Happy Mama Blog

Her blog’s tagline says it all: “I don’t know what I’m doing either.” And it’s exactly this honesty, this willingness to admit that she’s not perfect, that makes Liz so approachable and so easy to read and relate to.

Mom-101 is the exact opposite of what its name would make you think it’s about. It is in no way a stuffy, self-important blog with lots of bulleted articles containing parenting advice. It’s not the type of parenting blog that tells you what to do and how to raise tour kids. If you’re looking for “Top 10 Ways to Get Your Child To Sleep Through The Night” type of posts, you should probably look elsewhere.

And not that there’s anything wrong with “Top Ten” posts! They are often fun, entertaining and filled with useful information. But they do tend to be a little detached. Liz’s writing is never detached.

Mom-101 is about parenthood, but it’s about going through this wild ride together, experiencing the ups and downs, the dilemmas, the tears and the joys. Liz never pretends to have all the answers. On the contrary, just like each and every one of us, she’s constantly asking questions and looking for answers.

My favorite posts by Liz are those that capture the deep pain of being a working mom. I know, we are all working moms, but I mean the type of working mom who works in an office and needs to leave her child with a caretaker every day. I wish it wasn’t so painful for us to leave our children behind. I wish we weren’t getting the subtle messages from the media, those that tell us we’re not good moms, that we should leave our careers and focus on our children 100% of the time. I wish being a working mom was a straightforward, simple choice.

But being a working mom is not a straightforward choice and working moms struggle with guilt every single day. Liz captures this struggle beautifully in many of her posts.

The Constant Battle, for example, brought tears to my eyes, as I’m sure it did to many other moms. That familiar yearning to have a choice, to not be in a place where you HAVE to leave your child at daycare each morning.

And then, in her follow-on post, Being There, she said, “It’s not such a horrible thing, to make our children proud. Through our actions, through our work, through our commitment to them and those in our lives. I have to remind myself that the choices we make now as parents aren’t just to get our children through the days. It’s to get them through their lives.” And I just nodded, again, tears in my eyes.

“I’m starting to feel more and more… that that World’s Greatest Mom Trophy is escaping my reach” Writes Liz in her post Trying to Do Something Right.

Don’t we all.

Drum roll… this month’s blogger award goes to Tsh Oxenreider of Simple Mom!

Simple Mom is one of our favorite blogs. We think that Tsh captures it so nicely in her About page, when she says that Simple Mom “is like Zen Habits wearing an apron.”

If you’re familiar at all with Zen Habits, you know that it’s a wonderful blog about simplicity and productivity, and so is Simple Mom. It’s just that Simple Mom is geared towards what Tsh calls “home managers,” a title that we love!

We all crave more time, and we all feel overwhelmed with life at times. I know I do. It’s weird, becuase we are surrounded with all this technology and appliances that were supposed to make our life easier, but in fact, life today is significantly more stressful than it used to be, simply becuase we’re trying to get so much more done.

People’s expectations in the past in terms of what they expected to do every day, whether at home or at work, were much lower. We now try to cram so much into our days. In addition, one has to realize that with the introduction of home appliances, including washers, dryers and vacuum cleaners, cleanliness standards have become much higher, so – again – we don’t really work less around the house than our mothers used to work.

We love Tsh’s focus on simplifying things, cutting through the chaos, refusing to be sucked into that whirlwind of nonstop activity and going back to a simpler, slower way of life. We feel inspired and calm after reading her posts.

It’s difficult to pick a single favorite post from Simple Mom, but if we have to choose, we would have to say that “The Beauty of Living… Slowly” was one of our absolute favorites. It’s one of the areas we really struggle with – slowing down – and this post not only inspired us to slow down, but also gave us concrete ideas for how to do that.

Our favorite tip?

“Instead of three Most Important Things on your list today, make it just one. Or none, even.”

Because really, when you take a moment to scrutinize your to-do list – really look at it and see if all the items there are important – more often than not you will realize that half of the items on your list are basically there to keep you busy because you have grown accustomed to feeling like you NEED to be busy.

Shaking the need to be constantly busy isn’t easy – it’s ingrained in our western culture as Tsh points out – but if we can manage it, we will be rewarded with more quality time to spend with our family, with more “me” time, and certainly with less headaches!

We, the moms at Happy Mama Gifts, are avid readers of blogs – especially mom blogs. We feel that the blogging community fills a gap and provides a sense of community in an era when so many mothers lead a pretty isolated life.

We follow many different blogs, enjoying immensely the tips, the advice, and the laughs. We would like to give back, even if just a little, by acknowledging the blogs that we love – blogs where moms bravely share their lives and struggles, where they make us laugh – and sometimes cry – where they give us the best advice ever, the advice that only someone who truly gets it can give.

So, without further ado, allow us to present this month’s Happy Mama Gifts April Blogger Award to the amazing Catherine of Her Bad Mother. Catherine is a beautiful person, inside and out (and we’ll get to the issue of beauty shortly). She is a gifted writer – her posts frequently bring tears to our eyes, whether tears of sadness, of joy or simply tears of “Wow, she really gets what it’s like to be a woman/ a mother/ a human being.” Highly perceptive and extremely sensitive, Catherine’s words are a must-read for any woman, for any mom.

One of our favorite posts by Catherine is the recent post titled Some Shape Of Beauty. Has anyone ever casually told you that you are less than perfect, made a remark about something in your physique that could/ should be improved? If you are a woman, your answer is likely a resounding “Yes!” As Catherine says, many of us were victimized at some point by “a schoolmate teasing them about their hair, a friend commenting on their weight, a well-meaning relative remarking that ’she’d be so pretty if it weren’t for her nose’ – some memory of some statement that maybe wasn’t meant to hurt, but did, because it aggravated all those insecurities.”

Catherine wrote this post becuase she doesn’t want us to be victims anymore. She wants us all to know how beautiful we are, and at the end of her post, she asks us to “Go tell someone that they’re beautiful, and tell them how they are beautiful and why they are beautiful and everything that is wonderful about their beauty.”

Thank you, beautiful Catherine, for your blog, and for this post.