You are listening to episode 100, Finding Joy, Surviving Parenting in a Pandemic.

Welcome, welcome back podcast fam. It is Dr. Mona. If you have been following me on my

Instagram, you know that I would love to make this a Encanto podcast, but I'm not going to do that

for you guys today. Today we are back to podcast episodes and I'm doing another Finding Joy episode.

And this one is a little bit hard because we had a very rough few weeks as parents. We were

expecting the holidays to be here and then Omurkran hit and is racing through our community

and we're worried about our kids, especially if you're like me that has a child under five.

It has been really heavy for a lot of parents and we have carried a load for so long and I think

you're going to feel sad, feel better, feel like someone understands you after you listen to this

episode because I'm really just going to lay out what I think is really happening in a podcast

form. I think we all know what's happening, but sometimes when you hear it from a friend or hear

it from even another mom or maybe a pediatrician like me, it may make you feel a little bit better

that you're not alone, that what you're feeling and whether it's anger, grief of the last two years

that you feel like you have lost, which I hear so much from the parents in my office, especially

the mothers that come in, they're not going to feel alone in those feelings. So this may be a little

bit like therapy and that you just get to listen to a friend talk about how rough it's been.

It's also going to be uplifting because these finding joy episodes always have a point of how can

we really look at the difficult times and you know navigate through them and for some it's going

to take a little bit longer and for others you may bounce back a little bit quicker from hard times,

but the goal is to move through the feelings, the goal is not to ignore them. So that's what these

finding joy episodes are all about and I'm recording this on a day that I actually probably should

have taken rest but I thought you know what this is going to be even better because I had what

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