Finding Joy in Your Home

After the longest podcast break I've ever taken, I'm finally back! In this episode, I'm sharing where I've been, why I disappeared for over six months, and what God has been teaching me through a long season of transition, rebuilding, and learning to love a quieter life offline. I'm talking about our family's move, settling into a new home and community, healing after a hard year, stepping back fr...

In Part 1 of this series, I asked the question: Can you really raise a large family well? Welcome to part 2. I'm the oldest of four kids, which, in my mind growing up, did not feel like a large family. But apparently… it was and is especially now! People used to ask my mom if we were all from the same dad (which was always baffling because we all look like clones). And now, looking back, I realize...

I originally wrote this article in April and I'm finally getting around to publishing it. I'm about to place 5th Azure order and it indeed has already made a huge difference in our budget (see the bottom of the article)!  Over the years, I've developed quite a system for storing and cooking out of a bulk pantry. I routinely buy 25-50lb bags of dried goods and cook almost everything from scratch. N...

  If you've been feeling stressed, weighed down, worried, or just quietly unsettled lately… this is for you. I've walked through cycles of this myself over the past few years. Since 2020 especially, it has felt like a constant hum beneath everything, an undercurrent of tension that never quite goes away, especially when one is chronically online. And somewhere along the way, I realized I didn't wa...

Rediscovering God's design for family in a world that sees children as a burden I have mostly been off of social media entirely since early January when I got my new "dumb-ish" phone for my birthday. But even so, news reached me that Hannah Neeleman from Ballarina Farms had her 9th baby. And that the internet has imploded over it. I'm honestly not sure what is so shocking about a Mormon mom, who's...

For the first time in a couple of years, I've really been enjoying my reading list! I've set a goal of reading 104 books this year, at a clipped pace of 2 books per week. Here at the end of February, I've managed to stay on track with this goal and hope to see it through this year. Part of my renewed vigor with reading is that it has now been 4+ years since I've gone this long without being pregna...

When I first got married, I was behind. Admittedly, I was only nineteen. That alone explains part of it. But if I am completely honest, I do not think that five more years would have made much difference. Even if I had finished college as a single woman instead of a married one, even if I had waited until twenty-four or twenty-five, I do not believe I would have been significantly more prepared to...

I am deep in the part of my gardening year where I am SUPER excited… and also starting to wonder if maybe I did too much. If you garden, you know this feeling. January and February are all hope and seed packets and plans. Everything feels possible. And then suddenly your dining room table is covered in milk cartons and seed trays and you're counting how many varieties of peppers you started and th...

The kids and I had the opportunity to go visit my family in Pennsylvania this past week, and I'm so incredibly glad we did. We've been trying to schedule a trip up there for ages, and it just never seemed to work out. There was always something — a launch, a deadline, a busy season, a reason to push it off. Finally, we picked a time that worked… except Jason was just too busy to take off work. So...

In a world full of Pinterest-perfect homes and constant comparison, it's easy to feel like our homemaking is never "enough." In this short and encouraging episode, Jami offers a much-needed reminder: homemaking isn't about perfection, it's about faithfulness. She shares why social media can quietly distort our expectations, how God calls us to stewardship instead of performance, and why the quiet,...

There are seasons when the world feels too loud. Too heavy. Too much. And often, that weight doesn't stay "out there." It follows us home. It shows up in tired bodies, overflowing sinks, loud kitchens, and hearts that feel stretched thin. In moments like that, it's easy to wonder if the quiet, repetitive work we do every day really matters. This season, I've been thinking a lot about what it truly...

I have finally — and I mean finally — been really diving into my reading goals and actually enjoying them again. For the last few years, my reading has been a little lackluster. I've been reading far below my goals (which in and of itself is totally fine), but I was also lacking excitement and joy in my reading. I read a lot of fiction in '24–'25, but most of it was throwaway fiction that, once I...

It's been two long years since I've been able to grow a garden. Life shifted in big ways during that season. We relocated to North Carolina, and for a while I didn't even have a yard, just a moving target and a lot of transition. Gardening simply wasn't possible. And while that season held good things, I missed the soil deeply. Now, though, everything has changed. We're on three-quarters of an acr...

Do you ever have one of those days? The kind where you wake up already irritated, before anything has even happened. You're short on patience, easily overwhelmed, and it feels like joy is nowhere to be found. If I'm honest, when I was a young mom those days came more often than I care to admit, and I usually felt a little ashamed that my attitude could sour so quickly. But motherhood has a way of...

Homemaking Is Bigger Than a Job Title When most people hear the word homemaker , they picture one specific life: a stay-at-home mom, in an apron, with dinner simmering and a spotless house to match. And if that's your life right now, I hope you feel encouraged in it (this is my life, more or less with the spotless house). But if that's not your life, if you work outside the home, if you're a stude...

We've started a new system in our home the last couple of years and it's been one of those changes that quietly ends up touching everything. It's not flashy. It's not complicated. But it's steady, practical, and surprisingly life-giving. Each of our kids is now trained on one special food that they're fully responsible for making each week. They are not helping me make it. They are not reminding m...

I grew up in the 90s with divorced parents who both worked full time and did their best to provide in two separate households. My mom was a rockstar. Our house was always clean, and she never failed to have dinner on the table, even when it was simple. But in the 90s and early 2000s, it just wasn't on anyone's radar, at least not ours, that kids should be learning homemaking skills along the way....

Homemaking Isn't Cute. It's Holy. I woke up to wicked laughter coming from the living room. Not the sweet kind of laughter. The suspicious kind. The kind that makes your eyes fly open and your stomach immediately drop. The two-year-old twins had clearly escaped their beds and were up to something. I groaned and dragged my very pregnant body out of bed. I was 38 weeks along with our second set of t...

Last week, Jason and I sat down for our annual planning and goal-setting meeting. This has become a long-standing tradition for us, and it has made such a difference in keeping us on the same page and making sure our top priorities truly stay our top priorities. If you'd like to peek behind the scenes, you can read about how we do our annual planning session here — and how we do a year-end review...

There's something about a fresh notebook, a warm cup of coffee, and a quiet conversation with your husband that makes you believe anything is possible. Once a year, Jason and I carve out intentional time to sit down together and talk through our family — what worked, what didn't, what God might be inviting us into next, and what needs to gently be laid down. It's not fancy. There's no color-coded...

If you've been following along in this goal-setting series, you already know I'm not interested in hype-y, pressure-filled planning that burns you out by week two. I want plans that actually fit your real life and help you grow in faithfulness, peace, and purpose. And that starts with something most of us skip. Before we make new goals… before we build new routines… before we write a single list f...

Boom. It's January. The month where we all set wildly impossible New Year's resolutions… burn out by January 3rd… and then spend the rest of the year feeling vaguely guilty about it. Obviously, that's not the way we're meant to approach change. But what I've noticed this year is something interesting. After years of failed resolutions, a lot of people have swung hard in the opposite direction. The...

You can read the article here:   https://findingjoyinyourhome.com/ i-dont-want-to-forget-this-year-what-god-taught-me-in-a-hard-season/

You can read this blog post here: https://findingjoyinyourhome.com/ still-learning-recultivating-the-habit-of-reading-in-a-full-season-of-life/  

Read the article here: https://findingjoyinyourhome.com/this-is-me-starting-again-returning-to-the-work-of-home-faith-and-everyday-faithfulness/