Toddlers

Remember before you had kids, when your dinnertime was a cherished time to unwind with your spouse, catch up on each other’s days, discuss the latest world events, and just be connected?

Or – let’s be real – a time to eat on the couch, watch TV, and play on Facebook next to your spouse while you both zone out after an exhausting day of work?

Dinnertime with a toddler is basically the same as that, if you did all of those things while wrestling a rattlesnake. Not only is it physically exhausting you from its surprising strength for its size, but you’re actually afraid for your life because it could bite you at any moment. But at the same time, you and the snake both gotta eat, so you’re just powering through and trying to get at least half the plate of food into your mouths before one of you completely breaks (and we all know which one of you it’s going to be).

Trader Joe’s is the mecca of all grocery stores. The cream of the crop, the best of the best, the G.O.A.T.

No, you may not be able to get your full grocery order there every time, but I’d be willing to bet you’ll end up finding all of your favorite things there.

However, if you’ve never been, it can be a little daunting. It’s organized differently than most stores, and nearly everything is Trader Joe’s store brand, so it can take a few aimless, wandering trips to get the lay of the land and figure out what the real gems are. Toddler moms ain’t got time for that, so lucky for you, you’ve got me!

Getting gifts for babies has always been a challenge for me. They don’t really have interests yet, like older kids, and it’s hard to know what toys are developmentally right for what age, unless you’re living and breathing it.

That’s why I created my Gift Guide for Babies last year, and I got such a great response to it, that I thought I’d create more of them as my son continues to grow into new toys. Some of the toys on that list are still big favorites in our house, so make sure to visit that list too, if you haven’t already.

So with that, here are his current favorites:

It’s that time of year when Pinterest is flooded with things like “How to Spring Clean Your House in One Day” and “Spring Cleaning Your Whole House in 3 Easy Steps”.

I scroll through, blindly pinning them all to my Home-themed board like some kind of fool, pretending that one day I’ll actually use one of them.

But we all know that’s a lie.

Toddlers are monsters. We all know this. We don’t need another mommy blog post regaling all the ways our toddlers terrorize us on a daily basis.

What we do need is a shift in perspective. Yes, your child is going to be a deranged lunatic for at least 2 more years, but let’s look on the bright side, shall we?