the Blog

Ever feel like no matter how hard you try, even your best routines just seem to unravel?

You're not alone.
 

I used to live in a constant state of randomness, tackling tasks scattershot and leaving things half-finished. Even a routine as simple as making my bed every morning felt like an impossible habit to keep going. 🛏️ I tried all the apps, checklists, and hacks, but once the novelty of a new routine wore off, I would slip back into my old patterns.

But mastering my time-management and productivity was deeply important to me. I wanted to do my part keep the dream my husband and I had alive of earning our income from home as a team, home educating the children together, and pursuing projects family projects that we knew mattered for the Kingdom.

Unwilling to let a lack of self-discipline be the reason we gave up on our most life-giving goals, I’d push myself into frantic bursts of productivity and sacrifice sleep to get caught up. But these sprints always left me completely drained. In 2016, after a 5-week sprint of trying to hold everything together, I nearly ended up in the hospital with an adrenal crash.

(That’s when I knew something seriously needed to change...)

My husband Kyle stood by the coffee pot, resisting the urge to brew a full strength flask of pour over. I stood by the stove making dinner. We were both staring pensively at the kitchen sink, thinking through the new problems we each faced.

We couldn’t have planned for that at the beginning of this week.
 

Thankfully, “that” was not any kind of a crisis—not even close. It was just one of those mundane situations that creates a domino effect in your schedule when you've been given so much abundance to steward. We’ve built plenty of margin into our family’s week rhythms to handle situations like these.
 

But this week was unique: our whole family onboarded with a new chiropractor, I was taking my mom to an out-of-state book sale, and our typical margin day had been committed to helping someone in an extraordinary situation with an all-day project. That meant we needed to run a tighter ship than usual schedule-wise in order to meet our responsibilities to the family business, my husband’s remote day job, homeschooling, and our local community.
 

So the unexpected logistics threw a significant wrench in our confidence that we could pull the rest of the week off without canceling something that was important to us.
 

Standing there in the kitchen, we sidestepped the temptation to put the kids to bed, brew the coffee, and pull a late-nighter to get more work projects done right then and there when we were thinking about them. (That would’ve been canceling sleep, which is also very important to us! Ha ha.)
 

Instead, we engaged in something we’ve come to practice like a lifeline: a fast but wildly effective joint planning session.

"Uh oh, Elizabeth, be careful. You're sloshing it out."
 

My four-year-old stops her stirring for a second, processing my words. She sees where a small puddle of batter has splatted on the countertop. She adjusts her grip, then begins to mix again, slower this time.
 

"It's okay, Mom," she says confidently. Then, under her breath, more to herself than to me, "It's all a part of learning."
 

I'm pretty sure she got that phrase from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, and I’m completely in love with it.
 

God seems to endow little kids with a strong growth mindset to sustain them through all the challenges of growing up. They fall a hundred times while learning to walk, but giggle through it, jump back up, and try again. All the while, their little muscles are getting stronger, their coordination is improving, and they’re learning to balance themselves as they move toward their target despite obstacles.
 

Having a growth mindset is vital to sustaining an intentional lifestyle, because making mistakes is a necessary part of the process...

The day was running so smoothly. Truly, it was timeblocking at its finest.
 

As soon as I finished that task and sent the file to the team for review, I habitually glanced at my planner (as I had at each transition throughout the day). I checked off what had been accomplished thus far, noted what didn’t so I could make sure to take care of it later, and then checked in with my timeblocker for what was next.
 

It was time to leave for the homeschool planning meeting my friends had scheduled at a local coffee shop.
 

Suddenly, I felt a familiar feeling crop up inside of me—emotional resistance to the transition...

I love it when a rhythm breaks—it's such an amazing opportunity for learning.

Just kidding, I am not that sanctified yet.

In fact, on Wednesday I walked through my disaster of a house to sit down and write this email because my timeblocker said it was time to do so. I have to admit that it was hard to avoid cleaning everything in sight and sit down for work. Every time I stepped outside of my bedroom this past week, my cortisol levels shot through the roof.
 

The kids have been doing their Morning Lists faithfully, so it’s definitely not their fault. It’s actually no one’s fault. It’s just a fact of life: sometimes rhythms break.

Studies are showing that children who are given responsibilities at a young age are happier and more successful in life- a true reflection of their God-given calling to bring order from chaos, and to stewardship! This blog post discusses the particulars of how we (McCauley and I, Shelby) involve our children in keeping the home...

They even have ways to earn significant money beyond their daily chores, which is very motivating for them to keep maturing and gaining skills. And while cheerful diligence is a habit that everyone has to work on, at the end of the day, they really do LOVE being involved and are constantly coming up with ways to be more helpful on their own!

The cliff was approaching rapidly.
 

We had just arrived in North Carolina for the week, and I'd woken up to a quiet house. The baby was still sleeping, so I tiptoed out of the room and explored our little AirBnB—seeing it in the daylight for the first time. The curtains of the big picture window were open, the table was set, and the children had made their beds.
 

Clearly, besides the baby, I was the last one awake. And yet it was so delightfully still. Walking into the kitchen, I decided that my husband must have taken the children to the store for breakfast ingredients.
 

Opening my thermos to find my husband had filled it with steaming fresh pour over, I smiled, feeling very cared for by him. Gathering my Bible and pens, I considered the treat I had stretching out before me. We had no set plans for the day, except to recover from the 15 hour drive we'd had the day before.
 

I was well rested. The children had apparently completed their morning chores unprompted. I was going to get to read my Bible and drink my coffee in silence.

*cue the ominous music* 

This week, the calling to faithfully pursue my children's hearts has been heavy on my mind.

I'm just about six weeks postpartum at the time of writing this, and between a new baby, a house that hasn't been fully put back together after renovations, coming back to work, and an out of state trip this month—there has been a lot to navigate!

I've found myself fretting that there just "isn't enough time" to pour more into the emotional side of my relationship with my two older children.

My husband and I want to build a home culture where long, lingering conversations at the table are felt to be welcome. We want to laugh, enjoy music, really taste our food, and clear ample space for anyone in our home to comfortably ask wondering questions about God's Word and world...

Story time.

When I was seven months pregnant with my first, I decided I wanted to be a work-at-home mom. My husband and I had been discussing all of our options, and I had been dabbling in the family business for a few months. While I'd always imagined that I wouldn't take on any serious income-earning projects until my kids were totally self-sufficient (like in high school, or something), certain life events combining with my studies of Scripture had me looking at things from another angle. My husband and I started charting out financial goals for our family. I looked over them with excitement because I was starting to believe that I would be able to help us reach our goals through grit, determination, and good old fashioned hard work.

At the time, designing my own planner was nowhere on my radar. I had a complex system of todo lists and digital calendars that honestly makes my head spin to think back on. But what was worse than my lack of a cohesive system of organization, was my total lack of understanding about the concept of trade-offs.

That's why, at seven months pregnant...

Effective yet flexible rhythms are one of the key building blocks in a sustainable and intentional lifestyle. But trying to copy a guru’s routine, whether for work or home life, quickly becomes overwhelming. There are dozens of “best practices” out there, so where do you start? How do you decide what you need in your personal rhythms?

Create a rhythm for your unique lifestyle

In this episode of the podcast, you'll get long look into how each of us approaches our morning and evening rhythms. Although we all have similar values—and we're even in similar stages of life—each of our rhythms look different.

Here's the thing about rhythms: they have to be crafted for your lifestyle, congruent with your season of life, and based on what you and your family value. I remember listening to a podcast years ago that said that "'should' is not a sustainable why." This idea holds true for rhythms. Feeling like you "should" get up before the kids, will not be a strong enough "why" when your alarm goes off at 6am. But if you begin to know in your core—because you've taken the time to reflect on your personal experience—that getting up before the kids sets you up for a better, more peaceful morning, this core knowing can easily become a very strong "why."