About Me

My name is Kiki Smith. First, I’m a mom to two boys and a stepmom to a teenage girl. I’m also a wife and my husband can be both my biggest critic and super supportive. Little does he know that when he’s a critic, it pushes me to do something even more just to prove him wrong:) About a year and a half ago, we moved into a new house, and by new, it’s new to us, but the house is over 100 years old and needed a lot of work.

A few months ago, I finally got up the courage to quit my job as a manager with the goal of being a full-time, stay at home mom.  While the idea of not going to a job that essentially took 12 hours of my day away (on a good day) seemed great, the reality of being at home seemingly without purpose has me a little regretful.  Don’t get me wrong, I definitely don’t want to go back to 12+ hour days, but I feel like I’ve lost all connection with the outside world.  And, of course, when you add the pandemic and the fact that we decided to home school our two boys this year (ages 10 and 4), there’s very little social interaction of any kind.  And, of course I love my kids, but kudos to all you moms out there that are doing this all alone, this stay at home mom stuff is rough!  I thought it was bad before when I had the mental stress of missing my kids’ lives and the stress of a full time job, but now the stress of feeling like a bad mom is so much worse!  We’re lucky that we have my parents and in laws to help out both with childcare and home schooling, so at least we aren’t all alone in this.

Now, on the positive side, I’ve been able to get a lot done around our house in the past few months, which brought me to the idea of a blog.  I’ve thought about it in the past, but really, what did I have to write about?  Well, the past few months have taught me that even on limited resources (two incomes down to one), we can still get renovations done around the house, I can still do the craft projects I find interesting and most things can be done for next to nothing compared to what you would pay for if you bought them.  Somehow, maybe more so now, I find joy in completing a project that I love when I can look at it and know that I made it AND it was super cheap to do!! 

My hope is that you enjoy reading about my projects, find some innovative ways to do some of your own projects and share your opinions and ideas with me!