Weeding out the activities that make life so busy

Tsh Oxenreider, Author & Blogger, shares advice for parents on how to put activities into perspective and make life easier and less busy our family
Parenting Tips - How To Weed Out The Activities That Make Life So Busy
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Weeding out the activities that make life so busy

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When my family is debating how we should spend our time, whether we should do an activity or not, the two main questions we ask ourselves are, one; is this going to benefit the entire family? Now that might mean it's just my daughter going to gymnastics, but is it going to create a major headache for everybody involved, because we have to be home at a certain time, someone has to reschedule a meeting, we need extra baby-sitting help over here? Is it just going to be more effort than it's worth? If so, it might not be the best thing for her to do that activity. We might need to consider some other activity for her. Then the second thing we ask ourselves is, will this activity matter one year from now? Will it matter, in the long run, if our family's overall life, whether we are going to go to this one holiday party, or school event or something? Are we mostly going because we feel guilty and we feel like we need to go? A year from now will we care at all that we went or not? If we know that we won't care, we can let go of that guilt and realize, "You know, we're just doing this because we feel like we have to." We can say, "No," and go to bed at night not worrying about it. Whenever we ask those two questions, it just puts everything into perspective and these little bitty decisions become a lot easier for our family.

Tsh Oxenreider, Author & Blogger, shares advice for parents on how to put activities into perspective and make life easier and less busy our family

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Tsh Oxenreider

Author & Blogger, SimpleMom.net

Tsh Oxenreider is the full-time blogger behind Simple Mom and the founder and creative director of Simple Living Media, a blog network dedicated to helping people live intentionally (while throwing perfection out the window). She thinks a library card, a Netflix subscription, and a passport are some of the greatest parenting tools in the universe. She’s a wife to Kyle, mama to Tate, Reed, and Finn, and is the author of Organized Simplicity and One Bite at a Time: 52 Bites for Making Life Simpler. She is currently working on her next book. Tsh and her nomadic family currently live in Bend, Oregon, but several dots around the globe have also been called home (her 7-year-old has been on 60 airplanes and counting). Together, they love to travel, read books, go camping, and make homemade pizza for Friday Family Movie Night.

Tsh writes about living simply and intentionally at Simple Mom, which was named one of the Top 100 Mom Blogs of 2012. She was also number 2 in the top 50 Twitter Moms of 2011, was named one of the Top 100 Mom Blogs of 2011, her blog was nominated for Best New Blog of 2008, and has been mentioned on Apartment Therapy, HGTV, Better Homes and Gardens, Food Network, CNBC, CNN, NPR, Parents Magazine, and more. She speaks frequently about blogging, writing, living intentionally, and motherhood in between changing diapers and hitting the 'publish' button. She is also an advocate for Compassion International, serving as one of their bloggers, and is a regular contributor at (in)courage. Tsh also records a podcast with Homefries called The Simple Mom Podcast, which during one week ranked second under NPR’s This American Life in most listened-to podcasts.

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