For the last year or so, I’ve stopped putting pressure on myself to make something new and shiny for meal trains. I’ve gotten into a good rhythm where I put together a double (or sometimes triple) batch of chicken soup, saving half for my family and sharing half with the family in need. Postpartum? Chicken soup. Hospital recovery? Chicken soup. Illness in the home? Chicken soup.

I love this cobbled-together recipe for a lot of reasons: it’s colorful (eat the rainbow, am I right?), it’s baby and toddler friendly (both in the prep and in the eating), it’s infinitely adjustable for allergies or preferences, and it’s so easy to scale and batch-make.

But before this becomes a full on food-blog post, where you have to scroll through an endless essay to get the goods, here is the recipe for the Dietz family Meal Train Chicken Soup.

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Ingredients

• Rotisserie Chicken

• Apple Cider Vinegar

• Bay Leaf

• Water

• Carrots

• Celery

• Garlic

• Onions (Red and White/Yellow)

• Bell Peppers (Red, Orange, and Yellow)

• Potatoes (Medley Mix, with the purple ones if you can find them)

• Spices (Salt, Pepper, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, Thyme, just a dash of ginger and turmeric)

Steps

• Remove the meat from your chicken. Chop the meat into bite-sized pieces and store in an airtight container.

• Place your chicken carcass (including some remaining meat, skin, etc. but NOT the string that tied the thing together) into your largest stock pot. Fill 3/4 full with water. Add a swirl of the best apple cider vinegar you have on hand. If you’d like, add spices and vegetables to taste // whatever scraps you’ve set aside for broth.

• Bring to a boil. Cover, lower heat, and simmer for a few hours.

• While the broth simmers, dice the rest of your add-ins.

• Strain the broth and set it to the side. (If you’ve added vegetables, these can be set aside for any baby-led weaning escapades or homemade purees you may be interested in pursuing.)

• In the stockpot, sautee carrots, onions, garlic and celery in your preferred oil until soft.

• Add potatoes, bell peppers, chicken, and spices. Mix well.

• Pour the broth back into the stockpot, reserving any extra in your fridge or freezer for another day. Bring the soup to a boil, cover, reduce heat, and let simmer for 30-40 minutes until potatoes are soft.

• Season to taste, if needed.

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Now, back to singing the praises of this particular chicken soup.

First, scaling. If you’re the type of person who prefers to roast your own chickens, then by all means, don’t buy the rotisserie and do it from scratch yourself! But if you’re on a time crunch or in a challenging season yourself, then buy the already-shredded chicken, the boxed broth, and the frozen mirepoix. No shame here.

Second, HELPERS. My daughters are desperate to be helpful in the kitchen, and I am often desperate to direct that energy into a non-essential task so that I don’t accidentally chop off someone’s fingers. With so much chopping, this is a perfect recipe to let the kids help out. After minimal instruction, my little ones (3.5 and 2 years old) could use kid-safe knives (we have these, thanks Aunt Gigi) to cut the chicken into small pieces. Even though their attention span was shorter than the task at hand, they were unable to do any damage to the chicken—I just finished chopping it myself after they ran off to play baby dolls. Older kids might be able to chop bell peppers or celery easily, and teenagers could handle carrots and onions with ease.1 Mixing spices in a bowl (and measuring them, if you’re into that sort of thing or your kids are learning about fractions) is another good job for children to help with.

Third, allergies. This recipe is naturally free of most of the major allergens, and all the veggies in it are easy to substitute. I know some women avoid bell peppers while nursing due to reflux. Some people can’t or don’t want to have starchy potatoes. Substitute for (or add in!) sweet potatoes, zucchini, yellow or butternut squash, cabbage, tomatoes, kale, peas, corn, mushrooms, barley, pasta (gluten-free or gluten-annoying2), rice, beans… Heck, you could even use vegetable broth and avoid the chicken altogether for a vegetarian dish if you really wanted to.3 There is so much room for personal taste within this recipe that still gets you a wide variety of nutrients to support a healthy recovery.

Fourth, flexibility. You can prep the whole thing and bring a full pot or tupperware to the door of the person you’re serving. You can do all the broth-making and chopping, package it in beautiful mason jars, and deliver it with instructions for the basic mix-and-simmer so that they can have it hot when they really want or need it. If you’re prepping for yourself, you could flash-freeze all the mix-ins and store them in one freezer bag, with the broth in another, and do the whole thing from frozen up to three months later. Or if you’re really ambitious, you could dehydrate everything but the broth and store it in your pantry for a scoop-and-go soup mix like this one I’m obsessed with from Frontier Soups.

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I think that’s all I have to say. It’s getting quite late, and my eyes are getting a little screen-sore, but I can’t remember anything else I wanted to add.

If you do end up making this soup, tag me on Notes so we can be excited about it together!

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If I am being honest with myself, I am not good at meal planning. I tend oscillate between very rigid and totally disorganized, and effective meal planning for a family on a budget means being somewhere in the middle. The end result of this is that every week, by the end of our grocery cycle, we’re scrambling to cobble a meal together from what we have left over, or we procrastinate and end up eating out more than we want (because hungry toddlers are not happy toddlers).

I’ve written before about the way that place shapes us, shapes our expectations, shapes our habits. One of the habits I got into at our old apartment was a direct result (and likely a direct cause) of this struggle with meal planning. We lived across the street from a mini-Walmart grocery store, so if I found myself struggle to put a meal together by 4:00pm, I’d just load the girls up into the stroller (we all needed the walk anyway, right?) and bop on over to Walmart. Some days I might just buy the one or two ingredients that I forgot to pick up on our big grocery run; other days, I’d grab something from the frozen section and stick it right in the oven when we got home.

In general, I think this was a good thing for me during the first three years of parenting. Two under two was difficult, in a lot of ways, and not having anxiety about meal prepping or running out of key ingredients was a blessing, albeit a blessing I sometimes abused. (Looking at you, pack of three cookies for one dollar right at the front of the store.)

But now that we’re out in the country, we’re not in walking distance to anything, and my strategies are having to shift. Four o’clock grocery store trips now look like the sixteen month old shrieking and climbing out of the cart while the three year old wails about the things I won’t buy her. There are lots of weighted glances from strangers, and lots of huffing and fluffing on my part.

Less pleasant for everyone involved, and much longer than a ten minute trip.

As a result, I’ve found myself becoming more creative in my cooking, trying to find ways to repurpose leftovers that don’t involve either eating them cold or reheating them on the stove and hoping for the best. Some days, this is stressful! But recently, I’ve discovered an easy go-to meal that’s kid-proof helper-friendly, infinitely flexible, and enjoyed by everyone in our family: pasta bake.

The first time I made it, James told me: “Wow. This is incredible. I am proud that you are the mother of my children.”

Silly comment aside, it was a real confidence boost for me. Our three-year-old and I had worked together to assemble everything, we’d all kept our calm, and dinner was on the table (hot!) on time. Almost all of the ingredients were sitting in the fridge threatening to go bad, and I knew from experience that I may just stare at them, full of guilt and dread, and watch them day by day as they spoiled. Instead, we turned them into something delicious, avoided food waste, and cleaned out space in the fridge to boot! It was, by and large, a rousing success. (We made this recipe again recently, with much the same response, which inspired this reflection.)

It’s gotten me thinking about the virtues of resourcefulness, thrift, and contented gratitude. As I said above, there was a definite good in being able to run to the grocery store to relieve witching-hour stress, but I don’t think it would have served me well to have that access indefinitely. A la “Chopped”, having a set number and quantity of ingredients is forcing me to become more attentive during my weekly grocery runs, but it’s also giving me the chance to waste less food. I’m getting forced to experiment and strengthen my kitchen skills. And as an adult with taste and texture sensitivities, I’m learning when and how I can utilize unfamiliar or less-than-ideal ingredients so I can gradually try to expand my palate.

But beyond just food, I’m wondering if there are other areas where I can be implementing this same set of virtues and attitudes:

• Can we prep the coffee maker in the evening so that there’s no excuse to buy coffee on our errands in the morning? Would a small “reward” like adding sugar to homemade coffee reduce the appeal of store-bought coffee? Likewise with breakfast, at least some of the time?

• When trying to bring some order to our days and weeks, can we re-think our existing routine and work within the natural paths we’re already walking, rather than imposing a new and totally foreign routine, complete with Shiny New Things to buy?

• When I notice the tug of envy, anger, or loneliness on my heart, where can I turn instead of compulsively spending money on things I don’t need (or even really want)? How can I retrain myself to seek solace in other people, and in prayer, instead of in purchases?

• What basic skills could we learn to help us pursue a mindset of repair and longevity, rather than a throwaway mentality?

• Do I pursue “sustainable” solutions because I believe in long-term waste reduction, or because it’s an excuse to buy a Shiny New Thing?

• Am I generous in sharing out of my surplus, whatever that surplus might look like: hand-me-downs, hosting lunchtime play dates, holding space for others during difficult seasons, giving James time “off” when I know he’s feeling tired?

Frankly, I’m struggling or outright failing in most of these areas right now. It’s so much more soothing to my ego to buy vegetables ambitiously, even if I know I likely won’t use them, and then tell myself that I’m composting them, so they’re not really going to waste. It’s so tempting to spend time (and sometimes money) designing print-on-demand coffee mugs1 or sweatshirts when I don’t want to face difficult conversations. Likewise with online shopping and dissatisfaction with my two-kids-in-two-years tummy—why face my real problems when Old Navy or Kate Quinn is running a clearance sale?

All this to say, I’m feeling reflective today, examining my conscience (and my subconscious) for areas where I’m “running to Walmart” when the Lord is inviting me to try “making a pasta bake”.2 I’d love to hear where the Lord is inviting you to grow as we move from the oppressive summer heat and towards intoxicating fall breezes and the promise of spending time outdoors without melting like a popsicle.

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Plus, below, see my super official pasta bake recipe, featuring Very Exact Measurements (tm) of Whatever Food in Your Fridge is About to Expire. Enjoy, if you’re so inclined.

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Dietz Family Pasta Bake

Ingredients:

• Pasta, as much of whatever shape as you have, ideally leftover but could cook fresh

• Meat, as much of whatever as you have, preferably ground meat, but shredded chicken or pulled pork could also work

• Cream cheese, mascarpone, ricotta, some kind of creamy base

• Tomato sauce, pasta sauce, pizza sauce, whatever

• Italian seasoning, garlic, onion, salt, pepper (to taste)

• Extra cheese (feta, parmesan, etc.) to top, if desired

Instructions:

• Mix an ingredients in a 9x13 pan, or whatever pan it will fit in

• Bake at 350 for 20 minutes

There ya have it, folks.

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It wasn’t even on our radar, this place that loves us well.

I biked past it as a teenager, on my way to the store or just out for a ride.

It was “sketchy” and “those apartments by the Walmart”—you know the ones.

And yet, when we needed an open door, this was the door the Lord opened. First floor. Two bedrooms. One bath. Laminate floors. A crepe myrtle outside, blossoming like fireworks in the late summer sun. Right along the fence line in a corner of the complex that is always quiet and safe.

We landed softly, held by the strong hands that carried our furniture over the threshold when my body, swollen and still swelling at nine months pregnant in the sweltering summer heat, could barely stand for long enough to sweep. Welcomed by friends two buildings over, by family a two-minute drive away. Nurtured physically by the grocery store across the street and spiritually by the perpetual adoration chapel just down the road. Socialized in the park and the pool just a few blocks away.

This place loves us so well.

Our last neighbor would play music at all hours of the day and night, the bass thrumming through our walls. Never quite loud enough to keep us awake, but never quiet enough that you could brush your teeth without noticing it.

Our neighbor here prays the rosary each evening, the sweet repeated words drifting across our shared wall, calling us to prayer. Our wider community knows us, has affection for us, misses us when circumstances don’t align for a chance encounter in the parking lot.

They’ll miss us when we’re gone.

Here we welcomed our children home, held them close, filled their tummies and stroked their heads. Soothed booboos and meltdowns. First smiles and first teeth and first foods and first words and first steps. I hate to think of the lasts. I cannot bring myself to say ‘goodbye’, even just in my imagination.

I wonder, sometimes, how much this place has shaped our family. If we’d lived in our old carpeted home, would we have been so daring with diaper-free time?1 If we’d had a yard, would we still have joined our park group? If we didn’t live in walking distance to the chapel, would our daughter still insist on going to visit Him in the Little Church? How often would I have melted down an hour before dinnertime because I’d forgotten a key ingredient, weeping as I loaded the girls into the car or scrambled to come up with an alternate meal?

This place loves us so well.

This is the home where I was told—amidst the wailing of my children and the clutter of a life well-loved—that my family has a special charism for hospitality in the thick of things, welcoming one and all into our very selves, as we are, wailing and messy and smiling through yawns.

Yet even now, I feel the detaching begin. I know how this goes, and I dread it, and I long for it. I could not leave now. I only pray I will be able to when the time comes.

What I love about this place is its eternal sameness—we are one of a handful of families dwelling among the elderly and the alone. The divorced Jewish woman and her poodle. The never-married and the widowed. The childless and the grandparents and the not-yet-married. The endless supply of gray tabby cats.

This place loves them so well.2

One by one, whether in the past or in the future, all the close connections that tie us to this place are slowly slipping away. Friends, family, jobs—these will not last, not in this season of perpetual growth and change and motion.

But the elderly? The alone? The divorced and widowed and never-married? Here they are and here they will remain.

That rosary-wielding neighbor, the one who came with us to Mass and rejoiced to see an altar rail installed instead of removed? She told me this week that she’s been here for twenty-five years. For almost as long as I’ve been alive, she’s been living here, praying, growing, thriving, aging. Her sister—who we also know and call by name, who has called us in moments of fear or sorrow—tells me that my neighbor is, indeed, a living saint. That those rosaries drew her back to the church and back to the heart of Christ. I rest, awe-struck and grateful, in the certainty that those rosaries are sometimes offered for me. They predate our time here and they will continue, God-willing, for many years after we leave, until our dear neighbor’s work is done and she is welcomed to our heavenly home.

This place would not be enough to sustain us, if all else failed, but it is enough to grieve while all else holds its tentative and transient truce. The clock ticks towards the day when grandparents will move away, when new children will call our friends further into the suburbs, when new vocations and new Vocations will unravel the threads with which we currently weave our social lives.

This place, I have to assume, cannot love us well forever.

And, it is true, my heart craves more. My heart craves grass and new paint on the walls and space for more children if the Lord so chooses. But my heart also craves permanence and consistency and the deeply-grounding experience of being seen and known. My heart craves proximity to loved ones, neighbor-friends for my children, and the promise of solace for this mother’s heart in the ever-beating, ever-waiting Heart of Christ.3

Should He ever open to us the door of a home to call our own, will we find there what we lose in leaving here? Will we find a place where everything we need can be accessed without a car, if we so choose? Will we find family, friends, neighbors with whom we can live in that delightful and uncomfortable imbalance of debt?4 Will we find slides and swings and swimming pools? Food and festivals and fair weather?

Will we find a place that loves us oh so well?

I find it difficult to believe. I know I will miss this place.5 Here within these walls is the illusion of permanence, of stability, of community.

Is it an illusion? Or do I merely treat it as one because I know, someplace deep in my bones, that this home is simply a layover for us?

What is life, if not a layover? The world, after all, is our ship and not our home.

So maybe the past isn’t what I’m truly missing
Maybe I’m missing what’s to come
Or maybe eternity has already begun6

Is there something in this ache, this longing, this grief that can point me to heaven? I know there must be. I know that there is no place on God’s green earth that can fully satisfy my heart, that these longings and grievings must be signposts. I hope that if I follow them faithfully, one day I will find myself among the angels and saints, all desires fulfilled.

I hope that when I die, I can say with Psyche that “The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — […] the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home?”7

This place is not my final home, but it is a home. This place has loved me well.

For now, as we anticipate the ever-increasing likelihood of being among the first to leave this place, instead of among the last, we grieve.

And for now, it is enough.

What does the longing for home look like in your life? What other longings and griefs is the Lord using to draw your heart back to His?

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We recently attended Mass at a parish affiliated with the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest (ICKSP for short). In spite of bringing two children under the age of three, who were hopped up on sleep deprivation and travel-induced lack of routine, we felt incredibly welcomed and cared for by the parish community, and as we drove away, I found myself reflecting on the experience.

You can always tell a family parish when you see one, and this was a family parish. Half of the choir were children. Every other woman was either pregnant or wearing a baby. A small army of toddlers roved on the front lawn as their parents listened to the homily over the church speaker system. When I bent down to correct my baby, who was trying to steal a little seed casing from the hand of another child, the other child’s mother reassured me that it was no big deal—“She’s the sixth of seven kids, and she knows exactly where to find more.” In other words, don’t stress yourself out trying to mediate this interaction. Focus on the Mass.

At many parishes, this is where it stops. A sort of sense of “we’re all in this together” among parents. Occasionally, there will be a more-or-less formal declaration of parish “policy” such as the one I discussed here. To be sure, this isn’t a lack! This is an incredible gift from families to families, and often comes with a hidden support network of meal trains, childcare swaps, and play groups. I don’t mean to imply that this is somehow lacking, that it’s “not enough.”

This parish, though, went a step further. Halfway through the homily, when I took my two-year-old to the bathroom, I found (to my joy and amazement!) a potty seat reducer hung on the wall of each stall. And as we were walking through the family life center, I noticed high chairs and booster seats standing at the ready for Coffee & Donuts. Liturgical coloring sheets sat next to a bin of crayons at the entrance to the church, along with an invitation to pray for the son of the artist, who was undergoing medical treatment for a serious condition.

Y’all this parish is anticipating that families will be showing up to their Masses, to their events, to their bathrooms. And not only that, they’re planning for us. They’re taking steps to facilitate an easier existence for families within that space.

I am 100% serious when I say that I have never, never felt so welcomed at a parish. So seen and held and supported and wanted. By offering these incredibly simple and incredibly thoughtful accommodations for my children, the parish was telling me that our presence was desired and important, perhaps even a gift to the community.

recently posted an essay on the ways that our culture is ordered toward/around sterility more than it is ordered around/toward fertility—I’d read the essay mere days before attending this Mass, and I couldn’t help but walk back into the Church thinking, This! This is what it means to build up a culture of life. Of course, advocacy and policy work is important, but as was recently talking about on the podcast, sometimes a grassroots effort at the local level is going to be more practicable, more effective, and more timely than working towards government-wide policy shift or a cultural about-face.

If we really believe that the family is the domestic church, the seedbed of vocations, the believing and evangelizing community… do we act like it?

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So, without further ado, here are five simple, easy, actionable things that parishes can do today to support families and build a family-friendly culture:

1. Little Free Library // Parish Library of Mass Books

While any kind of LFL is a gift to the community, I’m thinking here of a shelf in the Narthex with Mass-friendly books that families can borrow for the length of Mass and then return. I’ll include a list of our favorites in the footnotes, and I’ll see if I can pester into collating a more formal list for you all.1 I’ve also seen parishes subscribe to the MagnifiKid magazine in bulk and offer copies to families along with the worship aid, or little “my journey through the Mass” cards that walk kids through each part of the liturgy. These liturgy-themed, age-appropriate tools can help children to enter more deeply into the mystery, while also freeing up parents’ attention (and attitudes!) to participate more fully themselves. (Bonus points if missals, prayer books, or resources for adults are available as well.)

2. Diaper Bag // Diaper Station

The parish by our house has offered a diaper station in the family bathroom for about a year now, and it’s a huge blessing. The basic idea is that parishioners can donate diapers and wipes to be made available for families who, for whatever reason, need a clean diaper during Mass and don’t have one. (Maybe you forgot to grab your diaper bag; maybe your kid just outgrew a size; the possibilities are endless.) This is a super scalable project: families could donate new or gently used blankets or onesies to add to the shelf; pads and kleenex packs could be included; clean underwear in toddler sizes might be nice as well. This might look like a literal, physical shelf in the family bathroom, or a spare, labeled backpack that hangs inside the door of the men’s and women’s rooms, depending on the set-up of the church. A laminated or framed sign can alert parents to the existence and availability of these supplies.

3. Potty Seats in the Bathroom Stalls

If the Gospel can’t come with a kid’s potty, at least it can come with a potty seat reducer. The reason I include this as a separate item is because, while the parish by our house used to have a potty seat reducer on the diaper shelf, someone took the “anything on this shelf is free to families in need” sign at its word and took it home. Potty seat reducers (like this one or this one) are cheap to purchase and make a huge impact for the children using the restroom. An alterative option would be to install a 2-in-1 toilet seat (something like this) at least in the family bathroom, and potentially in one stall of each “main” bathroom as well. Parishes that want to take it to the next level might consider offering Post-It Notes or “Flush Hush” suction cups2 to cover the automatic flush sensor. A stool to allow toddlers to reach the sink would also go a long way.

4. High Chairs // Booster Seats in the FLC

If your parish ever hosts any events where food is served and families are welcome, do your families a favor and order a couple of these cheap, sturdy IKEA high chairs. Grab a couple of easily-moved booster seats off Facebook marketplace. Just leave all those bad boys in the Family Life Center during Coffee & Donuts so that mom and dad don’t have to keep juggling the baby between them. Same goes for any parish dinners, baby-friendly date night events, parish missions, fish fries… anything where there is the expectation that families will be seated and eating together. An available high chair can be the make-or-break between a child (or a parent!) having a meltdown mid-meal, and everyone eating at least a little bit of food and getting to chat with their friends.

5. Put a Changing Table in the Men’s Bathrooms

Frankly, I don’t know why we’re still having this conversation, but honestly. Y’all. Dads change diapers too. A few months ago, we went out to brunch with James’ family, and the baby had a blowout. I had just taken the toddler potty, so James was on diaper duty… until he came back out, looking remorseful (and relieved!), and admitted that there was no changing table in the men’s restroom. My sister-in-law was particularly horrified by this, and exclaimed, “Wait! What? I’m an architect! I can change this!”3 Particularly in Catholic churches, where the role of fathers is (or ought to be) particularly respected and emphasized, having no spaces for fathers to change their children’s diapers is not doing anyone any favors. There are no good options for dad at this point. Just give him a changing table.

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When we accommodate children in our spaces, we allow the children to feel welcomed and wanted; we give parents mental space to engage more fully in the giving and receiving of parish life; and we invite the wider community to recognize children as unique icons of the Kingdom of God in our midst. These five simple accommodations can be done at any time, on any scale, with any budget… but their impact on the community is immeasurable.

This is, for sure, not an exhaustive list. What did I miss? What would you add? Have you ever had an experience at a parish—your own or one you’ve visited—that left you feeling “held” or supported, like your presence at the parish was anticipated and even desired?

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(SD): We left off last week on the topic of children eating off our plates. Bouncing off that topic, I’d love to hear how you each are trying to build up a culture around food in your own families. Do you and your husband come from similar “food cultures” in your families of origin? James and I definitely do not, so there have been lots of chances for us both to grow, whether in our palette or our patience.

(AR): I think about this a lot. As parents, I think one of the most important things we can do, perhaps especially as moms, is to do the work to deal with our own hang ups around food. More is “caught than taught” and so if we are modeling normal, ordered, eating—which, I might add, is going to include occasionally overeating and sometimes using food for comfort, because those are NORMAL ways to eat—I think we have a better chance of creating a good culture around food. I will say that I’ve noticed things coming up for me with a daughter that I didn’t experience with my boys. For example, my youngest is almost one and she’s just the most delightfully chubby baby. In my mind, a chubby baby is always a good thing, and because we've had to fight so hard for our breastfeeding relationship, it feels like a huge victory—look at how fat this baby is! I did it! But then I’ve made a few remarks about how chubby or yummy she is—fully intending it as a compliment, and I’ve received a few comments about how she’ll grow out of it! And it makes me angry and sad and all the things at once. She’s a BABY. But it is also revealing as to how much baggage we carry around from day one of our lives. 

In terms of practical tips, I like Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility. It assigns parents and children different tasks in the jobs of feeding and eating. You as the parent choose what, when, and where. They as the kid choose whether and how much. I’d say this is quite close to what we do at home. I try to keep meals and snacks regular for my own sanity! I cannot constantly be feeding people, even though that's still how it feels. We say a lot of, “Okay, you can be done” but then if they’re hungry later, we’ll present whatever they didn’t finish before they get new food (with discretionary flexibility). I hate food waste, and though there’s some waste inherent in feeding babies and toddlers (that’s why we have a dog!), we try to cultivate a family attitude of eating what's on the table cheerfully, even if it's not our favorite. My children have not really struggled with picky eating, so I don’t know how much of this is due to how we've handled things, and how much is just how they are. My pickiest eater is the child with whom I was the least diligent in some of these habits, but there's no way to know if that's just how he would have been anyway. My husband and I are both from large families where family meals were the norm, but I’d say my food experience was more chaotic than my husband’s. For example, our pantry was a free-for-all. As a mom now, I look back and think, “What? We just had a free pass to the pantry?” It's not that I don't allow my children to eat what they ask for most of the time, but a small child is not equipped to make all of their own decisions about food. As with other tasks, you start to pass that responsibility along as they're able to handle it (I think? Ask me again in ten years when I have a bunch of teenagers. I might be completely wrong). 

My kids need avoid a few common allergens, so I work hard to make sure they have ample alternatives, treats, “normal” food that allows them to participate in social events as much as I can—things like making gluten-free, dairy-free ice cream cake, and keeping extra slices in the freezer for parties. I learned how to make my own bread, so I would have a good option for my youngest who couldn’t eat eggs, and my deep dive into allergy-free baking was because I wanted them to have good associations with the joy and pleasure of special occasion foods. As they get older we are having conversations about why we choose to eat or not eat things and when they can make the decisions for themselves. The hope is to set them up for success, but understand they’ll need to decide if these choices are worth it to them.

Growing a garden and processing our own meat have both provided good opportunities for conversation. Our kids always want to know what kind of animal they’re eating, which I suppose some people might find macabre, but I’m glad they know where their food comes from and how much work it requires.  Meat processing is a family affair, and one of our boys got to go along on an antelope hunt this year! Gardening is similar. If you want your kids to try a vegetable, have them plant a garden. There’s nothing more tempting than picking fresh veggies. I don’t want to make this sound idyllic, because my toddler still spits out swiss chard, and one of my children reliably gags on homemade pizza. So, it’s a process. But I think modeling and participating are both important to building a good culture around food. We also try to not talk about people’s bodies. We don’t own a scale and haven’t since we were married because it’s not good for me. I keep track of their growth, obviously, but after the baby stage I generally trust their bodies know what to do. If my kids are persistently pestering for snacks, I assume they need more protein and try to offer something of that ilk. We are not super strict with sugar, because in my own experience as a child, that backfired and I was obsessed with candy and sugar wherever I could get it. We don’t have dessert every night, but there’s often a sweet treat, or chocolate at some point. I am hopeful that not making a big deal of sugar one way or the other will be helpful. I eat chocolate every single day, and due to that “mom’s food is better than mine” phenomenon, all my kids like dark chocolate, which I find very funny. 

(DDL): My kids also like dark chocolate, for the same reason! Annelise is so wise to talk about how food attitudes are caught, not taught. 

My husband and I both had a lot of home-cooked food growing up, though there were differences in our food cultures. We both experienced regular family dinners and come from about the same socio-economic background, so we haven’t really had conflict over food in creating a family culture together.

One thing that may be a little unusual about how we approach food in our home now is that we never call a food “bad.” We don’t even say “that food is not good for you.” We say that some foods are treat foods that we have every once in a while, and some foods are everyday foods. But even treat foods are good, not bad—they help us celebrate, and they bring joy!  We also explain that individuals have different tastes in food and that these are not value judgments; we all have our preferences.

So we try not to give any food a negative value, just as we try not to assign value to certain body types over others, even when we need to point out something that may not be a good habit in ourselves or needs to change for thriving health.

We explain, for example, that women’s bodies are supposed to develop fat stores in puberty in preparation for the miraculous possibility of growing and nourishing a baby. We also know that boys commonly have a period of gaining weight right before their adolescent growth spurt, in preparation for that. Wow – a healthy bit of fat is such an amazing part of God’s design! 

We also are blessed to have friends who model good self-care and eating patterns and joyful living whatever their body type. They are wonderful examples to us and our children.

Our family also ties our eating to the Catholic liturgical year, which carries with it a lot of wisdom about cycles and seasons of fasting and feasting. We are careful not to be scrupulous about fasting and try to model healthy discernment, but we do give up sweets as a family for Lent. However, we balance that Lenten sacrifice with a very cheerful enjoyment of treats even during Lent on Sundays and family holidays – we try to see food in part as one of the joyful pleasures of life that God gives us because He so loves to delight his children.

Like Annelise’s family, we do try to attend to providing mostly healthy, well-prepared, nutritious food, and dessert is not a daily occurrence. But there is always a dessert on Sundays, and little treats here and there happen often! Spontaneous surprise trips out for ice cream are a wonderful part of life. And yes, sometimes we even delight our children and ourselves with a surprise apple pie as dinner itself – with some cheese or eggs on the side, perhaps, of course.

We try to rejoice in food, and be moderate with it without being fearful of it.

SD: We also try to take that attitude of, “We try to eat a bunch of different kinds of foods because they each help our bodies in different ways.” I think Kids Eat in Color offers some really great resources and scripts for talking about food variety that avoid that kind of value judgement, while also tapping into kids’ natural curiosity! I think the only food we say is “bad for children’s bodies” is coffee, because I am not ready for a caffeinated toddler running around in full destructo-mode! On a personal note, I’m really trying to change my language from, “I don’t like this food” to “I’m learning to like this food”—on the topic of food attitudes being caught, I want our children to have that openness to new things that I’ve really struggled with. 

And finally, let’s chat about grocery shopping--somehow both my favorite and my least favorite home management task. It can feel like a lot to try and balance those “food culture” ideals with the reality of raising a family on a limited budget! My biggest rule around grocery shopping in this season is “don’t shop hungry”, but I want to believe that this concept of stewardship can be a sort of guiding principle here--being good stewards of our tables and our time and our finances. What do y’all think?

DDL: “Don’t shop hungry!” Great advice. But if you do shop hungry, go first to the yogurt aisle and get yourself one of those drinkable yogurts (Chobani makes a good one), and shamelessly open it and drink it. It’s worth the $2.50 to prepare yourself before you head into the tater tot. I love that Sara uses the term “stewardship.” Getting that yogurt (or the bag of pretzels to feed to the hangry toddler sitting in the cart, or whatever) is good stewardship, and saves you money in the end! Don’t be penny wise but pound foolish, as the old saying goes!

The cost of groceries right now is astonishing. Even reliable, inexpensive staples like rolled oats have more than doubled in price in the last couple of years. Always make a list, and make a meal plan (whether loose or strict), and whenever possible, go shopping by yourself! Still, often you do have to bring your young kids, and that can make you a bit flustered. Oh, well. Realize that mistakes at the grocery store are just part of the cost of doing the business of raising a family!

In terms of cutting costs, making food from scratch helps, but of course meat and dairy and produce are more expensive than pasta or sugared cereals.

I have learned two lessons regarding this in the past several years. 

First, accept that you may need to cut corners, but also that you get to choose which corners to cut. You may need to accept eating more carbohydrates than you would like, for example. But you can choose whether you do that through chips or sweet potatoes or pasta. Or you can save up for a bread machine (or ask for one as a gift) and make easy homemade bread, with no preservatives, a dinner and lunchtime staple. Think about Good, Better, and Best and choose according to your budget at the time.

Second, you may need to really tighten your belt for a certain season. If you have a difficult couple of months ahead financially, feed your family pasta twice as often as you normally would just for those ten weeks while you do a financial reset. Don’t worry—it will all even out nutritionally in the end. Make the mac’n’cheese from scratch if you have the energy (this is the recipe I use), and you’ll see that it is actually quite a good source of calcium and protein! 

Don’t abandon your determination to feed your family well, but again, don’t obsess. Know your real limits—allergies, time and energy, finances, basic nutrition—and then figure out what compromises are reasonable when you run up against a problem.

And always buy the ice cream. Remember Francie’s mother’s attitude in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: even in the tightest times, one little source of indulgence or even waste makes all the difference.

AR: Dixie has some very solid advice here. Grocery shopping used to be one of my favorite tasks, but with food costs the way they are, I’ll admit to it being a bit less enjoyable these days.

One of the best shifts in our family food budget came about accidentally. We spent a year living on a ranch in rural Wyoming, 55 miles from the nearest grocery store. I had to start thinking about shopping differently. I could go grocery shopping a maximum of once a week, and generally that involved a Walmart pickup order and perhaps a quick stop into Albertson’s to find a few items that Walmart didn’t carry. If I forgot an item, I just had to figure it out. It became important to have a plan, keep a stocked pantry and make do with what I had on hand. We all survived. I even made it through my first trimester cravings without impulse buying whatever sounded good (I’ll be honest, this was miserable. If there is ever a time to throw your grocery budget out the window when finances allow, it’s the first trimester and postpartum). When we returned to an area where the grocery stores were closer, these habits stuck. Grocery pickup eliminates impulse buying and also allows you to see the total before you check out, which is quite helpful! 

I think distinguishing between wants and needs is important. And so, though it might sound harsh, part of maintaining a reasonable budget is becoming less precious about what we’re willing to eat. Game meat isn’t my favorite, and sometimes I dread figuring out how to cook it. But it’s in our freezer, so it’s what we eat. With things like produce, we shop seasonally, which means that in the winter we don’t buy fresh berries or peaches, because they’re not in season and they’re not on sale. I don’t think it hurts people to observe some limitations. You can just as easily hit your nutritional bases with cabbage and a five pound bag of carrots, as with other less hardy vegetables (cabbage is underrated if you ask me). 

While the pictures of beautiful lunches and cute breakfasts on Instagram can be inspirational, they can also be stressful! Kids are not mini adults. They also enjoy repetition, so it is okay that breakfast and lunch are the same rotation of a handful of items! The purpose of a meal is to feed people, not to impress the Internet. Perhaps you do well with a lower carbohydrate diet, but I can almost guarantee that your children need carbohydrates. Kids are growing, and their body’s preferred source of fuel is carbohydrates. Our meals always have some form of a filler starch—rice, potatoes, gluten free pasta, banana bread, toast, oatmeal, rice cereal—because otherwise I’d never be able to keep four growing boys (and now a rapidly growing baby) full. 

Eating a limited diet is absolutely more expensive and sometimes this is so frustrating. But I also realize that I could pay for food that works well for our family, or I could pay for the consequences. So we prioritize food, but things like home decor often don’t fit into the budget. It also helps to have a bit of a rubric for which ingredients you prioritize. I try to buy the best quality meat I can, which means shopping around or eating less convenient cuts of meat – think drumsticks or chicken quarters instead of boneless and skinless. One of my doctors shared a helpful tip for meat buying, which is, if you’re buying grass fed, organic or local, buy the fattiest cut you can, if you’re buying conventional, buy the leanest cut you can. Because fat stores both nutrients and toxins, this helps you benefit when the meat is high quality. And ask around! We found a ½ beef this year for about $2 less a pound than was locally available because a friend’s parents raised beef in the next state over and had some still available. 

I use the USDA Thrifty Food Plan calculator as a way to get a grasp on what a realistic goal for our food budget is. Unfortunately I know that it’s not like the budget always expands with the food prices, and so many families are feeling the pinch. You just have to do the best you can. I’ve had friends surprised that with all the health concerns, we don’t buy all organic, and I sort of laugh… because, uh, do I look independently wealthy? We still buy good coffee. Life is too short to drink bad coffee. 

SD: “The purpose of a meal is to feed people, not to impress the Internet.” ONE MORE TIME FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK. But truly, all of this is so real. The “store snack” to keep yourself from buying a ton of junk food, the sale apples, and the unbelievable price of blueberries these days. We do choose to splurge on blueberries sometimes to keep the kids regular, but as you both alluded to—there’s plenty of room for priorities and prudential judgment when it comes to splurges or “excesses”. We’re currently in a challenging financial season, and I’ve experienced a lot of anxiety about grocery shopping over the last few months. Ultimately, the peace of mind I keep trying to return to is that while our grocery budget can be an important piece of our overall budget, shrinking our budget to the point of anxiety won’t singlehandedly cure our financial woes. It’s one piece of a larger financial picture, just like our food and nutrition is just one piece of a larger picture of our overall health and wellbeing. 

Friends, thank you so much for taking the time to chat! Before we part ways, if readers want to connect with you, how can they do so? 

DDL: Thank you so much, Sara and Annelise! This has been so wonderful. I’d love to invite your readers to come explore my work at The Hollow and also to visit Hearth & Field and the Arena blog at Current, where I write at least monthly. And of course, I also help edit the monthly liturgical living 'stack, Signs + Seasons. And you can always e-mail me by clicking my name at the bottom of any of my posts at the Hollow!

AR: It’s been a great conversation! Thanks so much for hosting this Sara, and for asking me and Dixie to participate! I would love to have anyone peruse my work at Writing While Washing. If you’re interested in navigating the choppy waters of the food and wellness world, you can join me over at The Everything Free Life, where I make no claims of expertise, but hope to share some of the things that have helped me along the way. I’m really hopeful that we can create a more realistic and balanced culture around what it means to live well, even with chronic illness. And, like Dixie said, you are always welcome to contact me by e-mail by responding to any of my posts!

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Unrelated to this week’s topic, but if you’ve been following along with this semester’s book club discussion of A Devotional Journey Into the Mass (or even if you haven’t, but you have questions about the Mass), our Zoom discussion will be hosted TONIGHT at 7:30pm CST. You can click here to add the event to your Google calendar, or click here to hop directly onto the call.

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(SD): Ladies! I am so excited for this conversation. Before we dive into the meat (pun intended!) of our topic, I’d love if you could each give a short little introduction!

(DDL): Hi everyone! I’m Dixie—historian of education, writer, editor at Hearth & Field, and mom of four. I homeschool my kids and daily get lost in thought while staring out my window at the white sycamore trees towering against the sky. And yes, while I am lost in thought, my children do exactly what your children would do: get into mischief and/or wreck the house. Oh, well.

I write about family, education, history, tech resistance, and sometimes random things like chickens. I live on the edge of a small town in Virginia and post essays (and links to my writing elsewhere) at The Hollow. I don’t like fights but I love conversations, and I’m really excited to be talking today with Sara and Annelise, who are some of my favorite thinkers on Substack!

(AR): Hello! Annelise here—mother of five, writer, educator of many small people, and CEO of household affairs. I like to write about the thing behind the thing—whether that is trauma, parenting, food, or sifting through the mundane for evidence of God’s goodness. 

I write about whatever is on my mind over at Writing While Washing, thus named because the vast majority of my drafts are worked out in my head while attending to a household task. More recently I’ve begun a new venture at The Everything Free Life, which focuses on providing helpful resources for those who, for any reason, have found themselves dealing with a limited diet due to health issues. 

I live in Colorado… for now. 

SD: So our topic today is food and family: how do the two intersect, and how can we go about pursuing a food culture for ourselves and our family that is healthy and holy? To start us off, can you share a little bit about your own relationship with food?

DDL: I am an omnivore these days, but I have had many different stages in my relationship with food over the course of my life. When I was a teenager, I struggled to prepare food for myself, especially school lunches; I remember packing just a graham cracker and a pickle for lunch more than once—I was obviously not in a great “place” at the time in terms of self-care and food! I think I was hoping that I could somehow just not need food. Some of this was related to childhood trauma, but some of it was also just a result of American food and body culture.

When I went away to college in Vermont, things got better. My college experience was partly outdoor-oriented, and so even though I did gain weight in college, I also gained an appreciation of food as fuel for a fun and healthy life, and so I didn’t struggle as much as before with feeding myself or with enjoying food.

Soon after college, I developed a gluten intolerance as a result of digestive wear and tear from a longterm medication. So I ate gluten-free (and often diary-free) for a nearly a decade. My best relationship with food in that period was while I was breastfeeding, as I stopped thinking about eating perfectly and just focused on meeting the immense caloric demands of nursing! But I still avoided gluten and dairy very carefully.

After eight years, my gut was finally healed, and I began to reintroduce gluten. That was when I realized that my gluten avoidance, though necessary, had also become a temptation to control. I was terrified to eat wheat, which I now realized I thought of as poison. I had to work very hard to get myself to return to a healthy eating pattern that included gluten.

It’s been about five years since then, and though I think I now have a pretty healthy relationship with food, there are always ups and downs and twists and turns (including a long detour on the low-carb bandwagon).

AR: My first thought is, “That’s a loaded question!” Like many people, my relationship with food has been a battleground at times. While my experience was of course, unique, I relate to Dixie’s experience of trauma upending things. I had several very difficult events that converged right as I entered adolescence. Food can easily become a means of numbing emotions, and punishing or otherwise manipulating a body which feels like your enemy because of the experience you’ve had in it. It was a gym class assignment to count calories that inadvertently introduced this as a coping mechanism. I latched on and held on for dear life. This tortured relationship with food and my body continued throughout high school and college. I did a lot of work during college to seek accountability and try to get a handle on things, but didn’t really deal with the overwhelming emotions themselves. When I became pregnant there was a lot of healing in seeing what my body could do—how incredible it was. Taking care of another human being motivated me to take care of myself, and it was much easier to feed myself well for someone else’s sake. Sadly, my autoimmune issues started rearing their head after my first was born, and worsened after my second was born, leaving me desperate for a reason I felt so awful. It felt like a cruel joke, that after having had the most balanced and enjoyable relationship I’d ever had with food, now it was a potential source of danger again. 

The thing about using “food as healing” is that any therapeutic diet should come with a disclaimer. I can see from nine years down the line, that I was just wanting to feel better, was relying on a smattering of resources that were not telling the full story, and was doing the best I could. The short version of the story is that I tried many pieces of different approaches: Whole30, GAPS, SCD, AIP… all the acronyms for the “healthy” diets. In hindsight it’s very difficult to say how much they helped, or how much the other work I ended up doing—namely very targeted work with a naturopath and counseling—ended up moving the needle towards remission. As I came to find out, it’s actually not uncommon to develop a loss of oral tolerance after overly restricting one’s diet, which is why I say that these sorts of therapeutic interventions should come with a disclaimer. It sometimes feels like I’ve painted myself into a corner with food, and I’m still working my way back out of that. Food brings up a lot of grief, and the impact of the social isolation that a limited diet creates, even if you have understanding friends, is hard. I’ve questioned so much of my approach, wondering if what I’m doing was wrong, or right. The limited diet I eat allows me to feel well and function in a full capacity as a mother and wife, but it’s not without its own heavy set of burdens. I wish I had some way of knowing if it was actually necessary, or if there might have been a different way to achieve stable health.  In the end I’ve had to have a lot of compassion for myself, for how hard I was and am trying, and for all the things I didn’t know. 

The common thread throughout these struggles is that my relationship with food has often been about control, more than food. It’s a tenuous thing, because the intersection of body-based traumas, chronic illness, societal messages about food and bodies, the glut of information, and the lack of good nutrition education in the medical world, creates this “wild west”. We throw people to the wolves, and tell them to hope for the best. That’s definitely been my experience. I have felt that trying to navigate a truce in between the lines of two opposing ideologies—intuitive eating and food as healing—is very difficult.  Intuitive eating gets so much right—you can be healthy at any size, you can trust your body’s cues, there is no bad food. However, there’s no room within this for wondering if certain foods might actually be making you sick. There might not be bad food, but there’s a real possibility that some food does not work for you. On the other hand, the food-as-healing world can often set an unattainable standard and instill a fear of everything as toxic. Trying to exist in the gray area, where you take both of these approaches and allow them to hold hands, is hard. Online spaces also tend towards extremes, and I have been shamed in more than one Facebook group for not doing a diet “the right way,” which is just horrible, and also assumes that if you did it “the right way” it would actually fix you! 

SD: I didn’t feel the calorie needs in breastfeeding so much with my first—I was working part-time and was probably not as active during her infancy, and she was much smaller than my second. But this time around, it really is just a free for all scramble to get anything in my body. I’m starting to see some anxiety pop up around food now, which I think just comes on the heels of being pregnant and/or nursing for the last three years. We took a Bradley course when we were pregnant in 2021, and while I absolutely enjoyed it and am so grateful for it, there’s a heavy nutrition component that gave me a lot of metrics to strive for. It was probably the first time in my life that I felt a need to pay close attention to my food intake, and while the metrics were probably a net positive, they didn’t come with a ton of education on the actual nutrition component. Since this second baby has been born, I’ve had intense sugar cravings, as well as some signs of deficiency in key nutrients (Annelise, I think you and I have talked about this before!), and I’ve definitely had a difficult time “losing the baby weight” this time around. I wish I didn’t care about that, and I’m trying to tell myself that it’s okay to just wait and take care of meeting my needs now while I’m nursing, and worrying about the rest after the baby weans. So that’s what we’re focusing on for now, and trying to avoid the shame and the negative self-talk that comes with, for example, skipping lunch regularly or eating too much food that comes in plastic wrappers. 

SD: I guess my experience the last few years has taught me that it’s so important for us to be aware of the emotional significance of the food we eat: whether because of our personal history or family of origin, because of experiences we’ve had with friends or classmates, with doctors, etc. There are so many things we think we “should” do--or we genuinely want to do--that add this pressure to “perform” or to achieve perfection in our culinary endeavors. In your experience, how does one go about understanding (and, when necessary, untangling) the emotional dynamics around food? It feels overwhelming--where do you even start?

AR: I began to touch on this with my answer to the last question, but yes. It’s so difficult. The competing noise of food messages is close to deafening. I think you could fall into any single “camp” and find someone whose message directly opposes yours. To be honest, this need to definitively find the right way of eating has stolen a lot of joy from me. At some point within the last few years I had to put my blinders on and stop researching everything. I started praying for the wisdom to apply all the information I had, and for God to help me to know when I needed to try something different. We’ve had some tricky issues with kids where they've had a hard time introducing solid foods (don’t even get me started on the mom guilt about how my potentially limited diet could have caused some of this). I have a large toolbox of natural remedies, but even with all of that it’s easy to feel like you’re doing everything wrong. Sometimes, even if something works, it takes time and patience to see that it’s working. I lean on my husband’s advice and perception when I’m not sure about decisions, for myself, or for our kids. He’s traversed this whole path with me, but doesn’t carry the same baggage, so his wisdom is invaluable. 

I also think that it can be helpful to have some biological benchmarks to look at. For me these are things like, am I gaining weight adequately during pregnancy? Is my milk supply staying up? Am I cranky and crashing all day long? Am I irritable and snappy? Is my menstrual cycle regular? You’ll notice that aside from pregnancy, none of these checkpoints have to do with weight. Especially as someone with chronic illness, the connection of weight and health is not a 1-1 correlation, and can actually be completely random and out of my control. There are far too many factors for this to be a useful metric, especially when you add hormonal fluctuations, inflammation, stress etc… into the mix. I have found that it’s hard to adequately feed myself as a mother. When you’re constantly attending to small children’s needs, and nursing around the clock, it takes so much intentional effort to not undereat, and sometimes it’s the lack of nourishment that’s the problem. I try to focus on treating myself well, regardless of weight, and then adding things I know move me in the right direction, like a protein heavy breakfast. 

Counseling has been, indirectly, one of the best things I’ve done for my relationship with food. For a long time—most of my adolescence and maybe into my early twenties—I thought “feeling fat” was an emotion. It turns out that fat is a very neutral thing. It’s just fat. But I was using that phrase as a catch-all for any emotion that felt overwhelming. Once I started to do the work to deal with the trauma, and become more able to name and metabolize emotions, it was amazing how much my body-related anxieties calmed down. Learning to treat my body as if it were a part of me, instead of some separate thing I could punish as needed, was really important. 

DDL: I’m struck by Annelise’s observation that food can feel dangerous. Sometimes it IS dangerous, as when you have an allergy, and that can only make it harder to figure out! But usually, it is not. 

Yet many of us have been taught by our culture to see food not as nourishment but as a guilty pleasure. Name any food, and you can find someone out there on the internet who will tell you that it is dangerous and wrong (or, alternatively, that it is a magic bullet to heal all your woes!).

I have always tried to focus on food as nourishment rather than danger or reward, but I’ve often been overwhelmed by the seeming incompatibility of nourishing yourself and meeting certain ideals of body size and shape. Sometimes I have let my common sense go by the wayside in favor of losing weight. Other times I’ve seen my body change without any intention on my part, whether I’m happy with that change or not. And when you’re a high achiever who expects to be able to influence everything through self-control, it is easy to take credit for “good” changes and blame yourself for “bad” ones.

In the past few years, however, I have come to realize that the size, shape, health, and experience of the human body is not naturally static. It is perhaps more static for men (although their bodies also change over time!) than for women, who experience monthly physical cycles of change as well as, for most, long seasons of pregnancy and breastfeeding. Clothing companies compound the problem with their focus on a single, maidenly, and static body type in their designs, leaving no room for even the smallest of physical shifts. Such ill-fitting clothes reproach the wearer relentlessly with their binding, slipping, and squashing: “YOU are the problem, YOU are the problem, YOU are the problem” they seem to say.

This all has emotional relevance in our approach to food because it is disordered to focus so much on the physical body’s shape and size. Body size is not everything, and it is not entirely controllable. In fact, a food or body obsession can be much more damaging than a moderately (and perhaps even significantly) overweight body.

In a small example, I’ll share that while I mostly drink water (and in the morning, some coffee!), once or twice a week I enjoy a Diet Coke. Of course, Diet Coke is not “good” for the body. 

But you know what’s worse? Obsessing over never, ever drinking a Diet Coke, and feeling like a total failure if you ever do – or, alternatively, feeling like a failure if you never drink a Diet Coke and yet you still do not lose weight: “YOU are the problem, YOU are the problem, YOU are the problem…” 

It is obsession that is the real danger, not the Coke. We need to free ourselves from obsessions about food. We have to let go.

SD: Dixie! Your observation that women’s bodies are cyclical is so timely--I’ve been thinking about this concept a lot lately with regards to chores. It’s so difficult and so encouraging for us to change our thinking about our bodies to be more conscious of those changes and give ourselves some grace when we aren’t perfectly consistent or steady or static. 

SD: And then on top of the emotional piece, there’s often also a sensory piece. As an adult who has a hard time with certain textures and with new tastes, I often struggle to know how to introduce new foods into my diet, even when I know I need the wider variety of nutrients. I see this conversation happening a lot in the parenting world, with regard to sensory-sensitive children, so I suppose there are some good resources we can lean on from that sphere. 

DDL: Sensory problems with food are certainly real. I’ve been fortunate not to experience many myself, but I do understand what you mean, Sara, about struggling to implement a change in your eating, such as adding new foods, even though you know the change would be to your benefit.

When I read this question, I actually immediately thought of another kind of anxiety, that which I experienced during a long bout of insomnia once. It was a really scary experience, and I would start to panic every night as bedtime approached. Then a friend introduced me to a technique that made a big difference in the fear and anxiety part of the sleep experience. I think it’s applicable to trying to open oneself up to changing one’s eating experience, too.

The technique is called “Considerations,” and it is a sort of rethinking of the concept of affirmations. You know, repeating to yourself “I am an adventurous eater!” or whatever. The Considerations technique suggests that instead of saying something to yourself that you instinctively, even if not intellectually, believe to be untrue (because, for example, you know you actually are not an adventurous eater), you merely ask yourself to consider the question: “But what if I were?”

So, you just sort of daydream to yourself a little bit, and ask: “But what if I were an adventurous eater? What would that feel like?” And then you just consider it. Just dream a little about it. “Oh, wow, that would feel amazing! I wouldn’t be afraid of any textures and I would know for sure I would never gag on a new food. I would be so calm and cheerful about eating.” Then you ask, “What would it feel like physically?” And you’d say, “I’d be so relaxed when going over to someone’s house to eat. My shoulders would be soft, and my breathing would be deep and slow, and I’d laugh, and I’d feel super comfortable in my stomach after eating.” And then you’d say, “What would I notice around me?” And then you’d talk to yourself about how you’d notice that the food wasn’t really that bad, and that spongyness or whatever is actually kind of interesting, if not exactly pleasant. Finally, you would ask yourself, “What would I do?” And then you’d say, “I’d eat everything without even thinking about it. I wouldn’t worry about trying raspberries, sheesh. It would be fine! Food wouldn’t have any power over me. I’d act freely.”

And pretty soon, if you’re doing this every day (it helps to write it down) you really start to be able to imagine that maybe you actually are that way. Your shoulders do get soft, and you start to be able to consider the possibility that you might have been wrong about yourself, that you might in fact be able to change—that you might eat the spongy thing and actually be fine. And that can be really freeing when you are trying to make a change.

AR: I love this idea of “Considerations” that you bring up, Dixie! Imagination is so powerful. 

For me, the sensory component of food is not a huge issue, but at this point I have some real anxiety around bad food reactions. I’m continuing to work through that, and I think the best advice I have is that you just have to start, and then keep going. Perhaps that looks like starting with something that feels relatively attainable or non-threatening, and then giving yourself a break. And then maybe you return to that same thing over again – titration of small exposures over time. 

From a kid's perspective, they say that it takes most children 10-12 exposures to get used to a new food, and it’s interesting to note that “exposure” doesn’t necessarily mean they’re even eating it! I also was listening to a podcast episode the other day where they talked about picky eating being hereditary, which I found interesting. We’re very quick to beat ourselves up for using food for comfort, only liking certain things, eating somewhat repetitively, or any other number of supposed transgressions, but perhaps some of that is less in our control than we think. I think about cultures in the broader world, and the fact that we’re so spoiled by the experience of novelty here in the US. For most of history, most people have eaten a pretty repetitive diet of a few staple ingredients. And perhaps that isn’t something to strive for, but I think we need a bit of a reality check. There’s really nothing wrong with eating beans and rice multiple times a week! Maybe this expectation of novelty is because we are so spoiled by our access to food. I wonder if trying to approach new foods from a seasonal perspective might also be helpful? Or incorporating your kids into choosing new things to try? I find that my children almost always want to eat what’s on my plate—which is both annoying and a handy tool in getting them to try new things. It’s even worked for liver pate, which they don’t know is supposed to be gross. One last thought is that, relative to kids' picky eating, mineral deficiencies, zinc in particular, can have a connection to increased sensory sensitivity. So it could be worth looking into that to see if it improves anything. This podcast explains a bit more. 

SD: “Food wouldn’t have any power over me. I’d act freely.” Gosh, isn’t that the dream? The “Considerations” reminds me a lot of the play therapy principles I wrote about a few weeks back—that we don’t want to accept statements about ourselves that we feel are false, but if we can call attention to the ways in which we’re already trying to practice virtue (even if they’re small things!) then we can shift the way we see ourselves and shift our behavior.

I also love what you said, Annelise, about our diverse diets being something of a modern invention and luxury. It’s helpful to remember that people survived for centuries without HEB and the rainbow of exotic produce we take for granted. 

And on the topic of children eating off our plates, I’d love to hear how you each are trying to build up a culture around food in your own families, but we’ll save that conversation for next week!

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The rest of our conversation will hit your inbox next Monday at 7:00am CST. We’ll be moving from some of the more emotion-related topics to some very practical ones: family food culture and grocery shopping. You don’t want to miss it!

Isn’t it funny how we come to attach so much emotional value to things like housework?

I’ve been pondering this a lot lately, first because of ’s excellent piece on homemaking, and second because of Mt. Clean Laundry, which is what I call the pile of clean cloths sitting on the floor in front of my dryer, waiting to be folded. I’ve mentioned MCL before, and I’m happy (and surprised!) to mention that, at least as of the time of writing, it has significantly decreased both in size and in emotional significance.

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Let’s back up a bit. Over the summer, I read a book called how to keep house while drowning. It’s a short, accessible volume designed for those with limited attention and unlimited overwhelm. The author makes a point to start the book with a reminder that tidiness—or lack thereof—doesn’t constitute a moral judgement on our worth as individuals. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, as they say, but this doesn’t mean that we are failures or worthless or deserving of bad things simply because our homes don’t look like the model rooms at IKEA.1

From there, she walks through a series of small changes, process suggestions, and permissions with the goal of helping you get un-stuck and eventually helping you find routines and habits that serve you well.

That, in my mind, is the key takeaway from the book: your space is designed to serve you. Your home exists for you, not you for your home. And you have the freedom to completely change the way things are done in your home to ensure that your space is functional. Reading the book almost feels like talking with a therapist. Her suggestions are out of the box, and she really gets you thinking about what you actually want to do with the set-up of your home.

For example, if you’re a mom of young children and you do most of the selecting clothes and dressing, do you really need or want to store everyone’s clothes in separate rooms? Would it make your life easier to set up a big family dresser in one place, or a mini clothes station with a stash of basics, so that you can get everyone dressed in the same place at the same time?

Obviously, that specific solution isn’t for every family, but you get the idea. By looking at the things you actually need to do, the place and manner in which you currently do those things, and the emotional significance of doing or not doing them, you can come up with creative solutions that will help minimize your internal resistance and decision fatigue, while maximizing your efficiency and executive function.

It occurred to me recently that, since our laundry room has the same wire shelving as our closets, there’s no reason why I can’t just hang all the empty hangers above the washer and dryer so that I don’t have to move hanging clothes to a secondary location before sorting and hanging them. Since that epiphany, I have hung all the clothes that I’d washed over the last several weeks (months?) and put them away. We are no longer living exclusively out of Mt. Clean Laundry!! And while I’ve been at it, I’ve utilized the flat surface of our top-loading washer as a folding table, selecting for one storage location or clothing type at a time (my pajama drawer, kids’ tops, James’ socks, hand and kitchen towels). This has allowed me to break the project up into smaller steps—folding a dozen hand towels and putting them away feels much more achievable than folding and putting away two months’ worth of laundry across two bedrooms and a bathroom.

Accomplishing even this small portion of the task has dramatically lessened my shame around it and has helped me feel less “stuck” in my laundry routine. Instead, I’m feeling curious and asking questions.

The reality of life with two kids under three—as many of you know—is that your days are not your own, and sometimes the timing of tasks just doesn’t work out. Maybe the dryer takes longer than the washer, so you end up with a mildewy smell and an endless cycle of re-washing things. Maybe as soon as the clothes are dried and moved to the bed to fold them, it’s time to wake the baby up, and by the time you get back to the pile, you’re so tired that you just shove the clean clothes on the floor and they get mixed up with the dirty clothes so you just wash everything again. Maybe it’s that you get the clothes folded, but only during naptime when the kids’ dresser is inaccessible, so the folded clothes get set aside and forgotten about.

This is where I’ve been: There’s been a jam somewhere in the process. What I’m doing isn’t working. And the not-working is causing a lot of shame, which reduces even further the likelihood that I will complete the task before it feels insurmountable.

But this experience has me thinking. Instead of ruminating on those perceived failures and allowing those judgments to shape our sense of self, let’s act like detectives. Picture a situation in your home or family life where you feel stuck or ashamed, then ask yourself: “Where is this process getting jammed? What circumstance—time, location, emotion, or otherwise—is causing the jam? And how can I side-step that circumstance entirely?”

Where is this process getting jammed?

My laundry process is getting jammed in between drying the clothes and folding them. Thus, Mount Clean Laundry is reincarnated regularly.

What circumstance—time, location, emotion, or otherwise—is causing the jam?

Because I can get a load started or moved over in five minutes or less, it is easy for me to step in, do what needs to be done, and go about my day even when the girls are fussy or I’m exhausted. But folding and putting away require more time and space (including a wide space to fold AND access to the specific spaces where clothes are stored) that are difficult to find. When I start, I rarely get to finish, and when I don’t get to finish, I get frustrated with the girls or discouraged. Often, I decide that I don’t have time or energy or patience to fold the clothes, but I need the dryer empty so the wet load doesn’t start to smell. I dump the clean clothes on the floor of the laundry in the meantime, with vague plans of folding and putting away “later”.

The jam then causes emotional distress—I feel ashamed of being unable to keep up with the task I have agreed to complete. I know James often feels frustrated when he can’t find the clothes he needs for the girls or when I haven’t washed a load of his clothes recently and something essential is unavailable before he leaves for work. I begin to tell myself—with no evidence whatsoever—that he believes all kinds of negative and terrible things about me. I externalize my low self-esteem, which validates it and makes it feel stronger and more important.

The bigger the pile gets, the more unlikely it is that I’ll complete it on my own. It becomes too big of a task to complete in one sitting. This leaves me with a couple of options:

1. Send James and the girls to the park on a weekend so I can have some designated chore time. Hope and pray I have enough time and enough self-discipline to follow through and tackle the whole pile.

2. Recruit a friend to share childcare and/or chore duty with. Either we swap watching one another’s kids while the other does some work, or we send the husbands out with the kids and work together on a large project.

3. Ask James to help me while we watch a movie together in the evening.

Each of these choices presents additional logistic difficulties and additional slices of humble pie, and I’m not a huge fan of either, so I tell myself that the clean clothes pile is working for now (teeeeeeechnically true, but not really) and I ignore it.

And how can I side-step that circumstance entirely?

If I can break the folding down into a task that is either of shorter duration or less dependent on location (or both!) then I’ll be able to scale it to the time I have available and the space(s) I can access. Having a designated clean laundry “hub” removes the shame and stigma of “a pile of clean clothes getting soiled again from sitting on the dirty floor”. Instead, I can say that I choose to place my clean clothes in a specific, out-of-the-way location so that I can manage the task more efficiently. Adding a bin or basket in the place where the clean laundry pile currently resides would lend validity to this idea. Hanging all the empty hangers in the laundry room and clearing off the top of the dryer would allow me to turn the space I have into the folding station I want—don’t even need to wait for a dream house to move into. Now I have a start-to-finish, one-stop-shop set-up for doing laundry. Choosing to fold only one type or location of item at a time gives me flexibility to only fold what I have time to fold, allows me to step away and tend to a child when needed (without leaving a mess on the bed or couch that I’ll have to deal with later), and lets me avoid folding kid clothes during hours when I will be unable to put kid clothes away. Having hangers available means I will be able to prep and remove hanging clothes from the “pile” easily and transfer them to the closet without making a million trips back and forth.

Going a step further, could I put out some bins or jars or tiny trash cans to collect washed tissues, hair balls, dryer lint, and spare change? That way, I don’t have to leave those things on the floor or in a helter-skelter pile that inevitably ends up back in the pile of clean clothes…

To be sure, if I’m not careful, this line of thinking leaves the realm of the plausible (brainstorming) and enters the realm of the ideal (dreaming). There’s certainly a time for both in the life of any woman, but for the purposes of this exercise, our goal is to stay firmly rooted in what is possible in this moment. Maybe I don’t have the money to buy a new three-section rolling laundry cart (or the space to store it!)—the baskets I have will do. Maybe my kids can’t yet do their own washing—but I can teach them where to put their dirty clothes. Maybe I don’t really need another cute trinket from Etsy—I’ve got some old bowls and baskets lying around that will work just as well.

Do you see where we’re going with this?

We’re inviting ourselves to ask some important questions here, and to answer them without condemnation or scorn. We’re giving ourselves a chance to detach our identity from our perceptions of our actions.2 And once we’re no longer seeing ourselves as the sum of our weaknesses and failures, we can begin to strategize and implement incremental and meaningful changes as we move toward functionality and virtue.

Now, to be upfront with y’all, it hasn’t been very long since I started operating like this. I can’t say for sure whether or not this system will last, whether it will work, whether it will solve all my emotional tangle around my self-worth and my laundry habits.

But I can tell you that I feel hopeful for the first time in months.

Pivoting just a little bit, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this breakthrough happened during the follicular phase of my cycle. This is the phase when a woman’s body is preparing her uterus for a possible pregnancy, but has not yet ovulated. There is a certain amount of “tidying” or “housekeeping” or “preparation” that is happening within her. It seems reasonable enough to assume that this attitude would transfer out into the world she is interacting with.

Put differently, I have certainly noticed a correlation between my cycle and my mood: during menstruation, I’m desperate to get rid of things we don’t use or need or want; during my follicular phase, I’m motivated to clean, to tidy, to create a stable chore routine; during ovulation, I’m confident and outgoing and more hospitable than usual; during my luteal phase, I’m tired and moody and want to seclude myself away.

On my period, the laundry pile left me craving a good purge—get rid of it all, embrace a capsule wardrobe, minimize the amount of washing that needs to get done in the first place and shorten the “maximum time between loads”. But as my body moved into a tie of preparation, the laundry pile left me feeling motivated, creative, competent: let’s figure out a way to make this space functional, to reduce its emotional impact.

I couldn’t make this stuff up, y’all.

If you spend enough time in the fertility awareness world, you’ll encounter the concept of cycle syncing: matching your [diet, workouts, social calendar, you name it] to the phase of your cycle that you’re in at any given time. For some women, this is done with the goal of balancing hormones for overall health or trying to achieve a pregnancy. For others, it’s a way of honoring their body and maximizing the health benefits of the choices they’re making. I’m sure there are many reasons for cycle syncing as there are women, although to be perfectly honest, I find the concept overwhelming.

But I wonder sometimes if women of old—before feminism, before the pill, before life became so individualized and atomized and lonely—synced their housework with their cycle, consciously or otherwise. Did they accomplish interpersonal tasks during their ovulation days? Do a deep-clean while in their follicular phase? Take a rest where possible during menstruation?

I wonder what it would look like to account for my cycle in my plans for housework.

There have been some great ideas thrown my way lately regarding chores—has a chore deck and draws a new card each day; rolls a ten-sided die to decide which room to clean. I agree with them that the element of randomness adds a pull that a simple “chore chart” doesn’t—and yet I struggle to stick with it.

Now I’m wondering if maybe, just maybe, the key for housework for me is to try some kind of cycle syncing. To lean into the deep cleaning when my body is primed for it, and to set those tasks down without guilt it’s not. I don’t know that this would work for everyone. Not every woman needs this rhythm, this cyclical approach to chores, but I like it for me. It’s intriguing. It’s new. It’s something I haven’t tried before.

And—and I’m sorry if this is a hot take—it leaves me questioning whether the expectations and cultural knowledge for housework have changed in a post-pill world, where women can exist in a sort of fertility limbo, not truly in any phase of their cycle, sometimes for years at a time. Modern life, for all its perks and drawbacks, expects women to function like men—consistent, available, unchanging. With no cycle, no fluctuating hormones, no predictable (albeit often frustrating) mood shifts, we should be able to do the same chores at the same time on the same day of the week over and over until we die.3 And we flagellate ourselves when we can’t live up to this standard.

Is this what people mean when they talk about internalized misogyny? That we, even as women, default to the expectation that what is happening in our bodies will not affect what we do with our bodies? That we somehow think it’s reasonable for our bodies to both be female and also act or behave or respond in a way that is deeply un-female?4

Is this the patriarchy??5

(It is difficult for me to understand how modern feminism can be built on the pill and yet refuse to acknowledge and honor this basic embodied reality of womanhood. It seems to me that feminism in its modern, extreme form is contributing to these male-centric expectations, rather than combatting them to nurture honor and respect for the female body.)

This is something I want to un-learn. This attitude—that my body does not matter, that it is something to be ignored or conquered or overcome at all costs—does not serve me well. It does not allow me to honor myself as made in imago Dei, and it does not empower me to make a gift of myself to my family.

So here’s to dismantling our piles of clean laundry, our shame about our dirty homes, and the patriarchy that lives rent-free in our minds.

I want to hear from you! How do you keep house while drowning? How do you dismantle the voice of shame or rewrite the story you’re telling yourself? How do you live out your cycle?

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Some pictures of our in-progress laundry situation!

5

Please know that this is said so tongue in cheek! I love a good “ah, yes, it’s all the patriachy’s fault” joke, and I think it’s important for us to examine the ways in which we don’t treat our bodies with respect.

Every time, on these (mildly) cold January days, that I have a moment of free time, I want to sit down and write to you all. Writing is so much of how I understand my experiences, how I come to see the Lord’s movement in my life.

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But recently, it feels like the words won’t come. Like they’re frosty, frozen in the snow we won’t get this year. Our average winter temperatures here on the Gulf Coast are anywhere from the low-40s to the mid-70s, and while that doesn’t qualify as cold to anyone who knows the true frigidity of a blizzard, it is certainly cooder than our hot, hot summers. Coupled with the lengthening-but-still-short days, and my apparent inability to keep up with my 26-pound nine-month-old’s calorie needs, my little mammal body is still pushing me to rest. To save my energy. To do what is necessary, and not much more. Sometimes (*gasp*) even less.

I’ve been spending more time reading seasonally-inspired writing lately. I’m learning to pay attention to the signs and signals of my body—“Listen to your body,” I tell my two-year-old all the time, when she clearly needs to pee, or nap, or eat, but do I do the same myself? Why do I continue to choose to push myself, as if one more thing would allow me to prove my worth, to earn my keep, to justify my presence here.

I’m learning to give myself permission to rest.

I have been doing so for years—my husband’s ability to revel in authentic rest was one of the things that first drew me to him—but this practice of checking in with my body has been a game changer. There is something objective about noticing physical signs that gives more validity and urgency to the desires and needs that have always been present.

It’s hard to call dehydration “laziness”. It’s hard to call sleep-deprivation “laziness”. And, frankly, as I’ve become more aware of the effects of seasonal weather and light patterns on mammal bodies, it’s harder to call quasi-hibernation “laziness”.

It’s not that I don’t think laziness or acedia or apathy are real things. Certainly, they are. But you wouldn’t (shouldn’t) call a woman lazy who, nine months pregnant, took the elevator instead of the stairs.

We ask so much of ourselves in this lifestyle that is, in many ways, so unsuited to our bodies. We were not made for desk jobs, for computer screens and phone calls and artificial intelligence. We were made for movement, for communal living, for hunting and foraging and tasting and smelling and seeing and hearing and worshipping.

For everything there is a time and a season: a season for pushing yourself, and a season for resting. A season for fasting, and a season for eating more than you think you need so you can keep up with your kids. A season for waking up early to pray, and a season of praying during middle-of-the-night wakeups.

I take great comfort in the fact that the Catholic Church excuses pregnant and breastfeeding women from the requirements to fast and abstain from meat.1 The Church, in Her wisdom, is telling us that our bodies are doing so much already. We are living out our sanctification in a visceral way already. It’s not that we don’t need help, or that we don’t need reminders. But it probably wouldn’t be prudent for us to deny ourselves in this way.

There are other fasts we can make, things that aren’t related to our basic bodily needs for food and water and rest. Things that aren’t covers for our desperate attempt to control our lives, to earn our own salvation.

But I digress.

Friend, I know that the dishes are piling up. The toys are scattered on the floor. I know that the laundry needs to be done. And the shopping. And the sweeping and scrubbing and donating.

But you are an embodied soul. Your body matters. “Every body is a gift.” Yes, even yours. Even now. Listen to what your body is asking for—keeping in mind your fallen nature, certainly, but also holding space for the needs that, being filled, will allow you to pursue your vocation with more grace and virtue and joy.

For whatever it may or may not be worth, you have my permission to rest for a moment before getting back to the grindstone.

In the meantime, I’d love to share a few things I’ve read and enjoyed lately.2 If reading is restful and nourishing and life-giving, I’d love to add these items to your list. If reading is overwhelming and stressful and one more thing to do, then consider this reflection ended.

Have you been feeling the tug of winter this year? How can you give yourself permission to meet your body’s needs this week?

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Blessed are You on the Struggle Bus by :

But the literal beatitudes say, Nope. We are blessed even in—maybe especially in—those circumstances our culture calls “cursed.”

Since then, I’ve started writing little beatitudes in my head. When some minor shitstorm befalls me, I write an absurdly specific beatitude. Here are a few recent ones:

Blessed are you whose oven breaks a day before your husband gets Covid.

Blessed are you whose hand is stung in the night by European paper wasps, because they’ve infested your broken air conditioning unit, which is built into the wall and you’re not sure how to remove it.

Blessed are you whose mammogram tech gaslit you about the crappy experience you had last time. “We would never do that,” she said. Blessed are you and your mammary glands.

babies, bathtubs, and Emmanuel by the one and only , who never ceases to amaze me:

I’m the baby in the bathtub. I’m the squalling, terrified, avoidant and ambivalent child, who had one bad experience and would rather never take a bath again. Sure, if you make me I’ll get through it — kicking and screaming and throwing a fit. We’ll all be a mess when we’re through. You can make me do it, but it won’t be pretty.

Like the Creatures of Winter Do by the lovely :

It’s January and my brain feels buzzy and scattered. I thought quitting caffeine would help with that. I’m opening the windows a few minutes every morning because someone on the internet said fresh air in a home helps with brain fog. I’m trying to be brave and get outside even when it's the last thing I want to do. It’s helping. Barely.

What Time is the Sunrise? by :

To be in your body is to pay attention to those signals so that you can respond and adjust, and in a time when our minds can so easily spiral, so easily find themselves in a loop, that simple act of reconnecting feels more important than ever. “When we get outside and are physically present, standing on the ground and looking at the horizon with naked eyes, or digging in the dirt, or sitting on the grass, we get into our body, which helps the chaos in our brain slow down,” says Sutton.

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As of the last week of August, I am fascinated by the idea of seeing myself as the “hostess” our family dinners each night, rather than simply the “person who’s usually home for the longest amount of time before dinner starts” with the ambiguous and often-handed-off duties that the latter role entails.1

On the one hand, it sounds like making more work for myself. The act of hosting is, unquestionably, a commitment. As said in her recent post, hosting is work, and as said in hers, our drive and ability to be deeply hospitable often waxes and wanes with each season. So why would I try to impose this expectation on myself at all, let alone daily?

The way I see it, we already prepare food, use dishes, and feed our children daily. Usually, this is accomplished in a mad scramble after James gets home, which results in everyone eating sporadically with ambiguity around who’s already said their Prayer before Meals (or are we going to say it together? are you waiting for me to come sit down?). The first ten minutes are up and down fetching drinks, utensils, napkins, and an extra side of something or other so that the toddler will sit still and eat. I feel frustrated and overworked because I “have to do everything” while James holds the baby; James feels frustrated and overwhelmed because I hand him the baby the moment he walks in the door, before he’s even had time to take off his shoes.

In other words, anything is better than what we’ve been doing.

We had my family over for dinner recently, which meant there were five adults, one toddler, and one baby-in-a-high-chair at our six-seater table. Our table was, of course, covered with weeks’ worth of clutter until about two hours before they arrived. I spent a little while moving things off the table and onto the counters cleaning up in the afternoon, and in the twenty minutes of relative peace while the baby took her last nap, I chose to go ahead and pre-set the table (plates and utensils out, glasses of water pre-filled and a pitcher as well) so that everything would be ready and we could sit down as soon as my family arrived.

And, while the post-dinner madness swiftly descended after we ate, the actual dinner experience was lovely. It gave me such peace of mind (and body) to have everything laid out beforehand, and a well-set table allowed the food and the conversation to be the center of the evening. Our dinner—now more a “dinner party” than simply a functional act—became a source of joy, nourishment, and even rest, which made it possible to survive a hard bedtime routine with (mostly) composure and gentleness. It was the first time in a long time that I had taken the role of “hostess” upon myself, and I saw so much fruit in that small mindset shift.

So here we are, entering into the fall, and I’m considering what it would be to see myself as the hostess each evening, rather than donning the metaphorical (or literal) apron only when we have company coming over. How would it affect the way I feed the hungry in my home?

• Would keeping the table clear, so that it only requires a few minutes to set it for dinner, help keep my mind and heart at peace?

• Would putting on my literal brown apron each evening become a physical, almost sacramental, symbol to myself and my children that we are preparing for something special?

• Would this small act of love enable me to see my family’s dignity more clearly, to respect them as being made in imago Dei more easily?

I’m inclined to think so.

Legend has it that wives were once advised to have the children bathed and dressed, and to get themselves dolled up in beautiful clothes and make-up when their husbands got home from work. Frankly, I chafe at the idea that this is something that men “deserve” simply by virtue of being men or being breadwinners. However, if I allow myself to hold space for that discomfort while also leaning in with curiosity instead of judgment, it’s not difficult to imagine a well-meaning desire to dignify and respect each member of the family. It’s not that women have to make themselves into objects of sexual desire and force their children into a silence and tidiness that is inappropriate for their age so that men can sit on the couch drinking beer and watching sports to “unwind” from the day; rather, it’s about revealing to everyone—mother, father, children, house-guests, and neighbors—the dignity of the individuals and the dignity of the family as a whole.2 The husband’s job in this scenario is to receive and rejoice in the gift of his family by fully entering into their shared life for the evening: leading grace at dinner, reading to the children at bedtime, and helping with any remaining duties around the house. Everyone in the family is asked to do their part to reveal and revel in the ordinary grandeur of family life.

All that being said, I don’t think that this scenario (everyone bathed, dressed, made-up, and quiet) is the only authentic way of accomplishing the goal. It’s simply not realistic for me, in this season, to have dinner ready and bathe and re-dress a two-year-old and a four-month-old (only to undress them and put pajamas on an hour later) every day, or even every other day, before James gets home from work. But it feels like less of a stretch to try to have dinner prepared by 500 or 5:30, not only with food cooked, but with table cleared, plates and utensils set, and a pitcher of water prepared. This is especially true when I can create a cycle of motivation, where I keep the table clear to facilitate easy dinner set-up, and I prioritize dinner set-up since the table is clear. Keeping the “status quo” for this one space—and, for the time being, it’s almost exclusively this one space—a little cleaner and easier to manage also allows us to feel more comfortable welcoming people to our home, as the upfront cost in labor hours is much lower.

Furthermore, in the few weeks that I’ve been “trying on” this attitude, it’s given me space to focus on meal-planning healthy, easy dinners that I can actually get prepared and served quickly. In the past, I’ve had this grand idea that I have to try out new recipes every week, to time all the preparations perfectly so that everything is hot and ready at the exact time James will be home from work that day (a time which varies daily, as other school-teachers’-wives will know), and to include precisely one meat, one theme-coordinated carb-side, and one or two vegetable sides, along with (ideally, because of who I am as a person) dessert for us to enjoy after the girls go to bed. Lately, though, I’ve been pulling meat out of the freezer and throwing a box of pasta on the stove. I’ve been repurposing leftovers into easy enchiladas or stew. And I’ve been giving myself permission to use the crock-pot more than once a week if our schedules call for it. In other words, relaxing my expectations on cooking has allowed me to focus more clearly on how I can best love my family. In our home, at least, nothing tastes so good as literally any food when everyone is at peace.

Prioritizing this mindset has also coincided with a reimagining, let’s call it, of how our household functions. I recently read how to keep house while drowning (which I’ll share more about later this fall), and I’ve been learning to let go of some other unreasonably-high expectations that I’ve held for myself. In other words, I’m recognizing that hosting is work, but it’s work that I value more highly than other tasks because it has a disproportionate impact on my mood, my desire to thrive in my vocation, and my ability to love my family through my actions. I’m also learning to say, “This is what I’d like to aim for, but I’m not going to stake my self-worth on it, and it’s okay if it doesn’t get done today. There will be another opportunity soon.”

All this to say, we’re giving it a shot. I’m putting in place little times throughout the day to carve out a moment and think ahead. To practice kindness to my future self and to my family.3 It’s a far cry from perfect, and we still scramble some days. But we’re choosing to look for the graces, even when this mindset shift feels new or unfamiliar or burdensome. We’re preparing the fields for rain as we strive to sow kindness, gentleness, and generosity in the way we serve one another.

How do you prioritize tasks and attitudes to best love your family? What is one small change you can make regarding your outlook on your family or your perception of your role within your family? How do you hope this shift will bear abundant fruit as you seek to serve those who have been entrusted to you?

Got a little story for you, Ags.

We spent a delightful few days this week in the Bryan/College Station area, where a piece of my heart will always be. It was a trip full of joy and nostalgia, getting to catch up with old friends, revisit well-loved and well-worn places, and celebrate as one of dearest friends got married. was on a business trip for most of the week, but he came and met up with us for the wedding weekend festivities, and he drove the girls home on Saturday night, so I had the entire drive to think, listen to music, and rest after a long week.

All that being said, it was (as all trips are) a blast, an incredible gift, and a huge break from our routine, with all the blessings and challenges that come with it. spoke in her devotional last week about summer as a season of growth amidst the dryness and heat, and truly, it could not have come at a more perfect time:

The Wildroot Parables 🌿

Supposed To Grow

Welcome, dear readers! Before we begin our devotional today, I wanted to briefly announce a slight schedule change that we’ll be making going forward! The Wildroot Par…

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3 years ago · 22 likes · 18 comments · S.E. Reid

Summer and traveling (individually, let alone both together) have a way of throwing us for a loop again and again, demanding flexibility and patience and a corporeal, visceral reckoning with our needs - and this past week was no different. Traveling meant that we were away from home for six of seven nights, the most we’ve been gone in two years. Cue the sleep disruptions, late bedtimes, and one skipped nap. We stayed with some old friends who also have two daughters, so we were learning how to balance the girls’ play time with needed alone time and rest on a scale our toddler had never experienced. Cue the jealous wailing and the socially-exhausted meltdowns. And then there were the endless ways in which a change of location deprives us of the little habits and reminders we set for ourselves - to take our vitamins, drink enough water, stop and pray, write our upcoming Substack post…

I wouldn’t change the trip for the world, but all of these deviations from normal - and the inevitable downstream effects - have reminded me of two profound truths:

1. We are physical, embodied human beings with real needs.

2. We are so deeply dependent on one another.

One of the biggest things to watch out for in the Texas summer heat is dehydration. I used to attend an annual field school with the Texas Archaeological Society, and it was common for a few of the older, more experienced participants to wander around the dig site shouting things like, “Have you hydrated lately??” or the ever-relevant, “If your pee’s yellow, you’re doing it wrong!!” It is so easy to forget to drink water, and the effects of dehydration can mimic so many other things, until you finally realize what the culprit is. And like always with parenting, I am having to create new habits in myself in order to care for my children. The girls are in two very different stages of dependence, and they force me in two very different ways to focus on meeting my own needs and theirs.

The baby, three months old, is still exclusively breastfed. I’ve been told many times that it’s impossible for breastfed babies to be constipated // normal and healthy for them to go several days without pooping, but frankly, I think that’s a load of bull, based on the direct correlation between how much (or little) water I’ve consumed in the last 24 hours and how angry she gets when trying to poop. Because she’s already doing most of her poops on her tiny potty, I’m very present with her in these moments, and I can promise that my hydration (and thus her hydration) affects her ability to poop easily.1 Of the handful of days she’s gone without pooping, I think that all but one or two have been days when I’ve been dehydrated. Every frustrated cry or prolonged-but-fruitless strain serves as a reminder to check in with my own water intake.

Our toddler, while she is no longer nursing, is very much a distracted toddler, and she might go entire days with no fluids beyond a glass of milk at breakfast if we forgot to remind her. As a result, I’ve decided that my best bet is to Pavlov’s Dog this child.2 When I want her to take a drink of water, I say, “It’s very hot outside!” and pass her a water bottle. My long-term goal here is that as she grows up, every time anyone comments on the heat, she will decide she’s thirsty. The short-term benefit is that I’m paying more attention to the heat - and my own response to it - and am remembering to pack and drink more water myself. Stay tuned for updates on whether this works and also how we handle it in the winter.

All this to say, I’ve remembered this week that my own well-being is intimately tied up with the well-being of my children, and that in many ways, I cannot serve and love them without tending to myself as well. My own dysregulation compounds in them, in just the same way that my practice of virtue (God-willing) bears fruit thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold in them.3 In an age where we are so distant from the physical world (think pre-packaged snacks, air conditioning, and cell phones - guilty as charged on all counts), we tend to lose sight of this interdependence, to forget that it’s written into all our relationships. We have no relationship with the places where our food is grown or the people who build our homes. We praise “healthy boundaries” as the hallmark of maturity and wholeness.4 In place of interdependence, we idolize “self-care” and argue endlessly about whether taking a shower alone should be called self-care or the bare minimum of functioning. We swing back and forth between two extremes: first, that I will pour myself out more and more until I am completely spent, physically or mentally unable to function; and then second, that I will not allow myself to be taken, blessed, broken, and given5 at all and will choose to foster resentment towards anyone who asks that of me. I can’t help but wonder if cultivating an awareness of our interdependence would allow us to strike a healthier and holier balance between these attitudes. To imitate Christ’s fruitful self-gift on the Cross in a more authentic way. When “my good” and “your good” are not seen as opposed, but recognized as intimately intertwined, we become teammates, working together for our mutual benefit.

Now that we are (blessedly) all home and reunited and planning to spend the week re-establishing our routines before the beginning of the new school year, we’re experiencing the growing pains of finding our expectations again. But we do so with a renewed appreciation for the ways in which those routines nourish us - not only as individuals, but as the relational and interdependent family members that we are. There is great peace in knowing that, no matter how far or how long we travel, home will always be waiting to welcome us back and nurture us.

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Tell me about the routines in your home that sometimes get left behind during seasons of change! How do you (intentionally or not) cultivate interdependence in your life? Where would greater awareness allow you to better tend to yourself and your family?

I’m writing this early in the morning. The rest of my family is asleep, but I’ve spent almost an hour resettling our two-month old back to sleep. She often wakes around 4:00 or 5:00am, cold or hungry or gassy. She squirms, cries, eats, sometimes farts, and eventually settles back into a quiet slumber in my arms. I wait fifteen or twenty minutes longer, hoping to ensure that she’s sleeping deeply enough for me to transfer her back to her own bed, before slipping out of the room.

THIS IS MY BODY, WHICH WILL BE GIVEN UP FOR YOU.

I’m a cradle Catholic. I’ve heard those words, with rare exception, every Sunday for almost three decades. My brother and I were well-catechized on the mystery of the Eucharist, and our mother brought us to Adoration regularly as children. I’ve taken graduate-level theology courses on the Gospels and studied the ways in which the Last Supper was a fulfillment of the feast of Passover and the Crucifixion a fulfillment of the prophecies of Israel. All that to say, I am very familiar with the theological context of these words in the Mass. Even so, they’ve taken on a new depth of meaning in my experience of motherhood. My knowledge of this radical self-gift is no longer merely intellectual, but physical and experiential as well.

I love to hear mothers talk about mothers’ bodies. Perhaps it sounds strange to say, but I find immense beauty in maternal femininity, as uncomfortable as it can be to live. I recently finished reading Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender. The entire book is worth reading, but for now I just want to share a quote with you:

I have given birth four times. Five, if you include the tiny body, no longer living, that was released from my womb at only ten weeks. The other four pregnancies bloomed to full term, my body stretched by a cumbersome metamorphosis, in which I am the cocoon. After the baby comes, once the chrysalis opens to unveil the face of a new human being, I feel shipwrecked, flung onto the shore in a state of limp exhaustion, not by the sea, but by my own terrible undulations. Thus begins the long season of postpartum aftermath, a grueling stretch of time that no one really talks about, that never appears on screen and is etched on few pages.

After each of my births, there is a moment when I am able to hobble to the toilet on my own, a massive pad pressed between my legs to catch the gush of blood that comes when I stand upright. I have to shuffle past a mirror to get there, and I can’t help but look at the stranger I see, as if she is a monstrous Gorgon and I am trapped by her gaze. I see a body that doesn’t look like me, that never matches how I appear in dreams or my own mental image. She has a dazed, half-crazed look, like she’s just crawled out from the underworld; her breasts hang down, already beginning to harden with milk; her womb protrudes, emptied now but swollen nonetheless, as it will continue to be, for months. She fills me with disgust, that postpartum Medusa. She is grotesque and excessive, bleeding and leaking and saddled with flesh. I try to forget her, but she is there in every mirror, staring back at me when I expect to see myself.

Her prose makes me feel things, y’all.

Favale goes on to describe her experience with postpartum body dysmorphia and anxiety.1 My own experience is almost exactly the opposite - motherhood has taught me how to love and freely rejoice in my body - and yet these words resonate with me. My body, too, has been given, stretched, changed, and then hollowed. My body, too, bears witness to this radical hospitality. In stretch marks and joint aches and restless legs on restless nights, even the “easiest” pregnancy leaves its mark. Even the calmest, most peaceful of births involves the spilling of blood.

THIS IS … MY BLOOD, … WHICH WILL BE POURED OUT FOR YOU.

It’s difficult for me to describe the experience of looking at our (frankly enormous) two-month-old daughter and ponder the fact my body sustains her. I ask, “My body is capable of this?” and hers responds with a resounding yes. This truth is simultaneously hard to believe and the most natural thing in the world. After all, she found her first home in my womb, where my heartbeat and the soft “whoosh” of my circulatory system were the first sounds she knew. I saw the ways in which my body changed to accommodate her presence within me, long before my belly began to swell, preparing for the long months of pregnancy and breastfeeding to come. During her birth, I felt her working with me, wiggling into a better position for an easier exit (a mercy, I tell you what, given that she topped out at 99th percentile for both weight and head circumference). Her first moments outside my body were a perfect introduction to her gentle personality - laying on my chest quietly and peacefully, not crying or screaming, just looking around and taking everything in. And now, two months later, my body - still soft and squishy eleven weeks after her grand exit - is the place she loves best, smells and sounds and all. Whether it’s tummy troubles, hunger, or sleepiness, her every malady is remedied in my arms. I know from experience that as she grows, my body will be not just her comfort and her nourishment, but her bed, her jungle gym, her mode of transportation, and her safety net in new situations.

And although our toddler has grown past the phase of breastmilk and instinct, as her primary caregiver, I am still her rock: a bestower of band-aids, pusher of strollers, and provider of blueberries. Her space to feel all her big toddler feelings. Even when she’s upset with me, she runs to me for comfort and reassurance. The first words out of her mouth every morning are, “See mommy,” usually followed by, “Daddy baby, mommy hold me!” There are other adults in her life whom she loves, of course, but there’s still something special about mommy. Something about mommy feels like “home”.

And that’s beautiful and humbling and it calls me higher, but it’s also hard and frustrating and exhausting. There are days when I sit and just stare at these sweet, beautiful children, in overwhelming gratitude and wonder. And there are days when I’m in tears before breakfast is over because I don’t know how I’m going to make it to bedtime. I’m learning to hold space for both experiences. I’m learning to say, with St. Claude de la Colombière, “I embrace the beloved cross of my vocation, even unto death.”

I’m also learning that, while motherhood includes demands made by the children, fatherhood often includes demands made by the mother. While I am my children’s home, my husband often feels like mine. And in a certain sense, I dictate and define my husband’s self-sacrifice in the same way that my children dictate and define mine. I sometimes wonder if this is what St. John Paul II meant by this almost off-hand comment in his document on the dignity of women:

The man - even with all his sharing in parenthood - always remains "outside" the process of pregnancy and the baby's birth; in many ways he has to learn his own "fatherhood" from the mother.

- St. John Paul II, Mulieris dignitatem 18

While this is usually true in a literal sense - it is the mother who takes the pregnancy test and shares the results with the father - I think it goes beyond that. The witness of how a mother responds to her infant’s needs, even when they conflict or compete with her own, ought to inspire the husband to self-sacrifice, both for his child and for his wife.2 Of course, the self-sacrifice demanded of the father by the needs of a new mother looks different from the self-sacrifice demanded of the mother by the needs of her infant. But because a new mother must focus so intently on meeting the needs of her infant and facilitating her own physical recovery, there are often areas where someone - ideally, the father, supported by the wider community - must pick up the slack. There have been many, many times postpartum where I have been unable to take care of myself and my family as I’d like to, whether because of physical limitations or circumstantial ones. My husband has stepped up to the plate, taking in stride a million requests for another glass of water, impromptu outings for our toddler to give me a chance to nap, and the hellish nightmare that is postpartum charting. If Christ loves his Bride even unto death, so ought husband do for their wives, and wives for their husbands, and both together for their children.

There’s something beautiful in this image of the family, vulnerable and storm-tossed as those first weeks with a newborn often are. We are given such a striking picture in this time of what it means to die to self, take up one’s cross, and follow Christ. We give up our bodies for our children, sacrificing our sleep, time, and preferences to meet their needs. We pour out our blood, sweat, and tears. In a very real way, our families demand our self-offering, and we must choose to embrace it, saying with Christ, “This is my body, given up for you. This is my blood, which will be poured out for you.”

And perhaps the most poignant part, the part that most deeply inspires me to hope for heaven, is that as our children get older and become less obviously dependent on us, we must continue to die to ourselves and let them grow up. Family life is, in many ways, a gradual detaching: in those earliest days of pregnancy, the relationship between mother and child is defined by radical bodily gift of self on one hand and radical bodily dependence on the other. When they are squishy babies or silly toddlers, we ask them to never change, to stay like this forever. But our children do grow. They age and develop, and as they do, that unique relationship changes and the dependence decreases. They grow up and pursue their own vocations, but we hope and pray we will always be a home for them, even as we point them in faith towards our ultimate goal, our mutual heavenly home.

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Have you ever had an experience that changed the way you understand the Lord’s words at the Last Supper? Where in your life have you had the privilege and challenge of being someone’s home?

Giving food to the hungry and giving drink to the thirsty are perhaps the two works of mercy that are easiest to "spot" in motherhood. Whether it's breastfeeding, the eighteenth request for a snack between naptime and dinnertime, or that one "last" cup of water before bed, so much of what we do as mothers is provide food and drink for our families. So already, we can pat ourselves on the back for fulfilling these two requests of the Lord - although I'm sure we all know there's room for growth in the ways we go about it.

But if you are looking for a way to elevate, so to speak, or highlight, or emphasize these two works of mercy in your own motherhood - or if taking care of food and drink gives you a lot of anxiety and you'd like to grow in this area - meal planning might be for you. What I love about meal planning (when I'm consistent and faithful to it) is the way it simplifies my week, reduces my stress about food (and rising food costs), and allows me to integrate natural and liturgical seasons into our family life. So let's dive right in!

The idea behind meal planning is simple, and we’ve all heard it before: rather than grocery shopping while you're hungry and buying whatever looks good, along with a few staples (guilty as charged), the person in the home responsible for shopping sits down once a week or once a month to plan out what meals will be made each day, when leftovers will be served, when eating out might be an expectation, and the like. From there, inventory is taken of items already in the house, a grocery list is drawn up, and the shopping is done.

Even in this most basic form, meal planning brings with it a whole host of benefits, specifically in the realm of increased intentionality. Thinking through a week (or a month) of food at a time allows families an opportunity to consider more deeply whether their overall diet is well-rounded and healthy, whether they are likely to stay within their food budget (the advent of grocery-shopping apps has aided in this in a totally new way!), and whether the portions they are preparing are meeting the needs of their family. There are so, so many recipes and food blogs on the internet, so whether you choose to start with a recipe and build from there, or start with an ingredient and find a recipe that fits your family's taste and budget, the possibilities are literally endless.

But beyond just these benefits, meal planning opens up a twofold world of seasonal eating and drinking - the times of year when certain produce items are "in season" and the seasons of the liturgical calendar that can be celebrated or highlighted through meal choices. Personally, I love searching for in-season produce (because it's most delicious and usually most affordable in-season) and building recipes from there. Let me tell you what, friends, stuffed acorn squash is something I never would have tried without a recipe recommendation from a neighbor, but now that I've tried it, I'll never go through another fall without making it. Purchasing in-season produce can become a fun avenue for exploring new foods or using familiar foods in a new way! In terms of the liturgical calendar, I'm seeing more and more resources, both online and in print, that share traditional recipes for particular fast and feast days, food customs for liturgical seasons, and even alcoholic drinks associated with various saints (iykyk). Food is such a rich part of our identity as humans, and as Catholics, so feasting (or fasting!) with the heart of the Church can be a beautiful and tangible way for our families to experience and enrich our faith.

So we've talked about the theory, but what about the practical reality of meal planning? Honestly, like many things, it's going to vary from family to family based on the routines and structures you already have in place. But as a starting point, I recommend carving out 30-40 minutes per week, one or two days before you usually go grocery shopping. (If you don't have a regular grocery shopping day - like me - it will probably be helpful to choose one.) From there, create a list or a chart or an Excel spreadsheet (you can have mine if you click here) where you can jot down notes about what you'd like to serve and when, as well as recipe links if you're creating a digital plan. If you tend to stockpile pantry basics, start by taking inventory of what you already have - are there recipes that likely call for any of these ingredients? If so, go ahead and build those into your meal plan. If you have anyone in your home who likes having the same thing for breakfast or lunch everyday, don't mess with a good thing unless you really need or want to - just add those notes to your plan. Check Google to see what produce is in season, and a liturgical calendar to see if any feast or fast days are coming up soon, then look for recipes that incorporate what you find. If there are any gaps in your meal plan at this point, you can gauge things like how much time you'll have each day, whether you'll need or want to use a crockpot or Instant Pot or whatever the newest gadget is these days, or if you'd like to find a new recipe or use a family favorite. Once your meal plan is completely filled out, you can create a shopping list or grocery order and head to the store (or ask the store to head to you).

Moving beyond both the theory and the practical aspects, I want to reflect for a moment on how this process - which can be a staple routine in both Catholic and non-Catholic households - can be lived out specifically as a corporal work of mercy. How can we prayerfully enter into the process of planning (and, later, preparing) meals for our families? Perhaps we can reflect on the ways our children (and our spouses, and we ourselves) take for granted the availability of healthy meals and thank God for His providential care for us in other areas where we take His gifts for granted. Or we could select an intention to pray for as we prepare and bless each meal for that week. Even the act of sitting down and meal planning, which may require sacrifice to accomplish (we all know how these things go), can become a moment to offer an aspirational prayer to Jesus or to sit with Mary as the model for our own motherhood. And then, of course, detachment. Detachment from our plans when something is out of stock at the store, or when a recipe doesn't work out, or when leftovers aren't put back in the fridge. Detachment from our children's insistence that, no, I won't eat this, I want mac and cheese or another avocado or yogurt bites. Offering up that change of plans, that perceived rejection, or that moment of overwhelm - standing at the foot of the Cross with Christ, and joining our small offerings to His definitive self-gift. And with the time, mental energy, or anxiety we save by planning ahead in this area, can we cultivate a new virtuous habit or prayer routine for ourselves, our marriage, or our family as a whole? If it is in and through our ordinary lives and our daily work as mothers that we will be sanctified, then it is into that daily work that we are called to seek the Lord and find Him.

We can also invite our children to participate in these works of mercy by including them in the various stages of meal prepping, cooking, and serving as their age and interest level allow. While very young children may not be prepared to absorb a detailed explanation of the process or the purpose, they can definitely suggest meals to include on the family’s list; complete simple cooking tasks, such as cracking eggs or mixing a salad; and assist with setting the table or washing dishes after a meal. It may add time or mess to the process - children are rarely as quick or precise or tidy as we desire, and I know that my tolerance for this “help” can vary greatly from day to day - but when it is feasible to invite our children to contribute to our household needs and culture in this way, we lay an important foundation that will be built upon, both in their faith and their interests, over the years to come.

As a closing thought, I have been dreaming for years of a year-round, one-stop-shop meal plan that I can cycle through every year with notes about seasonal produce, liturgical seasons, fast and feast days of special importance to our family, etc. It's in the works but a long way from usable. But when I finally sat down and started working, I put together a list of my priorities, which I want to share with you today:

• High protein options, especially during pregnancy

• Well-rounded and colorful

• Generally baby-led weaning friendly options at each meal

• Try to keep Sundays low-work

• At least 1 freezer or crock pot meal per week

• At least 1 one-pot or 30-minute meal per week

• Meat-free Fridays

• Prioritize homemade over pre-packaged where reasonable, but embrace pre-packaged when the freed-up time allows for a greater good

• Prioritize flexibility and awareness of family life

• Prioritize seasonal produce for at least 2-3 recipes per week.

• Ideally, no more than 3 lunch/dinner recipes per week, batch/bulk made

• Prioritize easy/quick breakfasts

• Feast Days & Sundays get special meals (or at least, special notes)

If you haven't considered what things are important to you in your family's food culture, I would encourage you to do so. Making this list really forced us to ask ourselves what was important to our family beyond our desire to maintain family dinner around the kitchen table as a priority. Especially since my husband and I come from very different families of origin when it comes to food, creating a unified front and ensuring we're on the same page - at least in theory, although not always in practice - was important for us, and I'm excited to see where these ideas take us as our family continues to grow, both in age and (God-willing) in number.

I would love to hear if you have any additional thoughts or suggestions on meal planning, sanctification through food preparation, or any recipes you just can't get enough of these days!