The Christian Homemaking Podcast: Simply Convivial with Mystie Winckler

It's easy to slip into feeling like dinner is a drag, like it's an interruption, like it's something we just really rather not do. But since we do need to serve dinner everyday, why not learn how to enjoy cooking more ? It truly is possible! Of course, there are times where it just doesn't happen or it doesn't work out or we don't have the time, and so we have plan B meals. We have takeout—there’s...

I had a dream. And in this dream my pantry always had everything I needed. I never ran out of ingredients to make dinner. I would go to the pantry, pull out what I needed to make dinner that day and it’d be there—no surprises. I had achieved well-stocked pantry perfection. But it turns out that making this dream a reality was much harder than I thought it would be. Still, it’s worth the effort to...

We need to stop striving for having ducks in a row and admit that ducklings actually waddle where they will, leaving sloppy footprints as they go. We need to stop believing the marketers who tell us we're only 5 containers and 1 label maker away from achieving the state of organization.

An index card organization system predates blogs and word processors. It’s a thing, and it works because it uses a simple principle. Back in our first year or two of marriage, a good friend and I talked at least weekly about all things homemaking. We were figuring out our new role, and we wanted to do well in it. So, of course, we read the books. One of the books was straight off my mom’s shelf: S...

The daily card is a term that we use from Work the Plan for your daily to do list. So, you might have a planner and the question is whether or not you use the planner correctly; if we actually use what’s written in the planner to direct our days? And the daily card can be just a card, just a post-it, an index card, or it can be a section in the planner. But the point of it is to keep a very trunca...

We all know the feeling. There’s just too much to do. Do you ever feel like the more you have to do the less you actually get done? That’s a real thing. There’s a reason for that. And it’s decision fatigue. The first step that you have to do to prevent decision fatigue and then to get started is decide what to actually do next. It seems simple but it can be hard. The more options there are, the mo...

Have you ever been frustrated trying to use a planner? Have you ever worried that you spend more time writing in your planner and decorating your planner than actually doing what that pretty plan tells you to do? Let me share my quick planner hack that streamlines the process and keeps me focused on the most important things to do each day. Let’s dig in. I know, planners are pretty. They’re fun. B...

Transformation Tuesday is our answer to the complicated, overbearing cleaning and organizing checklists out there. You don’t need to clean by someone else’s schedule. Instead, see what needs to be done in your own home, and spend 10 minutes improving the order and organization there. Transformation Tuesday is one of my little homemaking mottos that helps me tackle housecleaning in small bites and...

I wanted to talk about decluttering as a habit because there’s this rumor floating out there on decluttering (from experts and gurus) who say that “decluttering can be done once and for all.” That it’s a project you finish and check off and be done with (which is really what we all want to hear, isn’t it?).  We really want it to be something that we can achieve: “Achievement unlocked! We are now d...

So, we talk a lot about needing to declutter, but part of what holds us back from just diving in and making some progress in decluttering is that even though we say that we are doing this project we don’t really understand how to do it. We don’t understand what the project really is, what it entails, what we set out to accomplish. It remains this, kind of, vague, nebulous project that we can’t def...

So, what even is decluttering and why is it something that we keep trying to do and keep feeling like we never make any progress doing? Yeah, that’s right—you are not the only one. Decluttering is getting rid of clutter. So, before we can understand declutter, we have to think about what clutter really is. Sometimes we just use it as a generic insult to stuff we don’t necessarily want or want to d...

Today’s episode is an audio blog for one of my favorite posts: Life is like laundry. If you pop on over to the article on the blog, you’ll also find a follow-up 45-minute workshop on this topic. If you have some extra laundry to tackle and you need a pick me up to accompany the marathon folding session, it’ll be just the ticket to keep you company and keep your spirits lifted.  So, let’s dig in.

I think our attitude is the missing link in our attempts at getting organized. So I’m excited to announce my new free download: an attitude adjustment audit.  What is an attitude? Every passing feeling is not an attitude. The dictionary says that an attitude is “a settled way of thinking or feeling about someone or something, typically one that is reflected in a person's behavior.”  However, passi...

This episode is an excerpt from a recent mentoring session that I host weekly inside Simply Convivial Continuing Education. Our topic was mindset habits and how even our thoughts and responses can be habitual - both good and bad. So what we know about habits breaking and habit building applies even to our mindset, even to our attitude. We need to break out of bad attitude ruts and form some new an...

January’s podcasts are all about self-care: what it is and what it isn’t. In the medical world, self-care refers to those tasks a caregiver must do for someone, whether it’s a caregiver to an injured or ill adult or a mother to an infant. But when the internet tells you that you need self-care, they basically mean you need to spend some time being self-centered and self-indulgent.  What will help...

Guess what? Self-centeredness and self-indulgence is never going to make you feel better in the long term, nor will it prepare you for reentering your real life with joy. You don’t need to treat yourself or indulge in luxuries to be happy with your life. Let’s get a grip and a game face on and find not only contentment but also joy in our real life home duties.  What will help us face our real lif...

 In the medical world, self-care refers to those tasks a caregiver must do for someone, whether it’s a caregiver to an injured or ill adult or a mother to an infant. But when the internet tells you that you need self-care, they’re not talking about using the bathroom and brushing your teeth and putting your own spoon to your mouth. In fact, a CNN article about trends for 2020 outright said that se...

It is true that our selves do need care. We are not invincible. We are not infinite. We are not indefatigable. However, more than our bodies need care because we are more than our bodies.  When you feel the need for rest and renewal, remember that both come not by indulgence or through merely physical means. When we forget that we are souls, spiritual beings in need of spiritual things, we go look...

Moms are told all over social media and advertisements that we need more self-care. It's true that we become easily wearied, easily overwhelmed, easily frustrated - and a break sounds too good to be true. Self-care for stay at home moms seems like a reasonable solution.  But the break we actually need to overcome the weariness, the overwhelm, the frustration might be different from a day out or a...

Homemaking is not about personal style. It's about making a home where people want to be and where people can learn and grow. This replay of the Making Home workshop will remind you of the true calling of homemaker.

Homemaking has fallen on hard times for the last hundred or more years. Though it’s been devalued by our culture, it’s not lost any value in reality to the family. Homemakers don’t need to be full-time to be vital to their families and, yes, to the whole world and society at large.  Homemaking is not about achieving a certain look or state in the home. Homemaking is a process, a service, of love t...

When we think of homemaking, we usually think of housework, but even the dictionary tells us that homemaking is about creating and managing homes as a pleasant place to live. A pleasant place to live - not merely a clean or organized place to live - is the goal of homemaking.  Today’s episode is a blog post titled Becoming a Better Homemaker. In it, we will look at three areas we as homemakers nee...

When we think of homemaking basics or homemaking hacks, we should not let HGTV or Pinterest or Martha Stewart be the standard or the ideal. Homemaking is not about achieving a certain look or state in the home. Homemaking is a process, a service, of love through hospitality to those who live in and enter into our home. In this episode I’m chatting with Virginia Lee Rogers, my customer support mana...

Biblical Homemaking is not about achieving a certain look or state in the home. Biblical Homemaking is a process, a service, of love through hospitality to those who live in and enter into our home. That means that what HGTV, magazines, and Pinterest call homemaking, probably isn’t. Homemaking isn’t about decor or style or expressing ourselves. Homemaking is, according to the dictionary, “the crea...

We all want to have a clean house without spending all day getting and keeping it clean. It is possible! We just need a good house cleaning routine that works for our lives. Once we figure out the best house cleaning routine for our own homes and habits, we can turn it into a checklist and make it happen regularly. Checklists are even more helpful when the steps they list out are for bite-sized ro...