3 in 30 Takeaways for Moms

Last week, Dr. Lexie Kite gave us tools for our own body image resilience. But there's a particular kind of helplessness that comes from watching your child struggle with theirs. It can be heartbreaking to hear them say something and not know what to do with it. This week's guest is my Communications and Podcast Manager, Steph Wood, who has done deep personal and practical work in this area and br...

I have spent so many summers halfway out. Physically present at the lake, the pool, the family barbecue — but mentally somewhere else entirely, cataloguing how I looked instead of actually living. If that sounds familiar, this episode is for you. This week's guest is Lexie Kite, PhD, co-author of More Than a Body and leading expert in body image resilience. Lexie and her twin sister Lindsay have s...

My kids are 11 and 14, and I will be the first to tell you that teaching them practical life skills is not my strongest suit. I am genuinely good at the emotional work, the hard conversations, the staying connected through difficult seasons. But the cooking, the chores, the keeping-a-home-running piece of parenting is an area where I know, with great compassion for myself, that we have room to gro...

There comes a point in parenting where you realize the approach that worked when your kids were little just doesn't work anymore. The rules, the structure, the ability to redirect and reset — it all starts to feel like it's slipping. And if you have a teenager, you might already know that feeling well (iykyk 😅). The older our kids get, the more we bump up against a humbling truth most of us weren...

All of us have hard feelings that need somewhere to go — frustration, resentment, grief, the anxiety that just sits there and won't quite leave. And if you're anything like me, finding a reliable way to process any of it doesn't always come naturally. We push through, or we vent to someone who didn't necessarily sign up for it, or we just wait for the feeling to pass on its own. And sometimes it d...

There is a specific kind of worry that lives in the back of most mothers' minds —the worry that we're not doing it right. That somewhere in the gap between who we are and who we wish we were, our kids are absorbing something we never meant to give them: our unresolved stuff. Our triggers, our patterns, the things from our own childhoods that we're still working through. Is all of that making its w...

I have been a striver my entire life — the kind of person who color-coded her notes, lost sleep to get straight A's, and genuinely believed that doing more and finishing faster was just who she was. Until the season when it didn't work anymore, and I found myself wondering if what I actually needed wasn't a better system, but permission to put some things down. This week's guest is Yvette Henry, a...

Happy 3 in 30 Day, my friends! Today is March 30th — which, numerically, is 3/30 — and years ago I dubbed this our national holiday. When I started 3 in 30, I did not set out to build a community. I was a busy mom who desperately wanted a parenting resource that would just get to the point already — and when I couldn't find one, I sat down at my kitchen table with a cheap microphone and created it...

Spring is a season I genuinely love, but it also has a way of sneaking up on me. One minute I'm enjoying the slower pace of winter, and the next I'm looking at my calendar wondering when it got so full. If you're coming off of Spring Break trying to find your footing again, or you can already see Maycember on the horizon and feel your shoulders creeping up toward your ears, this episode is for you...

Last week, I found out that one of my kids' teachers unexpectedly lost her husband in a car accident. She's in her early 30s with a toddler, and when I was telling Ryan, I just started to cry. I don't often cry, so it surprised both of us a little. The truth is, I was crying for her — and for all of the heaviness that has been building in my heart for months. The political division, the internatio...

I didn't learn until I was 40 years old that my body moves through four distinct phases every single month — and that each one of those phases affects my mood, my energy, my patience, and my ability to connect with the people I love. Which means that the version of me who felt so present and empathetic last Tuesday wasn't just "having a good day." And the version of me who snapped at everyone befo...

A year ago this month, the travel and motherhood world lost Elise Caffee — blogger, adventurer, mother of three, and the woman behind the hashtag "take the trip." Elise believed, down to her bones, that making memories with your kids was always worth it — the chaos, the cost, the exhaustion, all of it. This episode is for her.   This week's guest is Tiffany Rosenhan, Elise's dear friend, co-author...

A few years ago, I read a book that made me think it was reading my mind. In the introduction, the author asks: Do you ever feel like you're running faster but not moving any closer to your goals? Do you want to make a higher contribution but you lack the energy? Are you teetering right on the edge of burnout? I wrote, "Yes, yes, yes!" next to each question in the margin of my copy. The book is Ef...

Right now I am definitely feeling the pull to simplify things in my life. I even said to my husband the other day, "I feel a bit like I'm on a runaway train!" Luckily, it's not the first time I've felt this way. I now know that this happens sometimes and life will suddenly accelerate faster than I intended. But here's what I've learned: I'm not actually on a runaway train. I can choose to get off....

It's easy to notice when your marriage feels disconnected, but it's much harder to know what to actually do about it. And it's even harder to look at your own part in the dynamic instead of just wishing your partner would change. This Valentine's Week, I'm bringing back one of my favorite conversations with Dr. Jennifer Finlayson-Fife, a relationship and sexuality coach whose work has profoundly i...

Six weeks before I recorded this episode, I woke up early with my heart pounding so hard I couldn't ignore it. The house was dark, everything was quiet, and as I lay there thinking about the medication I was on, the surgeries I'd been through, the pace I'd been keeping, this thought came to me so clearly: This is my life. No one is going to fix this for me. I am the one who has to change this. I w...

If you have a strong-willed child, you know how much energy they require—and if you have other kids too, you've probably wondered what this dynamic is doing to their siblings. Are they getting lost in the shuffle? Will they resent their brother or sister? Will they resent you? Many parents worry that their quieter child is fading into the background while the spicy one commands all the attention....

I stood at the stove the other night, and in the span of ten minutes, I was asked where the charger was, where the batteries are kept, and where the headphones went. And I thought, why am I the only person in this house who knows where anything is? It's not that my kids are incapable. It's that my home isn't set up in a way that lets them help themselves. Everything requires me—finding things, rem...

I recently sat down to reflect on 2025, and I was honestly shocked by how much lighter my life feels now compared to just a few years ago. I'm not talking about having less to do. I'm talking about releasing the weight of expectations that never fit me in the first place. The guilt over my son's screen time, the pressure to have my spiritual life look a certain way, the belief that I had to maximi...

A few years ago, I was sitting in a coffee shop feeling completely overwhelmed by all the things I thought I should be doing better—as a mom, as a wife, in my work, in every area of my life. My brain was foggy, my to-do list felt impossible, and I couldn't shake the feeling that I was failing at everything. So I grabbed a pen and started writing—and three questions emerged that helped me cut throu...

It's mid-December, everyone's running on fumes, and your child just screamed "I hate you." And even though you know it's the exhaustion talking, it still stings because you're killing yourself to make the holidays special, and this is what you get in return. The truth is, the holidays amplify everything: the excitement, the overstimulation, the meltdowns, and yes, the hurtful words our kids don't...

As the days get shorter and the cold settles in, I can feel the pull to just hunker down and survive until spring, and I have to consciously choose not to give in to it. Maybe your winter is the literal season, the dark mornings and the gray stretches that feel endless. Or maybe your winter looks different—a season of grief, a transition you didn't choose, something in your life that just feels st...

It's December, and if you've been feeling like you're running on fumes, snapping at your kids over the smallest things, or desperately craving a dark room where nobody needs anything from you—you're not the only one! The holidays bring so much beauty and connection, but they also bring overstimulation, dysregulation, and that version of ourselves we don't always recognize. The one who gets sarcast...

You know that sting in your chest when one of your kids says "I hate you" or slams their door in anger? Every instinct in you wants to smooth it over, to fix it, to make them not be mad at you anymore. But what if your discomfort with their anger is actually getting in the way of the connection you're trying to build? In this episode, I'm talking with my longtime friend Eli Harwood, known online a...

You know that feeling when you're completely tapped out—when you can't give one more ounce of yourself to anyone, including you? That's not just exhaustion. That's burnout. And it doesn't mean you're failing at motherhood. This week is Thanksgiving 🦃, and for many of us, that means facing all the "lions"—family dynamics, cooking timelines, travel stress, and that never-ending holiday mental load....