How to Romanticize Your Life as a MOM

This is a good a day as they need to start the rebuilding of life. Hello my friends! Welcome back to my channel, or welcome to my channel if this is your first time here. My name is Megan, I'm a 25 year old mama to an adorable 14 month old boy named Rowan, and I post motherhood and lifestyle videos on this channel twice a week, so if that sounds like your jam, please go ahead and click that subscribe button below so we can be friends. Today we're talking about a topic that I am so passionate about, and that is romanticizing your life as a mom. This is something I have been practicing for the last couple of months, and it has radically radically changed my life. Like I'm not talking about, oh yeah I feel a little bit happier or like a little bit more grateful than I did before, like it is a night and day difference. If you've been on my channel for a while, you'll probably have heard me mention that I was feeling pretty stuck in a rut of motherhood, and just feeling the monotony of the routine, and I looked around and I thought, my life is so wonderful, and I'm so blessed, and I'm not enjoying it. Like I'm taking all of this for granted, and like it wasn't an external factor that needed to change for me to be happy, it was my own mindset. And so I started researching, as I do, and I came across this of romanticizing your life. And this is nothing new, I think there was a text post making the rounds on tumblr like years ago about this that recently became popular again, and I'm gonna read it to you. You've gotta start romanticizing your life. You've gotta start believing that your morning commute is cute and fun, that every cup of coffee is the best you've ever had, and that even the smallest and most mundane things are exciting and new, because that's when you start truly living. This idea of romanticizing your life has been a big trend on tiktok recently, and I realize that that does lose it a little bit of credibility, because you know it's a trend, it's a fad, but the core concept is so so important. It's kind of a combination of mindfulness, presence, and gratitude, and I think it can have a really profound impact on your mental health. The problem for me was that when I was looking at all of these young women romanticizing their lives, you could tell they had a lot of time. And as a mother, you don't necessarily have that time, so romanticizing your life for us can't necessarily look like writing under a tree and going to the spa. I don't know, it just seemed like they would dedicate so much of their time to it, and that's awesome. Wish I had time to do that, but I don't. And I couldn't really find any resources online for romanticizing your life as a mom, and so I kind of just started making it up as I went along, and through trial and error I found what's worked for me. So I have some notes, three pages of notes actually, of things that I do that help me to remain grateful and feel like the main character, feel like I'm living in my own movie about my life. It brings a lot of vigor back to life and makes everything feel exciting and new, and I sometimes just feel like I'm in this place of just like drowning in gratitude, like my heart's gonna burst because I'm appreciating all the little moments in my day that I was taking for granted. So like I said, it's been a big, big change for me. I've been blabbering on about background for way too long, so I'm gonna go ahead and go into the tips now. Some of these are more basic and some of them are things you might not have thought of before. So the first tip that I have for romanticizing your life as a mom is to record on camera, on your phone, some of your daily activities that you do with your baby, like if you're doing sensory play or you're baking something together, record a little snippet of that. Don't pay attention to the camera, don't pose for pictures, just record yourself doing it. And then at night when your kiddo goes to bed, scrub through and take a screenshot of any cute moments in that activity that you guys did together. It helps you to start looking at your life from that like, what a quaint little, you know, montage that would be in a movie. And it takes the everyday things that you do and turns them into something that you want to save and something that you want to remember. I'll pop in a couple of recent times that I've done this here so you guys can see what I'm talking about, but look at that! Doesn't that just like make your heart happy? Also as a mom, you often take way more photos of your kid and your kid with other people than you have photos of yourself with them, so that helps with that too. Along those same lines, something else that you can do is to create little like 15-second aesthetic montages of your life on like a TikTok or an Instagram reel. You don't have to post it if you don't want to, or you can post it to a private account where you have no followers just for you to look back on. And what you want to do is focus on small details, so get your camera up nice and close to your morning cup of coffee or your baby's little chubby hand or flowers that you found on your walk. In addition to of course having just some shots of your kiddo and you, it doesn't have to be anything elaborate. Like it can literally be pulling out your phone for two seconds when something makes you smile and then putting it to pretty music and watching the best moments of your day in 15 seconds. I feel like when I do this, I look back at my day and go, wow, like that was magical. It's almost like you're showing yourself your own highlight reel, like you're not going back and watching, here's the screaming meltdown that my child had in Target. Like you're watching all of the best parts of that day and it's really sweet and fun and it's also just great memories to look back on. The next thing that I have to say is get ready for the day, every day, in some capacity. You don't have to go full glam and put on makeup and do your hair, but at least get out of your pajamas, get out of your sweats. Even if it's just a cute loungewear set, that will help mental health immensely. And if you want to take it one step further, have matching or coordinating outfits with your kiddo and then go somewhere in the world with them, whether that's like on a walk or to the grocery store. It's so fun to match with your baby and I feel like it just makes you feel so put together and like a little bit extra and we love that energy for romanticizing your life. It's really important. The next tip I have is to think back to before you were pregnant or when you were pregnant and write down some activities that you dreamed of doing as a mom. Like what is the hobby that you dreamed of sharing with your kiddo one day? Even if it's something you thought you couldn't do until they were older. Mine, for example, was baking. I have always thought about making Christmas cookies with my kids. How fun and special that would be to have them with the flowers sitting on the counter, getting messy, and then pick one of those things that you dreamed of doing as a mom and do it. Even if your kid is a little bit too young to like really participate or understand, do it anyway. Like I said, take a little video clip of it so you can take a screenshot. I've heard this from a lot of different people that when you become a parent, sometimes you're not the mother that you thought you would be. Like things are different. Not necessarily bad, not necessarily good, just different. Take a minute to be that mom that you dreamed that you would be for half an hour and just bask in that for a second without judgment of, oh, I wish my life was always like this. Just like let yourself have a special moment. The next thing that I have to say is background music all the time. I once heard a quote that if you're romanticizing your life and your life is like a movie, you might not be able to control the script, but you can control your costume, hence the outfit thing, and the soundtrack. And that just like blew my mind a little bit. It seems so like simple. Like of course you can play music whenever you want to, but when you think about it, like when I'm editing a YouTube video, say I'm doing a montage of me cleaning. If I put like nice, calming, acoustic music into it, then it has a very sentimental feel. If I put frantic, busy music, then it has a feeling of being kind of frenetic and chaotic. The exact same clips can feel radically different depending on the music that I use, and that can be true of your own life as well. I would recommend finding some instrumentals that you like. We have like a Saturday morning acoustic playlist that we love, and some lo-fi playlists that we really like. I'll link them down in the description in case you want to use them. Play that stuff all the time, unless you're having like sensory overload, obviously, but if you're in the car, play music and sing along to it. If you're doing dishes, get some lo-fi beats on. If you're making dinner, jazz music, a glass of kombucha or wine if you drink wine. You know, being a kid when you would listen to like a melancholy song on your iPod, and like you'd be in the car like looking out the window and pretending that you had some like tragic character backstory going on. Was that just me being dramatic, or did we all do that? It's kind of the same concept, but in your everyday life now. The next thing that you can do, and this takes a little bit more effort, but the payoff is so worth it, is to plan seasonal activities. So every season, I try to plan at least two activities that we can go out and do as a family that I can look forward to. So for example, in fall, it might be apple picking and the pumpkin patch. I know as a mom, it is so much easier to not do things than to do them, because you've got to get the stroller and the diaper bag and time the wake windows and the feedings, and like it's just kind of a nightmare sometimes. But if you don't pick out those days to plan something, have something to look forward to, then you get stuck in the routine really quickly, and it feels very monotonous, and it can just kind of feel like it's sucking the life out of you. And it doesn't have to be anything, like if you don't want to drive to a pumpkin patch, you don't have to do that. You could get a papier-mâché pumpkin from Target and have like a night where you and your significant other paint it, or if your kid is old enough to paint, have them in on the action. I think these kinds of activities are better when you can include your baby. For me especially, the pumpkin patch was like something that I dreamed of doing as a mom, going back to that concept. And so like getting dressed up in cute outfits and going to the pumpkin patch and having your kid actually pick out a pumpkin and taking pictures, like it just, it breaks up the routine and it really helps. A more like garden variety version of that concept is to get yourself outside and out of your house as much as possible. I know right now with the pandemic, it's tricky to do that. There are, you can find safe ways to do it, you know, go on a trail walk where you know there's not going to be a lot of people, or even just like in your backyard. If you're comfortable, go to a grocery store during one of your kid's wake windows, or go to Target, or go and get drive-through Starbucks. There is nothing more draining for me personally than the days where I feel like I just walked behind Rowan around the house for three hours at a time, three times during the day. That is just like, that sucks the joy and the surprise and the excitement out of life. For me anyway, could be different for you. But I find that getting out and doing things is always worth it, even though it does take the effort for a long, long time, months and months and months. I just wouldn't go anywhere, do anything, because it just felt too hard. But when I started to do it, even though it took effort to get there, I found that I had more energy in general because I wasn't feeling so drained from the monotony of the routine. So I personally think it's worth the effort to go ahead and do something like that once or twice a week. It helps those wake windows not feel quite so long. The next tip that I have is to have a non-kid related hobby. When I became a mom, everything in my life kind of revolved around being a mom, even my job, because I make motherhood videos. And I very quickly found that I needed to have a non-child hobby. So for me, it's reading. I love reading fantasy novels and I have found that the last couple of months really picking that back up and having something to do for me at night after Rowan went to bed made a massive difference in my mental health because I get anxious when I'm idle. And so at the end of the day, you're exhausted from taking care of your kid all day and you might feel like you don't have the energy to plan something to do. So if you have a hobby that you're pretty like well entrenched in and you just can pick it up easily, like crocheting or roller skating or reading or painting, you know, baking, there's a million different hobbies you could choose. It helps to stave off that boredom and like keep a little bit for yourself every day, which I think is really nice. Something that also massively helped me in this period of figuring out how to romanticize my life was putting down my phone. Now I'm not going to be one of those people who judges you for being on your phone too much. I am very guilty of that as well. And sometimes you just deserve a five minute scroll break. But when it becomes a problem is when you're doing it out of habit and you find yourself just like muscle memory, like pick up the phone, swipe up Instagram, and then you're scrolling. Like I didn't even have to look at my phone to do that, which is terrifying. I find that my phone makes it really hard to be present in the moment that I'm in, which is not great when I'm around my son. Either I'm worrying about an email that I got and kind of living in the past or I'm worrying about a work project that I have to do in the next few days living in the future. I actually bought a little box at the thrift store to put my phone in so that I couldn't just pick it up without thinking about it. Like I would have to go somewhere and open the box and that kind of triggered me to be like, oh, why am I picking up my phone? Do I actually need it? Yes. Okay. Let's use it. No. Okay. Maybe we won't take it out of the box. Something else that can really help with that is if you just put a rubber band around your phone, that way when you're going to look at it, there's something obstructing your screen and it makes you figure out if you actually need to use your phone or if you're just doing it because you're bored. And then the last idea I have for romanticizing your life as a mom is to get outdoors in nature as much as you can. I know it gets trickier around this time of year because it's kind of cold, wet, dark, et cetera, depending on where you live. But when you get the opportunity, go out in your backyard, go to a field or a park. If you have one that's not too crowded and you feel safe, go on a walk, especially if you have a toddler. Nature walks are so fun. You can point out the trees and the birds and have them try to find a pine cone. It helps with their vocab building. Um, and it also just kind of like helps them connect to the natural world, you know? And I think being outside and getting fresh air is such an underrated resource. I feel so invigorated after I've been outside for a little bit. We try to go on a family walk every day after Matt gets off of work and it really makes a massive difference. This is also a great time to listen to music if you're curating your life soundtrack, like I suggested earlier. Overall, I think that practicing gratitude and mindfulness is really what leads to this feeling of romanticizing your life. So if you're not familiar with what it is to intentionally practice mindfulness, quick Google search will help you out. I think there's an app that my therapist recommended called Headspace. You can check that out. But to me, at the end of the day, it's about really living in all of the tiny moments that you experience, whether it's clipping a flower in your garden or taking the first sip of your morning coffee or really slowing down to experience a moment with your child. And yeah, maybe the movie of your life is no longer the exciting coming-of-age story that it used to be in your teens and early twenties, but you're living in the happily ever after now. I know some days it doesn't feel like that. Believe me, I know. But what I don't want you to feel like is that your story is over because it's not. So I hope that those tips on romanticizing your life as a mom were helpful. If you have any tips for doing this, please leave them in the comments down below. We can all help each other out. I know I'm always looking for new ways to do it and I'm sure other people are too. Thank you guys so much for watching this video. I love you lots and I'll see you all in the next one. Bye!