Hi there, you're listening to the Lazy Genius Podcast. I'm Kendra Dachie and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't.

Today is the third bonus episode in our mini series on lazy geniusing a certain topic with a certain expert in that topic.

A month or so ago, I talked to Courtney Cleveland from all the best days about how to travel and do stacations like a lazy genius.

A couple weeks ago, I lazy genius dinner like all the dinner you guys we fixed dinner with Kate Strickler from Naptime Kitchen.

And today we're going to lazy genius being a mom with Kristen Howerton, specifically the thought of being a mom of teenagers down the road.

When I asked Kristen to have this conversation with me, I did not realize that her new book, Rage Against the Machine, had come out.

It had just come out. Then I read it since it's about learning to parent without perfection. And you guys, it is truly so good, which you'll be able to tell from this interview how much I loved it.

Kristen is such a great storyteller, so good, she's so funny, so vulnerable, and she's a lazy genius. There's even a chapter in her book that lists out the things that she's going to care about.

Generally, I don't enjoy books on motherhood, just because they feel too focused on enjoying every moment without talking about the difficulty of being a mom.

The Kristen talks about it all, and so well.

So in this episode, she gives some great knowledge on how our parenting now of small kids, the choices that we make now, can translate later into parenting our kids as teenagers.

And since she is a former marriage and family therapist, she really has such a good, like, educated perspective on what she's talking about.

This might be one of my favorite conversations about parenting ever, not just in podcast world, but in life.

Kristen is so great, you're going to love her. I can't wait for you to hear from her. So let's jump in.

You guys are so Kristen wrote a book that just came out like very recently called rage against the minivan.

It is fire. It is so good. I'm just and it's not scary. I would not but a grottoes for no reason. Like it is so good.

I feel like what I love about it, my book and my sort of way, the lazy genius way, is like a tool, it's a toolkit.

There's not a lot of story in it. It's a little bit more like, okay, so here's where we're going.

And I feel like rage against the minivan is like, alright guys, would you like a picture into what it means to live this way, where you choose your priorities, and you focus on those things, and you forget about the things that you don't really care about.

It's like, would you like a beautiful picture of someone's like motherhood journey through that lens. Here's rage against the minivan.

I had a hands in the air. It was just like, why is it so good? It was so so good.

So I want to ask you, it's wild how much overlap there is in our book. There's a lot of overlap.

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