Self-care tips for moms.

self-care guide for mothers

Yes, you are a mom.
Yes, you are a partner to your other half.
Yes, you are a career woman
Yes, you are the woman of the house…
But YOUR “ME” needs to be taken care of too. That girl without kids, without stress and so many balls in the air… She is still in there! And she needs your love and attention!

Most moms put their family’s health before their own.  And I am such a mom on occasion. Self-sacrifice is a natural parenting/mom thing that happens instinctively. But Putting Your Family ALLWAYS First at expense of yourself Doesn’t Make You a Better Mom. Actually… It will make you a tired, grumpy, exhausted and stressed mother if you neglect yourself for a longer period. 

We as moms (have to) take on so many tasks, so many roles, so many faces, so many responsibilities that we tend to bury ourselves in it and carry on way too long.

And we can take a lot. We are strong woman, and we can carry on for a long time. But we all have our limits. so before hitting a wall and end us completely exhausted and burned up. Maybe try and find, no, MAKE space for your needs. so you can be the best mom they deserve! A lot of the times the other partner/parent does succeed in taking care of themselves. And that’s wonderful! Take note. Now you!

Some misbelieves that may hold you down:

  • You are NOT selfish for taking care of your mental needs first once in a while.
  • The world won’t crash and burn if you leave others with some responsibilities for a few hours.
  • It does’n have to cost a lot of money.
  • It doesnt have to cost a lot of time.
  • Self-care is not an indulgence, its necessity to stay balanced!
  • You are not neglecting your kids or work. You are actually taking up the responsibility for your own helath!

What is self-care?
The better question is: What is self-care to YOU? All the little things you do that will take your stress away, give you a more emotionally balanced, centered feeling and generally makes you feel happier and give you a more positive outlook on life will count as Self-care.

What makes you happy that you do just for YOU!?
Take a pen and paper and write down what kind of little fun of relaxing activities you would like to do if you had no responsibilities or stress in the world? (maybe even think back to the time you didn’t have children) There is no right or wrong answer here. Are there little things that need to be resolved that are bugging you? make a list. write down what you need to do to take care of your needs.

For some that may be taking a long hot bath and read a book or listen to music.
For others It would be doing Sports, Yoga, painting, or meeting up with your friends and talk, going on a date with your partner, sauna, massage, swimming, writing in a journal, painting your nails! Or maybe all the above! Whatever you can think of that will make you happy, that will make you re-charge. That will get you to exhale for a few seconds and stop rushing.

For moms of tiny little babies making time for self-care will mean relaxing while having your baby near you but in the care of another person. That way you will be “able” to relax without feeling anxious about leaving your baby or checking your phone every 3 minutes.
Never let anyone tell you “you need to be away from your baby to relax” if you feel in your heart and stomach that you just don’t want to leave him/her.

 

It is hard to create space for self-care as a mom

How to find/create the time

  • The little things
    Small little routines like journaling before going to sleep or cooking a fresh meal in peace. Making up your bed every day.
  • Ask for help.
    What do you need to make it happen? A lot of the times someone will need to take care of the kids for a little while! Your partner will need to pitch in! The other parent in your family can hold the fort while you exhale for a couple of hours. For single parents (SO much respect) that will mean you will have to look for help elsewhere. Your Parents, friends, neighbors, parents of your kid’s friends, anyone you may trust and dare to ask for help! Please, people may surprise you! Lovely mama…Take a deep breath… and just. ask. for. help.
  • Reserve a date and time
    Block a space in your agenda for your self-care moment… now block the 2 hours before that time as a buffer. Better yet, plan at least one moment every week as me-time! It will become easier if this turns in to a little weekly/bi-weekly routine.
  • No Bailing on yourself!
    Take away your biggest stress factors, distractions & excuses to bail on yourself in advanced. Make sure that whatever happens. you will take time for yourself!
    Clear the road!
  • Pick it up again!
    And if you fail to take the time for yourself anyway… no worries! Don’t stress about it. That’s actually the very thing we want to prevent! Life happens. Kids can get sick, plans can change. I fail at it all the time! Whatever. The important thing to remember is… just pick it up again as soon as possible. Re-schedule. You deserve to be happy! And your family deserves a happy mom! You matter!

Set the right example!

Want the best for your kids… And how would you like your kids treating themselves as adults later in life!? Lead by example! By showing them that self-care is an important part of life and demonstrating that we all should help each other create space for individual needs they will learn how to take care of themselves and others in a balanced way later in life. And be happier people for it.

 

Love,
Jolanda, Michiel
Miley, Haley & Quinn

33 Self care inspiration list ideas

  1. Go to yoga class once a week
  2. Take 40 minutes every day to journal and reflect.
  3. Go and have lunch with your best friend!
  4. Take a hot long bath and read a book every week!
  5. Take a nap without an alarm clock
  6. take a walk through nature
  7. Craft something
  8. Go swim for fun
  9. Make art
  10. Sing and Dance like nobody is watching!
  11. Go online and learn a new skill using tutorials!
  12. Listen to a podcast
  13. Go to the gym
  14. De-clutter and re-organise your wardrobe or beauty products
  15. Unplug from social media for a day (or at least a few hours).
  16. Go to the spa
  17. Feeling overwhelmed? Create a plan to create order in the chaos! Start with all the small things so the list gets shorter. Then order the tasks from most-pressing to least-pressing.
  18. Pick flowers
  19. Bake something
  20. Cook something delicious 
  21. Learn 4-8-7 breathing
  22. do some mindfulness exersizes
  23. Write down your life goals and dreams and create an inspirational collage to hang on the toilet! (“toilet” a.k.a. safe space for moms…the only place you can run to for some peace and quiet when the kids are around)Get a massage.
  24. Go hiking, camping, or backpacking and spend some time in nature
  25. Go S.U.B-ing (stand up paddle)
  26. Go on a date with your partner
  27. Sleep in
  28. Do some gardening
  29. Take care of your houseplants.
  30. Restyle a room in the house! Change some pillows rugs, blankets, wallhangings and plants. A little bit of styling can make a big change! (search on Instagram or pintrest for inspiration)
  31. Meditate
  32. Spend 1 on 1 time with one of your kids for some quality time!
  33. Plann your next vacation!

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Shoot us mom!

Never let children pose… let them be themselves!

From the moment Miley was born until she was 4,5 years old we had a big photo studio. She grew up surrounded by camera’s, lights, makeup, fashion, and set styling… She occasionally watched the models getting ready and saw me shooting them in our photo studio. She saw them “pose” naturally and make subtle changes in their pose with fluid movements. changing expressions, taking directions from me and all of that without looking forced or unnatural. And she loved it.

As it comes to photo shooting kids, I like them to be interactive. give them something to do, something to engage with, something to play with. Anything but posing! I don’t like kids posing, because most kids (Really, I mean 99%) look forced and unnatural. That kind of photo’s with kids smiling those fake (almost creepy) smiles makes my hairs stand up. Not cool. Just fake.

So whenever I’m shooting kids (my one or any kids for that matter)… I let them play.
I have a strict NO POSING rule.

But… Tiny baby girls turn in to big baby girls! And then that day came, the day when Miley (8yrs) Came up to me dressed a bit much over the top and  Asked me “Mom? Can you shoot me? I’ve made everything ready!”
I looked over and there was my living room turned in to a complete styled set. With 3 different concepts, she wanted to work on!  I was like “What the….!?!? uuuh… Ok!? I guess?”

So we could proceed in peace. After every Klik, Miley made a tiny adjustment in pose, expression or looking direction. I didn’t have to give her any directions. She was totally in control.  Like she understood exactly what it was she wanted to reflect, express and what story she wanted to tell. I felt a warm proud glow in my heart for her. What a great way to express yourself.  There goes my “NO posing rule” for her… She has got this down.

 

Turned out she had a school project where they had to take their favorite piece of clothing, make a photo of it, and write a little poem about it. She wanted to create a photo she had pictured in her mind. (Creative little creature) So who am I to refuse such a brilliant initiative from my 8-year-old.

I grabbed my camera gear and as she stepped in front of the camera. Wow! She is actually doing a really good job posing! Not one Photo where she looked unnatural or overly posed. I guess she intensively studied the professional models in our studio! My little baby copy-cat. Loving this…

After a few minutes, her little baby sisters decided they wanted attention too, and started to jump on top of Miley… So I had to promise them that I would shoot them too tf they waited their turn. And If they would go and play a bit more I would call them and take their picture.


As for her sisters… The rule still stands. No posing! PLAY! Once I called them for their turn to shoot, I gave them something to keep busy! Singing a song,  playing peekaboo, giving them a ukelele or a watering can to play with. And as usual, that way I had a fun and playful shoot with my two babies. And my no posing strategy still worked out worked perfectly fine with them! Scroll all the way down to see the rest of all the photo’s we took!


How do you take pictures of your kids? I’m thinking of making a series of DIY video’s in photography toppics like “kids photography” .
Would you think that’s something you would like to see? Anny requests on specivic photography toppics!?


Love,

  Jolanda, Michiel,
Miley Haley & Quinn

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Getting a greener home

Energy friendly home
Living in a small home of only 50 square meters (=538 square feet) is one of the choices we’ve made to be more sustainable as a family. But because this is a home build in 1952, the Insolation was not what we wanted it to be. So in the last couple of years, we made some big steps in improving the insolation of our home.

For instance, we got double glazing in our windows in 2014, we insolated the roof back in 2017 (watch this dutch vlog from back then), and Insolated the crawling space under our home in 2018 (see this Englisch vlog), and we have LED lighting in our home.

This whole process is really expensive so we are taking one step at the time and every single change is taking us a little bit closer to our eco-friendly home dream.

Next steps we hope to take very soon:
-Insolating the double brick outside walls.
-Energy management system to track how much we use.
-Solar panels.
-Floor insolation.
-Heat pump hybrid system. (And Floor heating to make it more effective)

Because we are just a bunch of hippies on an eco-friendly mission Eneco asked if we were interested in a collab with them. So we did! We visited another family who is a few steps ahead of us and already has a lot of the eco-friendly solutions we are dreaming of in their home! Oh my! We are loving it!

And they had such a great family with two lovely little boys and a playful dog. We had a great time with them.
We were invited to stay for dinner so we did! Tiny little bummer to see all those throw-away plastic take-out containers on the table, but I guess our eco-crazy hippie standard is next level for most people. And they were certainly more energy-friendly than us! We all do what we can. baby steps.  So we all enjoyed the food and the lovely company.

Eneco made a lovely video of our visit! (Sorry, it’s only in dutch) You can check it out down here:

We went back home feeling inspired! Hopefully some day in the near future we get to have that energy-green home we are dreaming of. Until then I’m just making it greener with all of my plants!

Love,
  Jolanda, Michiel,
Miley Haley & Quinn

Oh, and p.s. Thanks for the levely flowers Eneco! So thoughtfull love it!

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Slowing Down! – Recap 2018

Happy new year everyone!

Time is flying by and everything is going so fast.
Treasure every second!

Here is an overview of our treasured memories of the year 2018. We hope you had a great year and a wonderful new years eve.

May 2019 bring you all the love and happiness in the world!

Love,
  Jolanda, Michiel,
Miley Haley & Quinn

Music in this video is by:
Meydän – https://soundcloud.com/meydansound/

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About this Curveball…

Uncertainties are scary yet exciting…

Normally we like to share our highs, but we do hit some low’s along the way, just like everybody else. So let’s get real. So here is one huge bump in the road we are dealing with right now.

The beginning of 2018 brought us stability… Something we haven’t had in quite a while. I didn’t have any pregnancies or newborns this year in our family of 5 (we think our little family is complete now) and we had a stable income through our Wedding photography (If you were wondering… this is what we do). No crazy sh*t happening around us. Just a nice day to day routine and all was good. We finally got into the flow of balancing work and family.

On top of that my Instagram and this blog started to generate some income too! We had some pretty awesome collaborations amazing brands. It’s still not enough to stop doing weddings (not that want to stop doing weddings, weddings are awesome). But it was enough to let all the photo and video editing after we shot the wedding days over to Michiel, so I could focus on investing my time on creating content for this blog, the vlog, and my Instagram!

-“And then came Oktober… Oh my. What a curve ball!”-


The curveball

Things were pretty amazing!

And then came Oktober… Oh my. What a curve ball!
Our stable income was not so stable anymore.
The short version: We don’t have enough weddings in 2019 to keep ourselves afloat! So we need to make some adjustments. We need to push ourselves out of our comfort zone once again.

To fully understand what happened I need to explain it a bit more:
It takes us 2,5 week to process all the photo and video images of just one wedding. We do a maximum of 18 weddings every year. We don’t have room for more. 
The summer month we survive with the income of the weddings, the winter months we survive on the down payments for the upcoming weddings and the orders of wedding albums of the past wedding season.

We reach 90% of our clients through the biggest wedding fair in Holland. We participate two times a year, and then we are fully booked.
No need for online ads, campaigns or another form of advertising.
But this year, the wedding fair of October was a complete fail. Where normally there are on average 5000 visitors, now there were only 1000. We got ZERO bookings from that fair this year. Something that has never happened before in the last 5 years. And on top of that, the fair of March 2019 is canceled. The whole fair stopped. Forever!

-“looking back afterward it always has been exactly the way it should have been. We just didn’t know it yet at the time.”-

So now we have 4 weddings booked for 2019, Wich generates not enough to get us through this winter, or the next summer for that matter. so we need to get familiar with online advertising. But oh’my… its all sooo complicated and time-consuming learning process. And we don’t have the time, we need bookings like yesterday.

 

So Now what!?

I’m positive that we get this online advertising thing down soon, and we’ll get enough bookings for the upcoming summer. But until then, we have a bit of a financial problem. So one of us needs a job somewhere for the upcoming 4 months. On “project base” or for a longer period of time if we like it enough. And with “we”, I mean preferably Michiel. I want to stay focused on creating our content and keep the inspiring Wild&BOHO collabs going! I’m only selectively applying to jobs that I would LOVE to do so much, that I would maybe ditch all other stuff and stay working there forever! And there are not so many vacancies out there that will get my attention. I’ve written 3 so far. Michiel 5 and counting. We’ll see…

-“It’s not a curveball… its a Pusch in the right direction by the universe.”-

I’m stressing a lot about the What If’s.
Our reserves are running dry and something needs to happen soon! The uncertainties are taking its toll. Images of every imaginable scenario are going through my monkey mind. The never-ending chatter of my internal dialogue who sometimes gets stuck in a carousel… Going round and round in circles. Pointless and exhausting. We are doing our best here, there really is nothing more we can do.

One of my goals for 2019 is to just let the universe do its thing.
I’m going to do the best job I can, work my but off, and then I’m going to let it go. No stress. Trusting everything will be fine. Because looking back afterward it always has been exactly the way it should have been. We just didn’t know it yet at the time. This is a chance to grow, evolve, move forward instead of getting stuck in the same pattern over and over again. It’s not a curveball… its a Pusch in the right direction by the universe.

Our glass is half full. We have love, we have each other, we have our creativity, we have a nice home. We’ll pull through. 

-“Because of you this blog and our Instagram has started to become a way to support our family”-

So if you reached all the way to this point in the blog, I want to thank you for reading!
You are here not only for our best moments but apparently also here for our struggles.
Thank you for being there for us, for following our blogs, watching our video’s, checking out our Instagram posts and by leaving a comment now and then. Because of you this blog and our Instagram has started to become a way to support our family a bit! Maybe one day we can fully focus on creating art and cool content full time! We appreciate your support so much. So Thank you Thank you Thank you!

Have a Wonderful New year’s eve! We love you guys!

Love,
Jolanda, Michiel
Miley, Haley & Quinn

 

Blog post: Jolanda Marti
Photography: Michiel Fook

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