Real Moms Putting It Out There: Our Top Posts from 2016

2016 was a big year – we saw growth in our community in ways that touched us more than we could have anticipated. Our Neighborhood Groups have exploded, bringing community building very personally right into your own backyard. As our events grew in number, so did our Events Team. And, our Writing Team doubled, bringing viewpoints that were new, experiences that more moms can resonate with and weaving the history of so many women together into a community willing to be vulnerable and share their good and their hard.

What we’ve always hoped for the moms within our community is that they will find a place where they belong. Not only because we truly want you to be here, but because you see a bit of yourself in one of us. With more than 90 of us and growing, our greatest hope is that this is true for you personally. Moms like you have walked some of the same roads you have, and while each experience is personal and unique, the ties that bind really do bring the larger community together in a way that we believe moms and women can do that others can’t. We build micro-communities within our homes and we can easily do the same outside of it as well.

We have the biggest hopes and dreams for 2017. Not only that we can bring even more resources, more events and more experiences through the words of our writers, but that you would find community within ours. Below we’ve gathered the top 10 posts of 2016 – we hope you love this second glance at them as much as we do! Keep an eye out for more stories like these, as well as some incredible new things on the horizon. Cheers to 2017, mamas…this is our year!

“I’ll keep fighting the fights that are necessary for his well being. I’ll keep fighting for him to be his own self. But I’m also going to be more calm and let go of the frustration. I’m going to slow down and enjoy the ride. I am going to embrace having a little mini clone of myself and show him how I can keep my emotions in check.”

“My mini-van is my mommy sanctuary where I can actually hear my own thoughts, despite my kids being in the car with me. We can drive at least an hour (haven’t tested it further yet) with absolutely no toys or tablets for entertainment for either one. Yes, even my crazy high energy almost 2 year old boy sits still for that long (70% because he’s strapped in). So what’s my secret? Lean in real close and I’ll whisper it…”

“Our day to day life can get busy, so having that one on one time is important to me as well as I know it is important to my girls. My girls are four and two right now so I am in that fun stage where they still think I am super mom vs when they turn into teenagers and don’t want anything to do with me……. So I have decided I better soak up this precious time while I can!”

“Around 36 weeks, my skin, specifically my feet, really began to itch. It wasn’t an itch like a mosquito bite where if you scratch it long enough it goes away. It was far more sinister. It was a deep itch and no matter how much I scratched and clawed there was no relief. I dug at my skin until it bled, and still no relief. I knew itching was common in pregnancy, but my feet had scabs on them! When I casually mentioned the itching at my next appointment, my low-key doc went into high gear. He called and set-up a high priority appointment with a maternal fetal medicine (MFM) specialist, wrote me a prescription and got very serious.”

“Confession: We gave our daughter a weird name.

It’s not, like, celebrity weird. It is not a cardinal direction or a common fruit. But it’s just quirky enough that she will never, ever, find her name on a gas station keychain.

The name could have been relatively normal, but we spelled it wrong. On purpose.”

“It’s one month out of the year I feel many women, parents, friends and family members can link their hands and spread word about this rare syndrome that has the most alarming statistics when it comes to survival, thus being 99% of Turner Syndrome related pregnancies do not reach full term. Ninety-Nine Percent! This February I find myself and a few other local moms who will not only celebrate the life of our girls, but we will also speak out, educate and look forward to more advances for those who have beat the odds and honoring those who lost.”

“I felt a bit blindsided by motherhood.

I’m just being honest. Judge if you will.

But like I said… blindsided. As soon as I found out I was expecting, people started giving me advice. They told me how challenging motherhood was going to be, but quickly followed it up with something like, ‘but it’s SOOOO worth it.'”

“I am sorry I did not know how special and unique you were from the beginning. I am sorry for trying to control instead of learn; for yelling instead of teaching; for being impatient, dismissive, and easily frustrated. I know you just want attention, to be heard, and to feel loved. Do not worry my spirited little one, you are loved more than you will ever comprehend.”

“So when I visited her this time, we spent the entire weekend shopping, relaxing, eating and talking and talking…and talking. It was more refreshing than I ever could have imagined and not just because I had a constant stream of Starbucks Ice Tea Lemonade in my hand.”

“As a Twin Cities mom, it is nearly impossible to not be a Target fanatic as there is a Target store about every five miles in the Twin Cities area. If you love Target as much as I do, or if it’s one of your main places to shop, you should be utilizing one of their best savings platforms, the mobile coupon app, Cartwheel.”

Our most popular articles are local event guides, which we’ve kept out of our Top Ten, but we couldn’t help but share a few here!