Happy Monday! I hope you’re all off to a good week! I just got back from my parent’s house in south Georgia and it was an awesome weekend celebrating my brother and sister’s graduation. I will tell you all about it later this week!
I am joining Heather of My Life Well Loved again this week, along with Brittany from Southern Mama Guide, to talk all things relationships! We had so much fun last week, chatting on Facebook live and will be back at it tomorrow at 1pm EST! So drop your questions in the comments and make sure you join us tomorrow here on Facebook!
One of the biggest things that can change after having kids are your relationships. Marriage, family and friends all have a different dynamic after kids. I think its SO important that you don’t completely change your life to adapt to a child, but that you allow flexibility in all areas.
Marriage
We will be married 12 years this year and while there are a lot of things that have changed in our relationship since kids, we work hard to keep us a priority. These are my top 3 focuses to keep us united as a couple.
Time Together. We try to get in a date night every couple of months, but I would love for it to be more! We’ve never lived near family since we had kids, so it isn’t easy to get away much. But that just means it’s essential for us to have a good schedule for bedtime. At 8:30, our kids are in bed and then it’s time for us to chat, have a back porch wine date, or just watch our fave tv together.
Communication. We started our marriage with a really bad communicator…me. I don’t like conflict and if I disagree, I’d rather walk away and let you think you’re right than to try to have a discussion about it. Over the last 12 years, The Hubs has helped me so much to voice my opinion and to not just stay quiet. Now, he may regret that since I will now challenge him sometimes! Hehe. But in all honesty, we’ve gotten to the place where we can (usually) voice a concern and have a discussion that ends in a hug instead of a fight. Most of this has been work on my part, as I’ve had to realize men aren’t mind readers and I actually need to ask for help or say what I need.
Show your love to your kids. I have a great example from my parents of what love looks like and really want my boys to see the same. I want my boys to see how a lady should be treated, to see us hug and to see us helping each other with our jobs/responsibilities. Our kids also know that we are on the same page with decisions and we try hard to not disagree in front of them.
Friendships
We were one of the first ones of our friends having kids and it was challenging at times, but we’ve managed to stay close with all of our friends and many of them are now parents. When we had Cooper, we lived in California and took him everywhere. I’m pretty sure he went to every vineyard in Napa! It was really important to us that our kids became a part of our lives.
Obviously there are things that had to change and we learned this the hard way trying to keep Cooper out too late a few times, just playing with the other kids while the adults hung out. There is a point where it’s just not worth it to us to keep a kid out after bedtime! We just end up hosting a lot more now and putting our kids to bed when we normally would. We are very fortunate to have great friends in our neighborhood, so that makes it easy to get together with people. There are a lot of ways to still get in your friend time with kids.
– Keep in touch with out of town friends. Social media helps this a lot!
– Have a daytime BBQ and let the kids play in the backyard.
– Go to family friendly places, like food truck festivals, seasonal events or a loud restaurant.
– Get a sitter and paint the town red.
– Bring in the grandparents and plan a getaway.
– Stay consistent with girls nights / guys nights. I get together with local girlfriends and no kids at least once a month. It’s a much needed break for all of us and it’s just good to chat and relax without feeding or changing little ones, or having to get up during your meal. Sometimes, we do wine night in our pjs at someone’s house. Sometimes we go to dinner or dancing. But it’s just good to do it! The Hubs doesn’t do it as much as I do, but he just started a basketball league and I’ve been pushing him to plan poker nights.
At the end of the day, you have to make sure you don’t lose you, your marriage or your friendships because of the changes kids bring. There is so much good that can come from the changes, like the new love I developed for my husband after seeing him as a dad. When we were dating, I never imagined him as a baseball coach of our kids, but it’s become something I absolutely adore!
Now let’s chat! I want to hear your tips and tricks for keeping your relationships a priority. We would love if you join our conversation tomorrow and let me know any questions you have in the comments or on social media!
One Hope Wine is partnering with us to giveaway a cheese party gift plate, valued at $199, that you can use for an in home date night! Use the rafflecopter below to enter!
Key for us is worshiping together. gives you something to fall back on when times get hard. Plus i can always tell when our worship schedule is off (missing service only making it to sunday school) then our marriage and family feels off.
You guys are such a cute couple! It's impressive that you seem to prioritize your marriage when you have 3 kids. Sometimes I feel like I can barely handle my one child LOL! My husband and I like to do what we call "silent sundays." We get off phones and social media, and just do fun things like play games, watch movies, sit on the deck, etc. So refreshing!