me anymore because I was a miserable person. A tough pill to swallow from your partner, but I look back at this with fondness. It knocked me off a path and kick started a new one. We all need that sometimes. I am very thankful for a partner who is willing to have hard conversations with me, this has served us very well over the years (lesson number 3).

I quit without a job, thanks to the support of Drew, and dedicated myself to TCBL full time, including launching a website I built myself (thanks to lessons at this first role) and loved the freedom this brought. However, no one was paying people for social media influence so I quickly realized this was not a sustainable career option at the time. I eventually picked up a full-time job with an event planning company, thinking that leaning into events was what I really liked about marketing. Look for Let’s Plan an Event Real Quick, next.

We kicked off our first pizza night on a warm May Saturday in 2025. I just wrote up a note introducing the concept and the first date and asked that everyone RSVP for food by Thursday evening of that week’s pizza night. If you were not coming for food but might swing by you did not have to commit ahead of time. I copied and pasted the note and sent it out in batches and group texts to everyone we’d elected to invite.

To make it as low stakes as possible and get as many people as possible to actually commit we did not ask anyone to bring anything. We supplied the pizza, a signature cocktail (again, see mom who is a super host), and water. I put out any and all yard games we had at our house, and we set up everything outside. We cooked the pizza in our outdoor pizza oven, a gift Drew received for his birthday the previous summer, and something we’d been doing as a family with Drew’s dad and step mom for a few years now. This is our exact pizza oven, which makes things super simple (just make sure to pre-bake your dough).

This was such a great kickoff, it was well attended, everyone had fun and promised to join the following month. However, Drew and I barely sat down. We felt like we were running around the entire time “hosting” and not getting to benefit from the actual relaxing nature that the pizza club was supposed to bring.

For the next month, June, we had just moved into a new house. Many thought we wouldn’t host, but moving made it MORE likely for us to host. The house we bought was perfect for hosting (I’ll write more about our adventure in moving soon), and this was something we had committed too. Drew and I are commitment freaks, we hate backing out of things we said we would do. I only have the below photo from this month because I spent the entire time giving people tours of our house. After the day was over, I got to thinking, I’ve visited everyone’s home here but never been given a tour of it. Why did moving make us want to give a tour, but also WHY NOT? We had nothing to hide, were so proud of our new house, and wanted to share why we had moved with everyone. It was a lot of fun!

This time however I did prep the pizza in advance, pre-baking the dough the night before and topping all of the pizza choices we’d decided on. We typically try to do 2-3 options and make 2-3 of the one we think will be the most popular. I just wrap them up and put them in the fridge so Drew can grab them as he is ready to cook another pizza and we’re not stuck inside building pizza! This time we introduced wings too, to give everyone some more protein and make sure no one was leaving hungry.

July’s pizza night followed the most incredible Fourth of July parade day. We invited anyone that wanted to come over before the parade to our house to then walk down to Lake Rd. for the parade. We had a ton of people from all over in attendance and many that had not done a parade with their kids before (they are all young). In my mind, I love the pizza nights, but this day eclipsed all just for how everyone got to be a child for a morning and just enjoy a real sense of community.

I have not a single photo of July’s pizza night, but that is because this is one we finally got a handle on and could truly participate in. I find it easy to take photos if I’m standing in the background, but this time I was actively able to engage with everyone. That came from the lessons learned from previous pizza nights that I’ve summarized at the end of this story!

August and September are a blur! Though we did finally get a group photo in September. October we got a little too aggressive and decided we want to celebrate my birthday and add a clam bake element. We asked everyone ahead of time if they wanted to buy in on the clam bake and then did a group order at Heinen’s for the supplies. I asked my mom to come over and help us prep all of the clam bake stuff and keep it moving so that we could still enjoy the party. She was a great help BUT this was still just way too many moving pieces. It was hard to get everything cooked, and the majority of attendees had passed on the clam bake, so we still had to make pizza too. We closed out this night discussing how we needed a break from the pizza parties because it was very overwhelming. It worked out well that we were headed into the cold season, so we took a pause and said we’d resume in the new year.

As we get ready to kick off the 2026 season, starting in May, I figured it was helpful to do a recap but also round up everything we learned. So without further ado, the lessons we’re taking into 2026 are:

1. We can’t do it all, give people assignments on what to bring (most everyone will ask)

   1. appetizer(s)

   2. a side that’s kid friendly

   3. Wings!!

   4. Dessert

2. Let people bring drinks for their family and don’t feel the need to stock a bar

3. Prep the pizzas ahead of time

   1. Specifically the dough is best pre-baked for our pizza oven

   2. Adding all the toppings the night before and wrapping the pizzas makes them “grab and go” when you are ready to cook

4. Set up the table and pizza kitchen the morning of the party

5. Keep all your supplies stored together

6. Give people plenty of places to sit

7. It doesn’t have to be perfect! Just hosting is enough for a great event. Everything else is a cherry on top.

Read more about our journey to starting a pizza night in my community series.

Part 1: Noticing the Shift

Part 2: The Illusion of Proximity

Part 3: Loss of Neighborhood

Part 4: What I'm Still Learning

If you want to hear more about a particular area please do let me know, I’d love to be inspired to write more content outside of my community isn’t automatic series. You can read more of that series here, here, here, and here.

If you did not already know, I come from a family of the most influential women I’ll ever know, and you won’t find them immortalized in any main stream platform, but they shape my every day.

In middle and high school, my mom hosted Friday pizza night, where-in both of my widowed grandmothers would join us for pizza, drinks (likely a Dewars on the rocks for Mimi, a white wine for Oma, and a Coors Light for my mom), and conversation. Often, my friend Grace would join us, and sometimes her dad, too. Sometimes our neighbors. My dad would come home from work just in time for pizza. Over the years the pizza shop we ordered from would change, but their commitment to coming over every Friday (except maybe during high school football season) never wavered.

Ok so to continue my story, you need some more background on the fantastic women I am so fortunate to know.

My Mimi (my dad’s mom) was fabulous, she had expensive and specific tastes, and she loved what she loved. She called me fashionista and princess. She wore her white reebok tennis shoes every day. She loved to shop. She followed her daughter to Sandusky to be near the first grandchildren, then moved closer to the younger grandchildren, to Avon Lake, after my papa died. Her house was almost entirely white and always spotless. She was feisty - I think you’d have to be as the mother in a house with 4 boys and 1 girl. Widowed for most of my life (papa died when I was 4ish), she had a pack of gals she played bridge with and traveled with and she never once slowed down. She was fiercely independent. She was my valentine every year, sending me cards even in college, always with a few bucks in them. When I went off to college her health turned fast, dementia took over before I was really at a stage to understand what would be taken from us with that and that pains me a lot. She died when I was 21. What I do know is how deeply she loved me, how easy she was to talk to about anything, and how much I wish I had a few more years of her stories to share.

My Oma (my mom’s mom) deserves a novel, I’m sure there are some written about similar situations. Forced from her home by the Czech government, exiled to a work camp, getting to the US only on sheer willpower, good fortune, and her knowledge of German and English (paraphrasing a books long backstory), she was still the kindest person I’ve ever met. She disliked seeing you not finish you food, would not let anything go to waste, could sew you anything you dreamed up, cooked the BEST food, and could do it all with a kind of compassionate stern-ness I’ve never experienced since.

As I got older, I tried to spend as much time as I could with her, I feel like especially after Mimi passed. Oma would never let you write anything she said down, let alone write it herself, but she’d tell you any story you asked about her past. In college, she would come stay with my aunt at our condo about an hour from college and I’d drive down alone just to spend a few hours with them both. When I graduated college, I really didn’t want to move home, but I am beyond thankful I did. I spent endless amounts of time with her in those months post graduation getting lunch and helping her get around. I learned a lot about her in those days, and I also went to her for a lot of advice, too. I’ll never forget just after she died how I drove somewhere and found myself screaming and crying in the car, because whatever situation I was dealing with could only be solved by a quiet conversation with Oma. I’m in tears writing this, I haven’t come back to this place for a while, she’s been gone for 10 years now. Grief is such a bitch. If your grandparents are still alive, go get lunch with them. You can tell them I sent you. I’ll give you questions to ask.

As I grew older and went off to college I met with a lot of people with interesting relationships with their parents. I’ll never forget a friend in college saying, “my mom always said she was not my friend, she was my parent”. My mom is my friend and she is my parent. She has walked the line well (most days). She is the first person I will call for advice, to share news, just to fill the time. She is my daughters favorite person, often more so than me (I’ll forgive them both, for I just shared how much I loved MY Oma - the name we forced my mom to also take….she lives up to the name so well). FYI she’s crying now that she’s read this part. I am so much of her, she is so much of me. She gave me my love for my grandmas, the strength that only a woman raised by powerful women can have, and an endless love for a good shopping trip, travel, sunshine, and a good deal. I am so thankful that we can do all of these things together, and love every moment of them!

Back to Friday pizza, weekly I would get to spend quality time with my grandmothers and they would get to chat with me. As an only child, I had a lot of practice sitting around a table of adults and I was always keen to listen in to conversations. I learned a lot, discussed a lot, and heard a lot at these pizza nights. Grace and I created newspapers that we forced them to read, and Mimi always had feedback! As a 14-17 year old girl, I never once stopped to appreciate my fortune, but today I would tattoo “I don’t have any regrets about spending time with my grandmothers” on my forehead. While they both left an immense hole in my heart when they left us, I never once had to wonder, what if I’d just picked up the phone one more time, and for that I am lucky.

Today, these three women influence every decision I make, whether I (or they) know it at the time. I am fiercely independent, I like what I like, I love to create and sew and dream, my experiences don’t make me hard, they make me soft, and compassionate and excited to share things with the world. So, at the heart of all of my discussions on community, what you need to know about me is how deeply I believe in the support of family. Family who believe in you, challenge you, support you, and do not tear you down. I am where I am and who I am today because I have the parents and grandparents that I do. Because I learned what its like to care for others early, to respect my grandparents, to be inquisitive and ask questions. But also because they gave me respect back, I was always my own person, never an extension of them. They influenced me because they let me grow into my own person, and I did it alongside a level of compassion and curiosity I’ll never forget.

Drew and I haven’t had blood-related grandparents alive in 10+ years. I get choked up anytime someone tells me a story about a grandparent that’s still alive. I want to shake them and say why are you here with me!!! go talk to them!! make them write things down!!! ask every question you can think of before its too late!! But now, due to our intentionality, my daughter knows her grandparents well. My mom gets to hangout with her two afternoons a week. We have dinner as three generations of fierce women a lot. We spend 10+ days in Georgia with Drews mom and step dad, not to mention time at home too. We have my dad and Drew’s dad and step mom over for dinners and breakfasts. We have 6 people who will drop everything to help us. And that makes us lucky, but mostly it makes me proud. It has not always been easy to manage 6 parents (lol), but community starts with practicing what we preach. We find the balance, we accept, forgive, and move on. We show our daughter that family is unconditional, shows up whenever you ask, never keeps score, and loves you for your individual spirit.

Read my ongoing series on community in parts linked below:

Part 1: Noticing the Shift

Part 2: The Illusion of Proximity

Part 3: Loss of Neighborhood

Part 4: What I'm Still Learning

1. The Ordinary Magic of Raising Resilient Kids: I love the idea that we need to provide our children with scaffolding, but not a box. Working to figure out just how much our child can handle and providing just enough support to help THEM solve the problem. This article ties into the following one…

2. Well-Managed Kids Don’t Become Capable Adults: I could write an entire article follow up on this one, and I just might… but you should read this. We’re killing childhood by micromanaging it out of existence. Can we all take a step back, remove an age-appropriate level of interference, and see what grows in that space?

3. 24 Spring Staples Every Closet Depends On: in the spirit of sharing things we spend money on, this timely post is exactly what I am talking about. The blog is filled with investment pieces (and some options to save) that help make your wardrobe actually work for you. I am very ready to invest in a casual striped t-shirt dress because I know I’ll be living in dresses this summer.

4. Not actually an article, but I was sent this reel after a friend read my most recent post (part 4: What I’m Still Learning (Not Solving)), and I loved the message. Community and connection CAN be simple, but in the spirit of transparency my response to the friend was I should make one for myself with my texts that all say, “sounds good, we’re booked until next month” lol.

Read my ongoing series on community, in the following parts. I discuss what we’ve noticed about our community, our village, and what we’re doing to fix it.

Part 1: Noticing the Shift

Part 2: The Illusion of Proximity

Part 3: Loss of Neighborhood

Part 4: What I’m Still Learning

1. The same people who made excuses kept making them.

   1. and there were always last minute excuses (as kids easily provide)

2. While groups of people attended monthly, we still were not reciprocated invites over to others’ homes or events.

That said, we had a core group who came almost every month. They weren't making excuses, they were showing up…. that mattered, even if the circle wasn't expanding the way we'd hoped. But here's what surprised me most: the lack of reciprocity. According to recent data, one-third (33 percent) of Americans seldom or never host people at their homes. We were doing the work of gathering, and people were happy to come, but they weren't taking their turn. They weren't hosting their own pizza nights, or game nights, or backyard hangs.

I’ve been thinking about reciprocity more since I initially drafted this, and I want to expand the definition. Because reciprocity doesn’t have to mean hosting. Not everyone has the space, the energy, or the upbringing that makes hosting feel natural. Kids’ ages complicate it. Life stages complicate it.

But reciprocity can show up in smaller ways: remembering it’s my daughter’s birthday and sending a text. Asking if we want hand-me-down toys you’re getting rid of. Sharing something that reminded you of us. Following up on an Instagram story. Recommending a book. It doesn’t have to be about opening your home, it has to be about wanting to connect.

At first, I thought it was about time. Everyone’s busy, right? But the more I sat with it, the more I realized: we’ve lost the habit of reciprocity, not just the time for it.

Somewhere along the way, we started treating community like a service we consume rather than something we co-create. We show up when it’s convenient, when someone else has done the planning and the hosting and the emotional labor of bringing people together. But we don’t think to return the favor. Not because we’re selfish, but because we’ve genuinely forgotten that’s how it works.

As I’m writing this, Drew forwarded me a Substack article with a telling quote: “In this independence culture, we may have overcorrected and forgotten that as humans, we have to be interdependent. - Dr. Aliza Pressman.”

That hit hard. We’ve built entire lives around self-sufficiency. We don’t need our neighbors, we have Amazon. We don’t need to ask for help, we can pay for services. We (especially us millennials) celebrate “not being a burden” and “handling it ourselves.” And in doing so, we’ve severed the very ties that create community.

Interdependence isn’t just nice to have. It’s how humans are wired. You need a ride to the airport, I take you. You're underwater at work, I grab your kid from school. You're sick, I drop soup on the porch without asking if you need anything. Your kid just started the phase mine just finished, I hand you the book that helped, or share hand-me-downs. Community is built on an ecosystem of giving and receiving, and we’ve somehow convinced ourselves we can opt out of one side of that equation.

So what are WE (my husband and I) doing with this knowledge?

We’re going to keep making pizza. Not because it’s working “perfectly”. Not because everyone reciprocates or because our calendar is suddenly full of invitations from others. But because consistency matters even when it’s not “working” the way we imagined.

The same families keep showing up. Our daughter is learning that our home is a place where people gather. We’re modeling what we hope to see more of in the world, even if it doesn’t come back to us in equal measure. Community isn’t automatic anymore. We’re seeing it firsthand, reading about it in the news cycle, watching it play out on social media. But if we’re waiting for someone else to fix it, we’ll be waiting forever.

So we make the pizza. We send the invites. We show up, and we keep showing up, because that’s the only way this gets better.

So I ask, what can YOU do with this information?

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Also, if you are local to us, please reach out via email or DM and I’d be happy to invite your family to our pizza night. We’d love to expand our community with others who want to join in the fun. We host once a month (every second Saturday) throughout the summer.

But here's the other question that keeps me up at night: what are we teaching our kids while we do this? They're watching us host, watching us invite, watching us show up even when it's not reciprocated. Are we modeling resilience and generosity, or are we teaching them that community is something you do alone? In Part 5, I'll explore how we're trying to raise kids who know how to build community, not just consume it.

Read Part 1: Noticing the Shift

Read Part 2: The Illusion of Proximity

Read Part 3: Loss of the Neighborhood