New Year New You!!

As the WAHM, SAHM, or working mom that you are... what are your plans for 2013??  What do you hope to change and/or accomplish?  Is it the year of finally getting organized?  Or maybe the year you will actually lose and keep off the last 5, 10, 15, etc. pounds you have always hoped?  Maybe it is a new look you are after.  You have had the same hair style for the past 5 years and you are finally ready to wow the world!  Share your New Year New You resolutions and in future posts, we will help you get there!

New Year's plans can be about anything!  Here are some ideas:

• Health / Fitness
• Organization / Home
• Fashion / Hair
• Community / Giving back (LOVE the 26 acts of kindness I have seen people doing on FB)
• Family (Close and distant)
• Work

Good luck to you all.  Together we can move these goals past the weekly to-do list and into a fabulous year!!

Why Donna Reed?

 

 

So when presenting this idea to my husband, his very appropriate husband response was "who is Donna Reed"?  It occurred to me then that to create the forum I hope to, I should explain why I chose her as a model.  Growing up and watching Nick at Night reruns with my parents and grandparents, I would very often see the Donna Reed Show.  In the show, Donna was the picture perfect housewife and mother to a pediatrician and a son and daughter.  She held a clean home, perfectly behaved children and managed to be stunning in a house dress by the time her hubby came home while dinner was cooking in the kitchen.

Now in this quest to be a "modern-day" Donna Reed, I am fully aware of how far removed that model is to most of today's households, my own included.  For one, most of us work in some capacity whether it is full time, part-time, work from home, etc.  Two, my husband is not a doctor.  Third, I have three children who you are lucky to get a shirt on let alone a nice button down shirt that has no wrinkles or stains!  We could go on and on from here. 

It is the idea of Donna that I want to take on.  Wouldn't it be great to feel like you have work, home, family, and self in order like she did every day.  When starting my first blog, I guess I should have asked this question.  Am I alone?  Are there other women out there who feel like the battle to be mother, wife and self is setting us up for failure? 

My next post, I am going to tackle New Year's Goals... What are your plans!

How it started

For my first post, I thought I would start by introducing myself a bit and why I decided to start this blog.  I hope that this becomes a common ground for women to "meet, relate, grow and glow"!  So here is what started it all.

I am a working mother of three (all under the ages of 6) and have been married for almost ten years.  I am fortunate to have a home and family nearby to help, support, etc.  So why the blog?  It would appear to be a modern-day "Donna Reed" situation, right?  I thought so too until I realized that in my attempts to do it all, I was failing (and was oblivious to it).  I was happily completing certain tasks but then pushing the problem to another area.  I was never seeing friends or having time to take a bath due to frantically staying busy until midnight when I would lay in bed stressing over what to do tomorrow.

In the balance of home, work, family and myself, it was always tilted one way or another.  Work might be great but the home would then suffer.  Dishes piled high in the sink and laundry touching the ceiling.  Husbands are great and this blog is in no way meant to blast them.  My husband does what he can but that doesn't help with my own guilt.  I grew up with watching the Donna Reeds and decided then that I would be that type of mom, everything to everyone.  Since Donna never worked, I know she is an unfair comparison so I am simply talking about the idea of her.  Always looking good, always happy, always had a clean home, always there for her sons, etc.

That is why I am on a quest to become a "modern-day Donna Reed".  I hope that on this blog there can be discussions of problems, annoyances, concerns toppled with solutions, ideas and support.  Once I have opened up this topic to friends, I realized I was not alone.  Instead though of continuing to complain, I want to morph into the beautiful, confident, attentive, patient, organized... mother-wife that is in all of us.  Sounds cheesy?  How many of you love when you clean your house for a party (the real cleaning) and you get a moment before the guests arrive?  Or relish the feeling when you actually do have one of those days where you had dinner on the table by 6pm, cleaned up and got a moment to play with kids and then sat on the couch and talked with your hubby?

And so the quest begins...

Topics to be included in this blog; organization, recipes/food, parenting ideas, beauty, "date ideas" / friend outings, etc.