We have 5 kids and the ages range from 11 to 7, 5, 3, and nearly 2. We have a 9 year age range from eldest to youngest. We’ve noticed that once they hit about age 7, the older ones begin to pull away more and create their own identity, discovering who they are as an individual. Each child goes through a different stage of development at different ages and it’s our responsibility as parents to accommodate those stages and provide opportunities for them to grow and develop, meeting each of...

Every parent experiences burnout and before Rosie became one, she used to go through stages where she felt like she could get burnt out every now and again very easily and she could never understand what it was, but there seem to be 2 things that can cause it. One is when you’re doing too much and the other one is when you’re giving too much. If you spend a lot of time around other people and spend a lot of your energy, you have to be able to recoup that spent energy and regain balance....

Adam says his conviction for this concept is so much stronger every week than it previously was even though it was strong before. There are so many reasons and we list off a few of why we feel that it can be super helpful at strengthening a marriage, healing challenges in a marriage, and making you a better parent. Date night can be a time where we are able to relax and be ourselves without anything hindering us, and we can just laugh and enjoy one another’s company, which is very healing and...

This is something Adam mentioned he thought would be a good topic and is also something Rosie had heard in the last couple days, so we decided to talk about comparison. We have all heard that phrase that comparison is the thief of joy, but one thing we’ve heard is that if you find yourself in a state of comparison, it either leads to discouragement or to pride, so it’s never a good thing. If you find yourself comparing, you’re either putting yourself down, or you’re trying to put someone else...

Today Adam and I wanted to discuss something that many people take for granted, including Adam, who used to really not make it a priority in his life, but now can see how important it is for progress. Our bodies are designed to react according to our situations and if we’re constantly stressing ourselves out, everything will be off, such as our appetite or ability to sleep, and so on. Rosie’s main tactic is making sure she gets enough rest to ease the pressure and stress in her life. You also...

We have lived in Australia, then we moved to Ireland, then Portugal, back to Ireland, and now we’re living in the US. We’ve lived in different kinds of homes in different countries like a house, a townhome, an apartment complex on the beach, and more houses in America. Our current place is great for children to run around outside and just enjoy time with friends and be in a neighborhood that is kid friendly. What we enjoy about our current place 2:00A big enough pantry 7:40An environment...

It’s easy as a parent to focus on the things that maybe frustrate you. We feel that the more we’ve had to parent, the more mellow we have become because now we just see them repeat the same things that the first ones did and it now just makes us laugh. Our children do a lot of funny things that we maybe initially thought was annoying, but after realizing it’s just something that kids do, it has become endearing, like when they feed the dog and the dog is covered in food later, or when they...

We were watching a cute little cartoon with the kids the other day and the kids were learning about how an old prophet had rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem in 52 days, and nobody saw it coming because he achieved so much with his crew in 52 days that no one expected so much activity to happen. The moral of the story was when you put your mind and action into a task, miraculous things can happen in short periods of time. Sometimes the things that can lure us away aren’t particularly bad...

When we think about fight or flight, that is usually when we think back to our biological days when people were more vulnerable and basically your digestive system and things would start to slow down to make sure all the extra blood would go into our muscles, giving them the opportunity to fight or take flight. One thing we don’t think about often though is that some of us just freeze, meaning we get stuck and we just freeze and there is no progress at all. This applies to life when we are...

Today we have a very special guest with Cindy, the baby dietitian and she talks to us about all things nutrition for the first year of life. She believes in not following a diet, but that moderation and portion control are key and that having a diet full of variety is the best way to nourish your body. Cindy believes in only providing her readers with credible and research based information. In a society where the main topic of conversation is figuring out the best way to lose weight, she...

Caley earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Special Education and her Master’s Degree in Early Childhood Education from the University of Florida. For the past 11 years, she has worked in a variety of roles to serve families including: preschool teacher, early interventionist, behavior therapist, and now as a private consultant. Her most recent professional development includes: Conscious Discipline™, The Play Project ™, and training with Dr. Ross Greene on his Collaborative Problem Solving...

Today we meet with award winning holistic health coach who specializes in women’s hormonal health, Katie Bressack. We discuss raising children along with maintaining your health as a woman, including how Katie handled things postpartum. Katie tells us about some frustrating things that can and have happened to her in the hospital and how she handled it. Getting the right nutrients and having the correct nutrition regime is vital to postpartum recovery and we talk about what worked for us when...

In this episode we talk to Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby, a licensed marriage and family therapist, a board certified coach, and the founder and clinical director of Growing Self Counseling & Coaching. She’s the author of Exaholics, Breaking Your Addiction to an Ex Love, and is the host of the Love Happiness and Success podcast. We talk about the common things Lisa sees in marriages with problems and the potential pitfalls couples face. Many people will begin to feel frustrated their partner isn’t...

Rosie realized 2 things before she started breastfeeding. Her mum had breastfed her, so she had her story and also the fact that her mother was unable to breastfeed her firstborn child. The time of year can affect how you breastfeed your child, or even if you’re going to be able to breastfeed them. Rosie was a Winter baby, so her mum definitely had less going on and therefore more time to devote to breastfeeding, so Rosie was breastfed as a baby. Preparing to breastfeed 0:30Latching...

You can come to marriage with money issues, and then you often develop new money issues once you get into marriage. Large amounts of arguments or disagreements in marriage stem back to money, beliefs around money, challenges with money, financial issues. regardless of whether it appears people have money or don’t, you don’t really understand what people’s relationship is with it, but marriage is probably the closest you will come to understanding it. The way you feel about money and handle it...

Something really powerful happened the other day that caused Rosie to want to discuss this topic today. We had guests staying with us and they offered to help bring in the groceries when Rosie brought them home, but before they could do anything, the kids had already gone out and grabbed the groceries, and then they all worked together to put the food away and organized it into the various spots in which the food belonged. There are so many basic, yet useful skills we as parents know that...

In a moment when your children are having an aggressive reaction, a great thing to do is say to yourself “If I were to respond like that, how would I like someone to treat me?” Adam found himself trying to console one of our kids when they were unhappy one night, and instead of getting angry himself and reacting with annoyance, he decided to try telling a story about overcoming anger with gratitude, which totally got everyone calm a lot quicker and they were all able to go to bed within 10...

This episode Rosie gives some great tips on how to make your life a bit easier as a busy mum including using a pressure cooker to save time cooking, baby blenders to blend up meals for your babies, clip-on chairs for situations where you need your toddler contained, and a few other items that can really help. Pressure cooker 0:35Baby blender 2:25Clip-on chairs 3:30Poncho eating vest 4:20Special tote bag with clips 5:104 in 1 crib 6:50 “I brought the chair and it was so funny, all these...

We watched a movie that came out called True Spirit, which is like a cinematic version of Jessica Watson’s journey sailing around the world at the age of 16 by herself. We were looking for a good movie to watch with the kids and came upon this one when all the kids agreed in unison to watch it, and then we were all glued to the screen from start to finish. We’ve begun likening the difficult situations of our children to the hard thing that Jessica Watson accomplished, and this has really...

Rosie loves to be surrounded by women who have a positive body image, regardless of who they are, where they come from, and what age, shape, or size they are. Rosie has always made a conscious effort to stay as healthy as she can during pregnancy and between pregnancies without being extreme. There are sometimes where women can fall to either side where they verge toward being healthy or unhealthy to an extreme, but Rosie has the goal set to be healthy and well so that she will be in top...

During the Summer time everything is happy as your kids take time off from school and get to play outside in the sun and just have a lot of fun. You’re actually fairly excited to go back to school, but then there’s this dance between loving being back and trying to settle back into the routine of being back there. We want to help our children to feel inspired and have a love for learning while also not pressuring them to follow after the ambitions and expectations we set for them, but rather...

Today we talk to one of our extremely special friends, Kristi Askew, who has been such an inspiration to us. We just really wanted to share her journey because we feel there are many people out there who she could help. There is a difficult sickness that afflicts various people in her husband’s family called Huntington’s Disease, which is explained like having ALS, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimers all at the same time. Her husband didn’t experience the symptoms until about 5 years after they had...

Adam tells about how in his teens and twenties, he would see these families with kids who had just these snot streams going down their faces, which absolutely disgusted him at that time. But as we’ve had children and grown as parents, Adam’s perspective on these things has changed and he no longer thinks of those things the same as he did before. We have changed in a lot of positive ways and wanted to share our own experiences in that regard. How Rosie has changed 3:50Having one vs having...

In this episode we’re talking all about how to keep marriage simple. Inspiration for this episode is the fact that we have our 12th wedding anniversary this week. We are very busy people with our own dreams, goals, and aspirations, and we realized that if we try to come up with something too complicated, things just become too hard and it ends up making things worse. So we were trying to figure out something nice to do for our anniversary, but then decided it would be better to just do...

As parents we naturally want to make things easier for our children and we want them to have opportunities that we didn’t have, but if you make their lives too easy, then they’re not gonna be resilient enough for the world. If you make life too easy, it can become a burden. Too much prosperity can create apathy and can kill ambition, which is something we need to be aware of when parenting. Principles to teach your children include hard work, service, and gratitude. Help them expect to bless...