Scratch That: Parenting & ReParenting Off Script (Rebekah Taussig & Caitlin Metz)

Today we bring you a mini mid-week episode to tell you about a resource Caitlin created, fueled by the specific needs of their neurodivergent brain that has expanded into a tool, a practice, a piece of art in so many other homes.

Tune in to hear:

🎂 A tiny update on how Caitlin has been processing their neurodivergence, especially as they cross the threshold of a birthday that feels big.

✨ A poignant insight from a dear friend.

🌱 Caitlin learning to recognize some of the tangible beauty that comes from their specific needs.

💓 Several ways that people use the calendar Caitlin made, including: a visual guide, a way to help kids understand long passages of time, tracking big dates.

☀️ Rebekah's use of the calendar as a daily practice for tuning into embodied memories.

Order/Download the Calendar Here 

We wish every single one of you could sit in the presence of Sacha Mardou. Until that day, we offer you this hearts-out, into-the-depths-of-it-together conversation. Author of the graphic memoir, Past Tense, Sacha shares her story of developing anxiety when she turned 40, going to therapy for the first time, and learning that her childhood story was still with her, waiting for her self-compassion. Rich with insight and never trite, she honors the mess, the nonlinear, the unfixable alongside the hope for meaningful change. Not only did Sacha share her own stories and wisdom, but she embodied a sharp clarity and generosity in her presence with us, showcasing, in real time, her hard earned therapy tool belt.

A heads-up for caution and care – around 36 minutes into this episode, Sacha references her mother being sexually assaulted at the age of 13.

Tune in to hear us talk about:

📝 How to adult through therapy – e.g. How do you know how long to go? When to go back? When to switch therapists? How do you process/document what you’re learning? How do you act as a self-advocate in therapy?

💓 Naming the parts of ourselves trying to hold us together with harshness and rigidity, and the importance and challenge of self-compassion.

🌈 Creativity as a bridge to connecting with and understanding Self.

📓 Sacha’s mini lesson on Internal Family Systems.

🧑‍🧒 How therapy shapes the way Sacha shows up as a parent (and how that’s changed now that she has a teenager). 

🔓 Closed family communication systems versus open family communication systems. 

🔄 Legacy burdens and repeated family traumas.

🔨 Grappling with the reality that we can’t fix ourselves enough to be perfect parents and learning to model owning our mistakes and repairing relationships.

⏰ Having the tools but feeling like we don’t have the time, energy, or wherewithal to implement them. 

To learn more about Sasha Mardou, you can find her on Instagram and through her website. Also, check out her books, Past Tense and Sky and Stereo.

We would love to hear from you! What has your experience been with (or without) therapy? What has been the best and hardest, most and least meaningful, frustrating, fulfilling, disappointing, healing part of it?

Find us on instagram @sitting_pretty ✨ @caitlinhasfeels

When we sat down for this conversation, we fully intended to dive into the tricky choices we have to make when deciding if/how to share about our kids — on social media or a podcast, in writing or conversation. And while we do spend some time trying to parse out that particular challenge, the conversation that unfolded quickly became much deeper. Because a conversation about representing another human is also a conversation about storytelling, perspective, autonomy, and relationship boundaries. And so we ask —

👀 What if we don't see things the same way that our kids/parents do?

📚 What happens when family members have conflicting true stories of shared experiences?

📷 How do we document our kids' childhoods without bringing an audience into their experiences.

👯‍♂️ How do I untangle where my story ends and yours begins?

🧑‍🧑‍🧒 How do we learn to tell our own stories when we've deeply absorbed a family narrative?

🪢 How do I hold onto a sense of myself when parenting/caregiving consumes so much of me?

🐣 And why even share about our kids at all?

In the episode, we mention...

Rebekah's recent Substack essay, " Dear Son of a Disabled Mother,"

Caitlin's collaborative artwork with Charlie, including the "Am I a Real Mom?" piece.

We would love to keep the conversation going on our Patreon. Have you found a way of representing your young people (online or anywhere else) that honors both your experience and theirs? Do you have tensions within family systems that hold multiple, differing true stories? What do you find especially sticky about the questions being asked in this episode?

Find us on instagram @sitting_pretty ✨ @caitlinhasfeels

We’re launching a podcast!!! First episodes of SCRATCH THAT: PARENTING & REPARENTING OFF SCRIPT drop September 30th!

Two scrappy midwestern authors, who birthed babies in the early days of the pandemic, walk into a bar. Well, one walks in their chunky doc martins and backward cap, the other rolls in on her Ti-lite chair, rocking teeny tiny bangs.

Both challenge the norms of parenthood in their own ways — one with their gender, the other with her body — and carry deep curiosity about what it means to be human. Naturally, these wayward misfits hit record and turned their angst and good cheer at being alive — in these bodies, at this time — into a whole ass podcast.

You are cordially invited to join us on this winding exploration. Along the way we’ll be chewing on impossible questions, interviewing people who are also going off script, and sharing the books, poems, and objects that support our quest to parent and re-parent ourselves at the same time.

You will always be able to listen on Apple & Spotify, but join us on Patreon (for free) to be part of the conversation (and see our intro videos!)!!

Hello and welcome to Scratch That!

We (Caitlin & Rebekah) are so thrilled that you — yes you listening to this right now — are here tuning in to this episode.

So we wrote you a letter! And had a quick chat about who we are, why we started this show, and how becoming parents ushered us into a new era of reparenting ourselves and rewriting our scripts for family, motherhood, childhood, and so much more.

We hope you’ll press play, subscribe wherever you listen, and join us on Patreon to continue these conversations.

xo, Rebekah & Caitlin

Mentioned in the episode:

• Basil Kincaid
• Scratch That Patreon

In today's episode, we reflect on our memories/associations with New Years, and the practices that do/don't feel good around this time of year. We are moving away from new year's resolutions and toward reflective practices that allow us to bear witness to the previous year.

Tune in to hear us talk about:

🎊 The ways we moved through this holiday when we were young.

📓 Caitlin's annual, seasonal, and monthly reflection practices (including picking a yearly word, Lisa Congdon's Live Your Values deck, and reflection guides).

🕯️ Caitlin's new practices, including admin adulting days, fun seasonal bucket lists, and a new advent tradition.

❌ A new kind of resolution that asks – what are you NOT prioritizing this year?

🗓️ Rebekah's daily documentation practices – why she does them and how she holds them lightly.

⏰ Our angst about the rapid passage of time and how we want to be present for the moments as they're passing.

💌 And invitation to write a letter to 2024 or 2025 – we'll read ours next week!

Mentioned in this episode:

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

Lisa Congdon's Live Your Values deck

We would love to hear from you! How to you mark the turning of another year? Do you have any documentation practices that feel good to you?

Find us on instagram @sitting_pretty ✨ @caitlinhasfeels

We don't have a lot of words right now. No hot takes. No three step plans. We feel heavy, confused, and scared. And while we might have the impulse to shut down, we want to be intentional to bear witness to the untidy snarl of this moment. It didn't feel right to carry along with our regularly programming when so many of us are grieving & afraid right now. So here's a tiny conversation to hold space for a greater pause — for feeling our feelings, for taking deep breaths, for listening to more stories & reflecting on the stories we hold, for making plans to support the ones around us, for whatever we need to feel the ground beneath us.

And in the meantime, here are some poems & essays that are speaking to us right now.

What do you turn toward? by Lisa Olivera

MAGA Hat In the Chemo Room, by Andrea Gibson

For My Sister, by Kate Baer

I don't want another black president: a love letter, by Kaplan Villacorte Trudo

How Dark the Beginning, by Maggie Smith

Lisa Olivera's words are a uniquely grounding force in a world fueled by algorithms that thrive on speedy-hot-takes, over-simplicity, and one-note narratives. Every time the internet feels like it’s literally going to combust under the strain of loud noises, her steady voice calls us back to our bodies and our inner knowing. We had so many questions for her! And in Lisa-fashion, she met our wonderings with a generous, present, and soft openness, offering reframes and revelations we didn't even know we needed. We're so excited to share this episode with you. 💛

Tune in to hear us talk about:

💫 Reframes for imposter syndrome, self-criticism, and the parts of our stories that have only ever felt hard/sad/painful.

📖 The strange experience of writing a book that makes its way into the world right after you've sustained a complete disintegration of self through new parenthood.

🦋 Giving ourselves, our kids, our partners permission to change, evolve, and grow.

🎭 The many different ways to think about the stories we hold – storytelling as an evolving practice, the limitations of storytelling, holding our stories loosely.

🪂 Letting go of the idea that we can control other people's stories, even our kids' (and letting ourselves feel the grief of that).

💕 The counter-intuitive strength of staying soft.

If you want more of Lisa's voice in your world, check out her stunning Substack, Human Stuff, her book Already Enough, and stay tuned for the release of her next one!

We would love to hear from you! How do you see storytelling showing up in your own life? Is it a tool? Or a hinderance? Where do you feel yourself becoming rigid? Where would you like to soften?

Find us on instagram @sitting_pretty ✨ @caitlinhasfeels

Today we tackle what Caitlin refers to as the "cheerful nostalgia and heart-wrenching sorrow" the holidays can bring. For so many of us, this particular time of year comes with a lot of guilt and pressure, hard memories or sadness that the present doesn't look quite like we think it should. Together we process what makes these days hard for the both of us and generate a host of ideas for navigating these both/and days with full hearts and a lot of creative curiosity.

🖨️ You can download this little zine, print on 8.5x11 paper and fold it down for your pocket to reference when you need it. Here are directions for folding.

Tune in to hear us talk about:

💔 Making space for the sadness and releasing the guilt.

✨ Grasping onto joy when we can.

🎊 Caitlin's tips on how to create new holiday traditions.

🍄 Learning to take off the pressure of a single day.

🙌 Our own experiences accidentally discovering new holiday rituals.

🌱 The pains of families evolving holiday traditions as they age, grow, and change.

⚙️ Moving away from default and toward intentional celebrations.

Find us on instagram @sitting_pretty ✨ @caitlinhasfeels

The conversation we bring you today is especially tender. We decided to sit down to talk about internalized ableism, because Caitlin is grappling with a potentially new diagnosis that has brought up a lot for them. We hope you'll listen to this one with care — as we process together, we lift the lids on some of the ugliest wounds ableism inflicts. And so much is still fresh.

The two of us experience internalized ableism differently for a host of reasons — Caitlin feels wobbly even claiming the title of disability and would embody a combination of old and new, non-apparent versions of the word, while Rebekah moves through the world in a very visible wheelchair, and has for most of her life — but as we talked, we bumped into a host of thought-provoking overlaps and deviations in our experiences.

Tune in to hear us explore:

🌪️ The wide range of layered emotions that can come up with a new diagnosis.

🦆 The definition of ableism through the metaphor of a duck on water.

🌊 The messy intersections of postpartum depression, internalized ableism, and ADHD/autistic burnout.

👍 The feeling of needing to prove we can be trusted to care for our kids, especially in public.

❗️ The ways pregnancy and postpartum can become disabling experiences, especially in a country that does not support new parents.

💵 How money changes the experience of disability.

♟️ Strategies for navigating mental health struggles as a parent.

🌱 A hope that adjusting to a new diagnosis can be a beautiful process, too.

Mentioned int this episode:

📖 Easy Beauty by Chloe Cooper Jones

🌀 Andy J Pizza shares a lot about his experience of ADHD as a creative — find him on Instagram or his podcast, The Creative Pep Talk Podcast.

🫧 KC Davis creates conversation around neurodivergence & parenting — find her on TikTok, her podcast, Struggle Care, or read her book, How To Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing.

⚡️Katherine May's book The Electricity of Every Living Thing

🌿 The Neurodivergence Skills Workbook for Autism and ADHD: Cultivate Self-Compassion, Live Authentically, and Be Your Own Advocate by Jennifer Kemp and Monique Mitchelson

We would love to keep the conversation going in the comments. How do your experiences with internalized ableism overlap/deviate from the experiences we talk about in today's episode? How are you coping? What feels hard? What do you understand now that you didn't at first?

Find us on instagram @sitting_pretty ✨ @caitlinhasfeels

Last week, we swirled around the impossible questions of paradigms – What stories did we inherit? What stories are we passing on (intentionally & unintentionally)? Enter – Abbie VanMeter. Abbie is the executive director of the CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution, the host of the Stories Lived. Stories Told. podcast, the host of the CosmoParenting Podcast, and an incredibly insightful and curious communicator. On this episode, Abbie meets us in the chaotic center of our swirls and offers us new frameworks and tools for the messy work of re/building paradigms as parents and people. We hope you enjoy our sprawling, juicy conversation!

Tune in to hear us talk about:

💭 What it looks like to embody a communications perspective (hint: communication is more than what is being said).

🧰 Instead of a script or map, building a toolbox we/our kids can carry into the unknown future.

🛠️ Good tools for the box, like resilience, curiosity, improvisation, and repair.

🌱 Taking good care of ourselves as good parenting (and the scripts that make us feel selfish for doing it).

❓ Questioning the common phrase "My parents did their best."

🌀 Leaning in, not pulling away from, complexity.

📚 Building paradigms that leave room for multiple stories.

📝 Empowering ourselves/our kids to be meaning makers in our worlds.

We would love to hear from you! What tools do you have in your toolbox? What tools are you trying to pass along?

Today we’re taking on the impossible question: do we have another baby? 😵‍💫

Caitlin opens us with a beautiful poem from Joy Sullivan, and then we each share the joys, fears, and swirls of question marks coming up as we consider having a second kid.

Listen in as we unpack our feelings about fertility, age, baby fever, finances, mental health, desire, and more — including how an oracle card is helping Rebekah figure out her answer.

Then join us on Patreon to continue the conversation! We’d love to hear how you’re approaching this question with your families. ♡

More from us:

• Follow Rebekah on Instagram @sitting_pretty
• Follow Caitlin on Instagram @caitlinhasfeels
• Mentioned in the episode: Instructions for Traveling West by Joy Sullivan, Haley Brown’s Tearwater Oracle Deck, Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller

✷ And if you loved this episode, please join us on Patreon for show notes, transcripts + more!

Today, we share with you a tender conversation with the one-and-only deep-feeler, wholehearted Emma Parker.

Emma is a photographer who longs for deep connections, feels inspired by the ways we are all different and also the same, and, for the last two years, has experienced infertility and miscarriage. Emma generously agreed to share some of her story, experience, and insight with Caitlin and Rebekah – two people who do not share this experience – with the hope that it could help give all of us in the Scratch That community new scripts for processing our own unique experiences and showing up for the ones we love. We are so grateful she was willing to have this vulnerable conversation with us – and y'all, she showed up with such honesty and heart💛

Tune in to hear about:

🌟 Fumbling through uncomfortable conversations.

🚫 The scripts we want to avoid when someone is going through infertility or miscarriage.

🌗 Growing our capacities for feeling more than one thing at a time.

🌱 Showing up for our hurting people by learning to sit with our own pain & discomfort.

❤️ Practicing new scripts for how to engage our kids when they are struggling.

📦 Miscarriage care-packages!

🌊 Better scripts for when our loved ones are experiencing unresolved/ongoing suffering.

Where to find everyone:

Follow Emma on Instagram @emmybeephotog + visit her website

Follow Rebekah on Instagram @sitting_pretty

Follow Caitlin on Instagram @caitlinhasfeels

This conversation was inspired by a visit Rebekah took to her son's classroom. As he has adjusted to a new school, Rebekah has tried to think more critically about how she wants to lead the conversation (and onslaught of inevitable questions these kids have) about her wheelchair.

In SCRATCH THAT fashion, this episode is more in-real-time-processing and back-and-forth questions than a 1-2-3 step plan for raising our babies to have immediate and "perfect" understanding of disability from a very young age. How do we teach our kids how to respond when they notice difference in public? How do we teach our kids about all kinds of difference when they don't experience all of it in real life? Are there any blanket rules about what we say/don't say? How do we avoid accidentally reinforcing the stigmas we're trying to push against? And as we ask and listen, we realize this is actually a conversation about how we do the hard work of being community with all kinds of different people.

Together, we generate a hearty set of ideas for how we strive to navigate these tricky conversations that we fully expect to be just as messy as human relationships themselves.

Tune in to hear us talk about:

📚 Our favorite disability-forward picture books.

📜 Rebekah's current script for answering questions about her wheelchair.

🎯 Evaluating our goals in teaching our kids about disability and difference more broadly. What are we really trying to do here?

🎨 The pieces that make these conversations sticky and complicated and learning to embrace the messiness of it all.

♿️ How Otto's new school has responded to Rebekah's disability and need for access.

🤝 A sprawling brainstorm on how we teach our kids (and ourselves) to build communities of care. 

Mentioned in this episode:

Come Over to My House by Eliza Hull

Bodies Are Cool by Tyler Feder

This Is How We Play by Jessica Slice

Mama Car by Lucy Catchpole

The Circus Ship by Chris Van Dusen

Cake Girl by David Lucas

We would love to hear from you! How are you navigating these kinds of conversations? Have you discovered any scripts that have helped you? What makes these moments feels especially tricky to you in any direction?

💔 Why is it hard to feel hopeful right now?

✨ Point to something that makes us feel hopeful — tell a story?

🌱 Hope as a verb — name a seed we are going to plant?

✏️ Caitlin leaves us with three practices they're using to imagine a hopeful future

This week on SCRATCH THAT, we process the great and ambiguous responsibility of creating paradigms for our kids — the context for what they will understand as "normal" — the scripts/stories they have about themselves, the world, and their relationship to it. Holding our curiosity in the forefront and never tying any tidy bows, we swirl around our own inheritances and the ones we're passing along. And if you would like some actual tools for navigating this wobbly territory, we can't wait to share next week's very special interview with you!

Tune in to hear us talk about:

🧳 The "cargo bay of baggage" we're bringing into this conversation.

☃️ The great allure & potential harms of creating cozy-snow-globe paradigms.

🌿 The desire to build flexible/stretchy paradigms that grow & evolve with us.

🎢 The uncomfy lack of control we have over the paradigms our kids are forming.

📆 The unspoken values we are teaching our kids through our deeply engrained daily actions.

🎞️ Trusting the process of long-arc relationships & human development.

🤸 Playing with new frameworks for paradigm building (e.g. Relationship over rules, or curiosity & openness over mandates & prescriptions. ) 

🌱 The importance of tending to our own deep beliefs and lasting paradigms.

We would love to hear from you! How are paradigms manifesting for you in your parenting and/or re-parenting experiences? What kind of paradigms are you wanting to build? What ones were built for you? How are you reshaping them?

Find Rebekah on Substack & Caitlin on Instagram ✨

Today we're thrilled to bring you our conversation with the aunt you always needed, the one with the funniest memes and all the colors, we can't imagine the internet without her — Nina Tame! Nina is doing powerful, hilarious work to revise the scripts we have around disability that has made its way across the globe (if you don't yet follow her Instagram, go forth and consume), but maybe the most profound evidence of this rewriting shows up in her own little family. Nina grew up disabled and is now the mum to three boys, the third of which shares Nina's disability. Listening to her reflect on parenting as she tends to her younger selves feels like a tangible moment of re-parenting that I imagine many of us need.

Tune in to hear about:

📜 The early inheritance of a script that disability is bad.

🧑‍🧑‍🧒 A gentle/honest reflection on what it was like to be parented as a disabled kid.

⚡️ Nina's hard-earned insights on the best practices for parenting a disabled kid.

💓 The lifelong work of teaching our younger parts that they're not a piece of shit.

👯‍♂️ The transformative shift of disability as a medical experience to a social experience.

🌱 The multitude of ways that disability enhances a family ecosystem.

Mentioned in this episode:

📖 Nina and Rebekah both have essays coming out in the forthcoming YA collection, Owning It: Stories From Our Disabled Childhoods. (While the target audience is around 9-13, we think it's also for anyone who's ever been 9-13.) Pre-ordering from Blackwells (linked above) includes free shipping to the U.S.

Where to find everyone:

Follow Nina on Instagram @nina_tame

Follow Rebekah on Instagram @sitting_pretty

Follow Caitlin on Instagram @caitlinhasfeels

Last week, Caitlin invited us to mark the turn of the year by writing letters to 2024/2025. Today, we bring you the words that came from that prompt. You will hear tears, a whole lot of heartfelt, both/and reflection, and an invitation to write your own letter/create your own artifact to mark this shift in the calendar.

At the end of the episode, Rebekah shares a little bit about how deeply difficult this year has been for her niece and sister. Since recording, the GoFundMe she started for them has exceeded the initial goal! It's been stunning to see folks rally around them. Because of that support, they are heading into the new year with one piece of this impossibly hard situation made a little bit lighter. If you would like to participate in supporting this family, the GoFundMe page will be up until January 3rd. A wholehearted, full-body THANK YOU to every single person who has donated/shared/tucked this family into your heart.

We would love to hear from you! What are you keeping with you from 2024? What are you letting go of in 2025?

Today we bring you a mini mid-week episode to tell you all about Rebekah's forthcoming picture book, We Are the Scrappy Ones.

Tune in to hear:

🌱 The origin story of the book and who Rebekah wrote it for.

👽 A bit about what it felt like for Rebekah to grow up with a disability.

🌗 The ways writing about the experience of disability for a younger audience felt very different from other writing projects Rebekah has done.

📖 Rebekah read some of the book.

PRE-ORDER THE PICTURE BOOK HERE

Find us on instagram @sitting_pretty ✨ @caitlinhasfeels

Alex Wegman is one of our absolute favorite people on (and off) the internet.

She’s a writer, storyteller, homeschooling mom of two, and a lifelong wheelchair user who tells stories about life at the intersection of disability, parenting, friendship, and generally existing in public.

Everything she shares has deeply impacted how we approach parenting. So we’re thrilled to have her as our first guest on Scratch That!

Tune in to hear about:

• Cultivating independence for parents & kids
• Disability representation in Alex’s childhood
• Confronting ableist attitudes toward pregnancy & birth
• Deconstructing the nuclear family
• New scripts for intimacy & home-building
• Learning to love the act of asking for help
• Indulging in our joy

More from us & our guests:

• Follow Alex on Instagram @alexwegman + visit her website
• Follow Rebekah on Instagram @sitting_pretty
• Follow Caitlin on Instagram @caitlinhasfeels

✷ And if you loved this episode, please join us on Patreon for show notes, transcripts + more!

We love books. And the best part of loving books is sharing them with our friends.

So we’re very excited to kick off our book report series — mini-ish episodes where we’ll talk about our favorite books that guide us as parents and people.

Our first pick is the amazing What Makes a Baby by Cory Silverberg and Fiona Smyth.

Tune in to hear us gush about this book that will help you explain reproduction to your two year old. Then join us on Patreon to request future book reports and share your fave reads!

More from us:

• Follow Rebekah on Instagram @sitting_pretty
• Follow Caitlin on Instagram @caitlinhasfeels
• Mentioned in the episode: Ericka Hart, What Makes a Baby, Sex is a Funny Word, You Know, Sex

✷ And if you loved this episode, please join us on Patreon for show notes, transcripts + more!

Now that we're a few months into making SCRATCH THAT, we take this episode to reflect on the podcast values that are revealing themselves as the most important to us. In this episode, we pull cards from Lisa Congdon's Live Your Values deck and compare notes. What do we want to prioritize? What is the target? What do we want to guide/ground each conversation?

This feels like an ongoing collaborative project, and we want you to be a part of it! Would you take a couple of minutes to fill out our Patreon poll? What SCRATCH THAT values are becoming the most important to you?? We wanna know.

We are in the season of a million gift-giving choices – What do we want to spend money on? How do we find gifts that make people feel seen/loved/celebrated? How do we buy/make gifts with thought and care when we don't have any time? Today, we dive headfirst into our personal gift giving values and offer a giant pile of recommendations (no one is paying us to make!) with the hope that it sparks something for you that feels good.

Caitlin, Our Favorite Bougie Bitch, prefers gifts that align with the way their brain functions. They prioritize fewer things of higher quality that will last over time and not make their home feel loud and cluttered. They recommend:

🎨 Consumable Gifts (art projects, activities, experiences)

🎟️ Memberships 

🥝 Kiwi Co monthly subscriptions or individual boxes (like this play-dough pasta-making kit)

🎭 Gathre vegan leather products for kids (like this doorway theater, seated spinner, car truck mat, and tunnel)

📻 YOTO for screen free entertainment

🖼️ Artifact Uprising beautiful books (you can make board books! Which I did for Charlie his first Christmas that we treasure), calendars, and more! It's so good!

📦 MakeDo I forgot to mention this! But it's one of our favorite toys ever! It's a set of screws, knife, screwdriver for cardboard that little ones can use! We make all kinds of things with it!

Rebekah, The Idealist Without Enough Time, wants everything gift to be handmade and soaking with meaning. She prioritizes items that feel one-of-a-kind thoughtful that don't take quite as much time as a hand-sewn quilt. She recommends:

🧶 ETSY for handmade, customized, feels-like-a-perfect-thrift-store-find items.

📷 Shutterfly or Artifact Uprising (or any company that lets you make things with your own photos) for photo books and inside joke mugs.

✨ Gift cards to local bookstores & small businesses! (Like this cozy spot in KC)

👻 Prints, stickers, buttons, pins from artists! (Like Tender Ghost)

🌱 Small scale handmade gifts that don't actually take a ton of time (like simple collaged photos and little decorated plant pots).

💌 A heartfelt, thoughtful card!!!!

And one of their all time favorite gifts to give – BOOKS! Together, their top recommendations include:

🌵 Instructions for Traveling West by Joy Sullivan

🙏 Gay Girl Prayers by Emily Austin

🐟 Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller

⏰ The Power of Moments by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

🍂 The Book of Delights by Ross Gay

💫 Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay

🥩 Night Bitch by Rachel Yoder

⛰️ All Fours by Miranda July

⚡️ You Better Be Lightning by Andrea Gibson

🦋 Lord of the Butterflies by Andrea Gibson

We would love to hear the ways you approach gift giving! What are your favorite gifts to give or receive? How do you prioritize your time/money around this time of year? What are your biggest gift-giving values?

Find us on instagram @sitting_pretty ✨ @caitlinhasfeels

Have you ever felt like maybe you weren’t a “real” parent?

When we decided to start a podcast, this was the first thing we wanted to talk about — why our brains keep sending us messages that we aren’t “real” mothers.

So today we’re sharing the images of motherhood we’ve seen throughout our lives, and digging into how those images are complicated by disability, queerness, and a desire to parent differently.

Listen in as we unpack our vision of what a Real Mom™️ should be. Then join us on Patreon to continue the conversation! If you have your own green shoes moment, we’d love to hear about it. ♡

More from us:

• Follow Rebekah on Instagram @sitting_pretty
• Follow Caitlin on Instagram @caitlinhasfeels
• Mentioned in the episode: Alex Wegman

✷ And if you loved this episode, please join us on Patreon for show notes, transcripts + more!

As we gear up for the week of Christmas and all of the layered feelings this stretch of days can bring, we wanted to offer you something good and grounding. To prepare, we gave ourselves a prompt: write a little blessing, love note, prayer for the holiday week. Today, we read them allowed – an offering to ourselves, each other, and you.

We would love to hear from you! How are you orienting yourself this week? What feels hard? What feels easy? What feels different than previous years? What are your disco balls on the tree or flashes of lighting over an open field?

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