So you want to know the truth? Not just the lovely bits, hmmm? Well, I don’t blame you. Here at JessConnell.com, I try to share from both my weaknesses and strengths… however, there’s always that niggling sense that other people are better than us, isn’t there? It shows up often in our online interactions, because these […]

Instead of having a good idea of what motherhood entails, most of us learn the ropes of motherhood while we live it out. We’re already in the role by the time we realize we’re almost entirely unprepared for it. This often leads to stress and anxiety for new moms as they not only take on the hardest, most […]

Wanna know what one thing has made the difference in becoming a better mother to my children? I made this 4-minute video to tell the answer to that question, and why I write at jessconnell.com. One of the lies moms have been fed in this past decade or so is that “you’re the expert” and that “you innately possess all the mothering […]

We’ve opened our homes to small groups for over ten years: We’ve hosted short-term groups (i.e., a single-book study that only met for that one topic, and then disbanded) For four years, when we lived in Istanbul, we were the primary host home for a house church that met, week in, week out with a […]

On a post last year about the growing expectations on young woman to look physically perfect (and increasingly generic), a commenter wrote: Quick thought from a guy – Know what really hurts? When a girl spends a mountain of care and attention trying to win over exciting but unsaved “bad boys”, but then discovers the […]

Q: My 2.5 year old son is having tantrums, laying on the floor, thrashing and screaming. I feel like something is wrong! Is this normal? What do I do? A: Yes, this is something “normal.” Tantrums are without a doubt something you will face as mom, and every single one of my children has tried to […]

2014 was my first year of writing at JessConnell.com. Since we’ve nearly reached the year’s end, I thought I’d do a quick “year in review,” to give you the opportunity to read any articles of interest that you may have missed. For each month of 2014, I’ve shared the “top” article, and my personal favorite. Let’s get going. JANUARY […]

Elizabeth Krueger, mother of 10, and author of Raising Godly Tomatoes, is also a horse owner. She recently shared some great thoughts about training horses to recognize a rightful authority and how it can be similar with children. I thought Elizabeth’s observations were extremely insightful and she graciously agreed to let me share them here: I […]

Exciting news! Baby #8 is on the way. 🙂 (Which you already know if you read last Monday’s post about Doug’s tremors. By the way- he ended up hospitalized and it became obvious it was his narcolepsy medicines causing his tremors. Thankfully, now that he’s off the meds, it’s all but stopped.) We are all […]

Hey there, mom in the thick of raising your kids, or mom of 3 little ones, or newly postpartum mom, or homeschooling mom, or tired mom who has been dealing with a sick little person for far too long, or mom helping your aging parent, or single mom carrying the whole load yourself, or nomadic […]

Well, so here it is. After Josh Duggar molested a number of girls and got caught a number of times, he went on TV, got himself a wife, and sold purity and courtship and not kissing until marriage. We all watched as his dad gave him a purity talk, which we now know, he did solely for the camera, because he […]

I guess I’m a slow learner. It took me lots of babies and births to finally start figuring it out. Our baby #1 (born in a hospital in Virginia) was in the NICU for a week, I had mastitis for a month, and then we packed up our apartment and moved across the country. WHAAAAT??! After baby #2 […]

Devices are a sticky subject now. 20 years ago it was TV time. No matter what, though, unless you’re Amish, you have to reckon with it. I’ll share what we do- but would love to hear your thoughts. A Yahoo!Parenting article (which — as a sidenote– I think should be retitled more honestly as Yahoo!UNparenting, […]

Christian wife, could I have permission to speak into that place where your disappointment resides? The portion of your mind where reality shows up and shows that he isn’t, in fact, the perfect guy you may have thought he was in your early months together? The place where you are tempted to keep an opposite-of-1-Corinthians-13 […]