Hello and welcome to the Emmice for Mama podcast. I'm your host Abby Halberstadt, happy wife,

Mama A-10 Bible Believing Christian.

On today's show, I want to talk to you

about a question that I keep getting asked

by mamas of all stages, ages, numbers of children, and that is, how is it that you're able to spend time with your kids?

And they're asking this to me specifically, but I think that this could be asked to just about any mama around us that we see who is doing something different than we are is in a different stage of life, has different activities or priorities or things that they're accomplishing

and it kind of strikes us as, hey, that's different than what I do.

I don't understand how that works for her, of can I glean from it how would this work for me will it work for me

And we just have all these questions swirling in our brains as moms and I do have a podcast on comparison and I talk about how it can be beneficial to say,

hey, what's working for this person? To line up what's working for us against what's working for them

and say, okay, these things things overlap I should keep doing that

if that's the conclusion that we reach or you know what I just realize that something isn't working for me

and she's got a really good system for that I I'm going to use some version of that. We have a penny reward system that I've talked about multiple times before and I hear so much good feedback from mamas who say that they have done a version of it, that they have adapted it for their own uses.

And I'm always grateful when I hear about proactive mamas that are finding what works well for

their families that are tweaking systems that someone else has kind of put out there as an

option and instead of viewing it as a threat or as a prescriptive thing that you have to

do exactly the same way they just take something and run with it.

I think that's really part of our jobs as mamas is to evaluate and like I've said before,

eat the meat and spit out the bones.

But what I'm specifically referring to today is a question that I got asked several times at a speaking event that I was at this past weekend and it got me to thinking about how maybe telling you about my current life circumstances and how they're different than they were

five, ten, fifteen years ago when I first became a mama might help to give you some perspective if you're at a period in your life where you feel like you can't figure out how other people are doing what they're doing and doing it well.

And especially if you're in a period in your life where you feel stuck, I've been there,

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