18 Years of Motherhood Taught Me This: What I'd Repeat and What I'd Change

Motherhood has been the most beautiful, challenging, and rewarding journey of my life. For 18+ years, I’ve had the blessing of raising my three children and watching them grow from curious toddlers into young adults ready to make their own paths. Along the way, I’ve learned that being a mom is not just about teaching right from wrong, but about weaving together a life filled with love, lessons, and the occasional chaos that makes family life so real. Because we all know, there is no such thing as perfect.

Now that my two older kids are in college. It got me thinking about how time really does go by fast. It has stopped me in my tracks about some of the things that I would have done differently, or things that I am happy that I’ve done throughout the last 18 years of being a stay at home Mom.

A few things that I would highly recommend new parents establish very early on within their family:

Be sure to get family pictures done every year. In my opinion, September/October is a good time to schedule or take them on your phone with a timer. Do what you need to do to get the images yearly.
Order all the school pictures. Looking back, I wish I hadn’t been so frugal. I always felt like they were a money suck but really it is nice to have them to look back on.
Create family traditions, no matter how big or small. Whether that be a family vacation, a Sunday family dinner, family game night, morning routines, birthday traditions or, honestly, anything that can be implemented very early on so that it becomes consistent throughout the years
Find a really good way to organize little keepsakes/ memories throughout the years of their schooling. I used a large plastic bin and stored things in there, but I wish I had done things a little bit more systematically. What I mean is that I wish I had dividers or some way to organize everything by year/grade. That way, they could easily refer to stuff.
Do yourself a big favor and print out pictures. I had friends who created yearly photo albums with all the images captured throughout the year. The reason I recommend this is just in case something happens to your digital copies, you have hard copies of the images.
Speaking of photos, the next thing I would recommend is finding a way to organize all your images in folders that you can easily refer to. My images have been all over the place. Some on my phone. Others on SD cards, others in hard drives… like seriously, all over the place. Try to get everything in one spot and sorted into folders/files. Make a back up of all your digital images.
One on one activities: this is one I really wish I had done more of. It could be something small like getting an ice cream or more extravagant like doing a game/concert together whatever it is that you wanna do just make sure you do one on one activities with your children especially if you have multiple children.
If you have decided to stay home to raise your kids, be sure you have a discussion with your partner about making sure you have a credit card in your name, have a bank account with monthly income/retirement that is under your own name. Just because you have decided to stay home doesn’t mean you automatically forfeit your right to have financial accommodations for your future.

It’s hard because now that I look back, there would have been some things that I would’ve done differently and I felt it was very necessary to share those things with all of you that are younger parents and that are in a position to start implementing things now it’s harder to do that when your kids are off at college, but you still can create some kind of traditions as a family when you do have older kids, but I’m gonna have to navigate through that and figure that one out but for now I wanted to give some advice or suggestions to parents that are that have younger kids.

I hope this helps, and I appreciate you visiting my website.