I was going to add some of this to the recent review of the Evidence Based Birth website. But it started feeling like too much personal commentary was taking over the review. But, it was still stuff I felt should be said. And Ma’s Corner is where I get to have my real say! So here we go.

Quick backstory: I’ve become fascinated by all things pregnancy and birth related since expecting our first baby. Prior to that, I had a lot of anxiety about getting through labor in particular. Despite coming from a family of 10 kids all born at home. Despite being present for a good number of those births.

(Now I know some of you are going to say, “That experience must have traumatized you…” Don’t go there, people.)

For me, knowledge made the difference. The more I learned more about how our bodies are designed for the miraculous processes of pregnancy and birth, the less anxiety I felt. I got excited rather than scared. A key factor in all this building of knowledge was our decision to hire a doula, based on a recommendation from friends. They’d had an unmedicated hospital delivery, and that was my goal, especially as I started learning all about epidurals etc. Now you can’t exactly plan births, but you can have goals. And thanks to God and our doula and a lot of prep, I was able to have an essentially zero medication delivery, just like I wanted. Even though I ended up having to be induced to kick things off.

Why do I share all this? Not to have a platform to share our birth story. (You’ll notice I didn’t really.) Not to go on and on about my personal experiences. Rather, I share this because something has come to my attention, through my experience so far and through observing other people’s experiences.

I believe there is a key question that’s not getting asked these days, by either women or their medical practitioners:

“How do I prepare myself for this huge workout and intense experience called delivery?”

“How do we help moms prepare for this huge workout and intense experience called delivery?”

[Note: I’m not excluding c-sections from this rant. I know a lot of women have c-sections, and personally I think a c-section birth is such a huge thing that it should require preparation too!]

Women: It’s way too easy to just keep going on with our lives, working, doing our usual stuff, go to our checkups, follow their directions, sit in the birth classes, buy or receive the baby gear, and then… suddenly it’s time to give birth and we’ve had no real preparation for that event.

Now with our second daughter on the way, I’ve been particularly interested in getting some great pregnancy and birth websites up on Ma’s List. The sites that would have benefited me the first time around. And while there are tons of sites out there, with plenty of great info, a lot of them just don’t line up with my mission.

There are the big sites like The Bump and Baby Center, and those are fine for lots of general stuff. Frankly, when we were expecting our first, we loved keeping track of our baby’s growth on The Bump calendar. (This time around I’m afraid we’ve gotten too distracted…) But I feel like these websites are way too “everything under the sun” to give really helpful, focused prep info to moms, especially new moms.

There are some websites that are very “group mom” websites. If they meet all my other criteria I might share them. But they’re kind of unfocused and unpersonal.

And there are plenty of websites that incorporate a lot of lifestyle content. Which is fine, it just isn’t our thing over here on Ma’s List.

When I think about all these websites, I can’t help thinking about the title of the book: What To Expect When You’re Expecting. Now I’m not bashing that book at all. I think it has LOTS of great info and some advice. But I feel like the title is setting you up like this: “Having a baby? Here’s all the info! Now go out there and… feel knowledgeable!”

Instead, let me repeat the question I think we should really be asking: “How do I learn AND prepare for this huge workout called delivery?!”

Ok. I’ve finished my rant.

To conclude: It’s been hard digging for the type of website I had in mind, but I’m happy to report I finally started finding some results. Evidence Based Birth is the first. And there will be more to follow, probably more personalized websites.

I hope you can get some great value out of these finds.

Best wishes to all the expectant moms out there!

The post Those Pregnancy Sites appeared first on Ma's List.

No just kidding.

I’m saying I’ve discovered we don’t need all the sauces.

But let me explain this with a quick story.

I’ve always been relatively careful about not loading up my kitchen with every random type of food item. Even though it did take me forever to start meal planning… however casual.

But when I had to consider actually cleaning out the refrigerator (ok, basically just when we moved apartments, I’m not that much of an overachiever), I noticed that this appliance was fairly cluttered. And one culprit was a bunch of  items that had been used once or twice, but they were past their due date and I had to throw them.

I never really had a conscious mental conversation about this issue, but if I had, it would have looked like this:

Q: “Why do we have these barely used items that we have to throw out?”

A: “Because they only get used once or twice for one or two recipes.”

Q: “Ok, so what do we need to do… Cook those recipes more often?”

Genius, right…

Well, that’s one solution, but there was a reason it wasn’t happening. Those one or two recipes just weren’t part of our staple recipe set. I could have made them staples. But for this season of our life, they just aren’t. Let’s set aside the fact that I only recently realized we’d had staple recipes at all, for years…

One of these non-staple recipes was a very delicious marinade for grilling chicken, from a friend of mine. A fabulous idea, except that we hadn’t had a grill of our own, ever. I guess I just wanted that delicious chicken, and I tried broiling it in the oven once, with very small success.

Anyway, I finally realized that going outside the staples took extra thought, planning, ingredients.

So finally, after (mostly) decluttering the rest of the house, I was struck with the inspiration and boldness needed. I threw out the Worcestershire sauce, and didn’t replace it. And the pickle relish. And some other stuff that I can’t even recall now.

But what if you want to make something that requires that special item?

Well I’ll tell you a secret. You may not need it.

One day, struck with a fit of I can do it better myself, I wanted to make chicken barbeque meat in the crockpot for a homemade chicken barbeque pizza. But all the good recipes called for Worcestershire sauce.

So I’d thrown out the W sauce too fast, right?

Well I had already planned on my pizza meal, with no backup. Yes I know… genius strikes again. So I was just going to have to wing it. So, I fished around in my fridge and realized I had soy sauce in there, and I decided to try that.

Did it taste exactly like chicken barbeque? Probably not. Was it still good and edible? You betcha.

The point of this story is that we don’t need all the things. That goes for sauces, condiments, ingredients too.

Do you have to get rid of stuff? Of course you don’t have to. And if you’re a major foodie chief, it might not make sense for you to do any of this.

But Ma’s just saying. If you want a more manageable kitchen, you have to figure this out for yourself. And sorry, I can’t give you a list of items to trash. Take stock of your life season, your staples, what you use, what’s working for you. What’s taking up space in your kitchen to the point that you never feel like cleaning it. Build your life around your staples and let the rest go.

So what’s in your fridge?

The post You Don’t Need Worcestershire Sauce appeared first on Ma's List.

First a brief description of what these posts ARE, then some disclaimers about what they are NOT.

Description:

These posts list the best blogs I’ve found so far for specific categories – e.g. minimalism, cleaning, food, etc. Always within our area of focus here on Ma’s List: By Moms, For Moms.

Ok, let’s dive a bit deeper into the details with the disclaimers. It’s always enlightening to hear what something isn’t!

Disclaimers:

1. Can you really make this claim?  I know you’re going to find ranked lists like this all over the Internet, and what do they really mean – with a billion websites out there? Can anyone claim to have really found the top ones of all time for all people? Nah, of course not. Ma means the top sites she’s found so far (see Description above). And let me further clarify “top”. It doesn’t mean that these sites have a monopoly on the onine quality content on these topics. It means their websites focus on these topics. They cover them thoroughly. They offer lots of great free content on these topics, so that readers and listeners can get a ton of value before having to sign over any money. And the site authors make it super practical and inspirational for you to get going on whatever their topic is. They have walked the walk themselves, now they are talking the talk – fueled by a vision and passion to help YOU. And finally, most biased but not least important… these websites have been instrumental in shaping my thoughts and actions about these topics. I’m giving you the power of personal testimony that these websites can change your life.
2. Did you try EVERYTHING?  So you have to understand that when I review a website, there’s a certain minimum amount I always review. I will always review a certain specified amount of posts / content, plus overview the whole website and everything offered. I will usually check out at least some of the free downloads. However on principle I never pay for anything, and I don’t plan to do so as part of Ma’s List. My premise is that a quality website will offer enough free content of value that it can enhance your life. I’m not here to sell people’s courses. However, given the quality of the free content, I’m fairly positive that their paid content would be well worth your investment if you choose to do it. But that choice is up to you.
3. What if you find something else?  Believe me – these lists are going to get updated! But they’ll remain carefully curated. Because I really don’t want these spiraling into the fifties, hundreds. That just gets so unmanageable by viewers. But who knows, perhaps someday in our indexing of the Internet we’ll get to that point… stay tuned!

The post The Top Sites Series, Explained appeared first on Ma's List.

Let me explain what happened after I washed a load of laundry:

1. Clean laundry lands in our laundry basket in our bedroom.
2. I forget to fold the laundry, or get too busy, or too tired…
3. Next clean load of laundry lands on top of 1st load.
4. Repeat.

At this point, I would have a laundry basket piled with clothes sitting in our bedroom for several days. We don’t have access to the nice clean clothes because they’re not in their place. We have to dig stuff like clean socks and underwear out of the laundry basket. And on top of that, I’ve just created a significantly longer folding session for myself.

You know what’s most hilarious to me now, is that I almost never used our laundry basket to carry laundry at all. It was just easier to grab things off the line and off the drying rack and carry them into the house by hand. Yeah we don’t have a dryer – that’s another story for another day. But don’t panic – we have a laundry hamper (2 in fact) for dirty laundry. They’re just not very handy for stuff like carrying. And I don’t want to stick clean laundry back in a dirty laundry hamper even if it’s empty… I mean, who does that?!

So anyway, fast forward back to the present. Lately we’ve been getting rid of a bunch of things in our house. As I was considering what else I could ditch, I thought about the laundry basket.

And that’s the moment when I realized this tool had become a crutch. My use of it had turned it into just another dumping station, I mean storage unit of course. It was enabling me to not manage housework.

So I packed that basket full with our next bunch of stuff to donate, and my husband carted it off in our next haul… NEVER TO RETURN.

Now the process looks like this:

1. Clean laundry lands on our bed. (WHAT?! From bad to worse right?) Transported in a reusable shopping bag if necessary – turns out it’s hard to carry a bunch of socks by hand.
2. Laundry has to be folded and put away before we go to bed. So we can sleep.
3. Repeat.

Ok, so I confess that sometimes I shift the laundry to our toddler’s bed if I don’t fold it before naptime… cuz naptime cannot be delayed, folks. And sometimes I still cheat and set laundry down somewhere. But it’s much harder to get away with it sans laundry basket.

Anyway, just sharing what’s helping me. Take what helps you, leave the rest!

And don’t let your tool become a crutch.

The post Why I Got Rid Of My Laundry Basket appeared first on Ma's List.