31Mar

Naptime Priorities Of Motherhood (& My Top 7 Productivity Tools for Bosses)

Motherhood shows you what your true priorities are. You become reliant on naptime to get everything done, and since the duration is always unknown, you have to make your list of need-to-get-done tasks and hope you get as many done as possible. It can quickly get overwhelmind if you haven’t planned things out, because you get frazzled trying to decide which things to get done, and end up spending the entire nap planning what you
07Mar

5 Empowering Gift Ideas for Your Best Babe, In Honour of International Women’s Day

Tomorrow is #InternationalWomensDay and I am celebrating by putting together a #GalPalGiftGuide with gift ideas that your best babe will love (at any time during the year, but feel free to use tomorrow as an excuse!). Another way I will be celebrating is by sharing about all of the badass women in my life and their accomplishments in my instagram stories. For this I need your help, so go ahead and send me their usernames in the IWD highlight on my
24Feb

Can’t. Gotta Pump.

Providing for a baby is hard work. Deciding to allow someone else to care for them—even if only temporarily—is a very difficult decision. And as if making that decision wasn’t hard enough, making enough milk for those one or two days a week is nearly impossible for a just-enougher. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Stephanie de Montigny (@bossmamadiaries) on Feb 2, 2020 at 5:27am PST It means pumping between feeds. It
23Jan

Happy 1st Birthday Little Miss!

There are so many emotions attached to that statement, which I have left for another post (all about my first year of motherhood) so this one can be all about Little Miss and her birthday celebrations. She welcomed her best buds over to play while the mamas caught up on things, she thouroughly enjoyed opening her gifts, and by golly did she ever stuff her face!

16Jan

Divide And Conquer

Even though we both chose to have a baby, to create a tiny human, there are bound to be things we don’t want to do. Things like dealing with tantrums, shitty diapers, cleaning bottles and endless laundry… So the best way with dealing with everything is to actually not deal with every single thing—divvy up the tasks and it’s like you’ve only got half the crap to deal with. Literally!

10Jan

The Banana Muffin Trifecta: Sugar-Free, Dairy-Free & Nut-Free

I cannot remember the last time I got to enjoy the deliciousness of a banana muffin–between the keto lifestyle I had to follow for a few years, the dairy-free for my breastfeeding child’s allergies, and the no-nuts for my mine, this really limited my opportunities. So, now that I am back on a simplified regime, I decided to adapt a handful of recipes into the perfect sugar-free, dairy-free, nut-free, soy-free banana muffins. This one is pretty darn close, if I do say so myself!

08Jan

If You Had One Extra Hour Every Day How Would You Spend It?

Even before becoming a parent, there were always never enough hours in the day to complete everything that needed to be done and still do things that I want. Becoming a mother stretched that time out even further, but I make it work.

03Jan

Working From Home Is Not A Vacation

As a work-from-home boss, I can tell you that more often than not people assume I do all of the housework. Umm, no. I work from home, which means I have actual work to do while I happen to be home, and that does not include the laundry or the plumbing. Do I try to plan that type of thing into my schedule? Yes. Is it a priority during work hours? NOPE. Since having a baby and earning my boss mama badge, the assumptions and opinions have only gotten worse. Working from home with a baby is hella hard, and cuts into my work time like you wouldn’t believe!

26Dec

Christmas 2019 – Starting New Holiday Traditions

This year we celebrated our first Christmas as a family of three. While it was different in so many ways, our beloved traditions lived on. Through the allergies, the nap schedule, the foiled plans because of contagious family members, and the food-poisoning (happy holidays to me!), we made it work!

24Dec

Mama, Get IN Those Photos. Friends and Family, YOU need to capture them!

Part of me knew years ago that my child’s photo albums would have mostly pictures of them alone or with their daddy, and very few with me. I didn’t plan for it, but that’s the life of a professional photographer. We are always the ones behind the camera and carriying a tripod and remote around everywhere is not exactly feasible (especially with an infant!), which means that we are often left out of the photos. So it should come as no surprise that this shoot, and many before it, did not even have one with me in it.

Ottawa Workshop Spotlight - 123 Petits Pas
19Dec

Learning Baby French with 123 Petits Pas

Having a baby in January, in Canada, is extra hard because you don’t want to go outside and also you probably shouldn’t cause it’s cold AF out there. Fast forward a year later, and now you pretty much neeeeed to get out of the house to avoid going stir-crazy with your little mover (however old they are!). Finding things to do can be a challenge, so I’ve compiled a list of kid-friendly indoor activities in Ottawa if you are looking for alternate options. Spoiler alert! One of those activities is finding some workshops to participate in–some are a one-time thing, and others are a weekly activity over the course of a month or two. This post is all about one of those workshop classes I recommended, to learn to speak & sing French with your baby, to hopefully help you decide if this one is right for you and your little one.

12Dec

Surviving Winter With A Baby

This post is about all of the wonderful mom hacks and awesome products that I have discovered after having a baby in January, in Canada. If you were hoping for ideas on what to do to avoid going stir-crazy, I’ve recently compiled a list of the top 10 kid-friendly indoor things to do in Ottawa during the winter so that you can adventure out into the wild without worrying about hanging out in the frigid Canadian cold. If you prefer to stay inside and avoid the cold altogether, scroll to the end of the post–I got you! Let’s start with that list of gear.

06Dec

Sweet & Spicy Ginger Chicken Bites

I don’t even like chicken. But I made my husband cook this for us two nights in a row, with leftovers for lunch both days. He said no the third day. Yup, that’s how good it is!

exclusively breastfeeding working mom mama sitting in desk chair pumping
20Nov

Breastfeeding As A Working Mom

In case you didn’t know, I am a work-from-home mama. I also exclusively breastfeed my daughter, which has been somewhat of a challenge, to say the least.

14Nov

When Baby Refuses The Bottle

When baby refuses the bottle, shove it in their mouth. Sort of. The milk, not the bottle. Let me explain the background on this one first. When my little girl was a month old, I was running on no sleep, no energy, and my husband was back at work. So, when he offered to do one of the night feeds for me so that I could get 4-6 hours of straight sleep instead of only 2-3, I begrudgingly agreed and bought myself a Haakaa to collect some of my milk. It went great! Fast forward to just over a month later, and bottles were apparently poison. Seriously, the screams coming out of this child sounded like death was imminent. As time passed, mama needed get back to work, which meant bottles needed to happen. Hundreds of dollars spent later on different bottles and nipples, we finally found the solution. It wasn’t ideal, but it worked.

10Nov

Pumping Is A Whole New Ballgame

This is my life now. I feel like this thing is always attached to me, and to escape it means my daughter might go hungry. My breastfeeding journey has been easy for me (minus a few minor issues along the way) so I had no idea that pumping would be this hard.

03Nov

Marriage After Baby Is Hard

Marriage is hard. Marriage after having a baby is harder. Marriage when that baby is cranky, won’t sleep, learns to scream on purpose to get your attention, and you’re living off little sleep and lots of caffeine…feels impossible.

18Oct

Babyproofing Can Be Simple!

When our daughter started crawling, it became evident that our space was not exactly child-friendly. Baby-safe, sure! But not so much for little movers. We needed to find a solution that kept baby safe, still looked pretty for my home-based business, and could be easily removed when outgrown.

Other than the obvious of baby gates and plug covers, I didn’t really know what else I needed. I could have crawled around the house myself to find the problems—as if I have time for that while keeping up with my little girl!?—so I brought in the big guns. Yup, the first thing they said was to lower that crib…