How Our Surroundings Affect Us as Moms & What to Do About It

Today we want to talk about how our surroundings in our homes affect us as moms and some of our thoughts on that. We hope you enjoy.

• Getting Kids Out the Door: How to Navigate Big Emotions

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Rachel’s Christmas Glimmer

As we write this at the beginning of January, we are still very much in Christmas joy. I did take down the tree. My husband had made, what we call, a basement build for our kids. It’s basically a loft with a ladder and a slide. He has worked on it for about four months. So we were keeping our kids out of our basement for September, October, November and December. It was hard.

It was very hard in multiple ways. It was hard work for my husband to build it. He did an incredible job. But it was hard for me too because we have this great basement that we could not use. We got through it. Seeing their faces light up on Christmas morning was so worth it, thankfully.

And just after that, seeing all of our friends come over and use the space, which is exactly what it’s meant to be used for, was so rewarding. We had a New Year’s Eve party with about ten kids in the basement running around playing. Seeing everybody using it made me so happy.

Rachel’s Christmas Dimmer

Quick dimmer, though, my kids did get hover-boards. I love the hover-boards. However, our baseboards do not. Ashlee has hover-boards too and she did not warn me. So now, we’ve only had them a week and a half, and our baseboards are all sorts of messed up. But the kids love them, so I guess it’s a win? It’s a win-ish.

Ashlee’s Outdoorsy Glimmer

We’re trying to get outside a little bit more as a family, and the weather was so nice here in Nebraska over Christmas that we got outside to play foursquare. You know how every kid is a little bit different about what they want to engage in? So while Levi was riding his bike around us, my oldest and middle child played with my husband and I. It was really fun. Great lessons from that game.

In general, I’m happy to start off the year with more outside time than usual. We were just talking about the thousand hours outside. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but it’s all about setting a goal to be outside for thousand hours from January to December. Maybe it doesn’t sound that hard, but when you look at, it’s actually a huge commitment. Every single day you’re outside for multiple hours, which is hard in the winter, but easier in the summer. But they account for that. So, in the wintertime, you only have to get out about an hour a day, and then it gets it’s easier to be out longer in the summertime.

I think anything is better than nothing. Even if we only get halfway there, I still think it’ll be amazing to see how much time we’re spending outside and be able to show that to the kids at the end of the year. But also for myself, I need a goal to get outside in the wintertime. I would not go out at all if it were just me.

I have a friend who did it. She did 1,003 hours. I’m so proud of her. I follow her on social media, and I see her videos of her and her kids outside every day. Way to go, Momma!

Home Organization & Life Decluttering Tips

Getting into our topic, our surroundings as moms, is mostly just talking about our homes and how that environment affects us. With all these New Year’s resets, this has been on my mind a lot.

Live with Less

Ashlee: I’m about a quarter of the way through reading the book, “The Year of Less.” One of the biggest things that I’m trying to do is live with less by getting rid of the things that no longer serve me. I want to have less things for my brain to catalog that I own. I don’t know if any of you other moms are the same way, but I feel like if we own it and it is in our home, even if it is not super present in the front part of my brain, it’s cataloged somewhere because that’s how I find it. My kids turn to me as the keeper of their items in the house. It’s a huge responsibility to be the person who knows where everything is and organize it in my brain and physically in my home.

It’s very normal that we all come to this decluttering stage at some point, unless you’re really good at home organization from the beginning, because you start with, like, nothing in your first home. Then it just gradually accumulates.

So I’ve been trying to be really purposeful about the things that I have and want. When I see an item in my house, it has to make me feel good or give me some sort of positive emotion, or I’ll donate it.

I’m not a great online seller, so donation is what works for me. That way, there’s not this burden in my mind. It saves me from having to list it and coordinate with people and just be a mental cost. Otherwise, I procrastinate and end up holding onto it for six to twelve more months. So I just donate it.

Rachel: I have a table posted on Facebook Marketplace, and it hasn’t sold for three months. It’s just sitting in my basement. We don’t need it. But I have this mental war with myself, like, “What do I do with this? It’s a really nice table so I don’t want to just throw it out or donate it.” If it’s not a big item, like an old outfit that my kids don’t wear anymore, bye!

Ashlee: We dropped off three bags of People’s City Mission clothes this week, and it just felt so good. I felt confident that I was donating to a good cause and the clothing was out of my catalog. I felt so free, and I realized that this really does affect how I parent.

Rachel: I have a recent example of that. Yesterday, my kitchen had breakfast still out and my kids were coloring on the table. My daughter was on her hover-board, and she was riding with our two-year-old. They crashed and both fell. There were tears. I think if my brain hadn’t already been overwhelmed by my messy kitchen and my messy house, I probably would have responded differently. I would have got down on their level and said, “Oh, are you two okay?” I would have checked in nicely, but since my brain was already overwhelmed, I snapped, “We’re done with the hover-board. Put it away!”

Ashlee: I notice this with my littlest. My little guy loves to play. When I feel like the room is decluttered and everything has a place, I’ll get down at his level to play with him. I can be creative. But if I have clutter in my mind, there’s a barrier to being creative.

If he tells me, “Let’s play Paw Patrol!” I don’t know what to come up with. I don’t want that for this year. I want to be more present. But I acknowledge that things still have to happen in my home. I still have to take care of my spaces, but what if I had less to take care of? So it’s not “I’ll take care of it less” because that doesn’t help. It’s “I’ll have less to take care of.”

Organize Digital Clutter

It’s not just physical clutter, like the things that we have on our counters, but electronic and digital clutter, too. That’s caught up to me. I have all these apps, all of these duplicate photos, emails, subscriptions. Rachel, how do you ow do you feel about your digital clutter right now?

Rachel: At the end of every year, I like to back up all my photos. So I let them sit on my laptop for a year, and then at the end of the year, I move them onto my external hard drive. I’m in that process right now. I was trying to figure it out earlier and I couldn’t remember how to do it because I only do it once a year. It just caused me stress throughout my day. My kids would ask me to do something and I’d dismiss them because I was trying to figure it out. But it got me thinking, “Is it really that important that I need to let it get in the way of real life?” I debated for a long time because that’s one of the most important reasons I have my device these days.

It’s our kids. When they grow up, this is how they’re going to see their childhood. So again, that’s an important tab open in our brain that we need to figure out as moms if we can. So I landed on finding a way to organize the digital photos smoothly.

Audit Your Social Media

Another digital reset you can do is with social media. If you’re following somebody who is not bringing you joy, not posting about the things that you care about most, not bringing to light topics that inspire you, bye bye. Or if social media is sucking from you, making you fall into a comparison trap, that is not going to make your life better. So just unfollow. Have it be the year of unfollowing. If you don’t look at it and feel warm and inspired, why keep it?

Ashlee: I don’t think that all social media is bad. It’s a part of our world right now. I think it can be very helpful. There are a couple of accounts that I love. One is PlantYou. We’re officially in our thirties. I wouldn’t have said that 15 years ago. It’s a plant-based cooking account with meal plans.

Another topic I want more of this year on social media is travel—tips for traveling with families, how to save for travel and inspiration for where to go. I totally want to save my money for traveling. Following travel influencers on social media will remind me whenever I open the app that I don’t need to buy anything because I want to use that money to have experiences with my kids.

Then another one is The Gentle Nomads, who is always posting about frolicking in nature with her kids. She’ll take pictures of trees and bark and all the simple things that are right in front of us, totally free, but I don’t pay attention to. The world can feel like nature is farther away than it really is. There’s so much out there that can fill us up. It’s different for everybody, but those are some of the things that I have followed recently.

Take Healthy Breaks

Rachel: As moms, I think sometimes we need breaks. During those times, it’s easy to pull up your phone and completely disassociate from your life. I’ll ignore everything else and zone out, which is maybe okay sometimes, but I think that there are other healthier ways to take a break.

Ashlee: We want to model that for our kids, which kind of brings us back to this whole topic of how the things that we have in our life affect us as moms and how we’re portraying that to our kiddos. We want to be helping them learn good habits. I’m very honest with my kids about my phone usage. They know I need to use it, but I don’t love having it out. We have open communication where they can call me out, like, “Hey, your phone, Mom.”

Notice & Do

Rachel: This is not our original idea, but we hope to incorporate it into our family life. This gal I follow on Instagram, Sam Kelly, in the last year or so started a platform of notice and do. What that means is you’re helping your kids notice when something needs to be done in your home, as opposed to setting up a chore chart and checking boxes. When they’re adults, that doesn’t exist. You’re not going to have a chore chart that says exactly what to do. You’re going to notice things like “My shoes didn’t get put away, I’ll put them away.” or “The sink is full of dishes, I clean them.”

To do this, we first need to teach our kids about a resting room. The way that she phrased it is “The room is resting. Nothing needs to be done.” You can walk around the room or home with your kids and show them a resting room right now. They can see that nothing needs to be done. There’s nothing out that needs to be put away. There’s nothing that needs to be vacuumed. Nothing needs to be picked up. It’s easy to walk into and create your own play or experience because the space is at rest and ready for you.

Each family’s at rest might look different. For some people, it might be okay to have water bottles on the countertops, while some families might not like that. You can set your own home system and values of what a resting room looks like. Involve the kids in their bedrooms as well.

From there, you can help your kids see, “I notice something is out of place in this room. What do you notice?” instead of, “Hey, those shoes are out, so I need you to go put those away.” They’ll eventually notice on their own.

Sam suggests with littles, it can help to say, “Let’s put on our noticing goggles. Show me what you notice. Let’s look around with our goggles.” And then they might say, “I notice my shoes are there.” So you can respond, “Oh, you’re right. They are there! What do you want to do?” That way, they’re becoming a part of the process. And it’s not just a big person telling a little person what to do. It’s working together to bring your home to a state of rest.

Everything Needs a Home

Ashlee: This will help your kids learn where items go. They’ll know where the markers need to be returned or where all these little things go so that when they are out of place, they’re not like, “Mom, what do I do with this?” We want less on our shoulders, not more. And if everything doesn’t have a home, you probably have too much stuff.

I brought this conversation of notice and do up with my kiddos yesterday. And I realized a barrier that could come up for my household is expectations. Even my husband will sometimes say, “I don’t know what you expect. What is your expectation of this kitchen being clean?”

Everyone needs to be on the same page as to what that resting looks like. I really do have to start as simply as possible if I want to be successful with this. The simpler it is, the easier it’s going to be for my kids to notice if we really want an item there or not. But also recognizing that if I feel overwhelmed by the amount of tasks to do and stuff to organize right now, they’re also going to feel overwhelmed. So I feel like I can’t fully figure out a resting room until I get rid of the things that aren’t serving, just cluttering.

Know When You’re Ready

We give full grace to moms. Disorganization doesn’t happen overnight. It creeps up on us without even realizing it. The junk drawer in the kitchen? I haven’t ever touched that. You’ll know when you’re at the point where a house reset can and should happen. Trust yourself on this timeline.

I had a hard time when my kiddos were little, especially with Levi. It’s taken me a while to feel like I could tackle it. I honestly think that was my body letting me know it wasn’t ready yet, but my head keeps trying to tell me that I’m slow and that I should have already figured this out.

But I want to offer you grace. You’re going to get there. You might just be going through a tough time. My motivation comes and goes in waves. There are going to be times where you need to rest. That’s okay. If I don’t feel like organizing my life today, I can either beat myself up or I can remember I’m going to feel it as soon as my body is back to a better state.

Prep for Your Future

Rachel: The last thing that we wanted to touch on was the future. The reason this came up is because I went to see my family over Christmas, and my aunt is housesitting for a woman who passed away. They’re waiting for all of their children to come back to go through the stuff in the house. My aunt knew they wanted to get rid of everything, so she invited my family to come in, look around and grab anything we wanted.

But all I could think was, “Woah, this house is packed. If I were these people’s children, I would feel so overwhelmed by the clutter of the home and trying to get rid of an entire lifetime of stuff.” Obviously, we’re all going to have things. I don’t want to judge, especially those who grew up in the Great Depression or other times when it was important to hold onto everything so tightly. We lived very different experiences.

But it got me thinking about how I could set up our kids to not have to walk into a massive storage room filled with items that didn’t have a purpose. I hope they never have the feeling of wanting to turn around and close the door and never deal with it. So I bring this lens to my items now, “Is this just going to sit in my storage room for 30 years and I’m never going to open this box? Do I really need to keep it for my kids to go through one day? Or will the weight of it being off of my mind and out of this home actually benefit my kids and I more in the long run?”

Ashlee: I feel like I could probably fit the items that really, really matter to me and bring me joy and are sentimental into a couple crates. I know when I adjust my surroundings I’m going to feel lighter and more present with my kids. I’m already making more eye contact, which is something that goes for me when I’m stressed and distracted. I don’t get down at my kids’ eye levels to really see them.

Really, I want to take advantage of this time. My kids are little. It’s a magical time to soak up. We hope that this helps you be more present. That you can go around your house and decide what stays and goes based on if it’s bringing you joy. That you can teach your children to notice and do and find resting rooms together. That you can rely on your family to help you take care of a home if it’s stressing you out. Ultimately, we want all moms to have better memories and better experiences with their families this year. Thank you for joining us this month.