Welcome to Just A Little Mom
Hi, I’m Just A Little Mom.
Actually, my name is Daphne and I’m a blogger.
This blog is about Home, Faith, Family, and Food.
This post is the first time that I have actually written a blog post for myself. I have been thinking about writing a blog for a long time (way too long!)
I’ve written different things for websites and various content outlets, including magazines. Still, I’ve never sat down to write about the things that I’m the most passionate about, and that is my family and my journey in healthy, holistic living.
I am a Texan through and through. I even wear cowboy boots. I live in the country, and I raise four children and lots of chickens. I grow an organic garden every year. Sometimes it’s successful, and sometimes it isn’t. It’s really tough to grow things in Texas.
What This Blog Is About
I’m so excited to share with you the things that have made the most impact on me as a mom and the things I’m the most passionate about.
Family
Faith
Holistic Living
Homeschooling
Homeschooling
I homeschool my three oldest children, and I have homeschooled all of their lives. We have been through so many different varieties of curriculum and teaching styles that I’m pretty familiar with most of them, and I know what works for us and what works for each individual child.
I have a love and hate relationship with homeschooling as I believe that most homeschool moms do! There are so many things that we love about it, like spending time with our children, teaching them from curriculum that we believe in, and seeing them learn and grow. I love when they get excited about a new subject. I love when they get excited about kindergarten and every day is a new day for them.
But there are some hard things about homeschooling, too, like scheduling and grading and attitudes and character development and just plain hard stuff like life when you have a baby or in this case, a pandemic, that sort of throws your whole life upside down.
As a homeschool mom of 10 years now (wow!) and about 15 more years to go, considering my youngest is not quite two years old yet, I can say I wouldn’t trade the opportunity to homeschool for the world. It’s worth it. And Mama, who’s struggling right now to find your feet or the right homeschool curriculum for your children, I see you. It will get better. It will be worth it.
Healthy Lifestyle
I’m also really passionate about healthy living. I discovered a more healthy lifestyle after our first year of marriage and I began to have quite a few health problems for somebody who was all of nineteen years old! (Yes, I married young!)
So I began to pursue ways to heal my body and I discovered there was a whole other way of living than the way I was raised. I was introduced to:
Detoxing
Eating Right
Vitamins & Minerals
Having A Healthy Pregnancy
Home Birthing
Breastfeeding
My Health Discovery
I learned to detox and cleanse my various body systems, I learned to take quality supplements and that all supplements are not created equal, and I learned to listen to my body when things are going well and when things are going wrong.
This journey to healthy living led to me making the decision to home birth our second, third, and fourth children. The ability to home birth was not only empowering as a woman but also a journey in and of itself with my health.
Pregnancy and Hyperemesis
I experienced hyperemesis gravidarum in three out of four of my pregnancies and it made the entire pregnancy experience the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. Albeit worth it, of course, the experience with HG left me with an entirely different perspective on my body as a woman and my role as a mother. I hope to share more about my experience with HG in future posts. Suffice it to say that it was hell on earth and yet I did it more than once!
Home birthing, however, is one of the most significant accomplishments that I’ve ever done in my life! The entire experience is entirely different than what I had experienced in the hospital with my firstborn son. I didn’t have an unpleasant hospital experience actually, but home birthing was an entirely holistic experience that completely changed my perspective on birth and birthing practices in the United States. If more women were educated and empowered during pregnancy and birth, we would have an entire generation of mothers prepared for motherhood and better equipped to care for their babies that it would change the world.
This leads to my other passion, breastfeeding. I’m a breastfeeding mom, and I have been breastfeeding for a total of over ten years. It’s probably the single thing I will miss the most when it’s over.
I am passionate about breastfeeding and helping mothers find their way through various situations that can come up with a newborn baby. Extended breastfeeding or tandem nursing, or nursing a premature or adoptive baby all bring their own set of challenges.
I began my studies to be a lactation consultant to help other mothers succeed in their experience and receive the joy and the benefits of breastfeeding for both mom and baby.
(Disclaimer: I have not finished my studies and am not a certified lactation consultant at this time.)
Breastfeeding I believe, begins a mother’s journey into motherhood as nothing else can. The bond between a baby suckling at her mother is one of the most beautiful things that God ever created. The health benefits alone are fantastic for both mom and baby. It truly is the best decision a new mother can make. It’s also not the easiest, of course. But anything worth having is worth fighting for, as my mentor would say.
Healthy Eating
Through my health journey, I have learned to feed my family very simply with delicious and affordable meals.
I learned to swap out unhealthy ingredients for healthier options. I learned to cook in ways that made dinner time fun and delicious, and healthy. Cutting out processed foods has been the main contributor to living a healthy lifestyle, and I’ll show you how you can do this very easily.
It’s really not as hard as you think. You can eat quick, cheap, and healthy by following the guidelines and recipes that I’ll share.
I’m so passionate about a healthy diet because it puts the power in your hands to control your health. That is genuinely empowering. To know you’re not a victim of your genes or your raising is freeing. You have the power to change your health!
Your diet makes up about 80% of your body’s health. You really are what you eat!
I’m convinced that the saying, “let food be thy medicine,” by the father of medicine, Hippocrates, is probably one of the most revolutionary truths in health to this day.
I’m excited to share ways to help you feed your family healthy meals and take back your own health. Your family needs you to be on top of your game!
Mama You are powerful
The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.
I’ll also share parenting advice, relationship advice, and a lot about Jesus. I hope to share my struggles and my experiences in ways that will help you either avoid the same mistakes or give you the courage make some changes and do better for yourself and your family.
I know that being a mom is the hardest job in the entire world and it is also the most unappreciated job in the world. Sure we have Mother’s Day, but seriously that doesn’t even start to make up for all those sleepless nights and diapers and fevers and craziness we deal with on the daily.
If only we could get paid for the jobs that we do on a daily basis like picking up their socks for the 100th time that day (or repeating yourself over and over and over again for them to do it!) or driving them to dance and sports or church. Things like holding a crying baby and deciding to not clean the kitchen but read a book instead and nurse them to sleep.
The world doesn’t see what goes on in our homes behind closed doors. They don’t see how hard we work, how much we struggle, how much we plan, how much we laugh, or how much we cry. They don’t see that it takes every single cell in our being sometimes to just get up the next morning and do it all over again.
So this blog is dedicated to you, Mama: that you will feel empowered and realize that you are not just a little mom.
You are so much more.
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