I mean, I knew that I liked Michael’s sister and assumed I would like her kids and that it would work, but we didn’t know, and it was just lovely, and they swam and played with the puppy, and it was just a delightful trip. But one of the things that really struck me about the trip when I was on the trip was how much I really love my day-to-day life.

I really love my day-to-day life and the way that I’ve set it up, the rhythms that I have, the house that I live in, the way I spend my time, and I came away feeling so grateful for the work that I’ve done to create that life.

So I wanna sell you so hard on this idea that you can enjoy your day-to-day life. And I know some of you have been with me for a long time, okay? We’ve been podcasting over here for a long time. 2016 maybe?

And you guys know how hard those years were when I had, you know, just three little kids, three little girls, little kid life, and it was so difficult. You can listen to those Coffee and Pearls episodes, and you can hear how I was grappling with motherhood, and it was, it was so difficult, and that was before we had the three bedrest pregnancy Irish triplet boys, okay?

So some of you might be thinking, “Well, Sterling, you went from living in the suburbs to living on five acres where the kids can be outside, and you don’t have babies anymore, and you’re not struggling with natural family planning anymore,” which is true.

We just aren’t doing anything, and we’re just not getting pregnant, and I just genuinely believe that that’s a gift from God and a miracle. I don’t even know why, and I’m not gonna question it, okay? I’m not gonna question it.

But he did tell me very clearly, “You’re not gonna have another baby, so just don’t worry about tracking your cycle for the purposes of NFP,” and that has just been a huge relief for us. But, so you’re gonna look at my life and look at some of these circumstances, okay? These are the circumstances of my life, like where we live, that we have property and space, that my husband is home, right?

Like, I have another adult that’s here all the time and can drive people places and can feed kids, and I don’t have any babies. My youngest is about to turn seven. And so you could look at that, and you could think, “She is so happy because she is in a different phase of life, and these circumstances are what is driving her to be happy and to like her life,” and I’m telling you right now that that’s not true.

If I could go back in time with the tools that I have now to any of those other phases, I could learn how to build a day-to-day existence that I enjoyed in any of those years. I didn’t have those tools then, but I do have them now, and I found these tools when Peter was almost a year old.

So when I found these tools and I was drowning in little-kid land and really struggling emotionally, the kids were still one, two, three, five, seven, and nine, and that’s when I learned how to really like my day-to-day life.

And the way that you’re going to like your day-to-day life is first you’ve gotta learn to calm your body down and to pay attention to your thinking. So many of you email me. I just got an email from someone, and she said, “I’m just so ragey all the time. How do I stop being so angry?” And I said, “You’ve got to decide to stop being angry.”

I know that sounds simple, but so often we say it like we don’t have control over it, but you need to start familiarizing yourself with the feeling of anger in your body, the thermometer. Like, paying attention to the fact that the thermometer’s at an eight, and that you can recognize that. Like, “Woo, kids are being loud. The thermometer’s going up and up and up, and I’m at an eight.”

And when you notice that it’s at an eight because you’re paying attention to yourself, then you’re gonna breathe. You’re gonna touch your chest. You’re going to drink some water, put some fresh air on your face. I have been, since making those kids stories, I have been showing the kids in a much more exaggerated way how I calm down.

And I’ll just say, “Woo, I’m starting to feel really frustrated right now. I’m gonna be like Dominic the dragon, and I’m gonna cool my fire.” So it’s interesting that I don’t even know that I was doing that in as obvious of a way before. But now it’s an even bigger part of my parenting goal is to show them like, “Yeah, you’re gonna feel frustrated and here’s how you handle that.”

And so I’ll just like do a big blow out. And so two things are happening. One, I’m reminding myself how to calm down and I’m genuinely calming down in that moment. And then I’m modeling it for the kids to show them this is totally normal that you’re gonna feel frustrated in parenting and it is your job to calm yourself down. It’s completely possible.

So step one is just understanding this concept, believing that you can do it, and practicing it, right? You can calm down and you have to be calm to then start looking at your thinking. So then you’re gonna start looking at your thinking, and at first it’s gonna feel like opening up the closet that you stuff everything into.

Some of you have a closet, some of you have an everything drawer, some of you have an entire guest room where you’re like, “We just throw stuff in there.” Okay? But this space where it’s just a catch-all for everything, you’re gonna open it up. Do you remember in Friends when Monica, like, opens the closet and, like, all that stuff falls out? It’s gonna be like that.

All the stuff is gonna fall out, and you’re gonna go, “Oh my goodness, I didn’t even realize what was going on in my brain.” It is a mess in there. And I hope you think that’s the best news ever, where you realize, “Wow, all of these thoughts are creating the drama and the pain in my life.” It’s not the circumstances. It’s not your husband, or the kids, or any of those things that your brain is telling you are the problem. It’s your thoughts.

And if you become a woman who’s committed to paying attention to these thoughts, and then popping the bad ones. Remember, they’re bubbles and they pop up, and you’re like, “Oh, that mom is so much better than me,” and we just go, “Oh, I’m not gonna think that.”

And we pop that bubble, and then you immediately redirect your brain to, “What do I like about me as a mom? I’m really funny.” I use a voiceover for our dogs. You know, like, the dog will come in and make some sort of facial expression, I guess.

And I will do a voiceover like, “Hey, I’d like to go outside right now. Would somebody get up and take me outside and play with me? I would really like that right now.” I feel like that was a really lame example. I’m much more funny, much funnier on the fly with the dog. But I realize that’s kind of an unusual thing, and it’s just part of who I am, and I love that about myself. I love my goofy dog voiceovers that make the kids crack up.

And so notice, in that moment, I can choose to compare myself to someone else and feel bad, and that thought is always gonna come up. I cannot save you guys from those thoughts. Those unintentional thoughts are just gonna float on by, but I want you to pop them, and I want you to redirect your brain to something else.

So now we’re more calm, we’re paying attention to our thoughts, and we’re beginning to understand this concept that our thinking is creating the results in our life. The thoughts that we have drive our feelings, which drive our actions or inactions and create our results.

And from there, you decide what results do you wanna have instead. I really wanted to enjoy my day-to-day life. That was really so obvious to me when I found coaching that I did not enjoy my day-to-day existence, and what a shame that was.

I was like, “Here are these beautiful children, this life that God has given me, and I’m over here pouting about how hard it is, and how bad it is, and how powerless I feel.” I had all these thoughts that were making me feel terrible, and that was the main thing that I set out to change.

I also really wanted to lose weight, and make money, and improve my relationships. But I would say the number one thing that I wanted was to enjoy the day-to-day experience of my life. And to do that, you’re gonna start putting what you want in the result line.

So you would put, Enjoy the children in the afternoon. And you would ask yourself, “Okay, what does enjoying the children in the afternoon look like?” ‘Cause they’re still gonna be your children, and they’re gonna do what normal children do in the afternoon. There’s different flavors of children, different ages, but you know what your children do in the afternoon.

You know which things you’re not enjoying, by the way, and you can either solve for that in a practical way. I am a big fan of practical solutions. And you can also change the way that you think about it.

So if you have a three-year-old that’s super crunchy and has stopped taking a nap. I think I got an email recently about a three-year-old who was not napping, and the mom was like, “This is so terrible, and it’s ruining our whole day, and I cannot get this three-year-old to nap.”

So you have two choices. You can go learn about how to make a three-year-old nap or enforce quiet time, right? Maybe the three-year-old really isn’t gonna nap, but you can say, “Okay, the lights are off, and you’re gonna be in this place with this blanket and this book, and you may not speak for this amount of time. And we’re gonna put this lovely music on.” So maybe we’re not napping, but maybe we institute a quiet time. We can solve that on a practical level.

And then you can also choose to think, “This is totally normal. This is such a normal three-year-old phase, either sleep regression or just dropping their nap, and I’m gonna figure this out. This isn’t a problem.”

And if we are at the place already where the kids drop their naps, how am I gonna restructure the day to make sure my needs are still being met? ‘Cause that’s usually what makes us feel so desperate when the kids don’t nap. We tell ourselves this story that it’s the only time that we get us time, rest time, catch-up time, meal prep time, whatever it is that you’re sticking in that time.

And at the moment, we don’t see another way to get that, so we just panic. But the panicking feeling is not coming from the three-year-old not napping. It’s coming from your thought, “Oh, no, this is a huge problem. I never get any time to myself. The three-year-old should be napping.” Those thoughts are creating so much tension in your body.

And then later you have teenagers and you can’t get them to wake up. I need you to wake up and do the dishes. It’s so funny. What is keeping you from genuinely enjoying your day-to-day life? And why wouldn’t you be willing to fight for that? If I told you it was just a list of skills that you could practice, and then you could enjoy your day-to-day life, why wouldn’t you wanna do that.

Now, I have nothing against vacation. I do have the thought vacation is not relaxing with children, and I think because I’ve set my home life up with so many rhythms that serve me and the kids, I actually find it to be pretty relaxing to be at home. And I give myself what I need every day and every week, and probably every month and every quarter.

You know, there are these ways that I take care of myself in different cadences. So every day I might sit and pray with the Lord and drink some tea. That would be like a mini vacation during the day.

And then within the week, probably two or three times a week, I’ll take a walk either by myself or with the boys, and when I take the boys it doesn’t stress me out, ’cause they It takes a little bit more work to get there. We have to put their bikes in the car, but then they bike the whole time, so I kind of get the experience of being on the walk by myself anyway, and it feels relaxing.

And I just say, “Stay on the right side of the sidewalk.” It’s not really a sidewalk. It’s like a bike path. But I’m always scared that they’re gonna be on the wrong side around a corner and smash into somebody on their bikes.

But in general, that’s a way that I meet my needs within the week. And then probably once a month I will take more like a half day, like a Saturday or something, and spend a little bit more time by myself or away from the kids or with a friend or doing something recharging.

And now that they are older, and this is because of their ages, probably once a quarter I might be gone for one or two days, or they’re gone. Either way, I get, you know, one plus days without the kids completely, and that may not be possible when you’re nursing and have babies and all of that.

But I’ve built in these restful moments into my regular rhythms so I don’t feel this desperate need to escape my life and go somewhere else, or that I need to be somewhere else to set down the worry of my life because I’ve trained myself not to worry in my day-to-day life.

And again, if you love taking vacations and going on trips and laying on a beach or by the pool and relaxing, that is not a problem. You can enjoy your day-to-day life and enjoy taking vacations.

But I think a lot of people kind of live for that vacation time because they haven’t learned how to manage their mind and set up a life where they like their day-to-day life. And I totally get why. It’s because we go to school, and school teaches us that there’s a right answer for things, and so we’re looking for this right answer.

And of course, there could never be a right answer about parenting or how to run your home or how to have your prayer life relationship with Jesus or your marriage. There’s not a one-size-fits-all there. And so if you are used to being a good student where you read a bunch of information and you memorize it, and then you give the right answer and you get a good grade, well, as soon as we leave school, that model is over.

It doesn’t really apply to the rest of your life. Instead, it’s more like, “Hey, here’s this smorgasbord of options. Can you learn to trust yourself to figure out what’s best for you?” And I think that the fact that I enjoy my day-to-day life is completely rooted in that I rebuilt trust with myself.

I was willing to rediscover what I actually liked and not what the world told me I needed to do. I was willing to try things and be bad at them, whether they were house systems or meal planning systems planners, I mean, any of that mom stuff, Instagram stuff, internet stuff that we learn, I was just, like, willing to try things.

And then go, “Oh, yeah, I really love that,” or, “Nope, that’s not for me.” I wasn’t seeking the right answer. I was seeking what I knew would be good for our family. But I’m telling you right now, I could list the things that are very difficult and painful in my life right now, and I could make them sound really bad. And I could make it sound like this year has been so hard.

And I share that with you because the brain can be very dramatic. And the brain can spin the story to sound really, really awful. And I think we often do that because we’re so desperate to be seen and heard.

But the truth is yourself is desperate to be seen and heard by you. You are the one dismissing yourself and not dealing with your own life, and that’s why we have to chirp and be so loud with other people and have them know how hard our lives are, because we are not taking our own selves seriously and solving our own problems.

And I’m not against sharing difficult things with friends, right? I do that. I have a very good friend, and we will sit and I’ll go, “Gosh, these are the things that are hard right now,” and we kind of hold each other’s hearts there. But we always end by leading each other to Jesus and saying, “God is good,” you know, “This chapter is good. Goodness will come out of this.”

So I’m not saying that we don’t ever share the hard things with each other, but so often I think we can get stuck there. We can get stuck ruminating on what’s hard, whether it’s in your own mind or with other people, and I think it’s rooted in this need to be seen because you are not genuinely seeing yourself.

Because genuinely seeing yourself would be feeling your feelings, the real ones, challenging the lies that are in your mind, thinking positive, true thoughts on purpose, knowing where you’re going, like having some target, something to solve. And it can be silly, like what are we doing about the socks in our house? There are socks everywhere. I’m gonna solve that this month. We’re gonna figure out socks.

But so many of us just sit in this, “It’s so hard. This is so terrible. It shouldn’t be like this,” and we’re ruining our own day. And when we do that over and over again, we have bad weeks, and months, and years. And I really just want you to see that for what it is, and ask yourself if you wanna keep living like that. Because you don’t have to.

You can rebuild self-trust, and it starts by acknowledging, “Maybe I have been allowing myself to be angry and not managing my mind, and then not making good plans because I’m always in a stress state.” Let’s commit to working on that.

And you just tell yourself, “I’m sorry I haven’t been doing that. I’m willing to do that for you. I’m gonna rebuild trust with you so you know I’m gonna take care of you, really and truly.” Because taking care of you is not complaining. It’s actually acquiring emotional regulation skills and then changing what we think.

And I just want you to know that it is possible for you to enjoy your day-to-day life no matter what’s going on. And I coach a lot of women every week, and there are some gnarly life things going on. And I am always able to show them some better thoughts about those situations than they were previously thinking, and it creates lightness and curiosity and openness in their bodies.

And I just want you to know that that’s, that’s possible for you, no matter what you’re dealing with right now. And I think we know that this is what God wants for us, right? We know that he doesn’t want us to be in our homes, stressed out, upset, feeling lonely, thinking, “It’s all on me. I’m totally screwing this up. I don’t even know what to do. Everything is terrible.” You know God does not want you to be thinking that right now.

And then I think we go to the Catholic resources and we get this sense that we can have peace no matter what’s happening, and we think, “How do I do that?” But I’m explaining it to you on this podcast every week how to do that. And then in Catholic Mom Calm, if you join us in that membership and you come to the calls, you can tell me exactly where you feel a blindness.

Like, “Sterling, I understand what you’re saying. I believe that it’s possible, but man, I’m really stuck here. I don’t see how I could feel better about this situation.” And then I will help coach you through that. That’s my job, is to show you your brain and what’s possible for you to think instead so that you can feel better with the cards that you have right now, with the circumstances that you cannot change.

And it takes a great amount of humility to make this your goal because it’s much easier to think, “Well, I just wanna change all the things around me. If my husband would just change, if the kids would just listen better, if my house was different, if my body was different, then I could be happy. The problem is we cannot change external things. You can’t change the way your body looks today, right?

So even though that’s one that you have control over, you can’t change it today. You have to love your body today. You have to love your home today. And then from that place of acceptance and peace, I promise you, you are gonna drop into problem-solving, and you’re gonna clean some things up.

All right. I’m trying to say it in different ways so that you believe me. Because I’m not a special unicorn. There’s nothing special about me. There’s no reason why all of you can’t enjoy your day-to-day lives no matter what is going on.

And I really want you, even in your mind, to replace the word enjoy with peace and acceptance I can teach you how to enjoy most of your days, but I want you to know that even in the tragedies or the very hard things or the back-to-back, you know, kids being sick, things like that, you can drop into peace and acceptance.

And having these pockets of rest, these pockets of things that feel like a vacation. When I sit and do a puzzle and I’m listening to an audiobook, it feels like a vacation, and I plan that in my day, and I look forward to it. And because I give myself these tiny moments, I don’t feel at the mercy of the chaos of most of my day. It is chaotic.

The amount of drama, my friends, that we have had in the last three days about the yo-yo in my house is ridiculous. And I’ll tell you that inside my body feels upset, okay? And then I wanna throw that yo-yo in the trash, and I wanna scream at everybody, okay? Those are those initial thoughts that pop up.

But now I just see them as bubbles. They’re red bubbles. I see them, I’m like, “Oh, okay. We could do that, Sterling.” That would probably feel amazing, by the way. It feels amazing to throw something in the trash and yell at everybody. I want you to know that. That’s why we do it. I think I bought little kid yo-yos for Peter and Blaze, and like a slightly bigger kid yo-yo for Forest.

And then whether they broke themselves by not using them well or not, Peter and Blaze’s broke. I think all three of them were lost, by the way. I think Forest found his yo-yo in the backyard after the snow melted. Just so you understand, this is happening in the middle of nowhere. I think I got them yo-yos for Easter last year. Not this year, last year.

So anyway, Forest has found this yo-yo. He’s yo-yoing, living his best life. He’s almost nine, so he can do cool things with a yo-yo all of a sudden, and now everyone, including my girls, want this yo-yo. And the amount of just sibling stuff over this yo-yo is just. It could be maddening, you guys.

It could be maddening, and old me would’ve let it be so upsetting, and new me is just fascinated by the whole thing, and I think it’s so entertaining I’m just like, yeah, children always want shiny things. And I can tell you my inclination is to immediately go to Amazon and buy five more yo-yos. And I told myself, “No, we’re not gonna do that.”

They have got to learn that they don’t always get everything. They have to share. They may not get a turn at all today. The other two have to recognize a little bit that they broke theirs, and that’s okay. My job is just to be calm in the middle of all of that so that they see what calmness looks like.

And that is just one tiny example of the many, many things that are dramatic in my life because I have six kids and a business, and a puppy who I adore. She’s amazing. Little Annie Avonlea, that’s her name, is delightful and I love her. She’s mostly causing difficulty for my daughter who has to take care of her, and I can tell she is now annoyed all of a sudden.

Like, a little bit of the honeymoon period has worn off, and she’s like, “Oh, I don’t want to watch her.” I’m like, “I know. This is the hard part, is watching a puppy to make sure she doesn’t destroy things.” So there are so many things that I could be upset about.

But instead, I just choose to think about those things differently so that I don’t lose my peace all the time, and I want that for you. And I don’t know what I was talking about, even in this podcast, Catholic Mom Calm, I think if you go all the way back to November of 2020 is when we started, and I was doing it with Larissa, who’s such an amazing human being, so if there’s an episode of hers, do listen to it.

You could go all the way back and just listen to them, just back to back. Just keep listening to them as you are doing summer life, and there’s so much wisdom there for you. And then if you want individual help, come join the membership.

All these moms are committed to loving their life and managing their minds and pointing you to Jesus and helping you to have different thoughts about the things so that you are not in as much pain. I just think it’s the most amazing place to be.

And we have such incredible testimonials. I get emails every week. I’m not joking. I have this process where I get an email and somebody says, “Your program has completely changed my life. I’m so happy.” Or they say, “This crazy thing happened this week, and I would have reacted this week this way, but now I’m reacting this other way.”

And then I put them in this testimonial folder, and we just have this huge bank of testimonials because this really does change your life. And for those of you that listen to me on Coffee and Pearls, you know it’s changed mine. The way that I talk about my life is completely different. And I want that for all of you. We only get this one short life. I don’t want you to not enjoy it.

Okay. I love you. I am praying for you. One more thing, we have six more spots for France. Okay? So that’s either three more pairs, mother-daughter, aunt-niece, granddaughter-grandma. We have a lot of different kinds of pairs that have come out of this or you can just come by yourself, or you can recommend it to a friend.

So I know that God has six more women or girls who are gonna come on this trip. So you can go to catholicmomcalm.com/france, and if it’s you, I just want you to know you’ll know. You’ll just wake up and you’re like, “Is it crazy for me to go to France in the fall?” But God will just put it on your heart, and then you’ll talk to your husband and you’ll be like, “I know this sounds crazy, but I really think I’m supposed to go to France in the fall with Sterling.”

And I’m supposed to go with my mom or my sister or my daughter, whatever it is. You’ll just know. And if it’s not for you right now, it’s not for you right now. That’s totally fine. It has not been for me in the last 15 years, and I’ve never been to Europe.

But I’m so clear that it is for me right now. And I know that it’s for six more people and they just haven’t said yes yet. So if you wanna talk on the phone about it, shoot me an email. I’ll answer your questions. But I know that six more people are gonna join us. And if that’s you, say yes and sign up.

All right, my friends. Thank you so much for listening. I am praying for you. Please pray for me and have a blessed day .