Hey, sweet friend, I’m re-branded! Oh my goodness. This is the first official episode since the rebrand which we’re going to talk all about here in just a second. But I’ve got to start by telling you a personal story.
The other day I walked into my youngest kiddo’s room, Canyon, (we call him Grand Canyon for good reason), and he has this little chalkboard in his room. He said, “Mom, would you grab a piece of chalk, and would you write down what I ask you to write down?” I was like, well, you’re perfectly capable of writing down whatever it is you’re about to say, but I’m all about seizing the moment when my kids ask me to spend time with them so, I grabbed a piece of chalk. He then asked me to write at the top, “To be a better kid:”. I was kind of stunned and shocked for a moment, and then he explained that he wanted to write down his goals to be a better kid, to grow and to do better. My jaw hit the floor! Here is what he had me write down:
To Be Better a Better Kid:
- Don’t provoke – he wanted to work on not provoking and pestering his older sister and brother
- Treat others how I want to be treated – I smiled so big because this is what we call honor or the golden rule, as taught in Scripture.
- Help my siblings – he wants to do a better job at helping his siblings when they need help.
- Eat what mom cooks – this one cracked me up.
- Don’t complain – Now, this little guy is honestly not much of a complainer at all to begin with. He’s the third child, the final child. And in my opinion, he is quite humble and quite full of gratitude for whatever comes his way. I feel like that maybe just comes along with that third child territory.
I took a picture, it was just the cutest thing. And in fact, it’s still there right now on his chalkboard. And he is looking that over every day and he is working on learning and growing in those areas.
The moral of the story for me was that we should always be changing and growing and challenging ourselves to be changing and growing. And so let’s just go into who I am, and then we’ll segue into how I’ve grown and how things have changed around here.
Who I Am & How I’ve Grown
So, I’m Katie Hedrick, a girl who loves Jesus. I’m a girl who also spent a lot of years wrestling with pains and hurts and anxiety that stemmed from my childhood when my parents got divorced when I was five years old. I’m a girl that got married at 20 years old in the hopes that it would magically fix everything…it didn’t. I’m a girl who had babies young, also in hopes that it would fix everything in my life…it didn’t. And then finally, I am a girl who found a mentor and got healed by the goodness of God, mentally, spiritually, and physically.
I’m a girl with a passion for sharing freedom through Christ and who loves to help other women experience life breakthroughs. I’m a girl who learned how to start a blog and a podcast (it’s not as easy as you might think). I’m a girl who became a certified Christian life coach. I’m a girl who loves wide open spaces, worship music, the color purple, and iced coffee. I’m a girl whose favorite place is at home on 40 acres in the Midwest and who encompasses the term homebody, even though I love adventure, and consider myself an extroverted introvert. Most recently, I’m the girl who became a homeschool mom, and I’m the girl who just rebranded this very podcast.
If you couldn’t tell, I am a girl who believes in the beauty of growth, and change, just like Canyon’s chalkboard. As long as I walk this earth, I will always strive to grow and to become the best version of me. I will faithfully ebb and flow where the Lord asks me to. And it was time to ebb and flow because the Lord was asking me to.
And so that brings us to the rebrand of the podcast and my entire brand and mission actually; it’s honestly been years in the making, like God knew what would be even before the first version of this podcast launched out into the world. He knew that we would end up here, and He alone knows what the future holds, and my job is simply to obey when God started knocking on the door of my heart several years back about the possibility of our family stepping into homeschool. Although I was reluctant at first, I knew that it was my job to obey. And when we did, it opened the doors to blessing for our family, beyond what I ever could have imagined. Homeschool has now become such an important part of our family’s life. In fact, it is our family’s life. The coolest thing about homeschool is that essentially it’s just doing life and learning together. And it’s all mixed into this beautiful everyday scenario that unfolds.
So as you can probably tell, my season has changed since the beginning of what started as a blog back in 2018, and what started as the Stepping Into a Joy Filled Life Podcast. By the way, if you want some great throwback listening, episode #1 holds my personal story and testimony and the start of this whole journey. And in Episode 154, I share about our family’s adventure of stepping into homeschool.
With all of these things happening in the recent years of my life. I knew in my heart that it was time to merge my current season of life with everything that’s already been built, adding value to your life with Christian content, life coaching and courses, helping you grow deeper in your faith and live more intentionally, and bringing homeschool into the mix because homeschool is a big, beautiful part of my life right now. And I want to share that goodness with you too, whether you currently homeschool, or maybe God’s tugging at your heart about it in this very moment, or even if you’ve never really considered the possibility, but you know that the podcast brings value and joy to your life.
The Rebrand & What to Expect
So welcome officially to the Joy at Home Podcast, where it’s still all about the joy of the Lord, and where I’m here to help you create more joy in your heart and home and where you’ll still find tons of great content to help you grow in your faith and live intentionally. And also where you’ll find homeschool tips and real life stories about our family’s homeschool journey.
So here’s what you can expect as we move forward together:
- A new podcast title (Joy at Home), a place to serve you in the areas of homeschool, faith, and intentional living. Like I said, you can rest assured that you’ll still see a lot of the same great content that you know and love. Biblical wisdom will always be the source behind what I create. And you’re going to get to experience a lot more of my personal life as I share tips about creating joy in your home and homeschool. Even if you aren’t necessarily into homeschooling, I really think that you’ll still find tons of value in the podcast.
- A refreshed website, you can go check it out right now at Stepintojoy.com
- And thirdly, beautiful new emails and updates through my new email provider. I’m actually super excited about this because it’s such a joy to connect with you in that way through your inbox. And so you can join my email list at Katiehedrick.com/vip.
So that’s the scoop on the rebrand. So exciting, right? Ultimately, though, my heart is full of gratitude for you, the one listening to this episode spending your valuable time with me. I recognize that time is a precious commodity, and I don’t take that lightly. So honestly, from the bottom of my heart, thanks for being on the journey with me.
Encouragement for Your Mama Heart
As the title of this episode states, I want to leave you with some final thoughts and encouragement for your mama heart. Interestingly enough, this is somewhat tied to homeschool. Recently, my family and I were at the Homeschool Iowa convention up in the Des Moines, Iowa area. And it was such a great conference, such a joy to meet so many other amazing homeschool moms, and full of such great information. There is a part of the convention where you get to walk around the exhibit hall and actually get your hands on all sorts of curriculum and meet the speakers and shake hands with them and kind of pick their brains and just network. It’s so good. The Holy Spirit is so present at these homeschool conferences. It was the second one that I got to attend, which was just awesome. So anyway, there we were at the Homeschool Iowa convention, and one of the guest speakers they had brought in was a gentleman by the name of Todd Wilson. He goes by “the family man”, and he actually reminds me so much of my husband; he is funny and charming and just adores his family. He was a great storyteller and so genuine, such a big heart, such a supportive homeschool Dad, just like my own husband. Definitely check him out, he’s got some great books that you’ll love.
Todd was actually the keynote speaker closing the entire convention out. And his whole thing was he wanted to bring encouragement to the hearts of the mamas that were at that convention. And so he told this story about how him and his family love to go RVing. They have this big RV and they go on these long family trips for weeks at a time all over the country, homeschooling, learning, in my opinion, it’s the dream life, what they’re doing. But he was talking about the hardships of RVing, and some of the scenarios that they found themselves in. He shared a story about the one time their RV caught on fire, and then another he called the turkey story. So his family was in their RV and they were going down the interstate and he notices on the side of the road that there’s a turkey, like a wild turkey bird on the side of the road. He and his family were all excited about this turkey on the side of the road, and then next thing he knows, BAM… the turkey flies up from the side of the road and comes flying entirely through the windshield of the family’s RV. The turkey is still alive and it is now inside of the RV flopping wildly, angrily inside of the RV while they’re traveling down the interstate. And so obviously, he pulls over and there’s broken glass everywhere and the kids are screaming and freaking out and the wife’s freaking out and he’s trying to shoo this live turkey out of the RV. It caused thousands of dollars of damage and tow trucks and all the things. But he was talking about these moments that they have RVing, some precious, good moments, but sometimes there are hard moments. And he was just really sharing the concept of how good things are hard, and the hard things are good. And I just felt like that applies in so many ways. In fact, you should write it down or just repeat it to yourself, “the good things are the hard things, and the hard things are the good things.”
Think about how that applies in marriage, and parenting, even everyday life things like losing weight, forming new habits, traveling, and especially with kids… it can be so precious and so good, but so hard, and so worth it. I’ve got three kids and we homeschool. And it’s like, one day a week, they each have an off day and typically one day a week, I have an off day. Nobody ever decides to have their off day on the same day. So just to be totally real with you, sometimes we have three or four hard days in a week. But then we have one or two amazing, wonderful days where we just build relationships, and we learn incredible things. And we form these precious, precious memories that are so good that they’re worth every second of the hard days and the hard moments.
That’s what I really just wanted to share with you today as we close this out. Mama, keep doing those hard things because those are the good things. Galatians 6:9 says, “Let us not become weary in doing good for at the proper time, we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” So keep going. Keep taking those steps forward. Keep doing the hard things, Mama, because those are the good things.
