Barefoot Bean & Co.

my daughter stopped eating at 3 months old, and what followed was YEARS of feeding struggles, specialists, therapies, appointments and learning more about feeding and nutrition than I ever thought I would need to know. food became complicated before she was even old enough to call it food, so when I had my second and he actually wanted to eat, I approached toddler meals completely differently.

not with a goal of creating the perfect toddler diet or by counting every nutrient, and definitely not by expecting him to clean his plate ... I just started asking myself **how can I make what I’m already offering work a little harder?**

a little more protein here, fat there, different colors and flavors, pairing foods in ways that help his body actually use the nutrients in them. looking for the easy upgrade instead of reinventing every meal.

toddlers are toddlers, so some days mine eats salmon and broccoli, and some days he survives on blueberries and a pouch. that’s normal, and I can’t control what or how much he eats. but I can control what I offer, and after everything our first feeding journey taught me, this is one of my biggest priorities to focus on. so this is what make every bite count means in our house.

save this for the next time you’re thinking about how the only thing your toddler has eaten is a plain bagel and blueberries and what the hell you can do to pivot.

and follow along for more things that make motherhood + daily life a little better, easier and more fun 💫

I did a poll yesterday asking what you guys wanted me to talk about first this week, and surprisingly, “marriage stuff nobody talks about” won. so here we are!!

I feel like I should preface this by saying I am not sharing this from the perspective of someone who has always had some wildly healthy, easy marriage. quite the opposite lol. my husband and I have been together for 18 years and in couples therapy for 3+ years, and there was a point in our marriage (3 years postpartum with our first) where, if I’m being completely real, we basically hated each other. it wasn’t good. we were disconnected, resentful, keeping score, and both felt like the other person just did. not. get. it. and then we had to figure out how to come back from that.

A LOT of what I share about relationships now comes from what we’ve learned in therapy, what we’ve had to unlearn ourselves, and what has actually helped us rebuild our marriage while simultaneously raising two little humans.

we still annoy the s**t out of each other sometimes and get triggered, and we still have moments where one of us is carrying more. none of this means we’ve cracked the code, but our marriage today is genuinely so different from the marriage we were in a few years ago.

so when you guys said you wanted the marriage stuff nobody talks about, I figured we might as well start with **the postpartum ick.** 😂

tell me I’m not the only one who has looked at the person they chose to spend their life with and thought, *omg could you literally stop chewing like that?*

tell me in the comments how you got over the postpartum ick!