If you have a kid who is going to be using technology this year, you want to listen to this podcast. We are talking about technology and tweens and teens as well as some of the pitfalls and pluses you can expect.
Some things we include in this podcast:
Erin talks about her past as a social media Luddite and tells a little about the path that led her to become a reformed technology convert.
How group chats are like the Wild West of the internet
The potential trap of creating a technology contract
Things to say when you give your child their first piece of personal technology
How to use filtering software as training wheels for technology
We also want to put resources right here in your hands right NOW so you can pin or bookmark them for whenever you might need them.
Some posts we have written about technology and kids:
We are adding the following guides because THESE sites are where your kids hang out online. Follow the guides to educate yourself and make a plan with your kid about how your family will treat technology.
In this election year, the art of talking politics, policies, plans, and ideologies seems to be on life support. Name-calling and mudslinging are the opening volleys to “discussions” that are frequently ended with broad brushstrokes like “All Republicans/Democrats are insert-your-go-to-insult-here.”
Why are opposing opinions met with such venom? Take a moment to think about it. We mean really think about the end game. Do we want everyone to agree with us? There can’t be checks and balances if everyone is kumbaya-ing, and that can lead to some scary ideas breeding and gaining momentum.
Would it surprise you that we align along different party lines? That we have discussions and disagreements, yet we still run a business together and maintain a friendship? We’re going to guess, or at least hope, you’re not that surprised at all. We know sensible discussions have to be taking place around the kitchen tables and fire pits of America far away from the click bait media headlines and sensational commercials.
So which parties are printed on Erin and Ellen’s voter registration cards? You’ll have to click over to the podcast because we gathered around the microphone to have our own conversation.
What else do we discuss?
How headlines that make awful inferences are still awful even if you don’t like the candidate.
How party affiliations should not be used as insults.
Voting across party lines.
When members of your family affiliate with a different party than you.
Happy listening! But beyond listening, we welcome your opinions. We have started a Facebook Group so that you can not only hear our conversations, but be a part of them. Click here to join.
-Ellen and Erin
Find us on iTunes! Listen to us on Android! We like the Podcast Addict App. Or click here to see a catalog of all of our episodes! Follow our podcast board on Pinterest where we pin our episodes!
Well, it’s official—autumn is here. Although fall is just as likely to punk us as shower us with pumpkin spice everything, we still love it or, at the very least, have to live through it. Sure, jam-packed schedules, rushed meals on the fly, and school’s many demands threaten to take us down, but we have learned a thing or two.
Step 1: Mutter under your breath, “This too shall pass.”
Step 2: Repeat Step 1 often.
Step 3: Rock the life hacks that keep our families afloat instead of drowning in the carpool.
Click the image to enlarge.
To hear the conversation–or maybe brain dump is a better description—where we lay it all out for you, just click the player at the bottom to hear our latest podcast. We give up the goods about all the tricks and practices that make our lives work.
Now we mention some really great stuff in this podcast, and since we’re nothing if not helpful, we’re hooking you up with a bevy of links. But you should consider these links the breadcrumbs to lead you back to where you really want to be: listening to our podcast. That’s where it ALL is.
1) We wax awfully poetic about our love for crockpots in this podcast. Two of our favorite crockpot recipes are Apricot Cranberry Pork Tenderloin and French Country Chicken. We get really excited about these, so seriously, go check them out. Now, we don’t mention these other recipes specifically, but we have a whole slew of yummy crockpot meals so if you want more, have at it. We highly recommend it.
2) We also mention a favorite recipe planning book that we both use. Once-A-Month Cooking Family Favorites: More Great Recipes That Save You Time and Money from the Inventors of the Ultimate Do-Ahead Dinnertime Method Shwoo, that’s a mouthful. Just click on this Amazon link and buy it now. Yes, we get a teeny tiny compensation, but we promise to throw that penny in a fountain and wish happy thoughts for you. If you don’t end up loving or using this book as much as we both do, re-gift it to your sister-in-law. She’s awesome and busier than you anyway. She’ll think you’re a genius for thinking of it.
But you’re probably going to want to keep your copy and buy your sister-in-law a new one because we have a Sisterhood Secret for you right here. In an unusual turn of events, Ellen took organization to a new level and created a coordinated menu of eight of the recipes with a complete shopping list for them all. Yeah.
3) We also introduce you to this great gal named Alisa who blogs at Mondays are Forever because she introduced Ellen to the Keep app from Google, our newest tech crush. We might get a little excited talking about this in the podcast. Bringing everything full circle, you can input the menu shopping list mentioned above, and just use it over and over again. Worth checking out, no?
And if you need more of a teaser, we share the do’s and don’ts of carpooling, the school supplies we ALWAYS have in our stash, and a little more about how we juggle all of the balls and why we do it.
Homework on the fly.
Intrigued? Interested? Desperate to hear a little something funny with a side of sensible?
Well, click that player at the bottom and hear our podcast.
So anybody who has been a parent more than fifteen seconds knows our little secret . . . parenting is really hard sometimes. Today’s modern landscape of social media combined with the threat of school violence makes it even more so.
The conversation is pretty serious this week as we discuss Erin’s attempt to parent through an actual threat of school violence. The conversation is an important one not just for the two of us, but for all of us as parents in this brave new world.
Please listen to our two differing views on the topic, then please feel free to join the conversation here or on our Facebook page.
In the interest of full disclosure: everyone is fine and nobody was harmed, but it is an incident that plays out often in our country, so we thought it was worthy of a soundbite.
Just click the podcast at the bottom of the post! Thanks again for listening!
Are you hiding in your closet? Or are you hiding from your closet? Might be time for a radical change with a dramatically simplified wardrobe. Simple is good, right? Keep saying it and you might believe it. Ellen isn’t quite buying it yet either.
So what is this capsule wardrobe you ask? It’s basically just the latest catch phrase for cleaning out and paring down. It’s been around for a while, but we first read about it on Dallas Moms Blog.
Caroline of the blog Unfancy describes it as “a mini-wardrobe made up of really versatile pieces that you totally LOVE to wear.” She recommends maintaining a 37 piece wardrobe: 15 tops, 9 bottoms, 9 pairs of shoes, 2 dresses, and 2 jackets.
Wh-wh-WHAT?!!!
Addendum: As our friend pointed out, this is 37 pieces per season. But still.
Ellen might have a long way to go. Her closet looks like this:
Even after she took out this much stuff:
Erin might actually be most of the way there:
But we know it can be done! We have a friend who has actually succeeded at this. Read all about how Binkies and Briefcases did it here.
And now listen to what we have to say about it in our latest podcast. Just click the player at the bottom of the post!
Erin: That one put a whole different spin on mean girls. I found the dynamics of group psychology . . .
Ellen: Wait! That’s not what I wanted to talk about! I know you are Queen of the Tangents, but I’m going to borrow your scepter for a moment. I want to talk about an article Megan recommended to me.
Erin:Whoa. Clearly you are excluding me from a group of friends I REALLY want to be a part of. Hook. Me. Up.
Ellen: Well, she recommended it to me and 8,000 of her closest friends on Twitter. I saw her handle in her bio and jumped over to check her out. There I saw a link to this article that has been bouncing around in my head ever since: Shutterbug Parents and Overexposed Lives.
Erin:Those are some interesting points to ponder brought up in that article!
Like: “Are shutterbug parents wiping away their mental databases of experiences with their offspring while bulking up their digital ones?”
Ellen: And this one: “When children grow up reviewing thousands of pictures and hours of video of their young lives, will these images supersede their memories?”
Erin: So many questions, so much to say. This feels like the perfect time for a podcast.
Ellen: True that! Listen to what we have to say and tell us what you think in the comments. My husband and I are going on a trip of a lifetime to Paris with our kids and I’m wondering if I will have enough nerve to limit my shutterbug impulses.
So, what level of shutterbug are you?
Would you be able, or even willing , to limit your picture taking??
For those of you keeping score at home we are both bursting at the seams with teens and tweens. Please send reinforcements in the form of Diet Coke and chocolate. Scratch that. We’re trying to be healthy. Just send lots of happy thoughts our way.
We jest, but there’s truth here too. These years leading up to and including the teens can be challenging for you, your kids, your sanity, and your bottom line. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a guidebook or ten to help you navigate these unfamiliar and sometimes hostile waters? How about some Sensible Sisters to talk you through it?
Well, we’ve got what you’re looking for! We are not promising that these books will solve all your problems but they are great guideposts to help you through the tween and teen years.
And if you need your middle school advice soundbite-sized, listen to our podcast at the end of this post!
This is a parenting book that frankly anyone who spends any time around any boys age 11 through 18 needs to read. With over 200 interviews with boys and strong research guiding her conclusions, Wiseman draws the adolescent boy in sharp relief and gives us not only a true picture of the more complex lives of boys, but some ways we can help them through the next few years.
Our favorite insight? We do boys a disservice by dismissing their emotional lives as simple when they most assuredly are not. There is even a free e-book for boys themselves to read about what to do in difficult situations.
Wiseman is kind of a superhero. Or a superstar. In any case, she has written a book that can save you and any special boys in your life.
And Wiseman works a similar magic for girls. Erin read this book when she first started teaching middle school and it fundamentally changed the way she looked at girls, their friendships, and their struggles with each other and themselves.
Wiseman offers sage, sound advice for how to guide girls towards treating themselves with dignity and grace and treating each other fairly, but there is so much more than that in this book. Understanding girl power plays, how boys fit into the big picture of girl relationships, and the different roles girls play really helps anyone who knows or loves an adolescent girl guide her to her best, most authentic self. Thanks again to the wonderful and very wise Wiseman.
We often scribble pearls of wisdom from what we’ve been reading. This quote from this book has become Erin’s talisman over the past few years:
“As our lives speed up more and more, so do our children’s. We forget and thus they forget that there is nothing more important than the present moment. We forget and thus they forget to relax, to find spiritual solitude, to let go of the past, to quiet ambition, to fully enjoy the eating of a strawberry, the scent of a rose, the touch of a hand on a cheek…”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys
Michael Gurian shares his larger vision of how culturally we are failing boys by not acknowledging and thus not meeting their biological and spiritual needs. We both love books with a strong scientific bent that are also easy to read. This book meets those criteria and yet exceeds expectations too. It will be a beloved helpmate on the hormone highway you are now traveling.
This is a riveting read. Honestly. Bursting with excellent, updated scientific research about how girls develop, how their brains work, and how this all affects how girls relate to themselves and each other, this is as unputdownable as nonfiction gets. Ditto everything we said about The Wonder of Boys but yet uniquely wonderful in its own way. Magic.
Anyone who has been anywhere near a middle school lunchroom knows that The Drama Years is the perfect title for a book about girls navigating the difficult tween years. This book is one of the best for helping you and your daughter through it.
Haley Kilpatrick is the founder of GirlTalk and she is on a mission to end the drama and change the outcome for our nation’s young women. Sharing her own personal anecdotes from middle school and drawing on conversations with middle school and high school girls about what actually happens and what helps, Haley Kilpatrick has created a book with real insights and a clear path for helping. You will love the real, honest talk and the great, usable advice.
We have already recommended this book so many times that we’re out of digits to tell you all the reasons we love it. But here are five.
First, Michelle Icard establishes herself from the very first page as a woman you can trust and want to share this journey with you. Warm and empathetic, Icard is also funny and real. You’ll wish you could invite her over for tea or, in Erin’s case, Diet Coke.
Second, as the creator of Athena’s Path and Hero’s Pursuit, social skills camps for middle school boy and girls, Icard has tons of real, practical solutions to share for lots of common middle school issues.
Third, we love this book’s central theme of shifting your parenting to the role of assistant manager. It’s such a recognizable, perfect metaphor for how your role needs to change during these years and she explains just how to do this perfectly.
Fourth, one of the best pieces of advice Erin ever received about parenting this age was to remain neutral when receiving information. Icard has given a great name to this strategy, “Botox Brow”, and she weaves in stories, examples, and advice for how to pull off this essential coping skill.
Fifth, Icard likes kids, even middle schoolers. We have that in common. She shifts the paradigm and the assumption that there is something wrong with kids at this age. Kids are just fine, but the way we have been dealing with them at this age has to change. She then goes on to give a ridiculous amount of ways to do help do this.
Honestly, we could go on, but you should just fire up the old credit card and order this one for yourself now.
So there you go: a collection of parenting books to keep you company through the next few years. Short of an endless supply of calorie-free chocolate, it’s the best option.
Of course, another great option is to listen to us talk a little about our experiences with middle schoolers.
Our question this week is how to flip the switch that will change your couch potato cake-gorging ways. We talk about Fitbits, food plans, and Ellen brings some hard core doctor advice.
What can help you flip your switch? Just hit play on the soundbar at the bottom of the post.
Now you were promised the recipe for stuffed pepper soup, but we’re going to give you even more. Here are THREE recipes you can make at the same time. If you’re browning one pound of ground meat, you might as well brown two and have dinner and lunches done for the whole week.
You can follow the links to the fully printable recipes, but here are Ellen’s tips for assembling the soup, Mexican casserole, and Greek beef at the same time.
When making these recipes all at once, Ellen typically uses one pound of extra lean ground beef and one pound of extra lean ground turkey.
She browns the turkey with the onions and peppers for the soup in her soup pot (because it cooks with very little fat draining off). She cooks the beef with the onion and the pepper for the Mexican casserole in a skillet. She drains both separately and removes her quarter cup of ground beef for the Beef with Greek Yogurt Sauce. but then returns half of the turkey to the skillet and half to the soup pot. She does the same for the beef, trying to get more of the peppers back in the soup pot.
She then proceeds with all three recipes. It’s a lot of cooking, but then you have dinners and lunches for days. So worth it.
Now these recipes weren’t the only resources mentioned. Another tool we talked about was this little guide that is so very useful for planning what you are going to eat when you go out:
Now while you can easily get this awesomeness on Amazon for under $9.00, Ellen mentioned another book that is unfortunately out of print: The Skinny: How to Fit Into Your Little Black Dress Forever by Melissa Clark and Robin Aronson. So since you can’t easily buy this for yourself, we’ll share the two philosophies in it that first helped Ellen “flip her switch.”
1. Eat what you want and banish the guilt. If you really want a food, there is a portion and a way to work it into your day.
2. You can indeed eat a few bites of something decadent, like cake, enjoy each bite, and know that there will be bites of cake in your future. You don’t have to consume it all right now.
Keeping these two philosophies in mind are a great way to supplement a diet plan so that you can kick boredom, bingeing, and guilt to the curb . . . along with your fat pants.
By the way, we were raving about the positive reinforcement our Fitbits give us. We both have Zips. You can look at the details and buy one here:
Three years ago, we asked the question that started it all, “What’s a blog?” We have been sharing stories from our test lab of parenting ever since. Ever wanted to hear some of those conversations for yourself?
Well, look who’s talking now! Check out our “What’s New” on the blog—our new podcast.
Welcome to the Sisterhood of the Sensible Moms Soundbites!
Click this to hear our very first podcast!
Stick Around! There are more where these came from!
Parents Guide to Youtube
by Rosalind Wiseman
by Rosalind Wiseman
by Michael Gurian
by Michael Gurian
by Haley Kilpatrick
by Michelle Icard
