Hey friends and welcome to the happy hour with Jamie Ivy podcast. I'm your host Jamie and I'm so glad you're here.

Each week on this show, I invite a friend to join me and we chat about the big things in life, the little things in life, and everything in between.

Hey friends and welcome to the happy hour Jamie Ivy podcast. I'm your host Jamie and listen, we're smacked up in the middle of December.

We're halfway through the very last month of 2021 and if you're anything like me, 2021 and 2020 feel like one big long year that just happened and happened 18 years ago.

But here we are at the end of this month and man, I think I'm just thinking today about how I hope that whatever your month of December looks like, that you have had a way to find rest, that you have been in God's word, that you have been celebrating Advent, awaiting Christmas morning when we celebrate the birth of our Savior.

And I hope you're just resting. It's been that way for myself. I've taken a bunch of time off social media. I haven't traveled this month and I've really been trying to just take it all in.

For one reason, it's been a crazy year. Another reason, this is my son as a senior, it's his last Christmas home with us. Not really. Obviously, there'll be more, but it just feels like another end.

So I'm just thinking of you today as you listen, wherever you are, whatever you're doing, maybe you're running kids around, or do you're doing dishes, or you're on a run.

Maybe on your Peloton bike, whatever you're doing, I hope that you have found some moments in this month to really just rest and pause.

Guys, we have a great show for you. As you know, this month we've been taking all of the audio from the Jamie Ivy Show, which we released in 2021, earlier in the year on YouTube.

And we're taking all of that audio and bringing it to you here on the happy hour. And today, my guest is Lauren Petrovsky. Lauren is an Austin girl. She lives in the same city as me.

And after 12 years of working as a morning news anchor, she made the hard decision to step away from her role and to stay home with her kids.

We talk about that a lot today. We talk about what it is like to have the best of both worlds working and stay at home and motherhood and all that it takes for women.

To be a mom and to work, whether you work inside the home or outside the home, you talk a lot about what it felt like for her to have a baby during the middle of the pandemic, the loneliness.

And I have a feeling that some of you are feeling those feelings right now. As always, if you want to watch our episode, go to jmeivy.com slash YouTube.

And you can see our episode. You can see Lauren and I sit down together. I remember Lauren had on the cutest little jumpsuit.

So if you want to go see it, go over to jmeivy.com slash YouTube and find the Jamie Ivy Show and you can see it there.

You guys, I want to tell you that we are still working hard to get as many children sponsored in the Dominican Republic as we possibly can.

We've partnered with Compassion International, which has been a family favorite of the IVs for over 15 years.

I've told you in previous episodes that our family has sponsored a child in Peru, a child in Mexico City, a child in Kenya, a child in Haiti.

And we have done all of that over the past 15 years. Some of them have aged out and so then we'll add another one.

But we've done it as a family and our kids know about these kids that we sponsor. And by no means are we able to do anything in their life besides financially support compassion, who does all of the work for them.

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