Gluten Free Granola and Mom Guilt

Gluten Free Granola!! Made with gluten free rolled oats, pecans, pepitas, dried fruit, coconut oil and naturally sweetened with some honey and maple syrup. You just can’t beat freshly baked homemade granola! You’ve got to try this!

Yesterday I was standing on my feet, filming recipe videos for 10 hours. More, if you count all the prep time beforehand. I’m not complaining at all. .  I love what I do. .  but I’m here to share about my life and what happened yesterday.

I’m a food blogger and social media influencer. This is what I do full-time for my job and I get paid for it. Although I didn’t choose this, this is my current job. I work from home. I am working all the time. I might be putting in more hours now than I did when I worked in advertising and digital marketing. I’m not here to tell you “how to become a food blogger and get paid doing it.” 

I’m super thankful for what I do. I’m super thankful I get to work from home. I super thankful that I get to engage and talk with so many of you. I’m super thankful (and it makes me so happy) when I get emails, photos and direct messages from you all when you’ve made a recipe of mine and love it.

Mom Guilt 

But it’s hard work y’all. Running my Instagram account alone is a job in itself. But again, I love what I do. My kids sometimes don’t fully understand it. They think I have a fun job and I work from home and they don’t understand when we miss school things or events. Although I try, they don’t understand why I can’t volunteer for everything.

I have been a minor stress ball these past few days. It takes a lot to prep and get ready for a video shoot day. But I love doing it because out of everything that I do on here (Hip Foodie Mom), doing the cooking recipe videos might be my favorite. I am a visual learner and I know a lot of you are as well. So, I know these videos will help a lot of people and that excites me.

After I decide what recipes we are going to shoot, and I have to select slightly easier ones because the goal is to get through as many recipes as possible in one day. The producer flew in from Seattle and the camera, lighting and video crew drove in from Milwaukee. After we change out the lightbulbs in my kitchen, set up the bigger/studio lights, set up all the cameras, and I get mic’ed up, we test for sound, color, lighting .  . everything. It’s a production.

And after we shoot one, sometimes we don’t even have time to eat it. It just gets moved over and stacked on a table so we can move on to the next recipe. Yesterday, we shot a Instant Pot Chicken Ramen recipe that I am super excited about. We broke for lunch and I re-made my soft boiled eggs because I’m crazy and I wanted the perfect soft boiled eggs for my ramen recipe. Long story short, we ended up shooting much later than I was expecting.

I woke up at 5am to prep some stuff. Everyone arrived at 8:30am and we wrapped at 6:42pm. It was a 10-hour day. And these were cooking videos, where I’m on camera cooking and talking through the recipes. I was wiped. Super tired . . but after everyone left, I cleaned up and cooked dinner for my family.

My fail from yesterday? We missed the first official school event of the year. The BBQ Kick Off/Fun Family Event that I promised Phoebe and Madeline we would be going to. With my luck, the event ended at 7pm. So, after everyone left, I told Phoebe and Madeline that we wouldn’t be able to go because it was too late. And I apologized.

We also missed Phoebe’s math tutoring and Madeline’s taekwondo class this week because of all the prep work and stuff that I needed to do leading up to yesterday. I miss things. Sometimes, I have to make the decision to miss things because of work. The main reason I am writing about this is because of what happened this morning.

Madeline was very disappointed we missed the school event last night. She’s 7. and says to me as I am driving them to school this morning, in a very quiet voice: “How are you going to make it up to us?” because they missed the event. How was I going to make it up to them? My initial thought was “are you kidding me?” I’m still tired.

This made me realize many things: In her eyes, I had messed up. I chose work over them. But, I was surprised that she said that to me. Even in her quiet voice, I got the message.

But, that also made me realize, I want my children to understand what I am doing. Why I am working. I work to help people and make money for my family. That is the bottom line. For me, it is also important to do something I am passionate about and where I can be creative. I need an outlet. What I do, also makes me a better mother I believe. If I didn’t do something like this, I think I would go crazy and I would be unhappy.

Tonight, Phoebe is going to a birthday party sleep over, so I told Madeline we could rent a movie and bake cupcakes-  from scratch. She wants to be a pastry chef when she grows up.

My hope as a mother is to teach my children to be compassionate. To be kind. To think deeper. To think about why things happen. They are still young but they know. My hope for myself is that I am present in their lives. That I have more balance.

My kids are at school. The house is quiet. I don’t know if any of this made any sense but I just felt like writing. I am still tired and because we have two batches of freshly made granola sitting around, I’m mixing this granola. I’m re-stocking the frozen chocolate chip cookie freezer drawer. And after I clean up the kitchen, I’m going to the grocery store to get ingredients for vanilla cupcakes for tonight. When I’m tired, I’m also super emotional.

Parenting and raising children is hard. I just take it one day at a time. I’m far from perfect. No one is. If you think they are perfect, they are fooling you. I just take it one day at a time and try my best. That’s all we can do.

To you parents out there with older kids: if you have any advice to share on anything, I’d love to hear it. Thank you for reading. And I actually hate the term “mom guilt” but I couldn’t think of any other title or phrase that made sense. 

Gluten Free Granola

For this amazing granola recipe and step-by-step photos (the video is coming later!), click here and enjoy!