I used to be VERY passionate about sleep training. I sleep trained Jadyn (my oldest, who's now 19) I remember reading the Babywise book, which explains you feed your baby every few hours on a set schedule and put them down for naps awake instead of nursing or rocking them to sleep. The idea is that full feedings during the day mean they don't need to eat at night. Plus learning to fall asleep on their own means they can settle themselves when they wake up. As a young mom who was worried about losing sleep, I thought it sounded great! A baby sleeping through the night early? Count me in!

I found it was pretty easy to implement with Jadyn. She was a mellow, go with the flow baby who went on the schedule naturally and slept through the night with little fuss. When pregnant with Poppy and on our babymoon in Santa Barbara, I reread Babywise and decided that we’d get Poppy on this same schedule too. It would make everything seamless, and I could jump back into work the way I was planning to. Easy right? Wrong!

I did everything the book said. I was so concerned about her getting the right amount of milk at the right time that I would pump and feed her the pumped milk (extra work for no reason, I know, I know) at set hours. It had worked for Jadyn, so I thought it had to work for Poppy too. She slept in a bassinet for the first couple of months in our room, and when she was around three or four months old I moved her down the hallway into her own room and crib. Co-sleeping wasn't something I'd even consider. All the schedules recommended babies sleep in their own bed and fall asleep on their own, no rocking and certainly no nursing to sleep. Bad habits! I would think, as if my baby would be using nursing as "a crutch." I thought I just needed to be more scheduled and start the day at the same time and wake her up from her naps to get her on the same nap schedule daily.

Every night I kept the baby monitor on my night stand, and when I heard her cry I'd run down the hall to get her, always in the biggest fog. It took so much effort to get out of bed and get to her. Anthony and I got so little sleep. I was so set on her sleeping through the night on her own, but some nights we'd cave and try bouncing her back to sleep. I was so confused about why she wasn't sleeping through the night that I thought I must be doing it wrong, and wondered why it had felt so simple with Jadyn. I remember being exhausted, trying to work and keep up with everything on four to five hours of sleep. I'd read mom blogs about babies on Babywise who fell right into the routine and never needed to be nursed to sleep. Their babies seemed relaxed and ready for bed, which made me feel even worse about it all. Meanwhile I was always asking what Poppy should be doing, whether she should be sleeping now or eating now, instead of going off of her cues. I would research “sleep regressions” and how we could skip them (as if a 4 month old had read the book and just needed some reminding). There was so much information that it felt like I was failing all the time.

So by the time I was pregnant with Elliott, we said there was NO WAY we were doing the schedule with him. I kept thinking back to simpler times, before anyone had written a book on how to sleep train a baby. What did moms do then? They wore their babies and kept them close. I wanted it to feel simple and practical for us. Scheduling definitely works for some babies (it worked for Jay!), and maybe I’d feel differently if Poppy had done well with it too, but if Elliott was going to be anything like her it was a hard no. So I donated my baby scheduling books. What we did instead gave us the best sleep we’d ever had with a newborn, and it made us want to do the newborn stage all over again.

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For about four years I made it a daily habit to keep up with my TikTok scrolling for "viral research," to save the sounds I kept hearing over and over, find the videos that were doing well, and figure out how to put my own spin on them. If I jumped on a trend early it had a better chance of taking off. Chasing virality was the formula that was working for me, and reach was all I cared about back then, which I explain more in my recent post Is the Influencer Era Dead?. When I first started going viral I was posting twice a day on Tiktok, then it was once a day consistently, and I kept that up from 2020 until the middle of 2024. The first post that really took off was me sharing my story of being a young mom, and from there it was styling outfit transition videos, then the funny videos like me “acting like my Gen Z daughter”.

I gained so many followers from that stretch and for a while it felt like I'd cracked the ever elusive algorithm code. But the people who came in from those videos were there to be entertained. They’d comment “I followed you from the Gen Z video,” and I’d think well, that was one video, and most of what I post is nothing like it. They’d followed for the funny videos and were waiting for the next one, and if my next post didn’t also go viral, most of them were never going to see it anyway because of how the FYP was structured.

When a video did well I was happy that all the research, planning, filming, and editing felt worth it, and when one didn’t I’d get down on myself, like the hours I’d spent creating and editing were pointless because it didn’t get the views. I tied it back to the feeling when I would get an A on a research paper in college, that I did everything my professor was looking for and got rewarded with the grade. This was of course completely different but it felt like my performance was tied to views and creating for what I thought other people wanted to see and it left out the part of building a deeper connection with my audience. At that time, going viral was the thing that helped boost someones account and set them apart from other creators, got them ins with brand deals or shot up in fame that opened other doors, there were many how-to create viral video tutorials and many others were thinking there has to be some secret to this and if they could only crack the code. But I’m here to tell you, viral is a poor game plan. Sure, if you create something that was true to you and it resonates with many people, thats one thing but creating for the idea of going viral can be left in the past.

It took me awhile to get to this point, after years of trying to stay on the “viral train” it’s hard to get out of that mindset. The part that would keep popping up in my head was remembering why we started our blog in the first place. When I quit my job to pursue blogging full-time (more about that in this post) it was to have the time to work on it during the day and also to be there for Jadyn for after school pickup, and somewhere along the way and in those most recent four years I’d started to feel like a slave to the content and that this job was owning me. Anthony and I would have these conversations, this feels draining and pointless, if we’re only looking at it from the money side we could do something else to make money, it didn’t feel like I’m helping anyone. At the same time it’s also not that deep, it’s videos and photos. But I felt like it could feel more meaningful, especially with having to stay motivated to want to keep creating, I lost my why. I wrote about our move to Tennessee and the season that led up to it in these posts here so I won’t go through all of it, but that’s where the real change happened, when we stopped and asked ourselves how we wanted to live and how we could keep doing this at a pace we chose and why going viral is the last thing I want now…

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I’ve been in this space since 2013, which means I’ve been through different waves of people saying it’s over, or that it’s not a long-term plan, and lately it’s being talked about more than it has in years. There was a Vulture piece called “The Influencer Recession,” about aspirational content losing its grip and creators turning to what the writer calls brand-safe rage bait just to get seen.

Jennings’ argument is that this is a supply problem. Too many people want to work in the attention economy, and attention runs on supply and demand, so the formula that worked ten years ago, post something aspirational enough consistently enough and an audience finds you, has stopped working. She points out that individual creators are now competing against clipping farms, companies paying people thousands of dollars to flood platforms with clips, which means an average post has almost no chance of reaching anybody new. On top of that, the aspirational stuff reads as tone deaf now, and luxury has gotten too common to signal anything, with one creator telling her that everyone has an Hermès these days. So people are reaching for rage bait instead, because anger still moves. She's right that it's happening, but I don't think it's a great strategy (more on this later).

NPR followed in August with an episode titled “The influencer era is dead. What’s next?” And talks about streaming as what comes next, and brands buying their way into the background of somebody’s live stream, then paying clippers pennies to spread those moments around. That’s the billboard model again, just cheaper. I’m no streamer, but when it comes to fashion, beauty and lifestyle brands, that’s not what I’m seeing. Brand budgets were at their wildest around 2020 and they’ve tightened since, but the deals didn’t disappear, they got selective. Brands are being much more careful about who they work with, and what they’re asking for isn’t eyeballs anymore.

I started my blog right after we got married in 2013, called Thrifts & Threads (my then IG handle too), thrift store finds mixed with whatever was already hanging in my closet. I loved fashion but we were also doing Dave Ramsey’s envelope system to pay off our credit card and student loan debt, so I didn’t have much extra to spend on my clothing budget, and finding cashmere or leather at a thrift shop and styling it was how I grew my blog. I was so excited when a brand reached out wanting to send me an item to feature in my email blast, because I could get the clothes I loved without increasing my clothing budget, and when another blogger told me I should be making a rate card and charging for those features and getting paid for my time, my mind was blown. This is was my first rate card:

My husband and I got really strategic and were so consistent, working on the blog on the weekends to make sure we had posts ready for the week while we were at our corporate jobs. Once I started making a little money at it, I also had a weekly section about how to start a blog and grow on Instagram, and my email list ended up being those who wanted outfit ideas plus other potential bloggers trying to build their own site.

I packed up my desk of my corporate marketing job at an insurance firm, in June of 2015, right as Jadyn got out of school for the summer. The blog had been outearning my salary for six months in a row and I wasn’t planning to leave if it hadn’t. I remember standing there thinking I really hope this keeps going, because it felt so freeing, no more late nights and weekends working on the blog, now I could be productive during the day with it! I also didn’t want it to be a failure and I didn’t want to waste the momentum my blog had going as my readership kept going up and that helped book even more blog post jobs. My CEO and CFO at the time were so supportive but I’m sure were a bit confused about what I was doing, because at the time I put in my notice I had 50k followers on IG and they were shocked it was making me money but also happy for me. I drove home that day thankful and completely determined to stay consistent and help people even more than I had been. Anthony left the following year after the business matched his salary six months as well.

Quitting meant I could pick Jadyn up from school and she no longer had to do the after school care, and it was the first time I ever felt like I had a flexible job to be there for her. She was eight and loved my blog because in her mind that’s why I was there every day at pickup.

We kept posting and focusing energy on hitting the Instagram algorithm to increase my followers, and every week I’d watch the numbers go up when I posted specific photos at certain times of day. I’d post ripped skinny jeans holding a coffee on a Thursday evening and it would do so well. I knew exactly what to post and when, and I’d hit some kind of flow.

I won Breakthrough Blogger of the Year at the 2015 Bloglovin’ awards and got my first agent for sponsored deals, and every deal we booked made us more excited that we’d made the right call going full-time.

My first designer fashion show was Chloé, fall 2016. And I only got invited because I’d bought one of their bags and worn it on repeat and kept using their #chloegirls hashtag, and someone in their PR office noticed and invited me. I’d never even been to Europe before; I had only recently traveled out of the country for the first time ever for our honeymoon. Anthony said well, we’re going, we have no clue what we’re doing but we’ll figure it out! They sent me an outfit and bag to wear to the show, and I sat in there certain I wasn’t supposed to be there, because my blog was called Thrifts and Threads and this was designer fashion. But I was so inspired, already thinking about getting home and writing up the trends I’d seen and the outfits I’d worn. That trip was where we figured out we loved traveling and loved not being tied to an office, and it made us want to work even harder to keep the whole thing going.

Nobody paid me for that bag. I bought it, I wore it constantly, I tagged it, and a person at Chloé happened to see it. That was the entire mechanism back then, and nobody was measuring anything. It was all happening organically, and I was very excited that I had saved up for that bag, believe me I was going to be posting it everyday!

The early deals were blog traffic and email inclusions, then Instagram got added on, so it was a blog post plus a grid post. When Snapchat and Stories showed up brands wanted the daily check-in, you walking through your day on video, and I was terrible at it. I’d been shooting outfit photos in sunglasses for years and suddenly I was supposed to talk to a camera without them, and I felt so awkward. I forced myself to get over it and learn it anyway, because you either evolve or die in this business. A deal by then was a feature plus a post plus stories, sometimes all three.

I only got on TikTok because of Jadyn. It was her favorite app and I didn’t understand it at all, so she’d sit and show me videos, and what I noticed was that I was barely seeing any fashion on there. That looked like an opportunity. I started in 2019 and was posting from the shows in Milan and Paris that March, right before COVID hit, and it opened doors to brands I wouldn’t have reached otherwise. Then the pandemic came, with everyone stuck at home the whole thing took off, and I gained millions of followers in a few months. At one point I was posting two TikToks a day, heavy on outfit transitions, and the editing ate hours because of all the clips, and that was on top of Instagram photos and the blog (which by then had become brittanyxavier.com). Everyone was trying to crack the code on going viral and brands were paying whoever managed it. Something had to give, so we stopped posting on the blog and put everything into video. We also grew my YouTube channel to over a million by focusing on strategy for that. Audiences followed whoever was most viral then, and brands paid for my reach.

But something began to happen…

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I walked into the ADU (where we set up her room so she has her own space for the summer) out of habit, said "Jay," and then it hit me, she's not here anymore, and I got emotional in there. All summer that was my little routine, poking my head in to see if she wanted matcha, or to come along for whatever I was doing that day, and the kids were always running in there to find her (usually waking her up much earlier than she was planning). Now it's quiet, and I got so sad standing in it, her bed was neat and she left her room all organized.

We just got back from dropping Jay off in Boca Raton for her sophomore year at Lynn University. This letter is the whole weekend, an hour into a 13-hour drive and she's on the wrong freeway, the dorm room rearrange, and the goodbye in a hotel lobby that got all of us teary eyed...

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While I was pregnant with Clive, I'd be out somewhere and people would ask me if this was my first, and when I'd tell them he was my fourth and that I'm 39, I'd get a surprised look. Then they'd ask the ages of my kids and get even more confused when I said my oldest is in college, because I couldn't possibly be "that" old. So it had me thinking… when is it too old to have a baby?

Is it external pressure about the age? Is it because I had Jadyn so young that I was always considered the young mom, and now I'll be considered an old mom?

I get asked this a lot too. People message me saying they’re worried they waited too long, or that they’re 37 and their doctor said something that scared them about being a geriatric pregnancy, or that they’re not old enough, 24 and everyone around them telling them to wait even though they’re married and feel ready.

If you’re new here, Jadyn is my oldest and I had her when I was 20. She turns 20 herself this January. I was a single mom until she was 3 when Anthony and I met, and by the time we got married and settled into life together she was 6. Then Anthony and I waited 8 more years to have a baby together. Poppy was born when I was 34, Elliott when I was 36, and Clive this past May at 39. There’s 19 years between my oldest and my youngest, and I’ve been on both ends of it, 20 with my first and 39 with my fourth.

So I'm getting out all my thoughts on it, what having a baby at 20 was like versus 39, where that geriatric label came from, and when I think it's too old.

(Also, my trying to conceive series has everything I did to help me get pregnant, and how I prepped for a healthy pregnancy and birth at 39)…

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I get messages about this almost every week now. People tell me they would love to get out of the city, and then they ask how we decided, whether we regret it, what the hard parts really were. So I'm writing it all out here, everything I'd tell you if you sat down across from me and said we're thinking about doing this too.

If you're new here, a little of how we got to Tennessee. Anthony and I both grew up in Southern California, he's from Fullerton and I'm from Glendora, and we first met in Claremont after we both graduated college. We got married in 2013, moved in together, and spent our first years in apartments, most of them in Pasadena. We could walk to coffee, we ate out more nights than we cooked, and we never once thought about a yard because we didn't have one and figured we could always take Jadyn to the park when she wanted to play outside. We had started the blog but were both working full-time corporate jobs, so on our off time we would shoot outfits in downtown Pasadena and LA. Over the years building the blog then social media, it turned into a very fast-paced lifestyle, which meant events and shoots and enough travel that once Poppy came along we had a nanny to make any of it possible. It was a full life and a good one.

We bought our first house in 2020 in Pasadena and renovated it while we were living in it (more about that in this post here). A couple of years later we found another one in a quieter part of Pasadena that we thought was going to be our forever home, so we sold the first and moved into another apartment while construction started. Construction was taking longer than expected, so we moved into a rental house in San Marino that also had a tiny yard. Our "forever" home was still being renovated when we welcomed Elliott at that rental, and having two little ones now changed our priorities. I wanted to slow down and be with them more, and I was also learning to cook because I wanted them eating nourishing meals and not takeout all the time like we were used to.

Around that same time Jadyn started looking at colleges out of state, when we had always assumed she'd want to go to school in California, and something about seeing her want to explore another part of the country made Anthony and I start asking each other some real questions. If we could make an intentional decision about it, was Pasadena where we wanted the little ones to grow up? Or would we want to be somewhere we could have land? We had never had the chance to move before, we'd thought about New York when Jadyn was in middle school and couldn't do that to her mid-school-year, and now the main reason we hadn't moved was letting go on its own. Long story short, after contemplating it for quite a while, with our list of whys and praying about it continuously, we decided to move out of California before that house was finished. It was completed after we were already living in Tennessee and we sold it last fall. (I wrote the whole story of that here).

We've been here for almost a year and a half, and this is what I'd want you to know before you make a move like this:

Get specific about what kind of country you want. We wanted “country-ish”, because country means very different things to different people. We’re not in a truly small rural town, and we’re not trying to be fully self-sufficient the way I’ve seen other families do so beautifully. That’s not us right now and it might never be. What we wanted was land with a garden and (some) animals, while still being close enough to a city that we could get on a plane easily or go out to dinner or see a concert if we wanted to. Franklin Tennessee ended up being exactly that mix. Nashville is right there when we want it, the airport is easy, Green Hills with luxury stores is twenty minutes away, and then we come home and there’s nothing but our own yard and quiet.

We looked at other places first. I fell in love with Carmel CA and we thought about it for a while, but land there was expensive and there were enough restrictions on what you could do with it that we didn’t think it would work for us long term, and water was a real question mark. We looked at Dripping Springs in Texas and liked quite a bit about it, but the drought concerns were an issue, and if the whole point was growing food and maybe animals eventually, we didn’t want to be fighting for water to do it. That’s what pulled us toward Tennessee. Rain, real seasons, land you can plant in, and a city close enough that we never feel cut off from anything.

We found Franklin because of friends. I had been to Franklin once when I was younger, around thirteen I think, our family friend had moved there to work with Christian bands and we went to visit. I remember thinking how green it was, but it wasn't built up then the way it is now. Anthony had never been to Tennessee at all. Then our friends Stevie and Sazan Hendrix were planning to move from Texas to Tennessee, and we were visiting them in Texas when they said wait, you should come see Tennessee, we just bought a house there! So we flew out that fall, and I don't know how much of the decision got made in those first few hours downtown, all the red trees, everything so quaint and homey, but I remember walking around and thinking I could see us here. We came back a second time once we'd decided, this time to look at houses, and we spent part of that trip an hour outside Franklin looking at places with a lot more land. We drove away from those knowing it would be too remote for us. We also realized we needed to rent first to figure out which part of Franklin we wanted to be in, we still weren't sure how many acres we'd want.

Rent for a year before you buy. If I could only give you one piece of practical advice, this is the one. We rented a historic house built in the 1860s on thirty acres, and I fell in LOVE with that property. But it was in an HOA, which meant there were rules about how often you mow, what your fence posts had to look like in the front of the house, and you couldn't have any animals outside besides horses. That year taught us we didn't want to be in an HOA, especially once we knew chickens weren't allowed. It also taught us we didn't need thirty acres, a garden takes so much less than that, but we still wanted enough room for privacy and for the kids to have space to run. We would have gotten both of those wrong if we’d bought right away.

The quiet will be harder than you think. When we moved into our rental on land here, I would lie in bed those first nights straining to hear something, anything, and there was nothing, and it was so dark. In California I had stopped registering sirens and traffic years before, and I guess I didn’t know how loud my life had been until it was silent. The stars were amazing though, that part I loved right away.

You’ll miss your old routine. For weeks it didn’t feel like we had moved at all, it felt like a long trip somewhere new, the kind where you’re still figuring out which grocery store you like, and then the last box got unpacked and I stood in the kitchen thinking, now what? Back home we had our coffee shops and our routes and ten years of memories around every street, and here everything felt like starting over. I missed my old routine until I got into my new one.

Your kids will need to un-learn the city. This one caught me completely off guard. At our rental house in California I had always told Poppy she could never go outside by herself, cars came around that corner too fast, and she learned that rule so well that when we got here, all that grass and her toys sitting right outside the door, she wouldn't go out alone. She wanted one of us standing next to her. It took months of saying you're okay, we can see you from the window, before she believed anything had changed. Nobody tells you that you don't just move your kids out of the city, you have to un-teach them the city too, and watching Poppy and Elliott slowly figure out that they could run out there without us was really sweet to see.

Making friends takes longer than you'd like. We knew a few people when we moved but it all still felt unfamiliar. I remember thinking we have friends, we just moved away from them, and now we would need to be open to meeting new ones too. We kept showing up at the same places until we stopped being “the new family”. For us that was church and one little coffee shop we kept going back to. Our neighbors invited us to their Fourth of July party that first summer and I walked home from it feeling like we finally had people here, not just a house. We have our people now, and the funny thing is that once I stopped worrying about it, I realized how much I love a quiet night at home too. We have friends over and it's so fun, and we're just as happy when it's only us.

You will lose a version of yourself. I wasn’t prepared for that at all… (the full post continues below for my Substack family)

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Eight weeks already, and I keep thinking about how different this feels from those first newborn bubble weeks when I couldn't do much more than stay on the bed and nurse. The thing I've loved most lately is being able to pick up Poppy and Elliott again, scooping them up for snuggles, helping them with something, carrying them when they need me. For weeks I felt so limited, standing at the bottom of the stairs waiting for Anthony to bring them down to me, and now I can just reach down and lift them up like I used to. Elliott keeps asking me, "better now?" because I always told him that when I'm healed and better I could pick him up again, and even though I've picked him up quite a bit by now, he still asks me every time. I just laugh and tell him, yeah little man, I've been better for a few weeks now.

Our days have more of a solid routine now. Clive usually nurses then goes down around 9 or 10pm, then wakes around 2 or 3am, then again around 5 or 6am, and after that he sleeps until 8:30am. He was in my bed with me for a while, but we recently set up his crib in my room right next to my bed, so Poppy and Elliott can sleep in our bed when they want to and Clive is still close enough that I can grab him easily in the night. We go to bed around 9:30pm, so even though I’m getting up in the night I still feel rested, I haven’t felt too tired this way. Usually I’ll nurse one side, then change his diaper and nurse him on the other. The times I’ve skipped the second side and laid him back down, he’s woken up so much sooner, so I try to do a full feeding every time he wakes, which gets me more sleep in a row after.

In the mornings Anthony works out first while I do the early feeding, and then we switch. He takes Clive so I can go get my own workout in with red light therapy, and he starts breakfast with the kids. We come back in and all do devotion together over breakfast, and then for the past five weeks we’ve been heading to ISR (Infant Swim Rescue) lessons. When we get back it’s lunch, and the afternoon is when I’ll get on the computer, film, or work in the garden, depending on the day. I’m wearing Clive for most of his naps. I’ll either wear him until he falls asleep and then lay him in his crib, or if we’re staying inside I’ll just keep him on me because he sometimes sleeps better that way. But if I’m going to be out in the heat, I like to put him down in his crib so he can get a solid nap. I really just go off what he’s doing. I don’t stress about what time he sleeps or where he sleeps, as long as he sleeps, that’s the most important part.

Back to ISR, because it's been a whole thing these past weeks. When we first started, both kids were screaming and crying and they didn't want to do it, they were scared of the water, especially without their swim vests on, (our instructor had us get rid of the swim vests after the first day since she said they teach kids a false sense of security and put them in the wrong position for learning to swim). Those first three days were rough enough that I wasn't sure it would be like this the whole time, but then something switched. The lessons are only ten minutes each so they're quick, but they're going every day and seeing the same instructor, and they started understanding what to do, and the quicker they did the amount of swims required the quicker the lesson would be over, and then they started having fun with it.

Now Elliott cries when the lesson ends because he wants to keep swimming! Which after that first week of tears is not something I saw coming, but so proud of them both. We've been having good talks with them about how good things are often hard, as much as we can explain it to them anyway. Poppy understands it more than Elliott does and it's been a sweet little lesson for all of us.

I'd been resting and taking it slow for weeks now, wondering the whole time if it was doing anything, and yesterday at my postpartum check with Shannon I finally found out…

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There's a moment in recent mornings, before the house is really awake, where I take Clive outside with me and the sun is just coming up and it's still cool out and the birds are going, and it's so peaceful that I sit there for a little while with the light in my eyes. I'm standing in the middle of eighteen garden beds with my coffee, trying to remember which things need harvesting and which will need to be rotated out soon, thinking about the seeds I want to start, admiring the wildflowers….it's my favorite way to start the day. Back in California our mornings looked nothing like this. We'd make eggs or run out for breakfast burritos from Erewhon, and we spent almost no time in our own backyard. It's funny, when I think of California living it seems like I should have been outside all the time, but we were always on the go, in the car, off to places, in the air conditioning on hot days.

I think about our house we sold in Pasadena sometimes, and the flowers growing in the backyard were so beautiful, but the lot was mainly on a hill and shaded by these gorgeous old oak trees, not much sun all day in the flat areas I would have needed for garden beds, and looking at it now I know my garden never could have thrived there the way it does here. And we certainly couldn't have had chickens for our own eggs. It's strange to realize how much of our life has changed in a year and a half…

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A month in with Clive, and the thing that keeps surprising me is how settled it all feels. After my home birth and my healing I wrote about in Two Weeks Postpartum and Three Weeks Postpartum I went into this one bracing for the chaos of three littles, that pulled-in-every-direction feeling I remember so well from before, and it hasn't come. These first weeks have been calmer than any postpartum I've had, and it's taken me a while to figure out why, because it isn't that three littles is somehow easier than two. I think it's that I'm so much more go-with-the-flow this time, I'm not stressing over the little things I would have with the others. I heard a mom say once that the more kids you have the easier it gets, and I never thought that made much sense, but I'm starting to understand it now.

We took Clive’s one month photo with this little milestone marker the same way I did for all the other kids, and he’s just lying there so still. We have videos of Elliott from right after he learned to roll where I’d lay him down for his monthly photo and he’d immediately flip over and start scooting out of the frame, and you can hear me laughing because there was no getting him to stay, and I know that’s coming for Clive too.

Our days move around him the way they do when they’re this small. I’m still nursing pretty constantly and he loves to be snug in the baby wrap for his naps, which I loveee because it means I’m hands free and can get around the house with him close. At night he nurses even more before he’s down around nine, then he’s up again around two, and again around six, and some nights a little more depending on how he’s feeling, but the thing I love most about nursing is that it soothes every situation, it doesn’t matter what he’s crying about or where we are, nursing solves it and that has made everything so much easier. I took him to an event the other night for Divi and he did so great, slept through most of it, and the second he started to fuss I sat down on the couch and nursed him and he was happy again, it was really sweet.

I'm also nursing what feels like every two hours all day, and now that I'm moving out of that early resting mindset and trying to get back into a routine, it can feel all consuming. I'll get him down for a nap in the wrap planning to get something done, and then he's up and ready to eat again and the list I made in my head just doesn't happen, and I'm learning to let the to-do list be slower than the old version of me wants it to be. But all that feeding is doing exactly what it's supposed to, he's a total chunk, he went from the 74th percentile up to the 96th, and he's 12 pounds now at his one month check.

Although I keep calling Clive, Elliott. I’ll be talking to him, or asking one of the kids to grab me something for him, and Elliott’s name comes out, and Jadyn does the same thing, we keep catching each other doing it and laughing, like how do we keep doing this out of habit, I think some part of me is still catching up to there being a new little boy in the house.

Poppy and Elliott couldn’t be more different about him. Poppy will hold him, but only when she’s sure it’ll be quick and he won’t fuss, and the second he makes the smallest noise she’s handing him right back…”Mom, he needs you, I think he’s hungry”, she takes it so seriously and can’t relax until he’s back with me. Elliott is the complete opposite, he wants to hold Clive all the time and be near him constantly, and it’s the sweetest thing how smitten he is even though he still has no idea how strong he is. I lay Clive out flat on a blanket by the window in the playroom so he can stretch out and look outside, which he loves, but the second Elliott’s up from his nap…that’s over, because he’ll come straight for him to try to poke at him or scoop him up himself.

We pulled our first real harvest out of the garden this week too, and I made a ground beef pesto pasta with steamed greens from it, and there was something about sitting down to a dinner knowing most of it came from right outside our door. It's a small thing, but it's the kind of moment we were hoping for when we moved here, and I don't take it for granted.

And then there are nights like this week where all six of us somehow ended up piled on my bed together. Poppy and Elliott had their little figurine horses out doing all the voices, “Hi, my name is horse” .., and Jadyn had Clive resting on her, and I just sat there in the middle of all of it trying to take a mental picture of it, because I know what this is, everyone still little, everyone still here under one roof (while Jadyn is home for the summer from college), and it won’t stay this way.

We were over with Anthony's family the other night, and his sister asked us, do you guys want another baby?…

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Last week, I shared the emotional side of these first weeks, and I promised I’d come back with all the specific things I’ve been using and loving the most, so here it is, three weeks in, what our days look like now and everything that’s getting me through…

The time is flying, and three weeks already doesn't feel possible. I'm up and moving around a little more now, baking something here or there and straightening up, but I'm still trying not to be on my feet for long stretches.

(These cowboy cookies didn't last, I'd made a big batch while I was pregnant and froze them for postpartum, but everyone ate through them in the first week, so I made more yesterday. So good!)

We had a few rainy days this past week, and they helped me mentally, because I knew I couldn't be out doing things anyway, so there was nothing to feel guilty about. It's the sunny days that get me. I'll look outside and think, okay, it's beautiful, I need to be productive, and then I have to talk myself back down and remember that this slower stretch is exactly what my body needs.

Our days have a small routine now even if they blur together a little. I nurse Clive until around 6am, and then he'll either go back down for a bit or, if he seems up, Anthony will take him out so I can get a little more rest before the other kids are up around 7:30. The one thing I'm strict about is getting all of us outside first thing to get that morning light in our eyes. After that Anthony makes us smoothies and then coffee while the kids play for a while. I recently got them a sand kit (perfect for a rainy day inside) and a little outdoor pool that have been saving us while we haven't left the house much, and they love the mini pool because they fill it with their toys and play like it's a little bathtub. Then it's back to nursing on my bed or in the chair. Later we'll all go out to the garden for a bit, where the kids love playing with the chickens, and I'll sit out there until Clive starts getting too sweaty and we head back in.

One morning this week was the first time I felt how far I've come…

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After my home birth experience I felt more prepared going into postpartum than I ever have. Two weeks in and it's still managed to surprise me…

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This is my fourth baby and I've had all different types of births. My first was a c-section, my second was medicated in the hospital, my third was unmedicated in the hospital, and this was my first home birth. This birth moved even quicker than my last and my midwife missed it by ten minutes. I get into all of that in this post…how it all went and my overall thoughts about the experience.

Let me back up for a second because to understand why this experience was so different for me, you have to know where I started. With my c-section I had just turned twenty and the doctor made it seem like it would be an easier route, and I thought so too, but the recovery was terrible even for me being so young. It was an elective c-section, not medically necessary, and I had no idea what I was agreeing to. I knew I never wanted to do that again. The recovery process was downplayed and the worst of the pain was after Jadyn was born, not during, and not being able to lift her and having staples was the hardest part.

With Poppy I really wanted to have a VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean) and my doctor at the time kept pushing a scheduled c-section, even though fourteen years had passed and I wasn't high risk for rupture based on my scar type. She kept finding reasons to talk me out of it, even telling me at one point that Poppy's head was too big and I'd most likely need a c-section anyway and wanted to refer me to a specialist. When I looked up the specialist and read the reviews saying he almost always recommended c-sections, I knew I needed to find a different doctor. I ended up leaving that practice at eight months pregnant to find someone who would be open to me trying, and I found one who believed in me and listened to what I wanted. I had a successful medicated VBAC with Poppy but I almost didn't make it to the hospital in time to get the epidural. I begged one of the nurses, told her I'd sit still during a contraction. I wasn't mentally prepped to do it without. I got the epidural and everything slowed down, I couldn't tell if I was pushing when they told me to, and my legs being numb after was something I didn't like. The recovery wasn't nearly as bad as the c-section but I definitely felt more out of it after, and I never considered going unmedicated at that point, absolutely not. That thought didn't even cross my mind… until Elliott.

Then with Elliott it seemed to go from zero to a hundred quick and by the time contractions were getting intense we were frantically trying to get things together to leave for the hospital. I had him at 38 weeks and assumed I'd have until 40…so no hospital bag was packed. By the time we got there I had the urge to push and they told me right away there was no time for an epidural. I was so mad at myself because I knew we'd left too late, I'd told myself I wouldn't do that again after arriving too close with Poppy. The panic of knowing I'd be doing it without lasted about a second, because the nurses told me to get into whatever position felt right and kept telling me I could do this and it would be quick. And they were right. I was free to be in any position I wanted, I could actually feel myself pushing, and I felt way more in control than I expected. It was intense but it was over fast, and the moment he was born I could feel the relief of it that I hadn't felt the same way with an epidural. I felt amazing afterwards with no numbness having to wear off and Elliott was much more alert than Poppy was too. The cramping after was uncomfortable because you can feel all of that right away, but it gave me the confidence that I could do it again. It wasn't like I had originally thought it would be. Where the epidural slows things down, going without it lets your body do what it needs to do without anything getting in the way, your body takes over and knows what to do. After Elliott I started thinking differently, not just that I could do unmedicated again, but that the hospital itself was starting to feel unnecessary for how my births were going. The scariest part of that whole experience wasn't the birth, it was the rushing to get there in time and not feeling safe in the car while I was in active labor.

With how quickly things had progressed I knew that unless I got to the hospital when contractions weren’t painful yet, that was really the only way I’d make it there in time, and I didn’t feel like the hospital did much for me with an unmedicated birth anyway. I knew I could do it at home with a good team and an emergency plan in place, and moving to Tennessee made that feel even more possible. Out here anyone who’s pregnant, you ask them who their doctor is and it’s always “I have a midwife.” It’s very common here to do a home birth, so much so that there’s a popular clinic that’s hard to get into and I was told the moment I got a positive pregnancy test to call and get scheduled, otherwise they book out. They wouldn't take me because I was a VBAC, which gave me a weird feeling at first because I've done it before, I know how my births go, I just needed someone trained in VBAC in case of rupture. I was referred to Shannon, who was also hard to get into because she was in high demand, but she takes on higher risk cases for people like me who get turned away from some standard midwife clinics. I talk more about her credentials and how she helped me prep for labor in the posts linked here:

1. Everything’s Different This Time

2. What I Changed After My Last Midwife Appointment

3. My Midwife’s Labor Prep Plan (and What I’ve Added on My Own)

4. My Midwife Home Visit: The Full Plan, My Labor Kit, and Postpartum Essentials

The day before he was born, I was almost 40 weeks when I went in for what I hoped would be my last prenatal checkup. Everything felt so heavy and the pressure was very low, I knew things were close. But when she checked on him his heart rate was much higher than normal, which can be a sign of stress…

(the full post continues below for my Substack family)

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For three years we talked about growing our own food and having animals and this spring we're finally in it, and it hasn't gone exactly as planned. The baby is almost here, Jadyn moves home soon, and this month I'm getting personal, including some things about who I'm becoming that I'm still figuring out…

I'm keeping the rest for my Substack family. Full update below, and this one picks up where my Very Personal Reflection on Our First Year in Tennessee left off:

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If you missed my last pregnancy update I'd love for you to check it out as this is a follow up, (but this one stands on its own too). I went to my midwife appointment yesterday and one of the first things she told me was to stop drinking something I had recently added to my routine. I'm sharing what it was and why, what she has me drinking instead, the new prep she's added to my birth plan, what she's assigned both Anthony and me to read before this baby comes, and a faith based birth method I had never heard of until yesterday that I'm already diving into. Sharing it all in this post for my Substack family:

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A year ago I was wondering if we had made a huge mistake. Now I can't imagine living any other way, and it's not for the reasons I expected. God has been in every detail of this year, some so perfectly timed they still give me chills. How it felt to finally close the California chapter, the reality of those first weeks in our new home, the morning routine that changed everything for me as a mom, why I stepped back from the content I was known for, and some new beginnings for our family I haven't shared here yet...

I’m keeping the rest of this update for my Substack family. The full one-year reflection continues below for subscribers. Check out my eight-month update if you missed that:

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This is a very personal pregnancy post. Between my c-section with Jadyn and barely making it to the hospital with both Poppy and Elliott for VBACs, I've never had a calm birth story. This time everything is different and there's a specific reason for that. I get into all of it here. What I found out about my body that changed this entire pregnancy and the birth plan we've chosen and the team I've put together and how I'm testing and preparing differently… sharing it all in this post for my Substack family:

And if you’re interested in how I prepped for a successful (and quick!) home birth, check out these posts here:

What I changed after my last midwife appointment

My midwife’s labor prep plan

My full plan for labor and postpartum essentials

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At 2am Saturday night we woke up to what sounded like gunshots. It was trees exploding from the weight of the ice, their branches crashing against the side of our house as they fell. We lay there in the dark, not sure what we would find the next morning. Welcome to our first Tennessee winter storm!

We went through our first real ice storm this past weekend and I think because we were really prepared, it wasn’t as bad as we thought. Which is good. But I learned so much about weather that I had been completely clueless about during all my life in California.

There’s this IG account that everyone here follows called Nashville Severe Weather, and in the days leading up to January 24th they were doing constant updates and live YouTube streams breaking down exactly how bad the ice would be. That’s when I first heard terms like “freezing rain” and “exploding trees.” I had no idea these were even things. Back in California, sometimes my deliveries would get delayed and I’d see a notice that said “due to bad weather” and I’d just think, huh, I guess there’s a winter storm somewhere. I had no concept that there were so many more ways weather could go wrong beyond just snow or rain. Turns out snow is the fun fluffy part. It’s the freezing rain that comes afterward that creates real problems, coating everything in ice until tree branches can’t hold the weight anymore.

For my Substack family, the rest of this post is all the details. How we prepped, what each day looked like, what worked and what we’d do differently next time…

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This month brought endings and new beginnings, and a few moments I don't want to forget. I'm keeping the rest of this update for my Substack family. The full December update continues below for subscribers. Check out my November update or October update if you missed that:

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I took a few days offline and came back to headlines I’m still processing. I have more questions than answers right now, but this is why I love this space exactly for that… sometimes I just need to get my thoughts out. I’m keeping the rest of this for my Substack family. The full post continues below:

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I got teary eyed in front of our new house this weekend. Not because anything was wrong but because I could suddenly see it all so clearly, the life we’re building, the memories our kids will carry with them. This week was full of moments like that. In this post I’m sharing everything from our Thanksgiving menu and what I’d do differently next year, to reflections on turning thirty nine and what this decade has taught me. Plus all the little details from our week with visitors, birthday celebrations, and why I’m feeling more settled than ever heading into the last year of my thirties..

I’m keeping the rest of this update for my Substack family. The full post continues below:

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