To our dear C+C community,

As we give our girl, Ashlee, the rest of the summer to be with her family in the wake of their loss, we are making some pivots with the podcast, and we need your input.

Up first: Ask Us Anything, Newlywed Edition! You’ve walked with me from divorce to dating and now, to my new marriage (!!!), and Benj and I are going to open up and answer any of your burning questions about dating in your 40s, trust after trauma, blending families, hard conversations about parenting styles, or any and everything you’ve been curious about. Use this google form to submit your questions. Be nice to Benj, it’s his first time on the pod 😜.

Thank you, as always, for the grace you continue to show us as life happens in all of it’s very good and very challenging seasons. Keep throwing love Ashlee’s way as you think of her. No one shows up for her people quite like Ashlee does, and now it’s her turn to let people just take care of her ❤️.

Love you,
Katie

Ask Us Anything

p.s. The summer collective is live! If these stories encourage you, we’d be so grateful if you would consider sharing our summer collection with a friend.

The Summer Collection

Last week, I went to a Vinyasa class. The instructor, Sarah, had primed the studio with incense and florals. She set out blankets and bolsters for each student, welcoming us as if the space were her own home. Her flow was fluid. Her voice, a gentle river. And as she taught, it was like she could see our pain, offering us the yoga studio as a sanctuary, a place to release it all.

At the end of class while we lay in savasana, Sarah delivered lavender-dotted washcloths to each yogi, placing them over our eyes. When it was time to re-engage with the world, she glided across the floor, daintily ringing a copper gong.

To our surprise and delight, while we lay with our backs flat to our mats inhaling essential oils and an essential sense of calm, Sarah had poured each of us a paper cup of strawberry infused water, with a mint garnish. We woke up to refreshment. When was the last time you received a drink with a garnish at a yoga class? Yeah, me too.

When I thanked Sarah for pampering us, she responded by saying, “It’s who I am, and I wanted to share that with you.”

Three days later, I went to another class at the studio—this time Steel Sculpt. The instructor, Celine, started the class with the urgent tone of a drill sergeant, “RISE!” It startled me a bit as Sarah’s lavender oil still lingered in my mind.

Celine practically marched us through her staccato sequence, pulsing and holding, squeezing and planking. It was all shoulder presses and “deep core work,” ankle weights and resistance bands. No incense. No gentle river. No song of the gong. I didn’t sip any strawberry water after class, yet I went home from that sanctuary feeling capable, confident, and strong.

Sarah offered us her authentic self; it was kind and healing. Celine offered us her authentic self; it was powerful and motivating.

And it got me thinking about mothers.

The moms who crouch down and snuggle their sons when they scrape their knees, and the moms who—from a distance—shout, “Shake it off!” The moms who cart their kids to sport camps, swim lessons, and every VBS within 15 minutes of their homes. And the ones who hunker down to bake bread, harvest zinnias, and paint cardboard signs for neighborhood lemonade stands.

We all have unique preferences, personalities, and strengths. Some of us are a little more like Sarah; others of us, more like Celine. But I believe we’re all offering the best of ourselves, in the summer heat waves, in the concentrated time at home, in the chaotic extended family vacations, and in the million tiny moments in between. We’re all creating space and mini sanctuaries—whether we bring lavender or not—for our mini-me’s to heal, to thrive, and to grow into kind and strong kids.

Good job, moms.

Namaste,
Becky

C+C Faves

“Stressed vines can make great wine, and I hope that’s true of people. But there’s a fine line, isn’t there? Stress the vine too much, and it’ll die. Its leaves will fall off, and its fruit will shrivel up. Not only that, but the season of stress for a vine can’t be constant. There needs to be a season of dormancy, pruning, and preparation.” // Stressed Vines by

Books on our (collective) nightstands: Mad Mabel, Nine Lives, It Could Have Been Her, Big Time, A Better Share, Having It All, The Favorites, and our Exhale book club pick, The Perfect Rom-Com.

Pair this 3-in-1 handmade garlic grater/herb stripper/spoon rest with a copy of You’re in Good Company 😉 for the ultimate hostess gift.

“If your voice is the center of your creative power, it is strengthened not by imitating others and conforming to the flavor of the day, but by coming into its own. In adolescence, we come of age. In the creative life, perhaps it’s not so much a coming of age, but a coming of authenticity, and the path is the way of rewilding.” // The Future of Writing Belongs to Those Brave Enough to Cultivate Distinctive Voice by

Summer is for streaming. On our watch list: America’s Sweethearts, Voicemails for Isabelle, Widow’s Bay, and For All Mankind.

“This season, let us consider how to encourage one another. We never know how a simple meal could brighten someone’s day.” // I’ll Never Forget That Mac & Cheese by

Recent additions to our summer mom uniform include this sandal, these hair pins for hot-weather friendly top knots, and low maintenance nail polish. Our accessory of choice? A reusable starter film camera.

“These elementary school years ask a lot of parents. And it doesn’t matter if you have one kid or four, they can feel eternally long. This is a mystery to me—how what once felt constant and never ending, is actively passing into memory.” // And That’s a Wrap by

Check your location—kids bowl free all summer long! Other passes that pay off: Top Golf and Lucky Strikes.

“Why, in my own home of all places, am I so uptight and reserved? Why does it often feel so uncomfortable to let my kids see me having fun? More importantly: Is playfulness something a person can learn?” // Attitude of Brad-itude by

ICYMI, Ashlee discussed hospitality, the gospel, and friendship in real life on this episode of the Truth Talks with Tara podcast. Don’t miss this month’s bonus episode, This Is How We Do Summer, or this community thread on summer MVPs.

“It’s not simply that I should want less, though this, too, is true. It’s that I should practice, with the Spirit’s help, the courageous habit of valuing what is truly valuable. It’s that I should practice, with the Spirit’s help, the courageous habit of saying ‘enough.’” // Can I Learn to Want Less? by

We’re bringing no fuss lemon tart and fresh peach cobbler to all the summer BBQs and celebrating America’s birthday with this berries and cream sheet cake.

“Throughout childhood, we practice along the way. There are preschool and kindergarten and fifth grade and eighth grade graduations and with each one we learn to say goodbye, to release a little piece of childhood, to acknowledge collectively that we can never go back.” // Last Last Day by

A roundup of tried and true favorites from our Quince era: trendy high-rise barrel jeans that also feel timeless, a black silk (washable!) slip dress that can be dressed up with heels or down with white sneakers, this cotton sleeveless shirt a la Jennifer Aniston in Friends, and this gauzy midi dress (in wild cherry because—summer!).

“Mom: Finally, last thing. We’re trying something new this summer. Any day that you want to forfeit video game time to hang out with your friends in real life, you will get 10 stars for that.

Middle child: TEN STARS?!!!!!! ACTUALLY?!!!!!” // Family Meeting on the First Day of Summer: A Transcript by

Give us all the summer berry recipes like Sarah’s Mixed Berry + Cocoa Smoothie and ’s Mixed Berry Protein Pancake Muffins.

“The sky begs us to look up and see the gifts before us. The sky delights in the moments where it feels like time stands still. The sky beckons us all to see the vast expanse above us and know that we’re covered.” // What the Sky Wants to Tell Us by

A simple pleasure: daily afternoon iced coffee out of a handmade ceramic mug.

Our new book is available now!

You’re in Good Company: The Gift of Friendship, Motherhood, and Showing Up mixes personal stories, reflections, and helpful ideas, all based on the belief that hospitality doesn’t need to be perfect to matter.

Buy the Book

Know someone who would love Coffee + Crumbs? Feel free to share our work with a friend (you can even earn free months in the process)! ❤️

Refer a friend

You're In Good Company

Read more

Alternative title for this episode: please send help and send it quickly. Kidding (sort of). In today’s conversation, Ashlee and Katie lay out their most optimistic summer plans, including screen time rules (lol) and reading challenges. Will all of this go off the rails by mid-July? Probably. But hey, at least we tried?! Whether you’re a summer lover or a summer hater, we hope this episode reminds you that you’re never summer-ing alone. (AKA: we’re all out here doing our best!).

Mentioned in this episode:

• Harvest grain salad (Ashlee subtracts beets and adds chicken, but you do you!)

• “Jennifer Aniston salad”

• Skylight calendar

• Vuori shorts

• Gap set: these pants / this top

• Resortpass

• Pre-order Katie’s new book (!!!)

And here’s a picture from Katie’s inaugural summer bike ride:

Read more

---

“If you need a reminder of who you are and whose you are, go to a beach and listen to the waves lap over and over and over on the shore, or go to a pond or a lake. Simply sit yourself beside some water, close your eyes and breathe the air, tip your face to the sky, extend your hands and reach forward.

Feel the pull of the water rock your body to its rhythm, trust you are held and made of this water that first formed this world and pulses through your body, water that nourishes and creates, renews and remakes and lives inside of you, calling you home to yourself, wholly known, wholly beloved.”

― , “A Blessing for Going to the Water” from Small Steps

We are thrilled to announce our summer collection is live! Head over to our website now to savor thirteen new works of art.

This collection, as always, is entirely free to read.1

If you’d like to support our work, please consider becoming a paid Substack subscriber.

Subscribe now

Our Summer Collection:

Stressed Vines by

And That’s a Wrap by

Last Last Day by

Attitude of Brad-itude by

Family Meeting on the First Day of Summer: A Transcript by

Run Riot: A Photo Essay by

Inside Baseball by

Progressive Lenses by

Strange Childhood: A Photo Essay by Corey Brie

A New Kind of Quiet by

The Boys Next Door by

We Can Do Hard Things by

Enough by

If these stories encourage you, we’d be so grateful if you would consider sharing our summer collection with a friend. In a world of ever-changing algorithms, plain ole word-of-mouth continues to be our most powerful marketing tool. ❤️

The Summer Collection

Listen Here

The day I open the email from my son’s fifth grade teacher requesting photos for the elementary graduation slideshow, I promptly turn to my husband and say, “I am unwell.”

I put the task off as long as possible, despite my son reminding me every single day that the pictures are due the following week.

“Moooom,” Everett pleads, dragging my name out with both urgency and irritation, “the class that turns in all their photos first gets a PRIZE.”

I nod and tell him I understand the assignment. I give him my word that I will dig up the photos and email his teacher as soon as I can. But the idea of a forced stroll down memory lane is making me feel feelings I do not wish to feel, so I wait, and wait, and wait.

Memory lane doesn’t seem to affect my husband the same way. He has willingly opted in to some feature on his iphone—I assume made possible through robots in The Cloud?—where a random “memory” will pop up once a day. Like a picture of our boys at ages three and five playing on the floor with wooden trains. Or a picture of Presley as a baby, her hair sticking straight up after a bath like a Troll doll. First days of school. Holidays. Ordinary scenes of our children at home, faces stained with melted popsicle juice.

Every time my husband shoves one of these pictures in my face, I recoil and mime a dagger going straight into my heart, a piece of my motherhood dying.

“Don’t show me that!” I say, swatting him on the arm.

I do not need the reminder that once upon a time, my now lanky eleven-year-old son was small enough to sleep tucked inside a baby carrier against my chest like a baby koala. I do not need the reminder that his feet are now as big as mine, that he has strong opinions about the way his hair is styled, that he is on the precipice of walking out of elementary school forever.

After Everett asks for a third time, I finally dig through my hard drive to find two photos for the slideshow: one baby photo and one photo from kindergarten, as the teacher requested. I comb through dozens of options, images I haven’t looked at in years, and feel a familiar pang. I find a picture from the first day of elementary school, of Everett standing on the porch in the outfit I had carefully selected from H&M, back when he used to wear whatever I bought without complaint, back when he used to wear adorable denim cutoffs and not a steady rotation of black basketball shorts. He’s smiling with his whole face, a bright red Lightning McQueen backpack perched on his tiny body like a turtle shell.

I pick two photos I think Everett won’t mind being shared in front of his classmates and attach them to an email to send to his teacher. For a brief moment, I imagine being in the crowded auditorium a few months from now, sitting next to other parents watching our eleven-year-olds walk across a stage celebrating the end of their tenure in elementary school.

I take a big breath in, slow breath out, trying to calm my racing mind. I still don’t know how we got here. How any of this happened so fast.

I am about to be the mother of a middle-schooler.

***

“Oh, I didn’t realize your house was right next to a school,” a fellow parent says, nodding toward the soccer field on the other side of our backyard fence.

“Yep, that’s where the kids will go to middle school someday,” I tell him.

It’s Everett’s sixth birthday, and even though we’ve only lived in this house for three weeks, we decided to throw a last-minute party. The house is cluttered with moving boxes, but the backyard boasts a giant patch of grass, the perfect canvas for a bright blue bounce house.

“I mean, of all the years to live right next to your kid’s school, I think middle school might be the best, right? Because it’s actually the worst?” I joke.

The other parent laughs, nodding in agreement.

The first time we walked through this house—a “charming fixer-upper” (see: small, unkempt, mostly falling apart)—the dreamer in me was so focused on the possibilities, I barely noticed the middle school. I never thought about the potential noise, or the fact that our entire street would be jam packed with cars every weekday at 2:50 p.m.

Shortly after we moved in, Everett became enamored with watching the big kids over the fence. Every day, he’d climb up in the persimmon tree and watch hoards of pre-teens running laps during PE class. Sometimes he’d bring his yellow plastic binoculars for a closer look, staring through the leaves like a little spy.

One day I found him perched in the tree, one hand holding onto a branch and the other holding Alexa above his head, blaring “Happy” by Pharrell Williams over the fence. It reminded me of that scene in Say Anything where John Cusack holds the boombox over his head outside of Diane Court’s house, serenading her.

“Ev, what are you doing?” I yelled.

“I’m playing music for those kids!” he called down from the tree, grinning ear to ear as if this was the best job in the entire world, him working as an unpaid, six-year-old DJ.

Five years later, I still catch him up in that tree sometimes, gazing over the fence to see what’s there, what he can expect, what it will be like someday when he finally follows the yellow brick road down our street and around the corner to his own personal Oz.

***

The week before fifth grade starts, we all file into the classroom to meet the teacher. After two years of Zoom and masks, I am beyond grateful that Everett’s final year of elementary school will have neither. Even better, Everett got assigned to the teacher he desperately wanted—a self-proclaimed Star Wars enthusiast. The entire classroom is decked out in Star Wars posters, figurines, LEGO sets, and the like. Brett and I exchange smiles. Everett is going to love this.

The parents huddle around clusters of desks, some of us bending our bodies into tiny blue plastic chairs, eyes on the teacher and whiteboard in front of us.

We listen as he tells us what to expect, how fifth grade is different from fourth grade because the goal of fifth grade is to prepare students for middle school. He uses words like “responsibility” and “accountability” and “motivation.”

Oh yeah, and by the way, sex ed is coming.
There is going to be a lot more homework.
The workload will be more challenging this year.
Please don’t forget: sex ed is coming.

I glance around the room to see if anyone else’s eyes are as wide as mine. Our last in-person back-to-school night was in the fall of 2019. Everett was seven years old, about to start second grade. I suddenly feel like I’ve been sucked up in a time warp and spit out somewhere new.

This is not my first rodeo. I’ve been attending back-to-school nights for years, starting with preschool. But this one feels different. This one feels like the teacher is speaking a different language. Like the classroom is filled with different air. Like everything is about to change.

***

We did not know when we bought the charming fixer-upper that construction would ensue on the middle school shortly thereafter. The entire campus was going to be rebuilt from the ground up—a much-needed makeover compliments of taxpayer dollars. Parents all over the neighborhood were ecstatic.

However, the homeowners whose backyards butt up against the school’s property line (like ours) weren’t quite as thrilled.

For more than two years we endured a steady soundtrack of jackhammering and bulldozing, while clouds of dust and debris traveled into our yard, covering our patio furniture, our lawn, as well as every wall and window of our home.

Half a dozen times we received an email in the dead of summer when the temperatures in Sacramento can reach 108 degrees. We need to pour cement before it gets too hot. We’ll be working at 3 a.m., just a head’s up. At three in the morning the whole house would shake like an earthquake. Picture frames rattled on the walls. Bright spotlights shone through the fence and straight into our bedroom like a movie set. Every time my husband and I would groan out loud. The baby is finally sleeping through the night and now this?!

While my boys had far outgrown the days of Bob the Builder, watching a live construction site of excavators and cranes proved to be irresistible entertainment. They’d often wander outside and push their faces up against the slots in the fence, completely mesmerized by the chaos happening on the other side.

We also did not realize they were building up—as in straight into the sky. The middle school is now one of the first things you see when you walk into our backyard. Grass. Trampoline. Shiny new building sticking up over the fence.

***

The day I take Everett to the middle school preview day, I feel a flash of—what is the opposite of nostalgia?

A kaleidoscope of memories flash through my mind: the lockers, the insecurities, the drama, the gossip, the loneliness, the smells, the peer pressure, the hormones pulsing through our bodies like electricity. I remember my stomach being tied up in a constant knot, little cliques of girls starting to form, all the social rules changing. I remember being invited to in-home “dances”—parties at which a bunch of awkward tweens would move their limbs around a basement to the tunes of “The Boy is Mine” and “Ghetto Supastar.” I remember anticipation and angst filling the room when “Truly Madly Deeply” came blaring through the CD player and kids paired off into slow dance partners. I have faint memories of spin the bottle being played at those parties, along with seven minutes in heaven, which seemed perfectly normal when I myself was a pre-teen, but now that I am a mother, I am nothing short of horrified.

Walking through the freshly-painted hallways with my son, I am brought right back to my own middle school days, only I am a mere spectator now.

I cannot stop staring at these children, who all seem so much bigger and more grown than my precious fifth-grader. I feel like I’m at a museum, studying a different species: Tweens of 2023. The way they walk! The way they talk! The way they style their hair and hold phones in their hands (phones! with Internet!).

It’s all too much. My eyes widen in fear; his widen in excitement. He strolls the campus captivated and eager, pointing out the main attractions as if we’re at Disneyland. Mom, look! The library! The lounge! The basketball court!

Outwardly, I try to match his enthusiasm. Inwardly, I am freaking out. I am worried about everything that plagued me in middle school and then some. Back then we didn’t have access to pornography in our pockets, active shooter drills, social media wreaking havoc on our minds, lethal drugs that look like candy.

I talk to other parents in hushed whispers. I’m terrified of middle school. They nod, relieved someone else said it first. Me, too. Me, too.

It’s hard to believe that on Everett’s first day of kindergarten, my biggest fears were that he wouldn’t remember to go to the bathroom and that he would miss me too much.

A guide leads us up a staircase to the second level. We stick our heads in the art classroom where the teacher is blaring grunge rock music and the kids are making a mess with some kind of chalk. I tousle Everett’s hair in the doorway, wondering if we should choose art as his elective next year. He shifts his backpack, which is full of books and sagging on his small frame.

“My backpack is really heavy,” he sighs. We both realize at that moment he didn’t even need his backpack and should have left it in the car.

“Can you carry it for me?” he asks, looking up at me sheepishly.

I nod, slipping the bulky backpack off his shoulders and onto my own. I’m glad he asked. There are so few things I can carry for him at this age.

We keep moving through the tour, breathing it all in: the locker rooms, the cafeteria, the hum of kids buzzing in between classrooms. I can’t help but wonder, after all those years of mystery and intrigue gazing over the fence, if this school is everything he dreamed it would be.

As if reading my mind, he turns to me and whispers, “Mom, I can’t wait to go here.”

His earnestness feels fragile in my hands. I swallow my fears, my kaleidoscope of cringey memories, and smile back at him, suddenly feeling the weight of his backpack sitting squarely on my shoulders. The weight of this moment. The weight of what I will say next.

I tilt my head down toward his ear and whisper back, “Middle school is going to be great.”

Subscribe now

Ashlee Gadd is a wife, mother of three, believer, and the founder of Coffee + Crumbs. When she’s not working or vacuuming Cheerios out of the carpet, she loves making friends on the Internet, eating cereal for dinner, and rearranging bookshelves. Her book, Create Anyway: the Joy of Pursuing Creativity in the Margins of Motherhood, is available wherever books are sold.

This essay was first published on Coffee + Crumbs.

Our new book is available now!

You’re in Good Company: The Gift of Friendship, Motherhood, and Showing Up mixes personal stories, reflections, and helpful ideas, all based on the belief that hospitality doesn’t need to be perfect to matter. Order today wherever books are sold.

You're In Good Company

As a college freshman, we weren’t allowed to have cars on campus. My memory is hazy about the details but what I remember: going with two friends out to lunch off campus and getting a ride with upperclassmen. Somehow our ride didn’t stay to take us home from lunch. So my friends and I had to decide: do we walk the couple miles back to campus or try to find a ride on our own? I remember walking through the parking lot looking for someone to ask. I remember asking an older woman who told us no.

And then I remember that same older woman circling back and offering the three of us a ride back to campus.

Most importantly I remember her words: “I have a granddaughter, and if she needed a ride, I’d hope someone would help her.”

I’m not sure why this memory has been on my mind so much lately. Maybe it’s because it’s June and we’re still in the season of graduations and sendings and moving from the end of school into summer mode. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been writing graduation notes and cards for high school seniors as they prepare for college and work. Maybe it’s simply the kindness of a stranger and her words: I’d hope someone would help her.

Isn’t that the truth—we’re all someone’s daughter and granddaughter. Many of us are someone’s mother. And ultimately, we’re all each other’s family. At least that is the hope I cling to as I raise my children.

I see this truth played out at the pool where mothers share snacks and expand picnic blankets. Where we’ll jump in after the toddler who toppled over without floaties. Where sunscreen is a shared commodity.

I see us sending text messages: Me too. I’m praying for you. I’m dropping off dinner tonight. Let me pick up the kids for you. I’m coming with you to that appointment. I’m running to the grocery store, let me grab groceries for your family. I know you’re going through a lot.

I see mothers at the park rocking babies and sharing stories of sleep regression and teething. I watch heads nod in agreement: this is hard.

I see library storytimes where we introduce ourselves to the new family and exchange phone numbers. Where we offer the number of the pediatrician our children love and the best place for ice cream.

I see us on the sidelines at the fields cheering for all the kids. Knowing each one by name and encouraging them, win or lose. We shuttle our kids and pick up the neighbor kid whose parents are both working late. We invite the friends down the street for popsicles and make an extra seat at the dinner table.

We open wide our hearts and doors. We’re mothers and daughters and aunts and friends. We have the opportunity to offer kindness to others remembering everyone is someone’s daughter.

We’re family.

Love,
Kim

Our new book is available now!

You’re in Good Company: The Gift of Friendship, Motherhood, and Showing Up mixes personal stories, reflections, and helpful ideas, all based on the belief that hospitality doesn’t need to be perfect to matter.

Buy the Book

C+C Faves

“Her recipe made not one, but two braided loaves—a double portion—symbolic of the double provision of manna that came before Sabbath to feed the Israelites wandering in the wilderness. To me, it simply meant: she had one to share.” // One to Share by

Books on our (collective) nightstands: My Friends, Mad Mabel, A Long Game, Behind White Picket Fences, Lady Tremaine, How to Love Your Morning Bible Study, June Baby, Dolly All the Time, The Compound, and our Exhale book club pick, Love Like a Mother.

Bring resort vibes to your bedroom with this striped duvet set.

“And where I’m looking, I see love holding on. I see surprising, bittersweet love arriving almost too late. I see bright, unguarded love arriving ever-so-slightly early. I see hard-won, bruised love plodding through the achy middle and learning to open up again.” // Depends Where you Look by

Add $5 cotton candy cake to your Fun Mom™ summer roundup.

“But over the years I’ve seen that creating an environment that is “warm, friendly, and generous” can be done by anyone, anywhere, who is willing to go out of their way to show people that they are special.” // Defining Word: Hospitality by .

We’re forecasting the MVPs of summer: this distraction blocker, this screen-free digital camera, SPF eye cream, a topper that turns your Bogg into a drink + snack station, a travel pillow that actually supports your on-the-go sleep, and this vetted summer reading list for kids and teens.

“You wonder if it’s enough—enough vegetables, enough patience, enough time, enough presence—tucked inside these ordinary days. But hasn’t love always looked more ordinary than we expect?” // A Blessing for the Mother Serving Frozen Pizza Again by

Ballerina flats, but make them summer. Complete the outfit with this gingham sundress.

“Maybe that’s the quiet work of this middle season, to loosen our grip on what friendship used to be, and let it become something truer, something steadier. To trust that connection doesn’t have to be perfect to be meaningful, or effortless to be worthwhile.” // The Friendship Recession by

ICYMI, Ashlee and Katie joined the Dear Nina podcast to talk low-key, creative ways to spend time with friends and this podcast to talk about motherhood and building intentional community. Don’t sleep on this month’s bonus episode on parenting tweens and teens.

“So if we want our children to be successful in the digital future, we need to protect them from the damage being done in the digital present.” // Why You Should Be a Techno-Skeptic by

We’re skipping summer dishes, throwing wax paper sheets on diner food baskets, and serving easy ham and cheese sliders whenever possible.

Keep your Birkenstocks looking spiffy with this cleaning kit.

“I’m just reminding you, that even when life feels impossible, there are still things you can do. Like, you can complain about volunteering for the end-of-the-year school carnival and then be there selling sodas and enjoying yourself immensely.” // It’s June and You Don’t Have to Bake a Cake by

In our earbuds: this episode about when to push and when to pull back in the middle school years on the Raising Boys & Girls podcast and this podcast episode on radical generosity + purposeful simplicity.

“We don't want those words—we’d prefer the sterile words of a machine that never lived, never had an original thought, never felt the pain of miscarriage or broken relationships or the joy of a friendship restored or of seeing spring’s first robin dancing on frost.” // Please Use AI by

Sarah’s (Paleo) Summer Broccoli Salad is the perfect make-ahead side dish for all your potluck plans.

“We can still practice courage. We can still opt out. We can still touch grass, cry at a live concert, support brands who refuse to use generative AI.¹ We can still embrace a wonderfully complicated human life, one filled with wonder and curiosity and every form of friction.” // None of This Is Real by

A simple pleasure: peanut butter + chocolate on the go.

Know someone who would love Coffee + Crumbs? Feel free to share our work with a friend (you can even earn free months in the process)! ❤️

Refer a friend

We are entering the stage of sticky. There was always some of that from the earliest days of parenthood, but toddler sticky is a whole new level. No matter how many times I clean my kitchen floor, I still end up repeating the phrase, “What did I just step on?!” more times than I care to admit. I carry baby wipes with me wherever I go – and it’s rarely ever for actual diaper changes. They’re for wiping granola bar crumbs, spilled applesauce, snot, drool or other mysterious liquids off my own body or that of my two munchkins. Clean up after meals all too often requires a full-blown bath rather than a quick wipe down. And summer? No one told me before having kids that summer is really three straight months of reaching epic levels of sticky.

I remember going down the shore as a kid and getting coated in a thick layer of sun tan lotion before the rays wreaked havoc on our pale skin. Then we’d splash in the ocean, play in the sand, grab a mayonnaise-slathered turkey sandwich from the cooler my mom stocked and repeat that routine until it was time to go home. By the end of the day, our bathing suits were filled with sand and our skin was covered in a layer of salt and sweat.

On hot days at home, my mom used to freeze orange juice in small Dixie cups with a plastic spoon stuck in it like a Popsicle stick. We’d peel off that paper cup and go to town, juice running down our chins as we raced to finish before it all melted completely. Somehow that frozen orange juice eaten in the backyard tasted so much better than simply drinking out of a glass in the kitchen.

I remember the best part about eating watermelon was having a seed-spitting contest outside, and the ultimate summer days would be topped off with an ice cream cone from the nearby Dairy Queen.

As a parent, it’s easy for me to get annoyed at the little things – the squished banana on the kitchen floor, the little hands that think my shirt is a napkin and the faces that return to their sticky state just minutes after a bath. But when I think of my own childhood, sticky was often accompanied by smiles, and messy meant there was fun being had. The nighttime bath that washed away all the ice cream, fruit juice, salt and sand meant we could make that whole mess all over again the next day. We were a blank, clean canvas waiting to be painted with whatever we could get our little hands on tomorrow.

I’m learning to embrace this stage of sticky. I’m learning to see the smiles behind the dripping ice cream, and lathering up my kids with sun tan lotion means I get to watch them splash in the pool with unrestrained glee. I’m learning that these ordinary days when I constantly feel like I’m cleaning up after my kids are not meaningless. These days, these moments – as mundane and messy as they sometimes seem – add up to a childhood that I pray my kids will someday look back on with joy and gratitude.

So bring on the summer…and bring on the sticky.

Strawberry, Banana + Coconut Milk Popsicles
Yields 10-12 Popsicles

Popsicles

1 pound strawberries, hulled and halved
2 Tablespoons honey, plus additional to taste
2 medium bananas
1 (13.5 ounce) can full fat coconut milk

Add the strawberries and two tablespoons of honey to a small saucepan. Cook over medium-high heat, stirring often, until the mixture comes to a boil. Reduce heat to medium and simmer about 8-9 minutes, continuing to stir frequently. The strawberries should break down and the mixture should reduce and thicken slightly.

Remove from heat and allow the strawberry mixture to cool for a few minutes.

Add the bananas, coconut milk and strawberry mixture to a blender. Blend until smooth. Add an additional tablespoon or two of honey if desired. (It should taste slightly sweeter than how you’d normally prefer a smoothie, because the sweetness will mellow when frozen.)

Pour the mixture into popsicle molds and freeze until solid, about 3-4 hours. If you don’t have popsicle molds, you can use ice cube trays or small paper cups. When the mixture is slightly frozen (after about 1 hour), stick a plastic spoon or wooden popsicle stick in each serving and continue to freeze until solid.

To remove the popsicles, I run warm water on the outside of the mold until I can easily pop them out. Serve immediately, or roll in the strawberry coconut topping (instructions below).

Strawberry + Coconut Topping

¼ cup freeze-dried strawberries
¼ cup unsweetened coconut flakes

Add the freeze-dried strawberries and coconut flakes to a food processer and pulse until you reach the desired consistency. Roll the popsicles in the topping mix. (This works best if you allow the outside of the popsicles to melt ever so slightly.)

Serve and enjoy!

Subscribe now

Words, recipe, and photos by .

This recipe was first published on Coffee + Crumbs.

Our new book is available now!

You’re in Good Company: The Gift of Friendship, Motherhood, and Showing Up mixes personal stories, reflections, and helpful ideas, all based on the belief that hospitality doesn’t need to be perfect to matter. Order today wherever books are sold.

You're In Good Company

“Would you like to invite a friend to go to the park with us today?” I ask the question without really thinking, but before my daughter even opens her mouth I know what name she will say. The possibility drops like a stone in my stomach and sends out ripples of worry.

“Nora,” she says. “Can we ask Nora to come?”

It’s been fifteen months since they shared a preschool classroom and longer still since our last botched playdate. How long until she forgets?

“Sweetheart, we aren’t having playdates with Nora anymore. I’m sorry. How about Ruthie? Or Kate? I could see if Emmie and Ella are free.”

“But why don’t we have playdates with Nora anymore? How come?”

I walk over to her bed and sit down. There were months of more simple explanations dotted with intermittent excuses, and there were months of redirection, and now here we are again with a genuine, but incomplete answer to her question. It’s no wonder it doesn’t make sense to her at four—it barely makes sense to me at thirty-three.

“I wasn’t able to be friends with Nora’s mommy anymore.” I say, watching her face for comprehension as she traces the flowers on her bedspread. “When we spent time together, it didn’t feel good. It made me upset. And the way that Nora played with you also made me upset. I know you have so many special memories from when they lived next door. But now we don’t see them because we live in a new house, but also because Mommy needed space from them.”

“But I want to see her! She’s my best friend.”

There are countless other friends. Friends that she has just as much fun with. Friends that she’s spent more time with at this point. But Nora was her very first friend, and even though there’s so much she doesn’t remember, she also can’t seem to forget.

“I’m sorry, honey. It will need to be a different friend.”

Her brows knit together and she looks up at me, confused and disappointed. “Why didn’t it feel good for you to spend time with Nora’s mommy?”

I put my hand on hers, shaking my head. “I love you so much sweetheart. I’m sorry this is hard. Emmie? Kate? or Ruthie?”

She drops her head and mutters, “Ruthie.”

On the way to the park, I glance in the rearview while she looks out the window. I can’t burden her with talk about boundaries and respect, about the nuance of vulnerability versus emotional unloading in friendship. I can’t explain the way my jaw tightened every time the doorbell rang, or how unfit I felt, still bleeding and post-partum with her little brother, when Nora’s mommy seemed so full of unspoken expectations around how this child of mine would fill the space in her life, too. How something as simple as a friendly neighbor could grow unwieldy, requiring the most delicate wording of texts, rehearsals of boundary setting with my therapist, and a constant redrawing of lines in the sand.

In the early months of renegotiating the friendship, I sat with my infant son on my lap while the girls played on the carpet at our feet. I tried to seem relaxed and compassionate as I listened to her latest struggles. Within a few minutes, the girls had disappeared and a quick search revealed that it had happened again, Nora had locked herself and Penny in her room and would not come out. Yes, it was those old skeletons, rattling fears from my own childhood. It shouldn’t matter at this moment with my daughter. But the way Nora was always pulling her away, out of sight, somewhere private. The way my daughter was too young, as I once was, to explain what had happened when no one was watching… It was too much.

And so I redrew the boundary in my mind: only playdates at our house. Then, they stayed too long. The girls toppling toy bins in every single room—Penny, wild and defiant in ways she never was until Nora was around, and I couldn’t even allow them to stay a moment longer to help clean up because every drop of my emotional reserve had been spent. Another line drawn: Only playdates in public settings. But when I looked up from reading to the girls at the bookstore, Nora’s mommy was gone. My baby, in her arms, was gone. And the train hurtling through the pit of my stomach whistled with every exasperated word she had ever spoken about her own daughter, every rose-colored memory about babies, and—even though I wished I could stop it—every uncertainty about her mental well-being, all throttling through my mind. I took each girl by the hand and sprinted past bookcase after bookcase, each empty aisle filling me with fear until we met her returning from the front of the store, my son asleep against her chest.

“You can’t just disappear with my baby like that,” I choked out, my eyes full of tears. She blinked back at me like I was crazy, and I thought, maybe I am crazy. But I have never had a friendship that required such constant reassertion of boundaries, such casting around in my mind for the right words, such strong ropes of guilt keeping me in, keeping me close, when there was nothing left for me anymore.

Penny shouts from the backseat as we pull into the park. She can see Ruthie on the slide and she can’t wait to join her. For now, Nora is forgotten, but the lines of connection run deeper than I want to admit. She will probably ask to see her again, and again I will have to say, no.

Someday, maybe I can help her understand how hard I tried to renegotiate the relationship so that the two of them could remain friends. The last boundary experiment was this: We can only have a playdate in public settings in a group of other friends. Nora and Penny and a handful of other preschoolers bounced around on a trampoline while the moms chatted about summer vacation. Nora’s mom stood apart from the group. It was her loneliness that drew me in from the start, that deep and familiar ache for friendship. I steadied myself and walked over to say hello. It’s been six months since the bookstore and weeks since we last passed one another at preschool drop off.

“How are you guys?”

“Good. We’re really good.” She recounted her latest parenting woes for a few minutes before saying, “And I meant to tell you! My husband and I were just driving in your neighborhood the other day. We’re thinking about buying a lot and finding a builder.”

And just like that, my best attempts, my empathy, and my grown-woman boundaries are knocked to the floor like a tower of carefully placed blocks. I want to have grace. I want to love even when it is hard to love. I want to make this friendship work for my daughter, but I just… can’t.

After a session with my therapist, I craft a text with the most gentle wording I can find: I am so grateful for the time we spent as neighbors and the memories our families made. I know I have been more distant since Theo was born. That has been intentional. I care about you and your family but I am not able to return to the closeness in friendship that we once had, even if we become neighbors again. I would like to stay in touch and support the girls’ friendship as best as I can. Nora is such a special friend to Penny.

Her response was bitter, a slammed door, the end. It was painful to pass Nora and her mom in the hallway at preschool the following year. Penny’s questions and requests to see Nora filled me with dread, a deep disappointment in myself, and the sense that I was withholding something from her, that I was being unfair. But these were just clouds passing in front of the sun. My life is lighter without the burden of this friendship, and I am reminded of the simplicity of playdates unencumbered by anxiety and conflict.

At the park, Ruthie’s mom pushes Theo in the bucket swing while I pass out snacks for the girls in the shade. Their legs swing freely as they sit on the bench and talk over one another, recounting their favorite scenes from Frozen 2. Someday, maybe, I will tell Penny more of the story. Someday when she’s drawing her own lines in the sand I will stand beside her and tell her that it is good to be strong as well as kind, to protect as well as share, to be willing to walk with someone a little while and be willing to let them go.

Subscribe now

lives in Bloomington, Indiana with her husband and their three little ones. Her essays have appeared in Coffee + Crumbs and New Millennium Writings, and her short story “No Longer Mine” was recently featured in LETTERS Journal. Adrienne believes magic takes the form of heart-to-heart conversations, petit-fours, and walks in the woods. You can find more of her writing on her website and Substack.

Photo by Lottie Caiella.

This essay was first published on Coffee + Crumbs.

Our new book is available now!

You’re in Good Company: The Gift of Friendship, Motherhood, and Showing Up mixes personal stories, reflections, and helpful ideas, all based on the belief that hospitality doesn’t need to be perfect to matter. Order today wherever books are sold.

You're In Good Company

Buy the Book

I learned to make challah in the kitchen of a chapel turned college boarding house.

The kitchen to me then was not the kitchen to me now. I was a sophomore—no longer with access to the all-you-can-eat dorm meals with a mere swipe of my student ID, yet not totally competent in feeding myself. I lived off Trader Joe’s microwavable orange chicken, individual cartons of yogurt, baby carrots, and takeout. Truly home cooked meals were a mystery.

Each week, I watched my flatmate, Claire, make challah in preparation for Sabbath. I watched her knead the dough, let it rise, punch it down, let it rise again, and braid the loaves. That flour, yeast, water, oil, and honey could come together to make the fluffiest, most beautifully braided loaves of bread? That was magic.

Her recipe made not one, but two braided loaves—a double portion—symbolic of the double provision of manna that came before Sabbath to feed the Israelites wandering in the wilderness.

To me, it simply meant: she had one to share.

With four children of my own now, I’m fluent in recipes that double or triple easily—like ’s Weeknight Bolognese or Sarah’s New Mom Meal. But my very favorite recipes are the ones that don’t require any recalculations of measurements, recipes that on their own make a double portion.

It’s recipes like this one that remind me: what we already have is more than enough to share.1

Subscribe now

Claire’s Challah

Group A:

• 5 cups flour

• 1 teaspoon salt

Group B:

• ⅓ cup honey

• ⅓ cup olive oil

• 2 eggs

• 1 cup water

Group C:

• 1 tablespoon (or one packet) yeast

• 1 teaspoon sugar

• ¼ cup water

Egg wash: 1 egg white

Instructions:

1. Mix Group C ingredients: yeast and sugar with ¼ c. warm water. Set aside to proof.

2. Mix together Group B ingredients. Add yeast when it is bubbly. Stir in Group A ingredients and knead about 50 times.

3. Put dough in buttered bowl and cover with wet towel. Place the bowl in a warm place. Let rise ~2 hours, then punch. Then let rise ~2 more hours, punch again.

4. Braid into two loaves and brush with beaten (lightly beaten) egg white, and sprinkle with salt or sesame seeds if desired.

5. Bake at 350° for ~30 minutes or until top is golden-brown and bread sounds hollow when knocked upon.

is a writer and content director for Coffee + Crumbs. She lives in Southern California with her husband and four children and writes about home and habits in her Substack, .

Photo by Jennifer Floyd .

Hospitality without the hype. Friendship without the filter.

You’re in Good Company: The Gift of Friendship, Motherhood, and Showing Up mixes personal stories, reflections, and helpful ideas, all based on the belief that hospitality doesn’t need to be perfect to matter. Order today wherever books are sold.

You're In Good Company

Rubbing sleep from her eyes, my youngest daughter trudges to the kitchen in her pajamas. She grabs a small plastic bowl and walks it over to the table. She returns to the kitchen and opens a drawer for a spoon. She takes it to her bowl. Back to the kitchen, she grabs a cup. I watch her move the way I would a tennis volley: Cup. Table. Milk. Table. Cereal. Table. Back and forth and back and forth. But then, like an itch I must scratch—I blurt out, “Honey, do you see how many trips you just took?”

She looks at me and smiles. She’s heard these words a thousand times.

“You can get the bowl and spoon and cup all at once!” I spread my arms out wide, as if begging. “You could have gotten the granola and the milk together!” She nods, as if saying Yes, I know, Mom. I get it. I’m tired.

But the next day, and the next—whether it be in the kitchen or cleaning up the living room or getting ready for school—one thousand little steps make up what could have been three.

***

I’m late getting home and traffic is bad. I still have one more stop to make because a kid needs something (poster board, maybe?) for school tomorrow and I’m near a store we used to live by. I pass a light and expect to be able to turn left into the plaza, but the traffic pattern has changed. A concrete barrier forces me forward.

Almost instantly, I feel insanely frustrated—at the traffic, at the kids, at myself. A fire ignites in my belly. “Augh!” I scream into the empty car. I bang the heel of my hand onto the steering wheel. It’s the second time this week my precisely choreographed child-free hours have been foiled by an unpredictable mistake. A setback that feels personal, some proof of a deficiency in me.

***

On Tuesday nights, I have three kids who have to be at three different practices at three different locations around town. The other days of the week are lighter, but I still drive around a lot. Every day feels like a repeat loop from here to there, and there to here. Over and over and over.

***

Do you remember trying to get out of the house on time when the kids were little, when you made sure everything you might need was in your diaper bag? And ten steps before walking out the front door, the baby made that face—turning red and furrowing her brow—and you heard it before you felt it? And the smell arrived before you registered the wetness that had, somehow, defied physics and blown up from her back to the nape of her neck?

And how you sighed a resigned breath and shook off your coat and laid the baby down; then went through not one, but two different outfits because she pooped again the minute she was re-dressed and lifted upright? And because you could not, in good conscience, leave without giving her a proper bath, late became the kindest of words to describe your eventual arrival?

Every day with a little one felt unpredictable. A fever, a missed nap, a tooth coming in could derail plans with ease. But oh! the monotony: diapers, feeding, laundry, playtime, bedtime, naptime. Over and over and over.

When my kids were young, I held my life with open hands—believing one day, one day, I’d arrive. That time would stretch and become my own, that my life would morph into some manageable and predictable pattern, and that all the little repetitions would smooth out and streamline and my life with older kids would run like a well-oiled machine.

***

As often as possible, I meal plan. I order groceries online. But for some reason, for the second time in two days, I drive to the grocery store for more food. I buy bananas, oranges, bread, and pasta. Only later, back at home, do I realize we’re out of milk.

How is this possible?

And when my son asks for cucumbers, I remember I forgot those too.

***

Have you ever thought about how we talk about our days?

Crushed it.
In a nice routine.
Hitting our stride.
Operating on all cylinders.
Max capacity.
Full throttle.
Automated.
Dialed in.
GSD.

Can you hear it?

I have been a mother long enough to proudly stand up against unrealistic expectations. I try to build in margin and welcome downtime. I laud rest and adore silence. I want nothing more than to move through this world gently.

And yet—how often does a switch flip in my brain, triggering me to feel like my sole purpose in life, or at least for part of the day, is to cross one thing after another off my endless list of to-do’s as fast as humanly possible, leaving absolutely no room for error?

***

I would never, not once, call myself Type A.

I used to sit and nurse, like so many other moms, tracing velvet eyebrows and hairlines and fingertips. When my kids got older, I’d play on the floor with them for hours. Then, I’d pull my kids onto my lap and kiss their cheeks and read Brown Bear or Goodnight Gorilla three or four times in a row. In favor of strolling through the park—pointing out geese and turtles and fish—I’d leave dirty dishes in the sink and heaps of laundry in piles by the washer. Day after day, for years and years, my life was a slowly moving repeat version of itself.

But even then, I was so proud of the speed of my diaper changes. How I could do them in the dark, in the middle of the night, barely even waking the baby. I’d pat myself on the back for my efficient system of washing pump parts, whispering, “Just let me do it,” when my husband offered to help each night. I stopped oohh-ing and ahh-ing over each new batch of little onesies, and instead folded them with automated precision.

Through the years, I’ve bought books on how to do more with less, listened to podcasts on creating routines and systems. Why? Because there is always more. More groceries. More laundry. More practices to get to. More orthodontist appointments and bathrooms to clean and volunteer opportunities at school. There are library books to return and deadlines to meet and always some new form to fill out. Life’s demands are endless.

I once read a book that asserted God gives us enough time for what he has for us each day. I don’t disagree, in theory. But the author wasn’t a mother. And I can’t help but wonder: What if there actually isn’t enough time for a mom to get everything done each day?

***

In a world that values speed and organization, in a culture that loves sleek and sexy, when robots and economy have defined productivity for three generations, why wouldn’t efficiency seep into every aspect of my life?

Why wouldn’t I start thinking motherhood, which is inefficient by nature, could be benchmarked by those same industrialized standards?

I guess I just thought by the time I had teenagers, I would have figured out my life. The thousand little repetitions would simplify. I’d have meal planning down to a science, carpool schedules would align without effort, and I’d figured out some system for all the paper in my house.

And while it’s true that I’m a pretty decent cook (no matter what’s in the fridge), and have subscription orders for everything from dishwasher tabs to trash bags, motherhood isn’t all that more predictable now than it was in those diaper years.

There is nothing wrong with systems and planning. But I’m realizing how often I respond with an intensity of emotions when things don’t go as I expected, that far exceeds the issue.

Why did I think motherhood would ever stop being full of surprises? That one day is never exactly like another, even when they get older. A kid forgets his viola. Another breaks his toe. After eating it every day for the last seven years, one of my kids no longer wants peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. The school nurse calls. An email arrives asking for canned goods tomorrow, and on Friday they need to wear orange. There will always be errands to run and items forgotten and last-minute changes of plans.

But this is how it’s supposed to be, isn’t it?

My youngest daughter may or may not walk into the kitchen each morning for the next ten years and grab what she needs for breakfast one thing at a time. And I may or may not ever have a day that runs as efficiently as I expected. But I am not a machine, and my life is not an assembly line.

And motherhood will always be a thousand steps that never could have been three.

Subscribe now

Sonya Spillmann is a nurse, an essayist, and freelance writer living in the DC area with her husband and four kids. She’s incapable of small talk, loves red lipstick, and spends the majority of her afternoons driving children around in her minivan. You can read more through her Substack, Finding Feathers.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd .

This essay was first published on Coffee + Crumbs.

Our new book is out!

You’re in Good Company: The Gift of Friendship, Motherhood, and Showing Up mixes personal stories, reflections, and helpful ideas, all based on the belief that hospitality doesn’t need to be perfect to matter. Order today wherever books are sold.

You're In Good Company

I stare laser beams into my phone. I don’t know if it will be a call or an email or a Hogwarts owl swooping down with news. Caw!

We spend our lives waiting on results.

What are our grades

did we make the musical

college admission

pregnancy pee stick.

Our days are a constant queue at the theme park of life and I’m at the top of the hill dangling before the big drop.

I’m ready for the results, whatever day they come. I already have a plan. Of course I have a plan. I always have a plan and the more out of control I feel the harder I try to pin down whatever I can.

Our good friends had given us the most expensive bottle of red wine I’ve ever had, and I tucked it in the back of the pantry. When the results come, whatever they are, I’m going to open the wine, Alex is going to sit on the barstool at the kitchen counter, and I’m going to stir risotto while we sip together, whether in celebration of good news or comfort for bad.

I think the stirring will be centering. Risotto takes time, and I want to take the time. I want to create something wonderful with my hands while my mind wraps around whatever the news is.

I refresh email for the thousandth time.

A new one pops up. Test results await … CLICK.

My eyes scan the medical jargon and hone in on the word I’m looking for: carcinoma.

I’m not a doctor, but I know that word. It’s official. The murder grape I found in my boob is cancer. I feel like Theoden at the beginning of the Battle of Helm’s Deep, standing in the dark, growling into the rain, “So it begins.”

My doctor calls and we talk through the next steps. Breast surgeon, medical oncologist, radiation oncologist. I’ll need a binder and some labels, I think. But first, risotto and red.

I set the pan on the stove and hand Alex the wine to open. He takes a seat and pours the wine. I inhale the fragrance. It even smells fancy. My mouth waters.

Okay, I have cancer. A plan is forming. Surgery first. I like a first step. I’ve had lots of surgery. Surgery doesn’t scare me.

We take a sip. Ohhh. It’s dry and perfect, and I couldn’t describe the layers to save my proletariat little life, but it’s the tastiest wine I’ve ever had.

Surgery doesn’t scare me but those other two steps, both of the ones with “oncology” in the name, those two sound more ominous. I know how to recover from surgery, and I know how it feels in my body, but I’ve never recovered from chemo and radiation. I’ve never had a port. These are mysterious and new, and their reputations aren’t stellar.

I drizzle olive oil in a big pan, turn the stove to medium, and dice an onion. I throw the onion in the pan to sizzle and pour the chicken stock in a medium-sized pot one burner over and set it on low. I move the onions around the pan until they turn translucent.

Alex and I sip our wine and breathe in the smell of it and the smell of the onion cooking. There’s no greater smell than onion cooking in olive oil. I add in minced garlic.

“Smells amazing,” Alex says.

“Yes,” I agree.

“So cancer,” he says.

“Boo-ya,” I agree, slicing mushrooms thinly.

I toss the mushrooms into the pan along with a pat of butter, give everything a stir, and hand a cheap bottle of white wine to Alex to open. The mushrooms are thirsty for some wine, too.

After they start to glisten, I pour in the wine, scraping the onions off the bottom. I breathe in. Risotto is aromatherapy and I need some therapy right then.

“I can’t do this treatment for you, but I can do the paperwork. Hand the bills to me, and don’t even think about them,” Alex says.

“Thank you,” I say.

“You’re gonna get through this,” he says.

That moment everything narrows to what really matters, and it’s this man who’s been with me for a quarter of a century. Raising teens is hard, special needs parenting is hard, and our two personalities are constantly crashing into each other. I’ve fantasized over the last couple years about leaving him to live in a cabin in the woods. Not with another man but just by myself without constantly tripping over his shoes or opinions.

Seems trivial now.

Everything drops away and it’s Cancer and I want my best friend, the one who shoved needles in my butt for fertility treatments and sees me at my worst and keeps choosing me over and over even when I’m not sure I’d even choose myself.

I pour the arborio rice into the pan and it makes a satisfying swishy sound as it cascades down.

“In sickness and in health,” our vows said, and I wonder if I’m still under warranty, because I’ve sure had a lot of sickness, and I wouldn’t blame him for having me towed away. What a hassle I’ve been.

“I love you,” he says.

“I love you, too,” I say, tossing the rice with the mushrooms and onions and oil and butter to coat it.

We sip, and then I pull up a barstool to the stove. It’s time to start stirring.

When the kids are around, I want fast and easy food. I want to feed these hungry caterpillars as quickly as possible most nights. Risotto for lunch feels luxurious, for someone with time to kill.

For someone with cancer to kill. I’m thinking they can just scoop it out with a melon baller, and I can move on with my life. It’s not that simple. It’s about to get much more complicated, but I don’t know that yet.

I ladle a scoop of chicken stock from the pot into the pan with the rice. Sizzle.

I stir, scraping the goodies off the bottom of the pan. The first ladleful absorbs quickly, and I scoop another. Sizzle. The rice is thirsty and drinks it up as I stir, making figure eights in the pan with my spoonula.

I ladle again and this one takes longer. I stir, grab another sip of wine, and we do this, me stirring, Alex sitting there, his presence reassuring. He’s with me. We talk about the next few months, about the kids, about taking things off my plate as I get out two bowls.

When the risotto has drunk up all the chicken stock, I stir in parmesan cheese, take it off the heat, and head to the back patio for parsley. I run my hand through its friendly, fragrant little leaves and smell my fingers. So fresh. I step back inside and the smell of the risotto hits me with warmth and security.

I chop the parsley, spoon the risotto into the bowls, and add fresh parmesan and parsley. I top off our glasses.

We take our wine and steaming bowls to the table and sit. Alex takes a bite and moans with pleasure. This feels decadent, this middle of the day pause. I’ll remember it forever, the day we made something beautiful together out of horrible news.

Life has gotten so complicated and yet in this tiny moment, it’s simple. It’s love and wine and slow cooking. The risotto makes us feel like I’m going to be okay. How can the world be all bad when there’s risotto in it? When there’s special wine from dear friends? When we have each other, after all this time, by the grace of God.

Melanie’s Mushroom Risotto

If you read all that and are wondering how much of everything I used, here you go. You can make much fancier risotto, but I tend to use the most basic ingredients that I always have on hand, that way risotto can strike at any time!

Ingredients

6 cups chicken stock, or vegetable stock for vegetarian
A generous swirl of olive oil
1 medium onion, diced
2-3 cloves of garlic, minced
1 pound of mushrooms, thinly sliced (I’m a simple girl and like button mushrooms, but you can put fancy ones in if you’re bougie like that.)
2 tablespoons butter
1 ½ cups arborio rice
½ cup dry white wine (something tasty enough to pour yourself a glass of while you’re cooking)
1 cup grated parmesan cheese, plus more for serving
Fresh parsley

You’ll need one pan where the magic happens, and one pot to keep the chicken stock warm. Cold chicken stock is like throwing ice cubes in your bathtub when you’re trying to relax, so jarring and detrimental to your risotto. You want them to feel cozy at a consistent temperature to soak up all the moisture, so warm that stock.

Subscribe now

’s debut novel for tweens and young teens, GIRL OF LORE, is on shelves now! Before embracing her love of monsters and sneaking into the fictional world of GIRL OF LORE, Melanie Dale published a bunch of nonfiction books, shambled around as a zombie on TV, and survived cancer. She’s written episodes for the anthology horror television series Creepshow and over a decade of essays for Coffee + Crumbs. While she’s won no awards for literature, one time she won a Halloween costume contest and still feels pretty stoked about it. When she’s not writing, she’s teaching yoga or battling her own brain. She lives in the Atlanta area.

This essay was first published on Coffee + Crumbs.

Our new book is out!

You’re in Good Company: The Gift of Friendship, Motherhood, and Showing Up mixes personal stories, reflections, and helpful ideas, all based on the belief that hospitality doesn’t need to be perfect to matter. Order today wherever books are sold.

You're In Good Company

In today’s episode, we chat about how we’re navigating the disorienting job of parenting tweens and teens. Katie shares what she’s noticing in the way girls speak about mental health, while Ashlee gives us a more granular example of a recent resilience-building opportunity with her son at a rollerskating rink. We hope this episode encourages you to keep having hard conversations with your kids, and to trust who they are becoming. We also hope you give us alllllllll the guidance, wisdom, and advice in the comments (#nopressure).

Mentioned in this episode:

• Raising Worry-Free Girls by Sissy Goff

• C+C podcast: The Parenting Hope We All Need Right Now with Sissy Goff

• Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

• Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier

• C+C podcast: Tweens, Teens, and Tech, Oh My

Read more

We’re standing in the security line at the airport when I see her again, the same mom I spotted just minutes ago in the bathroom. With a baby strapped to her chest and an overflowing diaper bag hung on her arm, I watched her impressively corral a toddler with pants around his ankles into a tiny stall. I briefly considered how I might help, but previous experience has taught me that offering to hold a total stranger’s baby in the airport bathroom is typically rejected.

I am now back in line with my own tiny circus: three kids, all of our carryon luggage, and a massive stroller. A man stands behind us, young-ish, maybe 30 or so, scrolling his phone with a grey backpack slung over his shoulders. I can’t help but notice how light and free he looks standing there, completely unencumbered by sippy cups and pint-sized bags of Goldfish crackers.

Behind the man are two kids, who were—if I had to guess—maybe six and ten years old. When I see the mom from the bathroom exit with her baby and toddler, I piece together that the older kids are hers as well. She hovers outside the bathroom for a minute, juggling an overflowing diaper bag and carseat while repositioning the baby in the carrier strapped to her chest. Suddenly she has an unmistakable look on her face that only another mom could spot across a busy airport.

I know that look. I’ve had that look. The nose wrinkle, the cringe, the mix of annoyance followed by a quick calculation of what comes next.

Diaper blowout.

I watch in equal parts horror and empathy as she carefully pulls her infant out of the carrier. I see her do the dance, the shift, that familiar move where you’re trying to hold your baby in a way that doesn’t get poop all over your hands and your arms. Too late. I can see the back of the baby’s onesie is mustardy-orange, drenched.

She bends down to retrieve a fresh diaper and package of wipes from the diaper bag, and at this point I am shedding my own backpack, dropping everything in my hands. I am on high alert, ready to jump into the warzone with her, waiting for a signal. She calls out instructions to the older kids in line, who are supervising a giant pile of luggage.

“I’ll be right back! Can you grab this stuff?” she yells to them, before abandoning the diaper bag and car seat to head back into the bathroom with her toddler and poop-covered baby. I follow one of her kids over to the pile. He grabs the diaper bag; I grab the car seat.

“Thanks,” he mumbles.

“No problem,” I say, as I take my spot back in line.

I turn to the 30-something guy behind me, the one still scrolling on his phone, the one who does not seem to notice any of the chaos unfolding around us, and I say, “Excuse me? Do you want to go ahead of us in line? We’re going to help this mom and her kids get their stuff through security.”

He looks confused, as if I’m speaking a foreign language. Then he glances behind at the kids I don’t think he’s even noticed until this point.

And who can blame him?

Before I became a parent, of course I knew mothers existed everywhere, but I didn’t really see them the way I do now. I used to see mothers in the wild the way I see the world without my contact lenses: anonymous blobs blending into a blurry landscape. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to spot a mother across a busy airport handling a diaper blowout like a boss.

In times like these, I can’t help but think joining the ranks of motherhood gave me a specialized pair of glasses. I see the world differently now. Not better, not worse, just differently. I see love and pain, tragedy and humanity, my own faith and beliefs and values and priorities through an entirely new lens.

But I also just see more. Literally. Everywhere I go, I see the mothers.

We spent the last few days at Disneyland, and from the airport to the hotel to the actual theme park, I saw mothers everywhere. Mothers applying sunscreen to little faces, breastfeeding babies on park benches, pushing strollers back and forth in a rhythmic motion, desperately trying to get their toddlers to sleep. I watched mothers changing diapers in the bathrooms, mothers opening applesauce pouches, mothers handing ice cream cones to grabby, grateful hands.

Halfway through our first day at the park, we finally found a restaurant with an open table, and just as we were getting settled into the chairs, I spotted a pacifier on the ground several feet from where we were sitting. Ten years ago, I don’t even think I would have seen it, let alone picked it up.

But this little paci, let me tell you. I felt immediate dread and palpable panic for those parents. My first two kids didn’t take a pacifier, but my third baby did (does, please don’t tell the dentist), and we’d be lost without it while traveling. Just ask my husband, who spent far too much money on a taxi ride last summer and almost missed a flight making an emergency trip back to the hotel to retrieve ours.

Remembering this, I grabbed the pacifier, and handed it to one of the restaurant servers.

“Do you guys have a lost and found here?” I asked.

He looked at the pacifier and then back at me, waiting for the punchline.

“I know,” I smiled, “This sounds totally crazy, but … some parent might come back looking for this.”

The server shrugged, took the tiny pacifier from my hand, and vanished into the restaurant. I’m not sure if anyone ever came back to claim it, but I like to think I did my part as a fellow parent.

Back in line at the airport, the guy with the backpack switches spots with us, so we are now standing directly in front of the kids with the mountain of luggage. He can’t help but crack a joke about us having our hands full.

I hold up a bunch of stuff in my hands—backpack, purse, water bottle, Cinderella doll, and joke back, “Welcome to parenthood!”

As we continue moving up in the security line, my husband handles our stuff while I turn around every so often and help the kids shuffle their luggage forward. The guy with the grey backpack, who is now in front of us, turns around a handful of times with curiosity.

Eventually the mom reappears, freshly changed baby and toddler in tow, and joins her kids with All The Things. I see her do that quick mental checklist—diapers, snacks, wipes—making sure they have access to everything they need.

“Hey you know what?” the guy with the backpack says to me, as if he’s suddenly had a huge epiphany, “You all go ahead of me. I can help her with that stuff.”

“Oh we really don’t mind,” I tell him.

“No, I want to. I can help,” he insists, stepping back behind us in line.

There’s a brief pause. A moment for us all to resettle and shuffle our luggage a few inches forward.

And then the guy leans forward and says, “I’m actually expecting my first baby in September.”

My eyes widen. I smile, offer him a genuine, “Congratulations!” Welcome to the club, sir. You’ll never walk through an airport the same way again.

Subscribe now

Ashlee Gadd is a wife, mother of three, believer, and the founder of Coffee + Crumbs. When she’s not working or vacuuming Cheerios out of the carpet, she loves making friends on the Internet, eating cereal for dinner, and rearranging bookshelves. Her book, Create Anyway: the Joy of Pursuing Creativity in the Margins of Motherhood, is available wherever books are sold.

Our new book is out!

You’re in Good Company: The Gift of Friendship, Motherhood, and Showing Up mixes personal stories, reflections, and helpful ideas, all based on the belief that hospitality doesn’t need to be perfect to matter. Order today wherever books are sold.

You're In Good Company

You're In Good Company

Read more

Listen Here

It’s cold. Arguably too cold to barbecue. But I’m breastfeeding a baby who gets a tummy ache when I eat dairy or soy or anything acidic, and I’m tired of eating soup, and steak sounded good, so here I am, wrapped in a down parka that resembles a sleeping bag, grilling steaks in 20-degree weather. And not just any steaks, either. The good steaks. The birthday/anniversary/client-we-need-to-impress/something-to-celebrate steaks. Rib-eyes.

Because he’s 6, my son Royce asks for a hamburger instead.

I don’t take kindly to dinnertime criticism and have a low bar for “I don’t like this” shenanigans. But I’m in a good mood (we’re having rib-eyes, remember?), so instead of reprimanding him, I tease him a little instead.

“You’d rather have a $3 hamburger than a $60 steak?” I say, ruffling his hair as I pass him on my way back inside, the smell of the grill following me.

I put the baby down for a nap (or maybe for the night? … at 4 months I’m honestly never sure) while the steaks rest, then slice them thinly against the grain. My husband gets home from work as I plate the perfectly pink meat with roasted potatoes, bread, and salad. We sit down to dinner and Levi compliments me on the steaks, which makes me laugh, and recount Royce’s hamburger request.

Levi grins and elbows him a little. “That’s good you like hamburger, buddy. Someday you’ll show up here to raid our freezer and I’ll tell you to help yourself to all the burger you want. I’ll just be sure to remind you to leave the steaks for me.”

We all laugh, but Royce ducks his chin in embarrassment and picks at the steak on his plate. “Nah, he won’t need to steal meat from our freezer,” I say with a wink. “That’s why we gave him his own cow. He’ll have his own herd and a full freezer of his own.”

***

Levi and I signed on the dotted line(s) of our first USDA cow loan when he was 28 and I was 25—a low interest, “beginning farmer/rancher,” loan from the government to buy 16 bred Black Angus heifers of our very own. I was newly pregnant with our first child, and as we signed here and initialed there at the direction of our loan officer we exchanged sly, hopeful smiles. We were starting our legacy, in more ways than one.

I was terrified to tell my parents, who pay cash for everything and paid off their property before they reached the end of the amortization schedule, who planned and conceived me in their mid-to-late 30s, about both the loan and the baby. They’d started contributing to my education fund well before I started elementary school, and when it came time to apply for and choose a college they encouraged me to look at study abroad programs, research fellowships, and academic rankings. It’s safe to say when they sent me off to Seattle University they didn’t expect me to graduate early so I could get married or fall back on my high school bookkeeping courses as a career.

From an early age I understood that while my parents believed I could be anything I wanted to be, they—my dad, especially—expected “anything” to be something, well, great. A research scientist or a college professor. A pharmacist perhaps. An environmental advocate of some sort maybe. But probably not a work-at-home mom. Definitely not a work-at-home mom who was in debt to the government.

My parents are kind, hard working, and community-minded individuals. They were and are excellent parents who made enormous sacrifices to ensure I, their only child, had the best start in life they could give me.

They just didn’t want to see their efforts—their legacy—go to waste.

***

For Royce’s 5th birthday, Levi and I gave him his favorite cow and her calf. After watching him bounce up and down on the seat of the feed truck with excitement every time he saw her the winter he was 4, we decided he was ready to start learning some very basic lessons about work ethic, caretaking, and money management. We decided 5 would be the “cow birthday” for our kids.

While the gift would be mostly symbolic—his cow would stay with the rest of our herd—it gave him the opportunity to make his own “business decisions” and set money aside for his future. Would he sell his calf or keep his calf? If he kept his calf, how would he pay us back for his share of hay, pasture rent, and vaccine? Or would he sell both his cow and his calf and buy a dirt bike with his profit? He would be in the driver’s seat. The only stipulation was this: if he was going to own his own cow, he’d be required to show up and help when and where he was needed, whether he wanted to or not.

When his birthday rolled around I pulled out my DSLR, walked out into the pasture, and snapped a photo of 404, her calf trailing behind her. Then I framed it, wrapped it, and watched with nervous anticipation as he opened it. Would he understand what we were giving him? Would he care? Could his 5-year-old brain comprehend the years of hard work and sacrifice wrapped up in that 5x7 picture frame?

***

On Christmas Eve this year, after my mom and I stuffed stockings and my dad and Levi ate Santa’s cookies, my mom handed me a gift.

“An early Christmas present,” she said.

I tore the flap of the envelope on the card, my hands shaking a little. My mom’s familiar cursive-print hybrid filled the card, but as I read through her note my eyes were drawn to one simple phrase: “We’re so proud of you and the life you’ve built.”

Feeling my eyes fill, I looked up at my mom, who nodded. “It’s true,” she said. “You guys have worked so hard and accomplished so much at such a young age. We’re so proud. We love you both.”

***

In the eight years since we borrowed those USDA funds we’ve turned 16 bred heifers into a herd of 75 cows. We’ve pinched pennies and worked long hours and made loan payments by the skin of our teeth some years. We’ve learned to be good stewards of the land, good neighbors and friends to our fellow ranchers, and good teammates and partners in marriage and business. We’ve created a life we’re proud of.

One we hope to pass on to our kids.

But as I wash the steak knives and put away the lone leftover rib-eye, I wonder if it’s a life they’ll want. While Royce announced at his preschool graduation he wanted to be a “rancher like my dad” when he grew up and was thrilled to receive his very own cow, he wasn’t all that excited about having to help feed cows last Sunday morning. And though he told us more than a few times this winter he’d like to sell his cow and buy a snowmobile, he also asked me on the way home from school last week if I thought 404 would have a heifer this year so he could keep her calf and grow his herd. I try to take the pendulum swings of his interest in stride because he’s 6. He will change his mind about the path his life will take about a thousand times before he’s twenty, and maybe a few more after that.

He might head off to college and study to become a doctor or a teacher. He might decide to build houses like his Papa or operate equipment like his Grandpa. He might fall in love with a big city girl and live the kind of life I thought I would have.

I don’t know who or what my kids will become any more than I know what the world will look like in thirty years when they’re our age. Even if Royce stands by his preschool proclamation and follows in our footsteps, will our pasture land get covered up with houses? Will our stock and irrigation water be diverted to water people’s lawns? Will people (or our own kids) stop eating meat altogether?

Will our hard work, our sacrifice, our legacy mean anything?

As hard as it is for me to face, the reality is that the dream we have of ranching alongside our adult children (and their children, eventually) may stay just exactly that: a dream.

I spent a lot of years feeling like I fell short of my parents’ dreams for my life, but what I realized on Christmas Eve was this: it was never about the path I chose in life. All they ever wanted was to give me the opportunity to choose a life I loved.

Our legacy is bigger than our cow herd or acreage. It’s our work ethic, and our willingness to both help and be helped by our neighbors. It’s the kindness and consideration we show our animals and each other. It’s showing our kids what it looks like to live a life they love, even if that life ends up looking different than ours.

And it’s the hamburger (or rib-eyes) we’ll have in the freezer to share with them when they come home.

Subscribe now

Cara Stolen is a writer, an adventurer, and a semi-professional travel sports mom. Born and raised in rural Washington state, she and her husband, Levi, raise black angus beef cattle alongside their three kids. A life-long runner and outdoor enthusiast, Cara loves starting her day with the sunrise, climbing and backpacking in the Pacific Northwest, and sharing her love of the wilderness with her kids. She believes words have the power to buoy us through the hardest of times, and hopes to make other mothers feel seen with hers.

Photo by Hailey Haberman Photography.

This essay was first published on Coffee + Crumbs.

Hospitality without the hype. Friendship without the filter.

We wrote another book! You’re in Good Company: The Gift of Friendship, Motherhood, and Showing Up mixes personal stories, reflections, and helpful ideas, all based on the belief that hospitality doesn’t need to be perfect to matter. In this heartfelt collection of essays and recipes, we’re inviting you to rediscover—and even redefine—what hospitality can look like in a busy, lonely world. Hint: it looks less like glamorous dinner parties, and more like ordinary grace around the backyard fire pit.

Order You're In Good Company

Every spring, when the perennial flowers begin to bloom, I am filled with a deep sense of sadness.

It’s not the normal reaction, I know, but when the buds start to form on the crabapple trees and the daffodils begin to bloom in the garden bed right across the street from our home, I almost want to skip ahead past the brief window of fresh spring. I don’t like how much pressure I feel to enjoy it all. It’s a sort of blink-and-you-miss-it moment in time, and I recently realized that I’m tempted to just sort of close my eyes and let it pass by me entirely. I love the flowers, but I don’t love the constant visual reminder of how fleeting time is.

I wasn’t always like this. When my kids were smaller, I always made sure we hit all the best crabapple spots in town during the peak of their blossoms. We’d walk down the library sidewalk lined with pink trees, drive through the intersection surrounded by rows of white trees, and ride our bikes under a canopy of the sweet smelling flowers on a bike path near our house. The bike ride started with three kids while my oldest daughter was in school. Then there were two, and for a couple of years, it was just my youngest son and me riding together during the day. He never cared as much about the trees as I did, but he indulged me anyway.

This year, I determined to participate in this spring tradition again, but I was a few days too late. The flowers above me were a bit sad and many of their petals had already fallen to the path beneath my feet. I’d missed them. As for the kids, I’d missed them too.

There’s a Portuguese word for the kind of sadness I feel during springtime: “Saudade.” The word (prounounced sow-DAH-deh) encapsulates a melancholic longing that I find rings a bit truer than “wistful.” The part of the definition that really speaks to me is this: “It often carries an assurance that this thing you feel nostalgic for will never happen again.”1

It’s almost as if the crabapple trees bloom each year and on top of the compulsion I feel to take advantage of their brief floral lifespan, I am also inundated with memories they bring of time gone by. It’s like compounding factors, and even though I’m faced with memories all throughout the year, there’s something about spring that feels, well, spring-loaded. It’s like all those memories have been stuffed into a pressure cooker, and then I’m only given a short window of time to take them all in.

When the tulips bloom at our local library, I am always reminded of the time my husband, Jake, and I impulsively put all four of our young kids in the minivan and drove an hour to the nearest Dutch town, so we could see their thousands of tulips in bloom. Jake had been studying day and night for his medical boards, and when he arrived home after he’d finished his test, we wanted to celebrate in some way. We walked through the town square that night and looked at every color and type of tulip imaginable. We stopped in a bakery for pastries, ran our fingers along the brick walls of the downtown businesses, and watched a group of girls practice a clog dance in the street. We ended the night eating pizza at a wooden park long after bedtime. We haven’t been back to see the tulips since.

When the daffodils bloom across the street, I remember the color walks I used to take with my daughters when they were in preschool. We always made sure to hit up the police station around the corner from our house, so their daffodils could check off our yellow box. While we lived in that neighborhood, our neighbor had a forsythia plant that grew right on our shared fence, and my kids would stand underneath the branches that bent into our yard. My neighbor today also has a forsythia plant, but I can only see the tips of it each spring and find myself wishing it could reach just a little closer. And then there’s the dogwood tree that stood right in front of that same, former house. I haven’t seen it bloom since we moved away seven years ago, but when our neighbor’s dogwood blooms here each spring, I’m transported back in time. Those white flowers met us when we first moved in and greeted us every spring after—a tangible marker of the passage of time. I miss that tree every year.

Last weekend, my kids helped me clear out my garden beds. I paid them each $5 to pull out the dead flower stalks and rake leaves from around the hostas and hydrangeas. And while we worked, I realized that I have slowly gotten rid of almost all of my perennial flowers that bloom only once a season. A few years ago, I dug out all the iris bulbs I inherited, and, not long after that, I got rid of some lilies because the rabbits were intent on consuming all their ground-level buds before I could enjoy them. I kept only the peonies because I love them enough to endure their short lifespan.

The kids love them too. Each year, they help me clip off peony blooms and shake them free of ants, so we can enjoy them inside. “They’re so pretty,” my daughter once said while she passed by a vase on the table. “I wish they would last longer.”

“Me too,” I told her. “Me too.”

Love,
Molly

Our Mother’s Day Gift Guide is here!

1. short pajamas // 2. Beats headphones // 3. lip mask // 4. pickleball set // 5. green aventurine hoop earrings // 6. You’re In Good Company book // 7. Merit flush balm // 8. Offline hat // 9. floral pouch // 10. bra-free dress // 11. bracelets // 12. bow frame // 13. candlesticks // 14. woven ballet flat // 15. planter // 16. pajama party puzzle

Shop the Collection

C+C Faves

The C+C Mother’s Day Brunch is back on May 9th, You’re In Good Company-style. It’s not too late to sign up to host! We’ll send you everything you need: a customizable Canva invitation, menu with recipes, a curated playlist, and 5 x 7 art prints to print at home.

Make iced coffee deliveries waste-free with these compostable cold cups. For poolside dates, these acrylic margarita cups are the cutest. Don’t forget the sunscreen!

BRB, adding this cotton voile blouse to our spring/summer capsule.

“I’m a student of hospitality, really—a product of the many people in my life who have loved me well over the years—and each day gives me new opportunities to take what I’ve learned and do something meaningful with it.” // Lessons in Hospitality by

This blessing binds together hosts and guests, both with gifts to share.

Great gifts for the woman who uses her words: ’s book, Small Steps: Blessings to Life Your Soul on the Pilgrimage of Life (releases Tuesday) and ’s book of poetry, Set the Bone (out now!)

“Why have I always felt the need to be seen as responsible? Why did I think I needed to do something “important”? In the past, did I achieve things to be seen? To be loved? What really brought me joy as a kid—and does it matter?” // The Cottonwood Standing By the Highway by

Books on our (collective) nightstands: Yesteryear, Joyful, Anyway; Lost Lambs, How to Love Your Morning, and our Exhale book club pick, Girl of Lore.

The first printing of ’s book, Girl of Lore, comes with gold embossing and sprayed edges. Grab it while it’s all glammed up!

“Roots grow deep, hidden from view, long before anything breaks through the surface. I wonder if we’ve been conditioned to expect the reward before we honor the effort it required.” // What the Dream Requires by

Exhale enrollment is open! At Exhale, we help mothers create in the margins, together. If you need accountability, encouragement, inspiration, or just plain friendship as you create in the midst of a full and busy life—our doors are open until May 15.

Think of this as the companion guide to You’re In Good Company.

Share the latest episode of the C+C podcast: Carrying the Burden with Her. And don’t miss our bonus episodes: Tweens, Teens, and Tech, Oh My and Women of a Certain Age.

“This is rakhum. And if God chose this wombed word to begin his spoken self- revelation, then perhaps it is there that we should begin the search for an answer to the question: Does God love us like a mother?” // Love Like a Mother by

This Caesar pasta salad is an all-around crowd-pleaser. Make it with Banza pasta for bonus (gluten-free!) protein. These gluten-free, dairy-free brownies taste like fudge and pair perfectly for dessert.

Fun fact: 3 of the C+C team members also work together at Kaleidoscope Kids Bibles! We've got a special discount code for you to use so you can stock up on meaningful resources for the summer. Use code COFFEE10 at checkout for 10% off.

“Fighting for something, being an inconvenience to anyone, making noise about something, none of it comes naturally to me. But then I had Cannon. And you know what, I can learn.” // Defining Word: Advocate by

Tell me you’re 40 without telling me you’re 40—we’re loving this pill box for alllll the vitamins plus this vitamin C serum and these copper peptides.

Moving can be hard for little ones, but this book reminds children that when you’re with family, you are home.

A simple pleasure: color-coded organization.

Know someone who would love Coffee + Crumbs? Feel free to share our work with a friend (you can even earn free months in the process)! ❤️

Refer a friend

I stood in the predawn light of our bathroom with one hand slung around my husband’s waist and the other gingerly holding a freshly used pregnancy test. The three-minute tilt-a-whirl of waiting for results had finally come to a stop, and I now found myself considering the bacterial ramifications of saving the pregnancy test in a Ziploc bag as a memento for posterity.

I was going to have a baby.

Minutes earlier, I had hobbled my very full bladder into the bathroom and ripped open the box I’d so carefully placed on the counter the night before. I had crossed and uncrossed my legs as I squinted once more at the tiny printed instructions on how and when and where to urinate. Never one to play fast and loose with the rules, I’d stopped just short of using a level to ensure that the back of our toilet was actually a flat surface, per the guidance given.

After a deep breath, I’d gone for it. I had counted my Mississippis, started my phone’s timer, and then joined my bleary-eyed husband in the hallway. While we waited, I worked to slow my breathing in an attempt to convince my anxious body that I wasn’t actually standing at the dizzying edge of a steep precipice. When the timer rang out, we’d stood in the bathroom and hugged after a bewildered first and then delighted second look at those two pink lines, and I fell head over heels off the edge into something between overwhelmed and overjoyed.

I wasn’t exactly surprised by the pregnancy; we’d waited five years into our marriage to try. The truth was, I’d felt ready for kids for a little over a year (though, at the time, I would not have known what “ready for kids” was if it had punched me in my well- rested face). But what did surprise me was how quickly the mantle of motherhood settled into my bones— or maybe just into my head, which at that point felt like it was audibly pounding. I had decided, out of an abundance of caution, to give up caffeine entirely, so the headache that consumed me as I journeyed into motherhood was the very first drop in what would become a cascading waterfall of sacrifice and love for my kids.

That instinct to protect the life within overtook me quickly and fiercely. Outwardly, I may have complained about being bereft of so much of what makes this life worth living: soft, unpasteurized Brie on crostini, a glass of red wine on a Thursday night while watching The Office, napping on my stomach at the beach. Yet on some ancient, internal level, I knew that I would happily give up these things forever if it meant my baby stayed safe.

And that is just what mothers do. When those two lines appear on the test, they add up to more than just an addition to the family. In that moment, |+| equals a new life, a new identity. Moms-to-be intuitively begin to check for signs of spotting with each visit to the bathroom; they force down prenatal horse pills and count every flutter and kick. Their lives begin to revolve around the effort to create a life that is happy and healthy for the baby within. In short, their wombs become cultivators of compassion. And God is no stranger to this kind of compassion.

The Wombed Compassion of God

…In Exodus 19, no one would have blamed the newly freed Israelites for picturing a dominant, masculine deity, like those of some of their neighboring cultures. We read that they stood like ants at the base of a mountain that was covered with dark clouds and violently shaking, waiting to formally meet this God who had parted the seas and turned the Nile bloody. We read, “All the people who were in the camp trembled” when God descended on the mountain in raging fire and billowing smoke and thundered the law down from the summit (Exod. 19:16). But fifteen chapters after these first impressions, it’s almost as if God pauses, having gotten ahead of himself, and provides an overdue introduction to his new people. In Exodus 34:6 we find God’s very first self- description of his character in the Bible, and what we read, given the context, is surprisingly comforting and unexpectedly maternal: “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness” (NIV).

The first self-referencing descriptor God uses is compassionate, which in Hebrew carries a lot more intensity than it does in English. The word is rakhum, and it has its roots in the Hebrew word for womb (rekhem), which indicates that the compassion of God, the rakhum of God, is a womb-born, deeply emotional love that time and again moves God to act on behalf of his children. The word conveys the urgency that a mother feels when her baby cries—an instinctive, reflective response that she feels in her body to soothe her baby’s distress.

We read of God’s rakhum for the Israelites when they were enslaved in Egypt. God heard their cries and was deeply moved, urged by his compassion to the incredible acts that led to their liberation. Later, in Psalm 51:1, it was God’s rakhum compassion that King David appealed to when he prayed for forgiveness after wronging Bathsheba:

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love;
according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. (NIV)

It was rakhum that compelled God to respond to the desperate cries of his exiled children later in the Old Testament, saying, “Can a woman forget her nursing child or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these might forget, yet I will not forget you” (Isa. 49:15). With these words, the prophet Isaiah was essentially asserting, “Can a woman forget to ‘womb’ the son of her womb?”1 Perhaps the most stark example of the meaning of rakhum comes in the account of Solomon and the baby. You have probably heard the story; it’s a memorable one. Two women from the same household each had a baby within days of one another. One of the babies tragically died, and an allegation was made that the mother of the deceased baby had swapped the babies in the night, claiming the living baby as her own. Solomon pondered this accusation and declared that the baby should be cut in two so that each mother could take a half.

While the lying mother agreed to Solomon’s ruling, the true mother of the living baby was deeply moved out of her rakhum. Pastor and author Chad Bird writes, “The Hebrew [in 1 Kings 3:26] is something like ‘her wombs warmed,’ that is, ‘her compassions grew hot within her.’ This mother, who had borne this child in her womb, ‘wombed’ him once more. Far from being cold-hearted, like the lying mother in this story, the true mother was warm-wombed toward him. So much so, in fact, that as she told Solomon, she would rather the false mother have the child than that he should be cut in two. Such womb-like compassion is gripping and unforgettable.”2

This is rakhum. And if God chose this wombed word to begin his spoken self- revelation, then perhaps it is there that we should begin the search for an answer to the question: Does God love us like a mother?

is a speaker and author of Love Like a Mother: How the Sacred Work of Motherhood Reveals the Maternal Heart of God. Her work has appeared in Christianity Today, Coffee + Crumbs, Mothering Spirit, and other online spaces where mothers gather to find meaning in the mundane.

She shares her thoughts in her Substack newsletter, , where she explores the image of God in the everyday work of motherhood. Berget has lived in Africa and Asia but now resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her husband, three kids, and one mischievous dog. And yes, she’d love to hold your baby.

Love Like a Mother

People love birth stories—stories of breathing and bearing down and babies placed on their mothers’ breasts. No one wants to hear my story. My story is blood. Blood on my pants, blood on my hands, blood on the walls. My story is saying, “I’m so sorry,” as the nurse pulled pads soaked with ruby red from under my legs and replaced pans full of vomit. The vomit smelled of garlic from the pizza we ate before I started bleeding, before my world lost its color. My story is watching the pulse rate of my baby’s heartbeat slow to a stop. I heard the doctor say, “She’s lost too much blood, we have to go now.” My story is waking up in a dark room and seeing my husband hunched over in a chair. “It’s a boy,” he said, staring at me with bloodshot eyes. My story is carefully unwrapping the blanket around my baby so that his skin wouldn’t tear and holding his eleven-ounce body in my hands. “I’m so sorry,” the nurse whispered when she took him away a few hours later. My story is leaving the hospital empty-handed, my arms aching for the baby who lived inside me for 34 weeks. At home, in the shower, cloudy liquid leaked from my breasts, and crimson blood spilled down my legs. My story is blood and milk and tears swirling together with my dreams of being a mother—and watching it all slip down the drain.

Guest poem by . Laura writes from a small town in Maryland, where she lives with her husband and daughter. Find her online at laurarennie.com.

Photo by .

April is National Poetry Month. Other poetry you might love: Collections of You, Buttercups, Just a Mother, and When I’m 90, I Will Go Here in My Head. Thank you for supporting women and the arts. ❤️

Subscribe now

How do you know when your tween or teen is ready for a device? We aren’t 100% sure TBH, but today we’re wading through questions like this with our dear friend . While Laura possesses around 100 talents we’d love to pick her brain about, today she simply joins us a fellow mom passionate about safe technology use. We ask a lot of Big Questions in this episode—How is technology affecting our kids? How should we help them navigate FOMO? Do kids have a right to privacy?—and none of them have easy answers. At the end of the day, we’re just three moms doing our best (same as you!), and trying to figure this out as we go along. Whether your kiddos are still rocking diapers or currently begging for iPhones, we hope this conversation inspires you to ask the hard questions, listen to your kids with understanding, and research what kind of tech setup will work best for your family when the time comes.

Mentioned in this episode:

• This Side of the Sky by Laura Wifler

• Gabb watch and phone

• Tin Can

• Apple Watch

• Bark phone

• When Should You Get Your Child a Phone? By Laura Wifler, plus other resources

• Ashlee’s phone contract for Everett, adapted from this

• The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

• The Amazing Generation by Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price

• Good Pictures Bad Pictures Jr. by Kristen A. Jenson

• Good Pictures Bad Pictures by Kristen A. Jenson

• Protect Young Eyes

• Bark organization

• Wait Until 8th

• It’s Time to Talk to Your Kids About Porn by Greta Eskridge

• C+C podcast: Talking to Your Kids About Porn with Greta Eskridge

• C+C podcast: Kids + Technology with Jean Twenge

• C+C podcast: Kids + Tech (Our Version)

• Laura’s website

• Laura on Instagram

Read more