The parenting challenges of stay at home mom survival are well beyond our wildest delusions of rainbows, butterflies, and blissful momdom. When your schedule includes cleaning an ungodly amount of sputtered baby food, peeling off crusty abandoned play dough, and imagining a warm sunny beach vacation while changing the most explosive diaper you’ve ever seen in your life…those joyous dreams of stay at home mom life are long forgotten. No amount of mom or parenting advice prepared you for this. Frustration, anger, and hopeless can soon creep in or worse…detonate.
The scary realization that I NEEDED to make some changes ASAP in my stay at home mom life came one innocent, sunny Tuesday morning while cleaning the kitchen…
I had put our little one down to sleep for her first nap and I started cleaning. I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. Soon, I had everything off of every single countertop in the kitchen and every item and drawer from the refrigerator in the living room. And when I say everything, I mean everything.
“If I could just get this one more thing cleaned…”
“One more thing.”
“One more thing…”
Congratulations! You’ve taken the pregnancy test and now need to know what’s next. The first trimester officially begins on the first day of your last period and ends at 12 weeks. By the time you know you are pregnant, usually, you are already 5 or 6 weeks pregnant! Below, I’ve listed a comprehensive checklist of everything you MUST KNOW, PLUS a free printable chart of essential to-dos for the next 12 weeks.
The heart-wrenching pain of having to drop your teeny-tiny newborn off with someone else (you may not even know!) for EIGHT or more hours a day is powerful enough that you’ve landed here. Doubt may be overwhelming you; can I work from home and get a stay at home mom job? Do these jobs really exist? Is it really possible for me to make money on the side AND raise my baby?
Hiding that little maternity bump with the right clothes might have been easy enough at first. Soon though, that sweet little nugget is big enough to compare to some fruits and vegetables (what the heck is a Rutabaga anyway?). It’s high time for some maternity clothing! 
Blog life can be rough. You’ve got social media dinging every few seconds, posts you need to write, a newsletter due yesterday and a whole library full of tips, articles, eCourses and ebooks you’ve bookmarked to get to “later”. Time management sometimes may seem like a lost cause.