How This Blog Came to be…
This is me. My name is Teresa. I am married to a wonderful man named Michael. He is a fabulous husband, father, and partner in life. We have 3 children together. In 2017, we were blessed with a singleton and then two days shy of 15 months later were double-blessed with twins. I’d love a 4th. Given the proximity in age of our first three kids, he understandably thinks I’m nuts.
We both work full time jobs (from home since 2016) and live roughly 800 miles away from most of our family (not to discount my dad and sister who each live about 1.5-2 hours from us). We have been asked more times than I can count how we make it work. My answer: daycare + working from home. Working from home allows me to do things like start the dishwasher or run a load of laundry on my lunch break. And having all 3 kids in full time daycare allows me to keep my sanity while interacting with other adults during the day. Life is hard – most days we joke that we work full time office jobs during the day and then shift to wait-staff all evening and through the night. But it’s a season, and we know it. And we try to make the most out of every day, in between the moments where I feel like I’m losing my mind 😉
Then… cue the quarantine of 2020. Our lives were turned UPSIDE DOWN. At the beginning of quarantine, our oldest had just turned 3 and our twins were 21 months old. Two kids were still in diapers and slept in cribs, and baby gates still kept them from an unexpected encounter with the stairs. None of them were independent enough to get themselves dressed. Work didn’t go anywhere – as a matter of fact, we were now expected to work MORE and get MORE done. We were doing double-duty and trying to accomplish the impossible.
I, like many others, struggled to find balance in our new life. I treasured the extra time we had with the kids but my patience was always thin and I was a stressed out mess. And – as in a quarantine – we RARELY LEFT THE HOUSE and were ALWAYS TOGETHER.
My husband and I had to quickly pivot. I started working around 6 am most days, we would then shift every 1.5-2 hours between who was caring for the kids and who was working and leading and attending meetings. Some days felt like we never stopped. We were getting by, but we were getting quickly burnt out.
I really needed to find things to do besides working and playing with the kids. Walking, sewing, reading, spending time with God… all things I loved had somehow gone by the wayside. It was literally all work and no play. And play is IMPORTANT. I’m sure you may have heard of filling your bucket… well my bucket had long been empty. I was running on fumes.
Enter this blog. You might find the title of my blog strange. Peaceful Shower & Coffee is actually the name of the alarm I set on my phone each morning as a reminder to wake up at least 10-15 (preferably 30) minutes before everyone else so I could have a peaceful shower by myself (no kids screaming) and start my cup of coffee. Every morning during quarantine, I would wake up to this and seeing the name of it reminded me WHY I needed to get out of bed. Now, I’ll be honest, many days, at least one of my kids was up already and on those days I likely don’t get my “peaceful shower” but it does still kick me off on the right foot and remind me to force myself to take a few minutes for myself that day. When I started this blog, the thought was, I can write about all the things that are exciting to me – or share things I’ve learned about with people. And while some of the topics might be dry to some people, starting this really helped me to focus on the things in life that are important and kept me from falling back into the pit of all work.
I hope you find something here informative or exciting to read about. Please feel welcome to recommend other topics you’d like me to add. I love learning new things and sharing my failures, as those can be the most fun and trigger some of the best laughter.
God bless, Teresa