Family Gratitude Ideas: December

As the holiday spirit fills our homes, it's easy to overlook the incredible thoughtfulness and effort we already put into creating magical moments for our kids. The holidays are a perfect opportunity to not only celebrate those strengths but also to add rituals that nurture family connection and cultivate gratitude. This December, give a few new family rituals a try, each designed to foster connection and appreciation. From delightful holiday feasts with fun conversation starters to post-holiday traditions that extend the joy well into the new year, these activities promise to infuse your family's December with warmth, gratitude, and a touch of festive magic.

December 21st:

A Parents Day of Rest

The holidays often center on creating joy for our kids, and as parents, we show up for that with love and care. But it’s just as important to honor the traditions and moments that fill our own cups. That’s why I created the Parents Day of Rest where I focus on my favorite things to do. No kids holiday music or movies - just Nat King Cole and White Christmas. I may even cook a batch of cookies that have things in them that only I like! Take the day - and share your fun using #parentsdayofrest on Instagram.

Holiday mEALS:

Conversation Starters

Try Table Topics Gratitude to start some really fun holiday conversations focused around what we have and not what we will receive. Gratitude conversations are a wonderful way to help your family notice the joy you’re already creating. As you share what you’re thankful for, you’ll likely uncover the small, meaningful ways you’re already enriching each other’s lives.

All winter long:

Gratitude Snowstorm

This is a crowd favorite in my house. Do your kids love to cut snowflakes out of paper? Every time they make a snowflake encourage them write a piece of gratitude on it. Then place a string across a room and hang the snowflakes from it at varying heights. Then watch the indoor snowstorm grow throughout the winter season! (Looks really pretty too!)

After The Holidays:

A Year of Gratitude

Each family member reflects on the past year and makes a list of moments they’re grateful for—big or small—that highlight the unique ways you’ve all contributed to a meaningful year together and places it in their empty stocking or the holiday decoration box before it all gets packed away. Read them all together when the decorations come out again next year.

Sincere Thanks - Explain to your little ones that this year they will be writing Thank You notes to family and friends who send them gifts. Disclosing this upfront will hopefully help them notice when opening gifts, so that the thankfulness they share is sincere. If they don’t have any genuine gratitude (maybe because the gift was something they already had, etc) I encourage my kids to think of the person wrapping it and taking time out of their day for them finding something within the act itself to be grateful for. Gratitude isn’t about perfection; it’s about noticing the care that others show us in their own ways.

During Winter Break:

Friend Appreciation

Have your children make a list of friends who were there for them this past year. Suggest they send them a drawing or a printed photo showcasing a fun activity they did together or a letter via snail mail. (Older kids won’t want to do this part, but making the list alone will remind them of the social support they have and can lean on for the rest of the school year.)

Gratitude is already woven into so many parts of your family’s life—sometimes we just need a little reminder to see it. Looking for more ideas? Check out November’s post, filled with even more ways to celebrate the strengths that make your family uniquely yours.

What to Read Next…

Gratitude Practice: Community Gratitude Events

Becoming a mother is a wild and life-altering experience. As moms, we navigate a whirlwind of emotions, from the overwhelming love for our little ones to the persistent worries about their safety and well-being. One thing we all want is for our children to grow up happy, healthy, and well-adjusted. But as the world changes around us, the way our children play and develop has evolved, often in ways that give us cause for concern.

The Decline of Unstructured Play

Unstructured playtime, where children use their imaginations and creativity to explore the world around them, has been on the decline in recent years (down by 50% in the last half decade!). Factors like fears, anxieties, and societal changes have led to the significant decrease and it has had a negative impact on our children's well-being.

Attachment theory, established by John Bowlby and Harry Harlow in the 1950s, emphasizes the basic needs for safety and exploration for children. It highlights that kids need to feel secure to play and explore the world. Now, to dig a bit deeper into what happened to play…the decline of unstructured play started before the current youth mental health crisis, during the '80s and '90s when kidnapping scares were widely publicized. Access to green spaces and varying crime levels across different socioeconomic groups further contributed to the decline.

As concerns for our children's safety have grown, parents from various economic backgrounds have responded differently. Some have enrolled their children in structured after-school programs, while others have chosen to keep them indoors (often relying on screen-time).

A Holistic Solution through Gratitude

I believe there's a simple solution to this, and it begins with sharing our thankfulness within our community. Practicing gratitude can have a big impact, like reducing our stress as parents, helping our kids become more independent and happier, and creating a safer and more trustworthy neighborhood for everyone.

History has shown that strong communities have a profound impact on individuals. Early research by Emile Durkheim revealed that individuals living alone or in less tight-knit communities had higher suicide rates. Recent studies, such as the work of James H. Fowler and Nicholas A. Christakis, have shown that when we're part of close-knit communities, we tend to be happier and have more vibrant social networks.

The Practice: Community Gratitude Events

Gratitude events that honor support people in our lives like librarians, crossing guards, and bus drivers remind us of how good our community already is. Gratitude can unite a community around a shared purpose, which can extend to advocating for systemic improvements, such as more green spaces and safe places for kids’ independent play.

When we all express gratitude together, it spreads a cultural message of kindness, understanding, and belonging. This makes kids feel safe and more supported by their community and helps them connect with their neighbors, which, in turn, builds the emotional strength they need for playing on their own.

The "Find, Bind, and Remind" Cycle

The cycle of "find, bind, and remind" promoted by gratitude also allows children to discover positive qualities in their playmates (finding), develop empathy (binding), and encourages them to spend more time together (reminding). Kids in the neighborhood form strong bonds, and that brings families closer as parents get to know each other through their children.

We all face safety issues and laws that make it challenging to give our children the freedom to explore as we once had. But collective bonding within a community is essential for enabling independent play to thrive. And while a neighborhood BBQ can serve as a community reminder, gratitude serves as a community binder. After all, when you know your neighbors are kind, caring and generous people, trust is built, and you are more likely to let your kids play on the sidewalk or walk to school or ride their bikes.

Give it a try

Give a gratitude event a try in your neighborhood and share your experiences with me! It can be as easy as hosting a little get-together in your garage, signing thank-you cards, and swapping stories while the kids draw with sidewalk chalk. It just amazing how by organizing a simple gratitude event that celebrate how connected our communities are, we can encourage independent play, too! Gratitude helps us build strong connections, no matter our background. So, embrace gratitude and strengthen your community bonds and you can ensure your kids grow up in a loving connected environment filled with independent play.

As moms we have the power to make a positive change in our communities and our kids' future. And despite what we have heard, it's not all bad out there! We can foster gratitude and work together to make sure our kids grow up in a world that treasures unstructured play, exploration, and the joy of making connections with others. And don’t you ever forget - you are a GoodAF Mom. - Stef

If you are ready for more community - join the monthly Gratitude Circle for moms.

Other Parenting with Gratitude™ Practices to try…

Gratitude Practice: Off the Hook

It has been a rough week here at my house. My children have been waking up in the middle of the night and now they are sleep deprived, and so I am. I can’t seem to keep myself together. I fly off the handle at the smallest spat between my sons, I am impatient and yell. My oldest is holding it together pretty well (gosh, I am grateful for emotional maturity), but my youngest and I step into the ring together ready to fight – at least once a day – and it’s tiresome.

In addition to these new/old issues, the ever-present Invisible Load and intense cultural expectations of parenting have got me burned out. Intensive Parenting is what sociologists and psychologists are now calling overly involved parenting, and they have declared it to be the most widely accepted parenting style in the US.

And so while I don’t want to paint this new style as a bad thing (there are many aspects of this type of parenting that are really, really good for our kids), I think we should get to know it a little better, ok? I’ll lay out the “Intensive Parenting” pillars for you, and you can tell me which ones feel familiar to you and which may make you say ‘ick’.

So the five basic beliefs included in the Intensive Parenting style are:

1) Parenting is best done by mothers. 

2) Parents should seek out expert support for proper child rearing 

3) It is naturally time intensive to care for a child properly 

4) It is expensive to provide the things the child will need for proper development 

5) Children are inherently good, innocent, and sacred.  

And in addition to those basics – Intensive Parenting’s hypothesis seems attractive. The thesis goes: (if practiced properly) “good” parenting should result in “good” kids (and healthy, well-adjusted adults even), and therefore a parent’s role and the family environment is the most important factor in the development of children under the age of 12 years old. 

How does this all work? Well, the tools of Intensive Parenting boil down to many things we talk about on this blog:

Interested in what to do instead of Intensive Parenting? Watch this video.

• parental modeling, 

• parental support, 

• encouragement and oversight 

So what do you think? Maybe the vibe feels good or normal. For me, “children are inherently good " feels like a no-brainer. But then, I have a knee-jerk reaction to mothers only being good parents because fathers are great parents too. The theory and style’s name throws me off too: “Intensive Parenting” — like our whole focus needs to be on parenting and doing it “right” and “well” and, dare I say it even…perfectly? 

This parenting style leaves out how influential culture and the media are, that peers are important to children way before they turn 12, and non-shared environments like school and daycare and the relationships our children form there factor heavily into the development of a child — not to mention the genetic code they inherit from our extended families and cultures of origin.

Of course, how we treat our children matters. What boundaries we lay out, environments we offer, and the battles we choose to prioritize — these things matter. But when you place the entire burden of a healthy and well-child on a single parent i.e., the primary caregiver - you end up in the mess we are in right now; burnout, anxiety, depression and despair.

Let’s look at it from our government’s point of view: If it’s all the fault of one parent, then policies don’t need to support parents because it’s not the fault of the culture – and with mothers who are burned out, well “they are lazy and should do better”.

This is a problem for primary caregivers. This is a problem mainly for women. 

I am not going to solve this in one blog post. However, I am going to share how I deal with it all, and how I have learned to lighten up my load. 

The Practice:

When I realized that I could no longer parent with the intensity required – I knew there would be consequences. I had to figure out how to get by in a world that was determined to call me a “bad mother” for not choosing that level of involvement in my kids’ lives. And so I accepted that part of this new learning process of parenting differently was to figure sh$t out and make mistakes along the way – and I adopted the mantra of wanting to be an Imperfect Parent. 

Then I started to look at what made me happy and unhappy when interacting with my kids. I hated decorating my house for the holidays, so I dialed it back. I didn’t like fighting with my 5-year-old while teaching him how to tie his shoes, so I bought slip-ons. Learning to ride a bike was a nightmare, so we stopped doing that. When I sat down at the end of the day and felt wreaked because I hadn’t caught my breath, we cut out all after-school and weekend enrichment classes.

And things let up. They really did. And I’m grateful for that. 

But there was a catch, and it had to do with an unconscious bias I had – remember the biggest thing on that list of intense parenting values that I did not agree with? That mothers best do parenting?

Well… under my own nose, I had been doing just that. I would go grocery shopping by myself and feel guilty for browsing too long, or I would go to coffee with a friend and bring my child along. It felt better knowing that I was handling my kids and knew what was happening with them. But in a way, I was saying, without saying it, that I knew best – and by doing this, by isolating my partner from any of the “hard” parts of parenting, I was robbing him of the chance to grow. To learn on the job and to make mistakes.

And I was saying Mothers know best.

We make an already hard job much harder by not sharing the load. And I know that sharing the load is a hard thing to do. I hate making lists for my partner, it’s so annoying. And it was for many years. But he makes the lists, too, now. Because I let him fall. And because I decided that the mom doesn’t have to do it all.

And to get to a place where you can start to share the load takes this week’s practice:

Take one night a week completely off.

Now you don’t need to fill it with gratitude - but this practice will result in immense amounts of gratitude that you will feel. Of course, with all new things, at first, it won't be easy, but in time I promise you it will be the first thing on your gratitude list each week.

This is how it works:

Sit down with your partner and find one night a week that you can consistently leave the house before or after dinner and definitely before the bedtime routine. Obviously, if your baby won’t take a bottle, then leave after the feed.

Find a weekly yoga class you can attend or a women’s group to join (like the Gratitude Circle!) - or go to a local bookstore and find a seat in the back. If you can’t leave the house, you will need a pair of noise-canceling headphones, ear plugs, and a lock on your bedroom door, or sit in your car in the garage - find a way to be completely gone.

And once you are gone, you are gone. And for the next 2 - 3 hours it’s your chance to be you. Read that steamy romance or call a friend to talk. Take a walk. Whatever you do, it should be free from the demands of anyone or anything. No commitments to meeting your mom if that feels like a chore, no dog to walk and pick up poop after, no people to ask to do you anything at all. 

Depending on your partner’s level of experience, it will be rocky (or easy) to get started but stick with the same night a week for your kid’s sake.

“Mommy goes out to yoga every Monday. I will tuck you in on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, and Friday…etc. But on Monday, Dadddy makes dinner and tucks you in.” 

We need this time, Mama. Now that I have been doing this for many years, I have increased it to two nights. Whether or not you subscribe to all of the demands of Intensive parenting, cultural pressure is still real, and we all must find ways of dealing. Being there for your child on a consistently loving basis is important. Connecting and caring about their development and education is important. And when you provide the extra things you never had growing up, that feels really good too. But the sacrifice it takes on our mental health and relationships with our partners is rough — like really rough people. 

And obviously, I know one night a week is not enough — it’s not even close to enough — but if you are in a two-person relationship, it’s something doable that you have at your disposal right now - and it can even be completely free.

And I want you to savor this time off, too, before, during, and after. If you want to learn more about savoring, check out this practice here – and of course, you can take a journal with you and make your gratitude list every week during your night. It’s up to you to find a way to make it work. No matter when I make my list, morning, night, or in between, I am forever grateful to myself for having the tough conversation and for remembering that just because I am the mother doesn’t mean I am the only and best caregiver for my kids. I certainly don’t need to do it all or should. And by stepping away even for just one night, I can remind myself of just how Good As Fuck of a MOM I am. - Stef

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Disclaimer:

I want to clarify that the conversation with your partner can feel daunting, especially if you want to do it right without any screaming lol. I didn’t ask for a weekend day to sleep in until our oldest was around six - so I get it. And it’s not easy. But the payoff has been huge. And every time I have a tough conversation with my partner asking for things I need, it leads to good things for me and him and our kids because they get to see how a father can be involved, competent, and part of the team. I do not believe that parents are the single most important factors in whether our children will develop into amazing and healthy, and well-rounded people – but a functioning household in which both caregivers can get the rest they need and where cultural expectations are examined and even said NO to is a great place to start. If you are ready you could start by watching this film together.

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Other Practices to Try:

Listen to this post as a podcast:

Gratitude Practice: Pick a Color

So you’re a busy mom who wants to practice gratitude - Hello, me too! 

I am also a busy mom, and I have been Parenting with Gratitude™ for over three years. I have less resentment and shame than ever before - and it felt so good once it started kicking in. I wanted to add more gratitude to my life. And so, I came up with all kinds of fun ways to practice it on the go - because sometimes I can't get to my morning list. And this practice is a favorite in my house because my kids like to watch me suffer, lol - jk! Really I think it’s because they dont believe I can do it - but I can.

The Pick a Color Practice

When I feel low and need a pick-me-up, I play rapid-fire gratitude using the cars around me. I will ask my kids to pick a car color on the way to school. And then, for the rest of the day, when I see a car that color, I will have to think of something I am grateful for. Sometimes if they are being really sadistic, they will choose silver, lol – but sometimes I can get them to choose teal or yellow, which is a little more manageable - or red even! 

I even do this practice when my kids aren't around, too, to be honest - sometimes I will pick forest green and go with it - because gratitude dramatically changes my mood.

Why is that the case? I wondered that myself, so I consulted OG gratitude researcher Professor Robert Emmons's new book, “The Little Book of Gratitude.” This is what he said:

“The need for novelty and change are hardwired into our brains. The substantia nigra/ ventral segmentation or SN/TVA, an area in the midbrain responds to novel stimuli. Whether you keep a diary, post gratitudes on your social media, or just think grateful thoughts, focus on surprising events, unexpected kindnesses, new and unusual experiences, and these will activate your SN/VTA. This area of the brain links memory and learning centers, so keeping your gratitudes fresh and new will be cognitively and neurally beneficial.”

So we must keep it new and different to learn to be grateful and store it in our memories. 

Bonus Family Game

Another little game I like in the car is similar to the Alphabet game - the game where you go around, and everyone has to name a vegetable or Star Wars character alphabetically. Substitute that Ewok for one item you’re grateful for - A for Aunty Ashley, B for Ballet Class, C for Chunky Peanut Butter – you get the picture. 

Mix it up, and make sure to let your kids see you being thankful! Let me know which one you try or if you come up with one of your own, and don’t forget to include yourself somewhere on that list, too — because you are a GoodAF Mom! - Stef

Read these next:

Listen to this post as a podcast:

Gratitude Practice: Savoring

@parentdifferently Learn the steps to parent differently with gratitude by joining the free 90-day challenge on my website #GoodAFMom #dailygratitudechallenge #gratitudechallenge #selfcareeveryday #momlifeyo #lifewithlittles ♬ original sound - Stef-ParentDifferently

What if I told you that your toddler’s crusty nose could be a great source of happiness and well-being? You would probably say gross, Stef.

And yes, it's true - after a lifetime of wiping other people’s children’s noses as a nanny (and then another lifetime of wiping my kids’ noses), I get it - it's gross. Nothing can prepare you for going in with a tissue to wipe and realizing that that crunchy exterior was actually a dam holding back a landslide of yellow and green snot – that’s a serious wiping commitment no one prepares you for. 

A crusty nose can be a source of happiness and well-being because of one thing — the contrast it offers. It’s a tiny hardship, something our minds are immediately attracted to. Just like so many of the annoying parts of parenting that don’t seem to quit - like the butt wiping and the ever-constant reminders that snacks aren’t gonna happen 5 minutes before dinner. And, of course, gratitude can fall flat without the contrast of more annoying times. But why do I remember that crusty sh%t so clearly – and forget the times when we fell into each other’s arms or ran around the playground?

Why does it stay stuck when the good is so much better?

You may remember our favorite OG gratitude researcher Professor Robert Emmons, has this to say about hardship and gratitude,

“When times are good, people take prosperity for granted and begin to believe that they are invulnerable.”

So we slide right into complacency, don’t we? The painful truth is our brains are efficient animals; they like known, simple, and easy. As James Clear says, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” Goals are not something you do every day or are baked into your genes. They are ephemeral thoughts. Systems or habits well those build and build over time. They can be helpful or hurtful. Our brains don't care. These habits are a carved rut in the road, which our brains can easily slide into.

So what does this have to do with a runny nose? Well, a whole lot, actually. Imagine showing up at daycare, walking into the classroom, and as you look at your child, the first and only thing you see for a second is their old, dirty, crusted nose - gross. Well, you have a scapegoat for your repulsion, and it’s what cognitive scientists call the Negativity Bias.

The Negativity Bias is an automatic habit of the brain that makes looking for and evaluating threats and anything that could harm us a priority over anything other type of thinking. It causes us to remember criticism more than compliments and mistakes over wins. And the secret’s out. It’s also the operator behind the curtain of Mom Guilt.

Getting Brainy with It.

The Negativity Bias’ main goal is to keep us safe. Snots - no. Germs - no. Our thinking brain is not allowed a first opinion because our survival instincts kick in. I’ll let the psychiatrist and co-author of “What Happened to You?” Dr. Bruce Berry explains the brain process a bit more to you:

“The brain organizes from bottom to top, with the lower parts of the brain (brain stem/diencephalon aka “survival brain”) developing earliest, the cortical areas (thinking brain) much later,”  Perry says. “The majority of brain organization takes place in the first four years.Our brain functions from the bottom up - the instincts first and then the sorting and reasoning after.“

And so when we see our child, we only see the germs first. We see our child only after that initial reaction, and our thinking and reasoning brain kicks in. Of course, no one is saying we haven’t evolved or that we can’t respond instead of react. That you aren’t a GoodAF Mom if you go gross inside your head. I know a big fat smile will most likely happen next as you dash across the room and scoop your son up – hugging him and spreading that sh%t all over your freshly dry-cleaned coat.

The Negativity Bias lives in the more instinctual part of the brain, but we really don’t need it. We don’t need to scan everywhere we go for danger anymore instantly. Our world is relatively safe - no venomous snakes or wild cats hiding behind the neighbors four by four. Plus, this scanning makes us really stressed - probably more than we used to be. Since our brains are programmed to be constantly scanning, and we are surrounded by SO many stimuli these days, our nervous systems are stressed the f out.

What now, then?

Using gratitude as a prompt, you can take a few very specific steps if you would like to work on your “reaction” time and bigger hardships. Where maybe the Negativity Bias does not ease up after a millisecond but takes control of your whole day instead. Well, that’s why we are happy we have neuroplasticity on our side. Center for Brain Health, University of Texas at Dallas, explains that neuroplasticity is “the brain's ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life." So, yay, you can teach an old dog new tricks.

The first step is to use gratitude to notice things we overlook.

This will help to shift our perspective and then do that enough. You will give it a new system to depend on in tough times. And begin to replace the old system (the negativity bias) that maybe has run its course. Like our almost instant ability to overlook the snot and crack that loving smile, we can also learn to shorten our reactive time in other cases. 

So we use the power of gratitude to notice the good, shift our perspective and then use our natural neuroplasticity to rewire with repetition over time cognitively. And then we can add one more practice to the mix…

The practice of Savoring

Savoring is taking an external view of an experience to review and appreciate it. So you eat a strawberry and notice, yum, this is juicy, and then pop another in your mouth, OR if you are savoring, you take the time to step outside the experience and really notice the nuances of it for like 15 to 30 seconds. Wow, this strawberry is so delicious! You intentionally slow down your chewing. You let the juices move around your mouth, you think about the last strawberry you had and how this one is so much sweeter, and even after you swallow, you think, wow, that was a delicious moment.

This is savoring. Science shows that although savoring “things” can be beneficial, we can get the most out of savoring experiences because not only do we get more happiness out of experiences over material things, but we get bigger does of well-being from experiences because we savor them BEFORE they happen AND after they happen as well.

Think of a trip you recently went on - I find it so easy to go directly to the good memories of a trip over the bad, do you? I always forget to pack things for a trip, but when I reflect on the experience, my brain immediately goes to all the fun things we did. It’s one place in my life where my mistakes do not cloud the wins. And this is because of the repetition of savoring a trip provides. You don’t do this with other things in your life, like going to the playground or putting your toddler in a cute outfit. An experience is a training gym for the mind, from the pre-savoring of a trip to the actual FUN a trip provides, and then to running through memories of the trip and sharing them with friends.

We can follow this recipe for savoring and apply it to other areas of our lives.

We could do it with the strawberry - it would feel really cringy, but it could look like Pre-savoring: I get the strawberries out and put them in a pretty bowl. I look at them throughout the day and think about how beautifully red they are. I feel gratitude for the farmers who planted and tended the seeds and the workers who harvested and boxes them. I take a photo and post it on Instagram sharing the beauty with friends. Savoring in Real Time: Then I eat a few, mindfully savoring and intentionally taking it slow to really indulge in the flavor. Post Savoring: Then, a few hours later, I text a friend to tell them about the strawberries and where I got them. Maybe I even pick up a pint and drop them off at their doorstep as a surprise. A few days later, I looked at the photo I had taken on Instagram, and I remember the juiciness of the berries and sharing them with a friend. I feel the gratitude and the specialness of the moment all over again. And on and on it can go. 

Savoring is a way to take gratitude to the next level.

And it can help to amplify situations that already feel pretty good. And when we do this, we push back against our instinct to look for what went wrong, to find the strawberry with the mold or the one that didn’t taste so sweet.  Opportunities like these are all around us. What can you find to savor this week? Could it be something you do every day? How about an experience or a trip you took recently? Could you take the photos out and savor those? How about the way the light trickles through your baby’s dark brown hair or the way he tucks his feet under his bottom while he plays? Can you apply the steps of noticing, shifting to a grateful perspective, and then savoring in three ways (before, during, and after) to these everyday parenting moments too? 

The crusty nose will still be there, and all the other annoying inescapable parts of parenting too. But the good is waiting to be seen, felt, and held - are you ready to train your brain so you can feel more of it? I know you are. I hope you enjoy your week of savoring experiences and things – and don’t forget you are a GoodAF Mom. - Stef

Other Parenting with Gratitude™ Practices:

Listen to this as Podcast:

Gratitude Practice: Hello Moment!

After 20 years of supporting parents, ‘practical’ mindfulness is the only way I talk about mindfulness anymore. Mindfulness is very doable, but the idea of adding mindfulness to our to-do lists is burnout-provoking. In reality, mindfulness simply means noticing what we tend to put on cruise control. I can be breathing and notice that I am breathing - that slight shift from just doing the thing to noticing the doing - that's mindfulness.

One of the obstacles to mindfulness is unpleasant emotions. If you are feeling angry it takes a lot of courage to look under than anger and see what else is there. It takes a lot of courage to feel anger too. It’s easier to move on with your day, isn’t it? Yes, mindfulness does apply to unpleasant feelings as well as pleasant ones. It applies to everything - it’s just a way to shift our awareness and become more present in our lives or even just small moments throughout the day. 

I want to talk about mindfulness in practical applications that can help us to jump the hurdles of our psyche (or what some mindfulness teachers call “resistance”), by incorporating them into our existing parenting routines.

Whenever I read a scientific study or an article on how the pandemic made our anxiety worse, the writers always say, “anxiety is worse in stressful times.” Then I think - but having a 2, 3, or 14-year-old IS “stressful times” even when the world isn’t on fire.

The stresses of parenting send you to places where you have no choice but to go.

And so even before we get to mindfulness we need to establish a little self-compassion for where we are and what we do each day. Your gratitude practice will help you to see all the good things that happen each day, and the good things you do for other people too - and for me, this is the proof that I am a good person, that what the voices in my head telling me is untrue. Once I remember my inner goodness, self-compassion can flow easier. It can be as simple as telling myself that this part’s not supposed to be easy, acknowledging that I am struggling without judgment of that struggle, or just stopping and saying that’s enough for today — these are all significant steps to take.

Mindfulness helps us stay longer in the present moment instead of bouncing forward to the future and backward to the past. And I know I have said it before, but – being in the present moment is your greatest ally as a parent.  Noticing how we feel, where we are, and what our expectations are, immediately makes parenting more of a solvable puzzle. So back to the basics here. We can notice things as pleasant and unpleasant or neutral – these are called feeling tones or vendanās in Buddhism. We can bring a soft mindful touch to those tones, and they, in turn, can keep us rooted here in the present.

Of course, you are busy, and you aren’t just going to remember to stop and feel your breath or body multiple times a day. At first, it will take some deliberate action to signal to your brain that this new way of noticing, or living in the world, with more awareness - well, it’s what you want to do now. This is why using techniques like Stop Signs, alarms, mantras, and lists is important because they replace old habits.

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GOODAF MOM GRATITUDE PRACTICE:

This is where the phrase Hello, Moment! comes in. I have painted the phrase Hello, Moment! on rocks and written it on post-it notes that I scatter around my house and car, and garden.  I like Hello, Moment! because it’s a phrase that is non-judgmental, kind, and even a little fun. If rocks aren’t your thing - you could even use a wipe-off marker to write it on the mirrors in your bathrooms.

These little reminders become an easy way to begin the repetitive training our brains require to develop new habits. This new habit is mindfulness, of pausing and noticing the moment we are in.

How does it Work in Real Life?

Maybe I am walking a basket of dirty laundry on my way to the washer and see the words Hello, Moment! on a windowsill rock or sticky note nearby. I am reminded to take a moment. What do I do with this moment? Well, maybe I go super sensory – I notice my hands holding the laundry, maybe there’s a smell to the laundry (gross) or a sound nearby. I could use it as an opportunity to list three things I am grateful for. I could also notice the feeling tones in my body of unpleasant, pleasant, and neutral, or I can look for any interior grumbling happening - I mean, it’s laundry after all - and if I want to or if it feels good to, I can deliberately notice something positive and beautiful instead - maybe the color of my favorite underwear in the pile, all moody and dark maroon.

Do it with Your Kids!

When you sit down to make three or four Hello, Moment! reminders, make sure they are cheerful, give them a sparkle, or make them pretty in some way. Then when you spot one in the wild, this “niceness” will naturally incline your mind towards that as a first step towards positivity. However you do it, make sure you place them in high-traffic areas at first, so you can get into a sort of rhythm. 

This is just one practical and no-pressure way to incorporate mindfulness into your daily routines. Adding in Stop Signs on your pick-up and drop-off routes is another, and the Choose a Color Game from Episode 12 of the podcast is another. Learning a new skill takes time, but the beauty of mindfulness is that it is always accessible. Like right now, if you stopped to notice your hands or feet, you could. Before I said that, your awareness was probably somewhere else (maybe coming up with a few places to put those rocks?) But once I said notice your hands, your mind went right there. It’s doable. And the more you do it, the more it comes in handy. You can notice, “Wow, I feel tight” or “I feel like I want to run out of this room and as far away as possible”, and offer yourself a little compassion just in time.

Because you are a GoodAF Mom who has choices. – Stef

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Gratitude Practice: The Hot Mom Walk

Rhythm matters to regulation, so if you are a stressed parent exercise that induces a rhythm is important to emotional regulation. Now if you follow me on Instagram you know that I post a video from my walk every morning. I love to walk, I walk three miles a day typically. And I walk fast, it's not leisurely. Exercise in general helps me overall from my physical health to my well-being. Ever since I started moving 5 days a week I have had fewer depressive episodes, and less low back pain and I am not as tired in the afternoons.

But I haven’t always walked. In fact, I really got serious about daily exercise during the pandemic because I was just dying on the inside. It was a way to balance myself out a bit. I didn’t want to leave the house because I was in charge of online schooling and basic child wrangling, so I started attending my son’s online PE classes. It was a win-win too because he was not motivated at all by the exercise videos the teacher shared and he was getting into trouble laying on his bed most of class, etc, you get it. So two birds and one stone.

We had fun doing the silly workout videos online - it was a blast - and it was f-ing hard too! I mean I haven't done burpees since I was in high school - and mountain climbers? I mean this was some real hard stuff they were doing. So a few months of that every day and I was feeling better (well, more in shape at least), and I decided I would try some online videos of my own. And so began the torture I called my pandemic exercise which consisted of all HIIT (or High-Intensity Interval Training) workouts - and yes it was intense. I did these 30-minute videos 5 days a week. Sure it felt great when they were over but WOW did they suck when I was doing them.

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Fast forward 6 months and I have reduced the videos down to like 3 days a week because it’s just too much, and I have substituted in 2 days of walking outside because its summer break, we’ve got this quarantine thing down – and it's a nice break from being in the house, to be honest. And I’m loving it, the birds, the breeze, the overall feeling of being OK and safe outside. It was so nice. But I’m also still putting in the work with the HIIT 3 days a week to make sure I'm staying fit you know? And sure it’s still torture but it feels like what exercise should be right?

At the same time as this is going on I am reading The Artist's Way, which is a classic self-development program that is targeted towards “creatives” or people who identify as such. And one morning the journaling prompt asked me to write out my perfect day. And I did - and wow, did it shape my life. The beginning of the paragraph is super crystal clear in my mind still because its what made me change overnight and it started like this:

I wake up and do my morning routine. The house is quiet and as the kids wake up I listen as they get themselves ready for school. They are old enough now that they do their own thing and I do mine. I finish in time to say goodbye as they get in the car and drive themselves to school. I stretch and get ready for my walk, I love being outside each day connecting with nature, the weather and my neighborhood. I come home and have a nice long cup of tea as I prepare my schedule for the day….

And on I go.

I can still remember sitting there reading what I wrote and marveling at the many similarities there were to the life I was already living or would in the future. The kids being older and more time for myself - it was already coming true each day. How much I loved my morning routine and listening to the quiet house - yes! But what was glaringly and obviously different was the fact that I simply went on a walk every day - I wasn’t killing myself to maintain my body and abs and squat muscles, I was enjoying my exercise. I knew right then I would be happier if I just walked every day. And I purposely let go of the belief that I wouldn’t get enough exercise and chose to slow down and do the thing that had qualified for my perfect day and to walk.

And I began to look forward to exercising - I loved walking. I pushed myself to do it fast and to break a sweat and I noticed that I didn’t gain any weight back. Sure, I may have lost some arm muscle but I didn’t care. I was outside and I felt like a weight had been lifted. I started to look around and use the walk as a time for purposeful gratitude. Sure I listened to podcasts lots of the days but for a lot of them I listened to nothing but the birds and the world around me and savored, and it was glorious. 

Come to find out I was doing something that many people were doing at the time which caught on with a trendy name - the hot girl walk. Invented by 23-year-old Mia Lind, on Tiktok, the Hot Girl Walk was born when she was stuck at home quarantining with her family instead of at USC where she was an undergrad. The Hot Girl Walk is simply a walk where instead of entertaining yourself or distracting yourself you spend the time thinking of all 3 things: Your goals, what you are grateful for, and how hot you are.

I love it. It’s such a simple formula — but of course, instead of a Hot Girl Walk, I go on Hot Mom Walks. My Hot Mom Walks are filled with gratitude, and also self-confidence boosting hip swings, but also I like to reflect on my goals for my self-growth: How am I doing? Am I treating myself well this week? Is gratitude landing the same as it did last week? What about my Mom Guilt is she still as loud as last week - how will I acknowledge her but also say no thank you? 

It’s a simple time to stop and reflect - like I always say: Checking in with ourselves is the simplest way to start any amount of healing. On a walk you don’t take the time to fix anything, you just notice, and if my mind starts getting crazy ideas like abs really do matter, I remind myself that I am walking because, from the deepest part of my psyche, something told me that my perfect day included a walk. I dont need the perfect sculpted butt or the tonest arms on the block. I just need to use this time to remember myself, to give myself the attention I so deserve, and to look around and really savor some really simple gratitude. 

We could go into the research on walking (or savoring too!) and I’m sure I could find a few studies to support the 3 miles I do each day, but I am going to go simple here - for me a Hot Mom Walk works. And maybe for you it’s something different. When I was doing the High-Intensity workouts they felt right, like just suck it up and do it Stef because it’s worth it right. But I never really wanted to do them - I want to walk every day. I enjoy it it doesn’t feel like exercise.

GoodAF Mom Gratitude Practice:

I would encourage you to sit for a few minutes sometime this week and try out The Perfect/Ideal Day journalling prompt. Try it - go from when you wake up until you hit the pillow and try to be detailed. Then look at the things you wrote. Where can you tweak your daily routine to be more in alignment with what you deeply desire? And how can you make your life a little more fun? For me it’s the Hot Mom Walk - we shall see what it is for you! Thanks for reading and remember you are already a Good AF Mom! - Stef

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Gratitude Practice: Stop Signs

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I am excited to share another gratitude practice I find super valuable — I think having many different ways of practicing gratitude regularly Helps boost your brain’s rewiring, but I’m not a Neuroscientist!

I do know from experience, that noticing our body states, acknowledging when things are difficult, and labeling our emotions all contribute to becoming O.K. with making mistakes and skipping the Mom Guild on our way to a more grounded and healthy life.

We live in a world constantly begging for our attention, pulling us away from our bodies and from what we are feeling at that very moment. When we live inside our phones, we have stepped out of our bodies — if we are looking at quotes that lift us up, well then phew, but if we are scrolling through clean house after gorgeously clean house - then it’s a setup! This out-of-body experience can make it seem like the present moment is not important. 

And even if we aren’t on our phone, maybe we are walking the dog or driving down that same stretch of road, our mind is a BUZZ with ideas and thoughts about landscaping designs or that annoying way our neighbor parks his car.  After all, sometimes it feels really relaxing to think! At least for me, my imagination has always been a place to let my thoughts run wild and free, but when our thoughts become judgemental or repetitive or stuck in “planning” mode - they have officially taken control of our moment AND of our life’s story, which is made up of moments upon moments. 

My 9-year-old son just recently said to me: “Mom, when I am in class, sometimes I can’t stop counting like I will count to 1000 if I let my brain do it!”  Wow - what a machine we have at our fingertips. And sometimes it feels good to count or to plan a big event – to give our brains something to do. To be out of our body, to not feel the sticky emotions left from a tough morning or week - yes, please! However, when we settle into that cozy thought pattern, we are not in control things like cultural expectations, parental modeling, habitual thinking, and survival instincts well they take the reins so to speak.

But being in the present moment is your greatest ally as a parent. 

Noticing how we feel, where we are, and what our expectations are, immediately makes parenting a solvable puzzle. It boils down to how we think, feel and behave. 

How we feel in any given moment can be the key to unlocking new and more beneficial habits. It can be the key to feeling satisfied in a world that keeps telling us we aren’t. 

Noticing how we think also accesses the same out-of-body skills we already have when we zone out –  just for good instead. We can rebrand this zone-out time as awareness time because awareness is something you have already. It’s just noticing. You are aware of where your phone is right now, right? How about your toddler? (fingers crossed...) How about when the dog has to go out next? Hopefully, that too. You have the awareness to know you are reading this and if you wanted to you could become aware of your right foot or nose right now, yep they’re there.

If this is your first practice post, I will get back to the basics here. We can notice things as pleasant and unpleasant or neutral. We can bring a soft mindful touch to those moments and they in turn can keep us rooted here in the present. Why exactly would we want that?

Because another name for when we freak out or lose ourselves to yelling or other things that feel like inner betrayals - is what neuropsychologist, Rick Hanson, Ph. D. calls “Reactive Mode”. This is a mode of living in which we spend all our mental and physical energy coping and nothing is left for healing or growth. 

This mode of living causes us to lose control over our actions and get caught in the cycle of our learned behavior and habitual/primal responses: like if we hear a crash in another room instead of running to our child and scooping them into our arms to make sure they are ok  – we yell “What happened!!? What did you do!?”

Living in this constant reactive mode can lead to an overload of both our physical and emotional systems. The stress of it may lead to a seemingly permanent shift in our perspective (like everything is always wrong) and in turn, cause the strong urge to self-medicate to soothe our guilt (mommy wine time anyone?). And if we live in that reactive mode for too long Dr. Hanson says there are risk factors for depression and other mental issues that may begin to occur. 

When it comes to our physical health I’ll let Hanson share the bad news:

“The reactive mode assumes that there are urgent demands, so its not concerned with your long-term needs...bodily resources are depleted while building projects such as strengthening the immune system are put on hold, adrenaline and cortisol course through the blood, and fear, frustration and heartache color the mind.”

I live with both anxiety and depression as many of us do these days. I am very aware of the diligence it takes to keep myself from slipping into suffering, whether it’s due to the past or the future at any given moment. I have grown tired of the days lost to depression, the loneliness of living in the future worrying about it all, and so mindful awareness is not just a practice anymore, now it's a way of living. 

Teaching my brain to be more mindful and present helps me to stay out of reactive mode, and I can respond to my children instead. A consistent state of mindful awareness helps me to notice when I have taken the first steps toward rumination or fearful anticipation. Sometimes it’s just noticing that I have fallen into a depression on the first day it hits versus after a full week or so - but wow I will take it.

Typically mindful awareness is introduced with meditation. Take 5 minutes and notice your breathing and watch your thoughts go by like clouds. I think there are many things we ask of parents in this day and age and taking 5 or 10 minutes to meditate just feels like one more big “Ask” I’m not willing to request. I know that what you get out of these podcast episodes is that time to look inside and ask yourself the tough questions you need to ask. 

And if you meditate already - yes it’s amazing and you know the benefits. You understand the levels of calm and ease that can come from sitting still. You may have even discovered some things lurking under the surface that needed to be felt and released. These are all the good parts of meditation. But if you are stressed out because you can’t even pee alone then just forget about it for now. 

So we find ways for you to build this muscle without having to squeeze in another 10 minutes by waking up earlier or taking over your precious naptime.  This is the true self-care - when you can care for your children by first caring for yourself - for valuing your life so much that you choose to live it in the present. 

So our mindful self-care for today is an exercise that I like to call: Building In Stop Signs

Let’s be clear, pressuring yourself to be “mindful” all day will make you miserable. You will not notice enough, or you will be too conscious of all the negative emotions, etc, etc. No. The key to beginner's mindfulness is to build “Stop Signs” into your day. And the second key is using gratitude to give your mind a job to do while you reflect.

We all shuttle our kids to and from music classes and school and sports, no matter what age they may be, so car time offers a great opportunity for us to weave mindfulness into our day. I love to drive and used to take huge long road trips alone before I had kids. This was pre-podcast so I would listen to books on tape or NPR for hours on end, but what I was really doing was thinking, letting my mind go wild! I would drive for 2 hours and not even notice how far I had gone. The car was not a very “aware” place for me. So making a place where I checked in with myself felt like a steep climb at first, but it wasn’t. 

I didn’t realize it at first, but I have a place on the highway I tend to arrive at that breaks me out of my car-driving stupor. It's the mountain near my house. The largest thing on the horizon so it’s tough to ignore and when I reach it I am typically woken up from my thinking trance. At first, it was an innocent “oops, I forget I was driving for a minute” realization. But it has grown into a purposeful “Stop Sign” now. 

When I get to the mountain I use it to check in, to notice different things about my present moment. Any number of inquiries can run through my head at that point pulling me back into my body and the world around me:

• Oh man, was I zoned out the entire time I went to grab takeout? 

• How are you doing Stef, what’s your body like right now? 

• Can you think of one thing to be grateful for right now?

• Have you noticed the song on the radio? How does it make you feel? 

• Look at the light on the mountain, isn't it gorgeous today? 

You get it. The more I do this, the earlier on the highway I can catch my zone out and look around and, more importantly check-in. This Stop Sign is usually the place where I discover I have been carrying a headache around all day. I can unclench my teeth and let the realization seep in that the pain most likely contributed to my mood or feeling a little off or impatient around my kids that day. And I allow myself to release a bit of tension.

Seeing the mountain sometimes inspires me to dive into what makes me happy. I'll finally notice the song that is on and do some deep listening, finding each individual instrument in the background, following them as they weave in and out of the melody. Or if it's a day that I need a release, I will crank it up and sing so loudly that the part of me that wants to yell is freed — before I get home. 

And so, I would encourage you to find your Stop Sign this week to incorporate more noticing and gratitude during the day. We can put our noticing skills to the test here, asking ourselves (sometimes multiple times a day) what we are grateful for. And remember, this is not an opportunity to criticize or even change what is going on - I can’t fix my headache in the car, after all, I notice it and accept that, yep I am in pain, and it sucks.

Choosing to notice the fog around the mountain or if you choose folding laundry as your Stop Sign — then the soft texture of a towel as you fold it — may seem small, but these are the compounding practices that make a big difference to our brains rewiring. So even if the stresses of parenting send you to places that you have no choice to go, you still have a choice: you can simply notice the present moment use your gratitude anchor to find something good, and allow the rest to just be - because a bit of reactivity or a lot of reactivity doesnt make you a bad mom, it makes you human, and I know you are Good As Fuck.  - Stef

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Gratitude Practice: Love and Kindness Body Scan

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Let’s do a ‘parenting with gratitude exercise where we focus on our bodies. Every few posts or so, I try to give you another gratitude exercise to try because I want you to have that moment when things click, that you say, “Oh yeah, it’s so simple I just have to breath” or “Damnit I AM a Good AF mom — that’s right.” 

I think it’s important to offer a variety of options for you using the catalyst of gratitude - we have done regimented practices like lists and alarms and more creative, fast-paced ones like rapid-fire gratitude and family fun – but we haven’t dropped into the body - that grounding place we carry with us at all times. 

Focusing on our bodies and their experiences during our changing emotional states is called a somatic approach. Yes, some of the exercises somatic therapists use involve breathing, dance, or meditation – but hang on with me a bit if that is too woo for you. What I am suggesting is not some ecstatic dance; I am interested in helping you to tune in with the messages your body is trying to tell you when maybe your brain just wants to keep you nice and busy. 

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For example, when I am feeling sad, and I feel it in my body, it feels like a deep dark hole in my heart, and anxiety, well, that’s a really somatic emotion where we can feel tight or vibration or agitation that rips through - that one is hard to miss. And yes, these are the more obvious and uncomfortable emotions, but I also feel gratitude in my body, like a warm light shining from my heart.  

And there are so many more - everyone has their individualized body sensations. When we are busy, not paying attention, or just caught up in modern parenting life, we can miss the more subtle cues our bodies are trying to tell us, like - “That doesn’t feel like the right choice” or “I dont really like talking to her.” And these missed moments can contribute to our feelings of uneasiness in our lives or just general dissatisfaction. 

Typically in these practice articles, I share exercises that work for me to self-reflect, contribute somehow to my long-term healing, or offer self-compassion — all using the prompt of gratitude — and since I feel like I have skipped the body up until this point, I started to sort through my days and experiences to see if I could offer a few somatic options.

A real basic and something we haven’t talked about much on the blog is a body scan, and as soon as I thought of it, I was like, duh, Stef – because I wrote an entire book for kids based on a body scan called The Middle of the Night Book.

A body scan is the perfect example of a somatic exercise you can do to check in with yourself and see just where your body is at. And a body scan is something you can do with or without having to experience a significant and possibly crappy emotion coursing through it. I love the extra attention it gives to the different microclimates of my body and the curiosity and openness it requires. In Buddhism, they call those microclimates feeling tones and typically label them as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral to take some of the mind triggers and judgment out of the process. 

To do a Love and Kindness Body Scan you don’t have to be lying down or in a meditative state - you can simply be sitting in the school pick-up line or feeding your baby a bottle, and you bring your attention to specific body parts. Start from your feet and move part by part up your body, and at each part, you pause and say something kind like Thank you for your support feet, or I send you love and warmth legs - yes, it may feel cheesy but trust me your body does not care. Take your time and go all the way up your body saying these kindnesses and gratitudes – and once you are done, you can offer that baby you're holding the same love and kindness, or if you are alone, then the world - may all beings everywhere be loved and at peace.

This is a simple way I give myself the attention I so deserve. And you deserve it too. Using this type of preventative self-care is vital so that when you do feel a deep and wide emotion like grief or anger, allowing it to be there will be your first step, noticing it and then offering it kindness - I see you deep dark hollow in my chest, I am not going to run away this time. I offer you love and kindness, and respect the messages you may bring up.

We are complex beings who sometimes get stuck inside our heads, I sure do, and the messages up there are hit or miss. The body never lies. It will tell you just what you need to know - it’s just whether or not you take the time to listen. - Stef

Gratitude Practice: Baby Steps

OK, so maybe a daily gratitude list is out of reach for right now. Every stage of motherhood is going to be different, there are different time restraints and different priorities and so I don’t expect every one of you to be able to sit for 5 minutes each morning and make a list.

However, training your brain toward a more positive relationship with yourself should be one of the top priorities (right under feeding that baby).

So this is your baby step - the 3:33 pm alarm.

And I want us all to share how we incorporate this into our lives on Instagram so tag me in your stories @parent_differently

The 3:33 pm alarm is going to help us introduce the concept of parenting with gratitude into your life in a very simple and easy way.

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Listen to this post as a podcast!

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So what is this concept of Parenting with Gratitude? Why do I want us to get deep into this?

I like to say that the recipe for achieving well-being is this:

Intention + Attention + Action + Repetition = Results

We have discussed setting an intention in the past you can read more about it here.

So we take our intention, and we add ATTENTION.

That means we are going to start to train our brains to notice what we want to notice - not what it was programmed to notice because of evolutionary biology.

If our intention is: to parent differently, we need to bring attention to our parenting.

If our intention is: to become our best selves, then we need to bring attention to ourselves!

I do this without losing my mind by looking at all the parts of parenting that fill me up. We already have the Negativity Bias to help us obsess over the mistakes, so now it’s time to shift our attention to looking at the good.

Enter the 3:33 pm alarm. The positive things we look for will be made into a short list of 3, and you will be reminded each day to make your list, and yep, its as simple as setting an alarm on your phone for 3:33 - then when it goes off wherever you are I want you to focus your attention on 3 good things, or 3 things you are grateful for, or whatever is positive and going well.

Other things we can look for are:

• What went well yesterday?

• What makes you a good mom?

• What you are grateful for?

• What did you provide for your family in the last hour?

• Who made you smile this morning?

• Who helped you or who did you help?

We are going to do this as a baby step to the big kahuna, which is a daily list of gratitude. This alarm will teach you to stretch your brain a bit each day and notice what may be overshadowed by stress, crying, work, and forgetting the lunch box, you name it.

I believe that Gratitude is the simplest tool we can use to ease the everyday stress of parenting. 

Science shows our mindset matters but also, that our route to living a more satisfying life tends to go directly through hardship. 

In our case, that hardship is also a gift pssst…its parenting.

Parenting brings with it the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. It tests us and asks of us again and again, to grow and to become more wise, patient, and gracious. 

Here’s a quote from Scott Bary Kaufman from his recent article on tragic optimism in the Atlantic:

 “In recent years, scientists have begun to recognize that the practice of gratitude can be a key driver of post-traumatic growth after an adverse event and that gratitude can be a healing force. Indeed, a number of positive mental health outcomes are linked to a regular gratitude practice, such as reduced lifetime risk for depression, anxiety, and substance-abuse disorders.”

Choose a traumatic event: COVID, overturning of Roe vs. Wade, pervasive school shootings, caregiver burnout - and I’ll assure you that we are ready for a healing force.  Google's "Year in Search" revealed searches for "How to maintain mental health" reached a worldwide high in 2021, as well as searches for affirmations and women’s health. We are crying out for science-backed practices that work.

So this is your baby step - the first practice that will help to establish a routine of daily gratitude. To remind you to look for the good - because we need to train your brain to see just how Good AF you already are.

Listen to the podcast on the 3:33 PM Alarm for more!

And don’t forget to follow on social for all things gratitude, parenting and positivity.