Lifestyle
Don’t let COVID-19 ruin your Mother’s Day activities. Here are some fun and thoughtful ways to spend Mother’s Day at home or with a loved one from afar.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve been thinking about Mother’s Day since last year. I really look forward to this special day so I can spend time with mom, grandma, & sister. I love being able to just relax with them and reflect on all the joys and craziness of being a mom…I also enjoy the mimosas and pratically child free day while enjoying brunch and massages, but I really love just being with the other women in my family. So you could imagine my disappointment when stay-at-home orders were pushed back through Mother’s Day. Not only would I not be able to see my family, or have a peaceful day to myself, but the Mother’s Day Brunch I had been planning for months for DFW moms was going to be cancelled.But if you know me, you know nothing can keep me down for long and I will always come up with a creative solution to celebrate this day even if I am bound to the walls of my home. Of course I couldn’t keep all my ideas to myself, as I know many of you are looking for ways to celebrate, whether you are a grandparent, mom, daughter, son, husband, or boyfriend, here are some ways to celebrate Mother’s Day at home with your loved ones close and afar!P.S. I even have some kid friendly ideas in here to 😉
Ideas For Celebrating Mother's Day
Everyone Loves Flowers Right?
Nothing says Mother’s Day quite like flowers. I know it may seem kinda basic, but with everything going on, a beautiful bouquet of flowers would brighten anyone’s day. This is also a great way to show love to someone who might be far away, like a mom or grandma, or even a friend who just had a baby. You can never go wrong with flowers. Luckily for Mother’s Day, many florists are open! If flowers aren’t her thing, an edible arrangement is always delicious!If you are local to DFW, Below are some amazing local florists that are still OPEN! If you are not local to DFW, 1800flowers.com is still taking orders!DFW FLORISTSGloria’s Flowers: 2752 W. Davis St. Dallas, TX (214) 339-9273Mockingbird Florist: 5606 E. Mockingbird Ln. Dallas, TX (214) 821-1433Paraiso Flower Shop: 1921 S. Story Rd. Irving, TX (972) 600-9688Fort Worth Florist: 8247 Camp Bowie W Blvd. Fort Worth, TX (817) 244-2345
Relax With A Spa Day
Okay, so if you aren’t here for the flowers, well I have another idea for you! Whether you do it on your own or if your a hubby or boyfriend reading this, treat youself or your special lady to a spa day! I love this idea because it can be as affordable as your budget allows or you can go all out and do the most!Here are some ideas to make your At Home Mother’s Day Spa perfect!Purchase a cute lounge set and relax in a cute and comfy outfit to enjoy your day in!Get some amazing bubble bath soap or a bath bomb and take a luxurious bath.*If want want to get extra fancy get some candles and soft music and really set the scene*. Pick up some face masks from Target and a nice bottle of wine. *Combine this with the bubble bath, a good movie, or both…talk about heaven*For the men reading this, look up a quick youtube video on how to give a partner massage (trust me, yall aren’t that great at massages as you think you are), purchase some massage oil, and give her a much needed full body massage!
Dinner For 2..Or 3 Or 4
I know they say “the way to a man’s heart is his stomach” but have you ever witnessed a hangry momma? I can assure you it is not a pretty site and you don’t want those problems. Avoid that this Mother’s Day by cooking something nice for the momma in your home or take a FREE online cooking class together!
Cooking is also a great way to get the kids involved this Mother’s Day! Have them be your little helper with mixing ingredients or even some light chopping if they’re old enough!
If you need some recipe ideas you can always check out the recipes here on my blog or check Pinterest for some inspiration! For those free online cooking classes I mentioned above, click here for a list of chefs who are hosting free classes almost every day!
Get The Kids Involved
Mother’s Day wouldn’t be a thing without our little ones invloved. Although I usually like to spend most of my day child free, that won’t be happening this year. I don’t know about y’all but I LOVE every single little craft my daughter does. So here are some crafts that your little ones can do to make your day a little extra special!DIY Mother’s Day Sugar ScrubDIY Mother’s Day CardNail Polish Marble MugsBaby Footprint FlowerDIY Popsicle Stick Flower PotsFlower Picture CardMother’s Day Crayon ArtMom DIY Coupon BookHandprint Jewelry DishHomemade Bath Bombs
I hope you enjoy all these cute and fun ideas to do at home! Let me know in the comments what your Mother’s Day plans are!With Love, Julianna
Pinterest is one of the largest online resources for just about everything. Learn how to increase traffic to your blog with Pinterest by growing your monthly views.
Why you Should Utilize Pinterest
If you follow me on Instagram you saw how I grew my monthly views on Pinterest K in less that 3 days. In the next days leading up to writing this post I’ve grown even more. I did all this growth just by following some simple steps.Like many of you, I have had a Pinterest account for several years and used it for finding inspiration for outfits, recipes, home decor, and so much more. I never really thought of Pinterest being anything more than just that. But y’all, Pinterest is the goat for anyone who has a blog or website. It took me a little while to realize that but after clicking on sooo many pins and it routing me to someone else’s blog and online store, I realized that I should be doing the same thing. Just think about it, you spend x amount of time on Pinterest looking at different pins, saving them, and clicking on the links that take yout to a blog or website. Each time you save a pin, it boosts engagement on the original pinner’s page. Everytime you click on the link from a pin, it increases that pinner’s site views for their blog or website. These actions are boosting their analytics which makes them gain more traffic and increase their opportunity to work with brands later.So after some heavy research and testing and trying out different methods to increase my monthly views and link clinks I found a way to do just that!
How to Increase Traffic to Your Blog & Boost Your Monthly Views
Here are my steps for increasing your monthly pinterest views and link clicks so you can increase traffic to your blog!
Create a Business Account
If you haven’t already, you’re going to want to create a free business account on Pinterest. If you already have a personal Pinterest account you can add a business account to your profile. By doing this, your personal account and business account will be seperate but utilize the same log in. This is also a great feature because you can always toggle back and forth between your personal and business account without mixing up your pins and boards and having to log in and out of each account!For detailed steps on creating your business account click here!
Claim Your Website and SM Accounts
Claiming your website is such an integral step in this process. By claiming your website, you will then have access to view your analytics as well as have your website linked to all your posts. Not only can you claim your website, but you can also claim your Instagram, Etsy, and YouTube accounts.I love claiming my Instagram because everytime I post to IG, it automatically creates a pin for that post! It takes all the work out of it! You can also get your blog posts to automatically post to Pinterest as well. However, I prefer to make pins for each of my blog posts on my own!Click here for steps on claiming your website and social media accounts!
Organize Your Pins With Boards & Sections
I know I said claiming your website was the most important step…but this is also a very important step.ORGANIZE YOUR BOARDS & PINS PEOPLE!Disorganized boards are chaotic and leave your followers and viewers confused. Create multiple boards on Pinterest based on your niche. If you want to get even more organized create sections within your boards.For example my niche is motherhood & lifestyle. I have seperate boards for recipes, fashion, motherhood, and decor. I also take it a step further and have sections within my boards for further organization. My recipe board has sections for Instant Pot recipes, crock pot recipes, and desserts. My decor board has sections for home, bathroom, and bedroom decor. By having sections your viewers are able to find more specific pins.Take a look at how I organize my Pinterest here!
Pin & Pin & Pin Some More
The most obvious step, but the most forgotten. PIN!Pinning is essential in Pinterest. It’s the whole point of it actually. You don’t have to spend hours doing this, but just set aside a couple of minutes every day just to pin and repin!I pin every morning and evening for about 5-10 minutes. It’s important to pin a variety of things within your niche so your viewers can see different things from you. It’s also important for you to do this frequently so your pins get viewed more which in turn increases your monthly views and increases traffic to your website.
Create A Variety of Your Own Pins
Make sure you create your own pins as well, whether its pictures from your Instagram or your blog posts. Your boards should have a healthy mixture of your own pins and others!
This may sound extra, but for every blog post or website page you should create 2-3 different pins. Creating multiple pins for the same link increases the likelyhood of your pin being seen.
Another tip is to use different images and titles for the pins with the same link. That way there are a variety of keywords in your pins that are searchable and so your viewers won’t be overwhelmed with seeing the exact same pin over and over again. For this blog post alone I have 4 different pins created with completely different images and titles.
My go to app/site for creating pins is canva!
Engage With Others
Make sure to follow other pinners. Collaboration over competition all day every day!When ever you come across a pin that you absolutely love, follow that pinner and pin several of their pins as long it relates to your niche. More often than not, they will follow you back and pin your stuff too! Also make sure to do this with pinners who are on the same level as you in regard to monthly views as well as those above and below you.Share the wealth! We can all thrive if we help each other!
Have Fun!
Last, but certainly not least, JUST HAVE FUN.Don’t work yourself up on getting a high amount of views and traffic overnight. It takes time and patience. If you follow these steps, I’m sure you wont have any issues getting views and traffic, but every account is different.Over time you will find out which boards and pins are doing better than others and you can adjust from there. I hope this helps you in your Pinterest journey! Let me know in the comments if you found this helpful! Also feel free to give me a follow on my Pinterest if you haven’t already by clicking here!With Love, Julianna
I’ve often been asked how Josh and I met and how we got to where we are today. For those of you who don’t know us personally and even to those who do and care to hear our story, here is how we met and made it to 3 years. This isn’t some quick little story either. I’m taking it from the very beginning…you’ve been warned.
Our story starts long before we officially started dating in 2017. I met Josh during my freshman year of college at Texas Tech University while he was a sophomore. It was early in the fall semester of 2011 and my girlfriend Jasmine and I were hanging out with our friend Stephen in Bledsoe Hall, an all-male dorm. I don’t know why, but my girlfriend and I decided to go through the hall and knock on doors and introduce ourselves and make friends…thinking of that now, we were super annoying for that haha...anyways while knocking on doors we ended up knocking on the door where Josh lived. Josh answered the door and behind him was his friend Nick. Now I know yall are probably thinking it was a love at first sight type thing but na, it was very far from that. From what I remember we all exchanged a brief conversation about how nice of a smile my friend and I had as well as Nick, however, I totally dogged Josh because he didn’t have as nice of a smile. I know I know, a total mean girl move…sorry babe, but you know I love your smile.
Now throughout college Josh and I would always run into each other because we had a common group of friends. We never personally hung out together and if we did it was very rare. In my sophomore/junior year of college, I dated a guy within our common circle of friends and unbeknownst to me, Josh had a little thing for me which was shut down the moment he found out I had a boyfriend. During this time as well is when I became not so fond of Josh due to a situation that had occurred. Long story short, I let me guy friends use my car to go out to the club and Josh tagged along with them. The night ended with Josh driving my car home and in the midst of that he had sex with some random girl that night
IN.
MY.
CAR.
To make matters worse, he left the condom in the backseat of my car and my boyfriend at the time found it and accused me of cheating. Yall when I tell you this was one of the craziest and wildest situations I’ve been apart of…I never thought I could forgive Josh, now look at us. Flash forward to my senior year of college, I had completely lost contact with Josh and was in a whole different relationship. I graduated from college in the summer of 2015 and moved on from my college life. It wasn’t until May of 2016 when I went back up to Tech to visit and I randomly saw Josh eating with his family celebrating his graduation. It was a quick hi & bye type situation and that was that.
A couple months later while I was living my best life as a single woman in Houston, I was invited to go out to some clubs by my friend Nick and of course Josh was with him. I decided to go and we all had a really good time. That night was the start of something between Josh and I…
The thing was, Josh lived in Dallas, so although the frequent flirtatious snapchats and text messages back and forth were cool, Josh wanted to take me out on a real date to see how things would go. So he planned a date for us out in Houston.
The day was here for our very first date and he texted me to let me know he was on his way down to Houston for our date. Four hours later he texted me that he made it safely, however, I never text him back. He texted me again telling me he was at the location for our date and asked where I was. I hesitated and ignored him for a couple minutes. A few more minutes pass and he called me asking if I was on my way…I told him I wouldn’t be able to make it and hung up. I stood him up.
Yall I know I know what yall are thinking..“you don’t deserve him” “we were rooting for you”…Trust when I say I still feel terrible about it and Josh never lets me live it down. That moment was the end of our beginning.
We never spoke again after that.
2017 came and I celebrated going into a new year with a whole different guy and he a whole different girl. It was like we totally forgot about each other. Until…I sent him a random snap. You know those ones where you just want to see if they will respond.
Well…he responded.
We talked all night like nothing happened. Then we made plans to redo our first date for the weekend of the superbowl since it was in Houston that year.
He drove down from Dallas again. This time he picked me up (probably to make sure I wouldn’t flake on him again) and we had an amazing first date. I did a lot of firsts with him on that date like sing karaoke in front of a crowd and ride a mechanical bull. It was THE best date I had ever been on. It made me regret standing him up the first time knowing I had missed out on such a great guy.
After that date we were inseparable. Almost every weekend we were visiting each other and spending as much time as possible with one another. A little more than a month later Josh asked me to be his girlfriend. Once that happened I felt like our relationship zoomed off.
Next thing you know, due to unforeseen circumstances after the huge hurricane devastated Houston, I moved to Dallas and moved in with Josh in August. Not even four months later I got pregnant with Jordy. The next nine months were the longest and most trying months. Not so much for our relationship but for me and my emotional and mental health…(another story for another time). I would have never imagined our relationship to start or look how it did. We were only dating for nine months before I got pregnant. I had a lot of feelings of shame, regret, and confusion. But Josh was always the light in everything that I thought was bad. If I didn’t know before that this was the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, this was that time.
In August of 2018, we had our daughter Jordyn. With a new baby comes its own set of new challenges. As we were learning to be parents we were also learning about each other. It was a bit of a struggle, there were arguments and pettiness, but our love, faith, and support of our families allowed us to overcome our differences and grow stronger.
Those first 18 months instilled so many lessons for us that we’ve been able to use during the last 18 months of our relationship and is what I credit to the success of our relationship thus far.
I’m not going to lie the beginning of our story isn’t picture perfect. From doing the nasty with some other girl in my car to standing him up on our first date, to getting pregnant within nine months of dating. We’ve had our ups and our downs, but we’ve always been able to put our relationship first and make it work. No relationship is perfect. I’d be lying if I said ours was. This wasn’t how we imagined it, trust me, we wanted to do things “the right way”, but this is the beautiful path we are on and I wouldn’t change it for a second.
Three years and a baby later.
There are a lot of bloggers and influencers out there. Here are my favorite 5 women influencers of color that you should be following!
The influencing/blogging world isn’t as big as you may think. Yea there are A LOT of us, but you’d be surprised how connected we all are. Someone you follow, follows someone else, who follows another person, who follows you. During my 9 months of “influencing” I have been inspired by some of the most radiant, beautiful, and well….down right inspiring women. I have looked to each of these women for many different things when creating and growing my brand and although some may not know who the hell I am lol. In no particular order, here are some of my favorite influencers, bloggers, and vloggers.
5 Women Influencers of Color I Love
Shay, Nikki, Meghan, & Brandy @influencingincolor
2019’s Trendsetters of the Year! These four women are fashion and squad goals. They are breaking barriers in fashion and are such an inspiration. I love how different each of their styles are yet they flow seamlessly together. They are a powerhouse and I promise you if you don’t know them already you are definitely missing out. Check out their liketoknowit for more fashion inspo!
Taryn Newton @tarynnewton
One of my favorite local bloggers…she is who I want to be in the next 8 years minus all the boys haha. She is a wife, momma of 3 plus 1 on the way, works full time in corporate america, and runs her blog FULL TIME. I have no idea how she does it but it is beyond inspiring. She keeps it very real on her Insta and her blog has so many amazing resources. If you aren’t following her you need to be!
Kimberly @mommyhoodjoy
One of the very first motherhood bloggers I ever followed because her daughters were the absolute cutest and because I felt that I could relate to her. She’s Hispanic, around the same age as me, currently in grad school, and not married…which won’t be for long since she recently got engaged. She shares the good and ugly about motherhood and all things target! Not only is she an influencer but she is on youtube and has her own blog so check her out for all the cuteness!
Candice @smilesandpearlss
I met Candice at Social Media Week in ATX and she is such a radiant woman! She’s so full of positive energy and someone I truly enjoyed being around the short time I was with her. Each one of her posts will put a smile on your face and brighten your day; one of the many reasons I love following her! A Texas local and San Antonio’s Fashion Blogger of the Year, she boasts body positivity and inclusivity with her amazing fashion style! You can check out her blog here.
Trinity Sierra @trinitysierra
When I say a light, that is exactly what this woman is. She stays completely true to herself and her faith and does it so graciously. From motherhood to her marriage, to her faith she shares such honest content and is such an inspiration to so many women. She is one of the very few vloggers I actually watch so definitely check out her channel here.
Welcome to my blog! If you made it this far, thank you. From the bottom of my heart thank you for coming to see what With Love, Julianna is all about.This is something that I have been wanting to do for over a year now since my daughter Jordyn was born. From being a first-time mother, going to grad school, working full-time, and running a “mother’s group“. I told myself I was too busy. Too busy to create and launch my blog, but not too busy to do everything I was already doing…where do they do that at?To be real though, I was honestly scared. Scared of being vulnerable. Scared of sharing my personal experiences and opinions. Scared that nobody would read or care about what I had to say.…but what changed?I stopped caring about what others thought about me. I know I know, easier said than done. And believe me, it wasn’t some overnight change for me either, it took months. But during that time I realized that you waste a lot of energy worrying about what others think. Energy that I decided I wasn’t going to waste anymore. Have you tried raising a toddler…they need like all your energy? So over time I just stopped giving energy into the opinion of others and started riding my own wave.So here I am, risking all of my fears and worries to bring you some amazing content. With Love, Julianna is not just a motherhood blog for moms. Motherhood is only a fraction of who I am. With Love, Julianna is a blog about life, families, some amazing recipes, and of course motherhood with some tips and tricks in there too. I may only be 26 years old, but I have lived a very full life so far and I am opening myself up to share it with you all.I am so excited to go on this journey and I am excited for all of those who choose to tag along.Make sure to follow me on my facebook page and Instagram!Until my next blog post…With Love, Julianna
