I’m not ready.

I love summer. Days on the water, longer daylight hours, sitting outside in the afternoon without the little black no-see-ums driving me half crazy. And right about now — when the light starts changing and the mornings get a bite to them — I go into what I call my summer depression. I know the season has to end. I just try to hang on to it as long as I can, like I’m dragging my feet on the way home from the best vacation ever taken.

Don’t get me wrong. I do love autumn in its time. Cool nights by a bon fire, the smell of dried leaves, fresh silage getting chopped, harvest on the farm. It’s a good season.

But here’s the other thing that shows up for me this time of year, right alongside the grief of losing summer and it took me a while to see it.

Pumpkin Spice

You’ve seen the posts by now. Everything is suddenly pumpkin spice, apple everything, all the fall flavors. And listen, I get it — they’re delicious. I’m not here to talk you out of a latte. But watch what your brain does the second these things show up. Mine used to go straight to: oh my gosh, it’s finally back, I’d better get my fill before it’s gone again until next year.

Now hang on. Is that actually true?

Last time I checked, you can buy pumpkin spice in July. You can make it any time you want. The “I only get this in the fall” story? It’s a story. It is not a fact. And it’s the exact story that turns three good months into three months of overeating.

And it doesn’t stop at pumpkin spice. It’s the whole run of the “Ber” months.

September rolls in — and honestly most of September is still summer — but the stores already have you excited for the leaves and the tailgates and the apple orchards. Then October: the pumpkin patches, more tailgating, hayrides, Halloween parties. November: football, Thanksgiving, and the warm-up to Christmas. December — well, you know December. Decorating, baking, church activities, family gatherings, office parties. One thing after another, and every single one comes with food you’ve told yourself you “ only get right now.”

Then it’s January, and you’re standing there wondering where the time went and why you let yourself go again.

So let’s tell the truth for a second.

Autumn comes once a year, from around September 22nd to around December 21st. Fact. Halloween is October 31st. Fact. Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday in November. Fact. Christmas is December 25th. Fact.

None of that is going anywhere. And none of it requires you to eat like the food is being outlawed on January 1st.

Take Thanksgiving dinner — the turkey, the mashed potatoes and gravy, the stuffing, the sweet potatoes, the green bean casserole, whatever’s traditional at your table. Growing up, that meal usually happened once a year. So that’s the story I carried into adulthood.

But when I got serious about losing my weight, I had to actually look at what I was telling myself. And instead of stuffing myself and feeling miserable, I started saying: this is amazing food, and I don’t have to inhale it, because I can have it again.

And guess what? There were always leftovers. I could buy a turkey and make that whole meal next month if I wanted to. The old story was just what I knew. But just because that’s how it was done in my past doesn’t mean it has to run my future.

Now I come to those meals from a completely different place. I listen to my body — my -2 and my +2. I enjoy my family and the reason we’re all at the table in the first place. The food’s still there. I’m just not afraid of it anymore.

So here’s where I’ve landed and it’s two things at once.

I can grieve at the end of summer. I can be a little sad the water days are over and mean it. That’s allowed.

And I can walk into fall without handing my brain a five-month permission slip. Both of those are true at the same time. Loving a season and losing control in it were never the same thing — I just used to treat them like they were.

The grief is real. The “now or never” is a story.

So my challenge to you this fall: start listening for the stories. “I only get this once a year.” “It’s Grandma’s special recipe.” “I’d better have it now.” Catch them. Then go looking for what else is true.

Because what you focus on you create more of. Keep telling yourself the scarcity story and you’ll keep eating like it’s your last chance. Start telling yourself the truth and the whole season gets a lot lighter.

Enjoy the rest of your summer, my friend. There’s still some left.

~Amy

Not the gentle kind that soaks in and does some good. The kind that keeps coming, day after day, until the ground can’t take another drop and the field you needed to be in sits there too wet to touch. I sat in my office looking out the window watching it come down, and I could feel my whole body tighten.

The thoughts started their swirl. This isn’t sustainable. How are we going to get everything done if it keeps raining like this. What’s this going to cost us. Markets doing one thing, input costs doing another, weather doing whatever it wanted — none of it in my hands. And that’s farming. You can do everything right and the sky still decides.

So I walked to the kitchen.

I wasn’t hungry. Let me say that plainly, because it’s the whole thing. There was no growl in my stomach, no shaky, no headache coming on. My body didn’t need one bit of fuel. But I stood in that kitchen and I ate — something, it didn’t much matter what — and for about a minute, I felt better. The swirl went quiet. The tightness let go.

And then the rain was still falling, the field was still too wet, the markets were still doing their thing, and I was standing in my kitchen having solved exactly none of it.

That’s food noise. And I lived with it for years before I understood what it actually was.

Here’s how I’ve come to picture it.

Imagine you’re walking through a big, crowded city. Cars honking. Sirens screaming. Traffic backed up as far as you can see. People rushing past you, late for something. Construction tearing up the sidewalk. Billboards flashing. A train station packed shoulder to shoulder. It’s a lot. It presses on you from every direction, and you can’t turn any of it off.

Then you come to a park.

The park is quieter. Softer. But here’s the thing — you can still hear the city. The sirens don’t stop because you found a bench. The traffic is right there past the trees. The noise is still going on all around you.

Now imagine you sit down on that bench and put on a pair of headphones, and some calming music comes on. There’s still sound coming through — you haven’t gone deaf to the world. But something shifts. A different vibration moves through you. Your shoulders come down. You feel a little more relaxed. A little more tolerant of it all. A sense of calm you didn’t have a second ago.

That’s what the food was doing for me in the kitchen. It was a pair of headphones.

And I want to be honest with you about what headphones do, because it matters. They don’t stop the sirens. They cover them. The city is exactly as loud as it was — you just can’t hear it for a little while. The moment you take them off, all of it comes rushing back in, unchanged.

There are a lot of things that can put headphones on you. Some of them come in a container. Some of them come in a prescription. And I’m not here to tell you those things aren’t real or don’t work — a pair of headphones is a real relief, and there’s no shame in wanting the noise to stop. But headphones were never going to make the city quiet. They were only ever going to make me quiet, and only for as long as I kept them on.

The rain kept falling the whole time I was in that kitchen. My eating never once slowed it down.

So where does the noise really come from?

It comes from a lot of places. Past diets and years of restriction, where you told yourself no so many times that food started shouting. Not enough water. Not enough sleep. Not taking care of yourself in the plainest ways. The way you talk to yourself when no one’s listening. Worry.

But underneath nearly all of it, if you go looking, you’ll find the same thing I found sitting in my office looking out that window.

Food noise is almost never about food. It’s a signal that something else needs attention.

For me, it was uncertainty. The facts were just facts — it was raining, the markets were down, the costs were up. Those things were true and they were hard and no amount of thinking was going to make them not true. But the facts weren’t what sent me to the kitchen. The thoughts about the facts did. This isn’t sustainable. We’ll never get it all done. Those thoughts stirred up a feeling I didn’t want to sit in, and the food was the fastest way I knew to quiet the feeling.

It was never about the food. It was about what was going on in my life, and more than that — what was going on in my head about what was going on in my life.

That distinction changed everything for me. Because you can’t out-eat rain. You can’t out-eat a market or a bill or a season that won’t cooperate. But you can learn to notice the swirl before you’re standing in the kitchen. You can get curious about it instead of quieting it. You can ask the question I never used to ask:

What is this really about?

Not “what do I want to eat.” Not “why can’t I control myself around food.” Just — what’s actually swirling right now, and is food going to touch it? Nine times out of ten, when I stopped and asked, the answer was no. The food was never aimed at the real thing. It was aimed at the feeling. And once I could see the feeling for what it was, I had something to actually work with — which is a whole lot more than a headphone ever gave me.

The noise still comes. It rained on me plenty of times after that, and it will again. But now, more often than not, I can hear it for what it is. My body trying to tell me something needs attention. A signal, not a craving.

So here’s what I want to leave you with.

The next time the noise gets loud — the next time you find yourself walking toward the kitchen and you know, somewhere underneath, that you’re not really hungry — you don’t have to white-knuckle it, and you don’t have to give in and feel bad about it either. You just have to get a little curious.

Take the headphones off for a second. Listen past the music.

Ask your body what it’s actually trying to tell you.

It’s been trying to tell you all along.

~Amy

Dishes done. Laundry washed, folded, put away. I’d come in from the fields and make sure every last thing was handled before I’d even let myself think about stopping.

Kids. House. Farm. All of it. All me.

And I was tired.

Not the kind of tired a good night’s sleep fixes. The bone-deep kind. The kind you carry around for so long you start to think it’s just who you are now.

So I did what I knew how to do. I reached for food.

I told myself it would give me a little relief. A little something for me at the end of a day where everything else went to everyone else. And for about five minutes, it sort of did.

But it never lasted. It never actually rested anything in me. I’d eat past full, feel worse, get up the next day, and do it all again.

I was overweight. My blood pressure was high. I wasn’t sleeping. And underneath all of it was a story I told myself on repeat:

Nobody is helping me. I have to do it all.

One day my husband looked at me and told me I needed to stop — or I was going to kill myself.

He was right.

Here’s what I eventually figured out, and it took me longer than I’d like to admit.

The exhaustion and the overeating weren’t two problems. They were the same one.

I was running on empty and reaching for food to fill a tank food was never going to fill. My body didn’t need a snack. It needed rest. It needed me to stop. And I had never once given myself permission to do that.

So I started small. Before I dove into the nightly routine — farm, kids, house — I let myself sit down for a minute. Just a minute. And I reminded myself of something that turned out to be true the whole time:

I did have help.

They just needed me to ask.

That “nobody helps me” story wasn’t the facts. It was a story. My people would have helped all along. I never asked them. I was too busy proving I could carry it by myself.

There’s a verse I come back to.

“And he said to them, ‘Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while.’” — Mark 6:31

Here’s what I love about it. If you read what comes right after, the disciples were so busy with people coming and going that they didn’t even have time to eat. Sound familiar? And Jesus doesn’t tell them to rest once the work is finished. He pulls them away in the middle of it.

Because the work is never finished. Not on a farm. Not in a house. Not with kids. There is always one more load, one more chore, one more thing waiting.

Rest was never meant to be the reward you get after you finish.

You rest because you’re a person. Because your body does hard work all day and needs to repair. Because a tired body will lie to you — it’ll tell you you’re hungry when what it’s really asking for is sleep, or a break, or a few days away.

And I mean the real rest too. A full night’s sleep, yes. But also a few days off the daily grind. A break. A vacation. Time where the routine doesn’t have its hands on you. You would be amazed what a couple of days can reset in your body and your brain.

For me, the thing that finally helped me stop was coaching. That was my shift. It's a lot of what I still work on with women now — not just the food, but the stories underneath it.

So this is your permission. From one tired woman who waited way too long to give it to herself.

Sit down for a minute before the nightly routine.

Ask for the help. It has probably been there all along.

Go to bed.

And when you can, come away for a while.

Your crew doesn’t need a perfect house and a mom running herself into the ground.

They need you.

~Amy

The scale lived in the bathroom, and Monday was weigh-in day.

So Monday I didn’t eat. Not really. A little coffee, maybe. I’d push through the whole day on nothing, tell myself it was discipline, and wait for evening — because I weighed in at night, and the less in me when I stepped on, the better that number would be. A whole day of running on empty so a piece of metal on the bathroom floor would tell me I was doing okay. And it was Monday. The start of the week. Everyone else getting going, and me already gone.

The kids felt it. Twelve and under, all of them needing something, all day, the way kids do. And I didn’t have it to give. “Not right now.” “Leave me alone for a minute.” “I don’t have time for this.” That tone — clipped, done, go away — that was the sound of a mother running on no fuel and a head full of a number she wouldn’t see for hours. They weren’t getting me on Mondays. The scale was getting me. They got whatever was left.

Then evening came and I’d step on.

If it went down, I felt okay — relief, a little see, it’s working. If it went up, it was defeat, that old drop in the stomach, here we go again, I’m never going to get this. Two completely different feelings. But here’s the part nobody tells you: it didn’t matter which one I got, because both of them ended the same way — with me eating. Down, I’d starved all day and my body was done waiting, so I ate. Up, I was crushed and food was the only thing that would quiet it, so I ate. Win or lose, I ended up in the kitchen, reaching for every single thing I’d told myself I couldn’t have all week. The scale had me either way.

Starve, snap, weigh, eat. That was the week. Every week.

So let me ask you something. When you tell yourself you’ll start next month — when it won’t be so busy — are you really putting it off because you’re too busy?

Because watch how the year goes. Summer’s not the time to start, too much going on. Then it’s I’ll wait till the kids go back to school. Then September shows up with the fall festivities and the fall sports, and there’s no room. Then it’s October shows up and it’s weekend pumpkin patches with family and friends or if you’re a farmer it’s your busy season. Then it’s

the holidays, and well, might as well wait till after the holidays. Next thing you know it’s January and you’re standing exactly where you started, having waited the whole year for a calm season that was never going to come.

Or is it something else? Some part of you remembers that — the starving, the short fuse, the version of you that diets turn you into, the one who hasn’t eaten and has nothing kind left for the people in her kitchen. And you look at summer, at the holidays, at all that time together coming up, and something in you says: not now. Not when they need me. I won’t be that mom during the good months.

If that’s what’s happening, I need you to hear this. That wasn’t laziness. That was love. You weren’t avoiding the work — you were protecting your family from what the work used to cost. You looked at the seasons when everyone’s home and together and you decided not to spend them hungry and irritable and half-gone. That was the right instinct. A good mom protects the table.

The waiting was never the problem.

The problem was that the only way you’d ever been taught to lose weight required you to be that woman. Starve for the number. Pay for it later. Be worse to the people you love in the meantime. Of course you waited. Given that deal, waiting was the most loving thing you could do. And then the whole diet world has the nerve to call you undisciplined for not starting.

You were never choosing between your family and your body. You were handed a method that made you choose — and then blamed you for choosing them.

Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then.

I lost 65 pounds. And I started during harvest.

If you don’t know what harvest is on a farm — it’s the busiest, longest, most all-hands stretch of the whole year. Meals in the field. No spare minutes. The opposite of a calm runway. And I started then. I had biscuits and gravy on my plan. I had ice cream. And Friday was still date night with my husband — beer and pizza, same as it always was. I ate when I was hungry and I stopped when I was satisfied and I kept the foods I loved, and the weight came off anyway.

Nobody got the deprived version of me — because this way doesn’t make one. There was no starving all day. No stepping off the scale and burying myself in the pantry. No “leave me alone” because I was too hungry to be kind. My kids got their mom. My husband got his Friday night. I was fed. I was there. And it still worked.

The fear was real. I’m not going to tell you it wasn’t. I lived it on the bathroom floor every Monday night for years. But the fear was attached to the wrong thing. You think you’re afraid of starting. You’re not. You’re afraid of the diet — the hunger, the grumpiness, the failing again. And those fears are pointing at a method. Not at you, and not at this.

You don’t need a clear month. You don’t need the season to settle down. There’s no season this ruins, because nothing about this asks you to go hungry in front of the people you love.

You can start today — with your kids needing you and dinner unfigured-out and your life exactly as full as it is right now.

If I can do this during harvest, you can do it during yours.

If you’ve been waiting for the right time, this is me telling you there isn’t one — and you don’t need one.

I put the whole method in a free guide: 3 Easy Steps for Losing Weight While Feeding Your Crew Their Favorite Meals. It’s exactly how I started — during harvest, with biscuits and gravy on my plan — and it’s the same three steps I’d hand you if you were standing in my kitchen.

No restricting. No starving. No becoming a different person at dinner. Just a way to start that actually fits the life you already have.

Grab it below. Then start tomorrow — busy and all.

3 Easy Steps

4.19MB ∙ PDF file

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Baseball diamonds. Maybe for you Soccer fields. Tournaments two towns over. Some nights I knew what was for supper. A lot of nights I didn’t. And on the nights I didn’t, supper was whatever the concession stand was selling — a walking taco eaten in the bleachers, a bag of popcorn between innings. Sometimes I’d buy a bag of M&Ms and pour them into the popcorn, because that’s what sounded good.

After the game, we’d hit a drive-through on the way home. Or sit down somewhere with a menu. That was dinner. That was the night.

Was there guilt? Maybe at first. I’d been a woman in the diet world long enough to know what I was supposed to feel about a walking taco for dinner. I knew the rules. I knew which foods were on the list and which ones weren’t, and the M&Ms were definitely not.

But somewhere along the way — as I started listening to my body instead of the rules — that guilt began to fade. Slowly. Not all at once. Just a little less every time. And I started to notice something the diet plans had never told me:

It wasn’t really about the food.

The food wasn’t the problem. The story I’d been told about the food was the problem.

Here’s what I want to say to the woman reading this — the one who’s going to be standing in a hot parking lot next July with a kid in cleats and a schedule that won’t quit. The drive-through is not a failure. The concession stand is not a failure. The Tuesday night where you eat popcorn for dinner because the day ate you alive is not a failure.

It’s a real life. It’s your real life.

You are a woman holding a lot of things together. Kid schedules. Work. Laundry that has to be done so everyone has a clean uniform for the next game. The to-do list that doesn’t care that it’s eighty-five degrees and you’ve been in the car for three hours. Sometimes gourmet chef just doesn’t make the list on a particular day. And that’s ok.

The diet industry never made room for that day. The plans were built for a life that doesn’t exist — a life where every Tuesday looks like every other Tuesday and you’ve always got two hours and a clean kitchen and the right ingredients in the fridge. That’s not a life. That’s a brochure.

Your life is the parking lot. Your life is the schedule taped to the fridge with six different colored markers on it. And the food has to fit that life — not the other way around.

Here’s what changes when you stop following the rules and start listening to your body:

You pull into the drive-through line without the spiral. You look at the menu and you order what actually sounds good — not the salad you don’t want, not the “diet” option the latest plan would tell you to pick. The thing your body is asking for. You eat until you’ve had enough. And when you’ve had enough, you stop, even if there are fries left in the bag.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

No good foods. No bad foods. Just food, and a body that knows what it needs if you’ll let it speak.

The freedom in this — and I want you to hear me on this part — is bigger than the food. It’s the freedom of a summer evening that doesn’t end with you beating yourself up in the kitchen for what you ate in the car. It’s the freedom of being present at the ballpark instead of doing math in your head about points and calories and what you’ll “make up for” tomorrow. It’s the freedom of being a mom in her real life, eating real food, with her real family.

The drive-through isn’t your failure. It’s your help on the nights you need help. It’s a tool. It’s a tired mom’s gift to herself on a Tuesday in July when the laundry is going and the game ran late and the kids are starving in the back seat.

Pull in. Order what sounds good. Eat until you’ve had enough.

Then drive home.

Because I think a lot of us have been taught to believe that if we really wanted to lose weight…
we’d feel motivated all the time.

But honestly..

I don’t think that’s true at all.

For me, motivation feels like:
“I’m excited to do this.”
“I have a good attitude about this.”
“This feels fun and rewarding.”

So let’s really look at this honestly.

I want you to think about all the things in your life you are naturally motivated to do.

Maybe even make a list of 10 things.

When I did this exercise for myself, I noticed something interesting.

The things I’m consistently motivated to do are usually the things that:

• bring me joy

• feel exciting

• give me an instant payoff

• create that little dopamine hit our brains love

Here are some things from my own list:

• vacations

• harvest season

• massages

• time with friends

• going to a movie

• sitting by the water reading

• float time

Those things feel good immediately.

Now let me ask you something.

Did losing weight make your top 10 list?

Because if I’m being completely honest…

it did not make mine.

And no…
I do not wake up every single day saying:

“Wow, I’m so motivated to work on my weight loss today.”

Absolutely not.

But here’s what I realized.

I may not always be motivated…
but I am willing.

And that changed everything for me.

So now I want you to make another list.

What are the things you are willing to do?

My “willing” list was a whole lot longer than my “motivated” list.

Because willingness is different.

Willingness says:
“This may not feel exciting right now… but I’ll still do it.”

And usually, the reward comes later.

Not in the beginning.
Not immediately.
Not with instant dopamine.

But afterward.

After you get over the hump.
After you follow through.
After you prove to yourself you can do the things.

Some things from my willing list:

• working out

• making a plan

• following the plan

• using my hunger scale

• scooping the horse barn

• pumping out hog barns

• dishes

• laundry

• cleaning the house

You get the idea.

When your baby cries in the middle of the night, you’re probably not motivated to get out of bed to do a feeding or change a poopy diaper.

But you’re willing.

When the dog throws up on the floor, you’re probably not motivated to clean it up.

But you’re willing.

At the end of harvest season — which absolutely makes my motivated list — we still have to pump out the hog barns afterward.

Trust me.
I am not motivated to do that.

But I’m willing because it matters for our business.

And honestly?
Weight loss is a lot like that.

Because eventually the excitement wears off.

In the beginning, it can feel exciting.
The scale drops quickly.
You’re seeing results.
You’re thinking:

“This is amazing! Look at me go!”

But then comes the stall.

The scale stops moving.
The novelty wears off.
Results slow down.

And suddenly motivation disappears.

That’s the moment most people think something has gone wrong.

But maybe nothing has gone wrong at all.

Maybe this is simply the moment where willingness has to take over.

Are you willing to keep going even when the scale isn’t rewarding you immediately?

Are you willing to look at what adjustments need to be made instead of quitting?

Are you willing to stop expecting weight loss to feel exciting every single day?

Because real life rarely works that way.

Motivation is wonderful.
We all need it sometimes.

But motivation is inconsistent.

Willingness is what changes your life.

Willingness says:
“I’ll keep showing up.”
“I’ll keep learning.”
“I’ll keep trying.”
“I don’t need this to feel good every second in order to continue.”

And honestly…
that’s where the magic starts.

The moment you become willing to do something different.
Something uncomfortable.
Something new.
Maybe even something scary.

That’s the moment real change begins.

And over time?

That willingness often turns into the motivation you were chasing all along.

Alright friends…
let’s go.

A date on the calendar.
A marketing campaign.
A reminder from commercials, radio ads, and social media that we should appreciate moms.

And maybe I’m the only one…
but the older I get, the weirder that feels to me.

Not because I don’t love being celebrated.

I’m a mother of four amazing kids.
Grandma to three beautiful grandbabies.
There is truly nothing I wouldn’t do for them.

But somewhere along the way, my perspective changed.

Because if I’m honest…
I used to be the mom who thought Mother’s Day should revolve around me.

I used to put expectations on the day.
Expectations on gifts.
Expectations on how appreciated I should feel.
And yes… disappointment when it didn’t look the way I thought it should.

But age has a way of softening some things and clarifying others.

And honestly,
Letting go of those expectations relieved me emotionally in ways I didn’t expect.

Because when God said:

“Honor your father and your mother.”
— Exodus 20:12

…I don’t think He meant:
“Only on the second Sunday in May.”

Honor was never meant to be seasonal.

And love was never meant to be performative.

That’s why I see Mother’s Day differently now.

I don’t believe we should need one calendar date a year to suddenly remember to appreciate our moms.

The radio says:
“Buy flowers.”
Social media says:
“Better post your mom.”
The stores say:
“Hurry before the sale ends.”

And somehow what was meant to be meaningful can start to feel forced.
Obligated.
Guilted.
Like everyone is trying to prove they care for exactly 24 hours.

Now listen…
flowers are beautiful.
Cards are sweet.
Gifts are thoughtful.

But you know what means even more?

The random Tuesday flowers.
The unexpected phone call.
The checking in for no reason.
The helping without being asked.
The remembering all year long.

That feels like honor to me.

And moms…
Can I lovingly say something?

If your children are little, your husband is probably doing his best guessing what you’d want.
Or he’s walking through a store while your kids proudly pick out something completely random that makes perfect sense to them.

Smile.
Say thank you.

Because those little ones genuinely think they found the greatest gift in the world.

Even if it’s bright red lipstick and you don’t even wear lipstick!.

And if you want something specific.
Tell them.

People, husbands in particular, are not mind readers.

I think sometimes we set others up to fail by expecting them to magically know what makes us feel loved.

Now that my kids are older, I honestly don’t care much about gifts anymore.

Want to know my favorite thing?

Help.

I have always said, “I don’t want stuff. I want stuff done”

So I send out a project list.

Come help me move something.
Fix something.
Plant some flowers..
Organize something.

No pressure.
No timeline.
No guilt.

And randomly throughout the next few weeks one of them will show up and help me with something on the list.

That means more to me than another card or mug ever could.

But here’s the important part:

I asked for help.

I didn’t expect them to just know.

There’s a lesson in that all by itself.

And one more thing, moms…

Please stop waiting for Mother’s Day to take care of yourself.

We chose motherhood.
And yes, it is beautiful.
But it is also sacrifice.
And exhaustion.
And giving pieces of yourself away daily.

That’s part of it.

But you still matter inside of motherhood.

And self-care isn’t always what social media tells us it is.

Sometimes self-care is:

• reading a devotion for 15 minutes

• sitting outside in silence

• reading a few pages of a book

• going to bed earlier

• getting the coffee pot ready at night

• doing the dishes before bed so tomorrow feels lighter

Honestly, sometimes I call preparing for tomorrow the greatest form of self-care there is.

And sometimes you need a real break.

Ask for help.
Call a friend.
Let grandma watch the kids.
Take a day.

There is no guilt or shame in needing support.

None.

And truthfully…
I feel this same way about Valentine’s Day.
Father’s Day.
Grandparents Day — which apparently is a thing now.

We shouldn’t need a date on a calendar to remind us to love our people.

Real love shows up in the ordinary days too.

The random Tuesdays.
The ordinary moments.
The quiet ways we care for each other when nobody is posting about it online.

That’s the kind of love that lasts.

Alright beautiful friends…
until next time.

~Amy