Blog Income and Traffic Report {June 2018}

Blog Income Reports / Blogging / Work At Home
blog income and traffic report

Inside: My final blog income and traffic report! Read how I reached my goal of $1,000 a month income from this blog, and where I will go from here.

Welcome to my long overdue blog income report.

June and July were not very productive blogging months for me, as I was in the middle of my first trimester. I thought the first trimester was bad when I was pregnant with my first baby at 23. Nope! It’s so much more exhausting at 32 with four kids to take care of besides. I did the very bare minimum with blogging for two months in order to keep everything moving in the right direction.

When I first found out I was pregnant with my fifth baby, I thought it was going to be the death of my blog, of all the hard work I’d poured into it over the past year and a half. On the other side of my first trimester – when my motivation is lower than zero – I now see it very differently.

This pregnancy is the best thing that could have ever happened to my blog.

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10 Signs Relaxed Homeschooling is Your Homeschool Style

Homeschool / Relaxed Homeschooling

Inside: Is relaxed homeschooling your homeschool style? Read these signs to find out – you might be surprised! 

Relaxed homeschooling is a homeschool style that gets lost in the shuffle. It’s often used interchangeably with unschooling and eclectic homeschooling and minimalist homeschooling, partly because everyone’s definition of relaxed homeschooling is a little bit different.

While I am a minimalist, and minimalism does influence my homeschooling, I’ve never felt comfortable adopting the label “minimalist homeschooler”. I always identified much more strongly as a “relaxed homeschooler”.

And all of these signs that you’re a relaxed homeschooler? I nod along in agreement with every.single.one.

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A Realistic Christmas Budget: 7 Things You’re Forgetting to Include

Finances / Home
realistic Christmas budget

Inside: How realistic is your Christmas budget? If you’ve only factored in gifts (and maybe stockings), I guarantee you have underbudgeted because you’re forgetting to include so many Christmas items that all cost money – and they’re not cheap.

It’s only August, and Christmas seems REALLY far away. But unless you want to have a super depressing January after December’s credit card bills arrive, now is the time to start creating this year’s Christmas budget.

Paying off last year’s Christmas debt is not a fun way to start your new year, especially when New Year’s is supposed to be a time for inspiring goals and fresh starts.

Here’s the thing about Christmas budgets: most of them are not realistic. They focus exclusively on the cost of the gifts – the ones that end up under the tress. Very few take into account all the other Christmas spending that usually occurs during the holidays, which means your Christmas budget is seriously flawed.

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How to Stop Curriculum Hopping: The Secrets to Loving the Homeschool Curriculum You Already Have

Encouragement / Homeschool
how to stop changing homeschool curriculums

Inside: Do you find yourself changing homeschool curriculums every year, or even more frequently? Learn how to break the habit and to be content with the homeschool curriculum you already have. 

Over the past week I’ve jumped into a few Facebook groups for homeschool moms to ask my own homeschool curriculum questions. I couldn’t help but stay a while and look through the different threads. As a homeschool blogger, I particularly enjoy reading posts recommending new curriculums I’ve heard of, but never used personally.

As I scrolled through the comments after each curriculum recommendation, this statement kept popping up over and over again: “I switched to this homeschool curriculum…I don’t really know why though because we liked the one we were using before.”

Once? I wouldn’t have given it a second glance. But multiple occurrences of the same statement got my wheels turning.

Why are homeschool moms changing homeschool curriculums so frequently, even when nothing is wrong with what they currently have?

And an even better question: why can’t they stop?

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10 Compelling Reasons to Become a Minimalist Mom

Family / Minimalism / Motherhood
Minimalism for Moms: 10 Ways Minimalism can literally change your mom life for the better!

Inside: Are you a tired and overwhelmed mom? I was, too, and let me tell you, minimalism can help you in more ways than you know.

A little over three years ago, I felt like I was drowning. As a mom of three kids from ages five down to one, I was exhausted.

I would organize and reorganize our stuff, spending hours getting everything just the way I liked it, only to have my kids come in behind me and wreak havoc on my perfect system.

I started to realize after a while that our stuff was negatively affecting my life in a big way, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. I tried organizing – lots and lots of organizing and reorganizing.

But while I genuinely enjoyed organizing, I spent way too much time on it. I felt like I was on a hamster wheel, and I couldn’t get off of it, no matter how hard I tried.

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The Easiest Way to Add French to Your Homeschool

Homeschool
homeschool french program

Inside: If you want to homeschool French and need a program your children can do independently, Rosetta Stone Homeschool is the best choice. It’s perfect for busy homeschool moms!

My daughter has always loved languages. From an early age, she listened carefully whenever she overhead conversations in foreign languages and even made up her own languages in pretend play.

While she loves all languages, she eventually narrowed her focus to French. For whatever reason, she developed a love for France and has grand plans of travelling there as a family one day (as a family of soon-to-be seven, we’ll see!).

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Co-Sleeping: The Best Sleep Hack for Busy Moms

Family / Motherhood / Parenting
Why Co-Sleep: How Co-Sleeping Can Help Busy Moms Get More Sleep

Inside: Are you exhausted trying to handle multiple baby night wakings plus all your other mom responsibilities? If you haven’t tried co-sleeping yet, you need to: a little extra sleep goes a long way for busy moms.

Sleep. That wonderful thing that all moms long for, myself included. When you become a mom for the first time, nothing in life prepares you for the total and utter exhaustion that follows.

You can survive off of a surprisingly small amount of sleep. But you may find yourself doing silly things like putting your phone in the refrigerator and the cheese in the plates cupboard (ask me how I know…).

There is a reason why they use sleep deprivation as torture!

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