Allison Cooper

10. 15 minutes alone in the grocery store has become your equivalent to a therapy session.

Clear the country bumpkin idea out of your head, because that’s not what I’m referring to here. A great plaid button down shirt can be just what you need to update your wardrobe this fall.

Family travel helped me see what I'd been missing out on.

These are the things I anticipate most when my kids finally go the eff to sleep. I deserve it after a day of being in what feels like survival mode.

My fingers are currently grazing the keyboard as my arms reach around my four week old, who happens to be strapped to my chest in our BabyBjorn – which has been my saving grace these days. She’s sleeping soundly, but just moments ago she was wailing (I’m speculating that I have a colicky baby on my hands) and this is the only way that I can get my work done. No shower yet today (it’s 1 pm, gross), pretty much all I’ve eaten is a quick bowl of oatmeal (and of course coffee) and have been up for the day since 5am (plus countless feeding during the night). But I’m chugging forward. Yup, being a mom of a newborn makes me feel superhuman.

Why the hell didn’t anyone remind me how hard the toddler years are? I’m taking all the mental notes on how to survive the toddler years.

Every single day of our lives, since the moment that we bring home our beautiful child from the hospital — well, actually, well before that — we are faced with a multitude of decisions that will impact their lives. Some decisions are more serious than others. Yet the constant need to rip parents apart for the decisions they make is so unnerving to me that I simply can’t take it anymore.

I am still a very spiritual person, but don’t necessarily agree with a lot of the things I was taught growing up — or the way it was shoved down our throats. So when Branden came along, we decided not to baptize him, because I just didn’t believe our sweet baby was born in sin. My husband wasn’t religious, and this was the right choice for us.

I grew up dreaming of living in that house with the perfect blue shutters and the white picket fence, three perfectly interspaced children running

There is no way around it, whenever you find yourself in a fashion rut, it’s pretty difficult to get out of. A fashion rut puts us in a place of comfort, where it’s very difficult to break free and expose ourselves to any newness that might be out there in the fashion world to explore — because we are too content with where we are.