avatar by on April 30, 2012   •   84 Comments Organizing Your Home

Managing your wardrobe: pregnancy, post-partum and all those sizes in between

The following guest post is written by my friend Stephanie Langford of Keeper of the Home.

I‘ve read plenty of good advice on wardrobe management and how to purge your closet, but there’s one piece of advice that doesn’t jive with this mama of four: get rid of anything that doesn’t fit or that you haven’t worn in the last year.

If I followed their advice, I would have to dispose of the four different sizes of clothing I rotate through to accomodate my various seasons of motherhood… skinny pre-pregnancy, early pregnancy (not showing, but nothing fits), full-on maternity, and post-baby (how did my hips spread this wide?).

It’s a fact of life. When you are in the midst of bearing sweet babies, your pant size goes up. And then down. And then back up again.

Being nine weeks out of having my fourth baby, I know this full well. The maternity clothes are now baggy and frumpy, yet the skinny clothes barely get over my hips. I’m lost somewhere in the middle. Fellow mothers, I know you feel my pain. Purging my closet fully isn’t an option, but I still needed a way to make peace with my wardrobe in the meantime.
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avatar by on April 29, 2012   •   4 Comments Links

Weekend links

I’ll announce the Queen for a Day giveaway on Tuesday!

“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” ― C.S. Lewis

avatar by on April 27, 2012   •   Giveaways

Queen for a Day giveaway 2012

This giveaway is now closed.

Welcome to our second annual Queen for a Day giveaway! Today we’ve got six gift baskets full of treats to celebrate the mom in your life (maybe that’s you!), just in time for Mother’s Day on May 13.

We love our mamas, we love being mamas, and we want to celebrate those women who do the hardest—and most rewarding—job in the world. No matter what kind of mother you are, you deserve praise and a tall glass of iced tea. At minimum.

This week, the six blogs at SLM (you have seen Simple Design, right?) are celebrating mamas by blessing six of them with a gift basket full of goodies! Each item we’re showcasing would make a fabulous Mother’s Day gift for the mom in your life—and most are around the $20-$50 range.

Hooray for moms! Read on to find out what’s in the Simple Mom gift basket.

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avatar by on April 25, 2012   •   38 Comments Kids: Developing Character Your Family

Room to build

Written by contributor Robin Dance of Pensieve.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day;
teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
~ Unattributed Chinese proverb

As is often the case, one of the best things a parent can give their teenager is hardly a thing at all: it’s room.

Room…

  • to make their own decisions and to enjoy the sense of accomplishment associated with wise choices—or—to endure the consequences or poor choices;
  • to learn life lessons never taught in a class or between pages in a book; and
  • to grow.

Parenting is tricky; time doesn’t play fair.

Days are long, years are short—before we know it, our pre-pubescent grade-schooler is learning to drive! There are no defining lines to mark seasons in development; they rarely occur overnight. Sometimes shift is so subtle you don’t even realize it when you’ve left one stage and entered the next.

My point?

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avatar by on April 24, 2012   •   23 Comments Inspiration

A little facelift!

The photo above? Yeah… That’s our new kitchen as of this afternoon. This is what it was like last week:

We didn’t waste any time. And needless to say, we’re very much in that it-gets-worse-before-it-gets-better phase. So grateful for a husband who knows what he’s doing. Or at least pretend to know what he’s doing.

So our physical home is pretty much a mess right now, but this online home of ours? It just got a little facelift. It might actually not look that terribly different to you—that’s sorta the point, actually—but I’d love for you to let me know if you find any snafus or design weirdness as you poke around the site. And in the next few weeks, we’ll migrate all the other SLM sites as well.

We just switched over to Genesis, thanks to the genius work of Brian Gardner. So very thankful for his creativity!

I’ve got some exciting news come Thursday, and something special I know you’ll love come Friday. Be looking for it!