Just One Small Thing Podcast for Catholic Parents

Hey there! Today I am, once again, proving that I have no fear. I am tackling a BIG topic: holiness. Why am I tackling this topic? Because I'm perfect? Because I have some sort of saintly-insight to share with you? Nope. I'm talking about holiness because I too am a sinner, but, like all of you, I am called to holiness. The call to holiness is universal. The spiritual journey is THE MOST IMPORTANT...

Hey there my friends! Today's podcast episode was born out of a little project I have been working hard on behind the scenes. For the past few weeks I have been reading everything I can get my hands on about prayer so that I can help you (and me) really understand what prayer is and how to grow in holiness through prayer. But, while doing this study on the topic of prayer I was struck again and ag...

Hey friends- Today's podcast episode is a bit of a personal one, so if you are sick of hearing me share about the baby I lost last fall, you might want to skip this episode. You see, although we have been infinitely blessed by and through the still-birth loss of our little Maximilian on Thanksgiving Day of last year, we are approaching his due date, and suddenly the pain is very real once more. Al...

Hello and welcome back! Here's hoping that you had a JOYFUL Easter and that you are still celebrating in earnest!  After all, we are an EASTER PEOPLE. I thought we would kick off this Easter Season with a podcast I have been meaning to record and send out into the world for a while now: WHY MARY. Here's why I wanted to do a podcast on Mary. The first few months of this year I have been talking abo...

Hey there my friend! First things first, happy Holy Week! I LOVE Holy Week.  I love all the pomp and incense and long services and drama.  I just LOVE IT. Isn't it so great to be Catholic and belong to a church that really let's us enter into the Passion each and every year? Praise be to God! On a much smaller note, the latest episode of the Podcast is up and ready for you. The episode discusses t...

Hey friends! Well, in case you've missed it, we've been spending all of Lent really digging into the seven vices we all face. To do this I have been pulling SO MUCH wisdom from Venerable Fulton Sheens incredible book, Victory Over Vice . We have already covered Anger, Envy, Lust, Pride, and Gluttony. Today we tackle Sloth. First off, I sort of hate that word, Sloth. Maybe it is my Midwest, farm gi...

Hey there friends. Today we are tackling the Vice that I have been dreading since the beginning: Gluttony. For some reason the idea that food can lead to sin is just a little bit hard for me. It is hard for me to understand, and hard for me to look straight in the face. I LOVE FOOD, and, like many of you I would guess, I have lots of food issues, coming from a variety of different source.  I have...

You guys are just blowing me away with your response to this Lenten Series on the Podcast where we are digging through the Vices we all face.  So far we've talked about Anger, Envy and Lust, and although I am flattered, and want to give myself a big 'ol pat on the back, I really shouldn't!  All of the wisdom I am sharing here comes directly from the great Venerable Fulton Sheen and his incredible...

Hello dear friends! Well, based on the HUGE response to last week's podcast, I have a feeling I'm not the only one that struggles with vices!  Thank you to all of you that wrote such encouraging and vulnerable emails and Facebook messages to me after listening to last week's podcast on Anger! Confronting the vices in our lives is sometimes painful, but always fruitful and I feel so blessed to be d...

Hey there and welcome back to the 3rd installment of the Lenten Podcast series on the Vices. Today's episode focuses on LUST, and, before I go into the details of this episode, I want to warn you that I felt I needed to use real language while discussing this topic. Nothing I say is vulgar or scandalous, and everything I say is strictly inline with Catholic Teaching, but I do use real, clinic name...

First of all, I pray that your Lent is off to a beautiful and Holy start! To be completely honest, I have been CRAVING Lent. My life has just started to feel a little too noisy and busy and I am glad the Church is wise enough to give us a season to get back on track. So, I decided to take advantage of this season and do a little series on the Podcast. Lent is meant to be a season of quiet and grow...

We are one week from Lent, so it's time to start planning! I really love Lent. I love an opportunity to get back into those good habits I've lost track of and just dwell in the quiet a bit more. I also love being a part of a Catholic community during Lent because we are all in this together. I love the support I often get during Lent from my Catholic friends and hearing about how they are attempti...

As part of the Lent Build-Up Fun (and yes, it is fun!) today's podcast episode is about the joys and benefits of Spiritual Reading. Some people around here are total rock stars when it comes to reading about Catholic Saints, Catholic Teaching or just Moral Living...but if you are like me you need a bit of encouragement to get back into spiritual reading from time to time. I love reading about the...

Today's podcast addresses an issue I hear about from Catholic Mothers all the time: How do I teach the faith to my children . I hear this all the time, often from very faithful women, who just worry that they aren't doing enough. I get it. I often struggle with those feelings myself, and in a way it is GOOD that we feel this way. Teaching our children the faith is a big deal. In fact, it might be...

I suspect that it is a nearly UNIVERSAL problem faced by new mothers: when do I find time to pray? Many of us had pretty good prayer lives before that first baby arrived. We had a routine and a set time that we prayed. Perhaps we had adoration hours or a nightly routine that involved prayer. And, if you are like me, you had no idea that having a baby would change everything, including prayer. But...

December 31st was the feast of the Holy Family. I love this feast day, and to celebrate I posted a picture of my own family on my Facebook page. The picture was one we took just 4 days before our little Max, whom I had carried in my womb for 20 weeks, flew to heaven, so it really was a picture of our whole family. But, to really celebrate I asked my entire community to post a picture of their Holy...

First of all, Happy New year, and feast of Mary, Mother of God! I love New Years and an opportunity for a fresh start.  A chance to evaluate the previous year and look ahead the the year on the way. Because of this I'm really into goals. Are you? I have given a lot of thought to my 2018 goals. I set goals for all parts of my life and in this new episode I share some of my major goals for the comin...

Hey friends! I have a beautiful, challenging and inspiring new podcast episode to share with you today.  Stephanie, a wonderful podcast listener emailed me with a RADICAL idea for a podcast episode: Praying the Rosary with your Husband.  Daily. My husband and I are definitely not getting in a rosary together right now so I was super interested in what Stephanie had to share--and I wanted to knot i...

Today's episode is all about gratitude.  Yes, gratitude, even though we are now on the other side of Thanksgiving.   I had originally recorded an episode on gratitude shortly before thanksgiving...but I forgot to save it and the episode was lost.  You'd think I'd know better by now.  Nope!  I thought perhaps it might not be worth it to rerecord on this topic after Thanksgiving, but that's just sil...

A few days ago I wasn't sure I would be publishing another post...or recording another podcast episode.  As you maybe already know, we lost our little Maximilian on Thanksgiving day, whom I had carried in my womb for 20 weeks.  Loosing a baby at 20 weeks is hard both physically and emotionally, and the week after we lost the baby was really dark. Things were made just a bit worse because one week...

It often feels like I am on an endless (and fruitless) quest to make my life at home raising kids just a little bit better.  Maybe if we stayed home more...or went out more...or had better toys, or fewer toys. This sort of searching leads to an awful restlessness and discontentedness.   For this very reason I was given so much peace by this simple idea shared in my woman's Bible Study: This Side o...

Housework is an unavoidable part of many of our days.  It is something we dread, and put off and force ourselves to just get through. But, housework can be much more than that. Housework is a call to and opportunity for Holiness. Although I struggle with this as well, I worked hard to research and pray about this topic and I have come up with 3 points to consider when it comes to housework and hol...

I love a good story of hope, healing and mercy.  Thanks be to our good and gracious God, our faith is filled with them, but the message of continued hope and the redemptive power of suffering never gets old.  For this very reason I loved the interview I did with Jennifer Ringwald of Mercy Every Morning .  Jennifer agreed to join me for episode 19 of the Just One Small Thing Podcast, and in this ep...

The talented Genie from Barefoot Abbey ( https://barefootabbey.wordpress.com/ ) is on the podcast today to share simple, beautiful ways to bring music into your home.   She has many wonderful tips and advice for engaging more in music, but her whole story is beautiful.  Her love of music, her family, her conversion, her choice to homeschool, we cover it all and all of it ties back to music in some...

In this beautiful episode, Christina from the Evangelista ( https://www.theevangelista.com/ ) share on the cross of waiting.  I promise that you will be inspired as Christina shares all she as learned from waiting through her single years, and now waiting for the birth of her son. We all have something that we are waiting for right now, and, especially for women, waiting is HARD!  But, the cross,...