Hey mama. Welcome to the Inside Out Mamas podcast. I'm Brittany Turley, mom of six, and I know what it's like to feel stuck and overwhelmed trying to be the perfect mom, but everything changed for me when I learned that small changes on the inside can bring big results on the outside. Each week I will share simple, yet powerful inside shifts or outside tips that can transform your approach to mothering, helping you thrive from the inside out. Ready to ditch the mom guilt and enjoy this season of life. You are in the right place. Hey Mamas. Well, some of you may have thought that I just quit and gave up the podcast, but I didn't. We just had a rough month in March but I am back for real now. One of the purposes of my business is to help moms feel joy in motherhood. Now, joy is defined as feeling of great pleasure or happiness. Joy is an internal state that comes from our thoughts, and that's why working from the inside out is important. Joy can be felt even in difficult times because it is linked internally to meaning and to faith and to perspective through our thoughts rather than just enjoyable experiences like happiness is. We can build joy in our life through different ways. Five of those ways are. Connection being aligned with our values and our purpose being present and in the moment, gratitude and serving others with April Fools coming up got me thinking about family traditions because our family loves April Fools, and I realized that we build joy in Motherhood With our family traditions. Now, family traditions can be big ones or small. But traditions usually check a lot of the boxes in the ways I just mentioned, that we can build joy in our lives. So I'm gonna illustrate that for you today with our families. April Fool's Traditions. Now, I don't know exactly when this started, but at some point when our kids were young, my husband and I decided it would be fun to play a few April Fool's jokes on our kids, and it's just kind of snowballed from there. So the first way that I said we can build joy is through connection. April Fools has made connections for us. This was especially true in the year of Covid. I think it was like right after they shut down the schools and sent all the kids home that it was right around April Fools. And, you know, everybody was just kind of in this state of unsure and don't know, and we were safe at home and we had everything we needed, but my kids were still, you know, just kind of like disheveled, like their whole world was just turned upside down. And April Fools was coming, so I started getting my little bag of tricks ready to go. And by the way, none of these ideas are original. I don't think all of them. I either saw somebody's idea and copied it exactly, or saw somebody's idea and just barely tweaked it. There's amazing people on the internet who share such fun ideas. So the year of COVID, I saw an idea on the internet to have a mini dinner. So I made a regular dinner, but I served it to my kids on my girls' little tiny toy dishes. And so we all had an itty bitty plate and an itty bitty cup and itty bitty utensils. And I, whatever I made, I put it in the small. Pot that came with her set, and we served it outta there with a teeny tiny spoon, and they just thought it was the funnest thing ever, and it's still a memory that they talk about, and it's really brought a lot of connection for us. Also, along with that dinner, I saw an idea to make sponge cake. So you take a little sponge and you cover it with frosting, you put sprinkles on it. And so since we were having a mini dinner, I got a small sponge and I cut it up into little tiny pieces and made little sponge cake for everybody and. Then I did make an actual cake also. And they thought that was hilarious also. And so those two memories for them just brought our family together in a time that it was just a lot of uncertainty. So it really made connections for us. All right. The second way I talked about is traditions help us align with our values and our purpose. When we're aligned with our values and our purpose, we feel. Joy. Our family thinks that life should be fun and we do try to have a lot of fun. And April Fools is one way we do that. Some of the ways that are kind of like the old standards here at our house that I've done for years that sometimes they still forget about is each night all of our kids lay out their clothes before bed so that in the morning it's just easy to get out the door and I will snag one of their clothes. Usually the pant leg, and I'll just stitch up the bottom with my sewing machine on a really. Light stitch so that when they go to shove their foot in it gets stuck, or I've done that with their pajamas too. We've taken safety pins and safety pinned all their underwear together, so when they grab one out of the drawer, all of them come out. We've booby trapped their doors so that when they open the door, balloons drop or confetti or balls on their head. We almost every year without fail stuffed socks or toilet paper in one of their shoes. So there's, they're rushing out the door to get to school and they shove their foot in their shoe. They can't get it in all the way. One of the best ones that we had was done by one of my daughters, and she was actually only seven at the time. We woke up on April Fool's morning and I opened my door and outside my door is a hallway that kind of has all of the kids' doors and it, it's kind of an L shape and it's probably, I. I dunno, maybe 40 feet of hallway. And in the middle of the night, my daughter had gotten up somehow and gotten all the books off of one of the bookshelves in the hallway and laid out. Meticulously covering almost every inch of the hallway with books And then she'd also pulled stuff from the bathroom, like soap dispensers and shampoo and hair combs. She just covered the entire hallway. You could not walk down the hallway. And I was so shocked. I thought it was one of her older brothers. It was so hilarious when we found out that it was her in the middle of the night without anyone knowing. She had been up for quite a while, I'm guessing. Laying this maze out for us in the morning. It really was a lot of fun. number three being present and in the moment, no one is more present in our house than on April Fools. We don't do mean pranks, but people are always either watching out for pranks or watching to see one of their jokes being played out, one of the times that this was very, very true is one year I got the idea to make cake pops. So I just bought little donut holes. You dip them in some chocolate and then put sprinkles on'em, and then. Put'em in the fridge so it hardens. And you do that with donuts, but then you also do it with some tomatoes that are the same size. And so I made a bunch of cake pops and dinner that night was kinda like some people ate at this time, some people ate at this time, some people ate at this time'cause we had soccer and different things going on. So the first people through didn't know it was gonna hit'em. And you know, some people got a donut and some people got a tomato and it was a surprise. And so then they were watching as the next wave of eaters came, and they were eating their treat after dinner Everybody was just paying attention and being involved, and it was really fun. All right, number four is gratitude. Surprisingly, my kids have actually told me thank you for pranking them. Like I said, we don't do mean ones, we just do fun and funny ones. But they've actually told me that they like it a lot and. Make sure that I know that they want pranks on April Fools. I am also grateful for the opportunity to focus on April Fools on fun with my kids, because sometimes in the day to day caring for kids and all the tasks that is required in, you know, just the. Logistics of running a family and making sure everybody has what they need. Sometimes they get old and monotonous and just hard, and so April Fools is a way that it kind of mixes, it mixes things up for me, and I really get to just put a lot of energy into having some fun. And then number five, serving others. It does take extra effort in planning on our part to pull off April Fools, and some years I'm kind of like behind and I'm like, ah, do I really wanna do this? It's so much work. But then I remember what joy it brings me and my family, and the smiles on my kids' faces. And so I've done it every year. Even though it's often April Fools and me and my husband are up late putting, putting pranks into place, it's still worth it. a couple of our, my kids' favorites that dos take some extra prep. Is when I turned their juice into jello. So I buy juice and then mix it with gelatin and pour it into cups and put a straw in it and serve it to them with dinner. And we like never drink juice for dinner and we never drink out of a straw for dinner. So they know something's funny. Then they try and sip it and nothing comes out. And then they get to eat their juice with a spoon. Or several years I've put jelly beans in the fridge, ice dispenser, so when they go get ice for their water. Jelly beans comes out. So even traditions as silly as April Fools can help us build joy through motherhood, by helping us build connection, helping us align with our values and purpose, helping us be present in the moment, helping us have gratitude and helping us serve others. Now, I don't want you to think that you all now need to. Have an April Fool's tradition. This was just a silly way of showing you that traditions, even though sometimes they're a lot of work for the parents, they are so helpful in building joy through motherhood. Now because I believe small changes on the inside bring big results on the outside. Each week on my podcast, I'm going to give you a small change challenge, something small you can do throughout the week if you choose, that could end up bringing big results to your life. So the small change challenge for this week is to think about a tradition. Big or small, doesn't matter that you do with your kids. And take a mental note of how it builds joy through connection, aligning with values and purpose being present in the moment. Gratitude or serving others. It doesn't need to check all of them off, but even if it checks one of them off, that's so wonderful. And then celebrate that joy building time that you create with and for your kids. Sometimes traditions can seem overwhelming, and we do sometimes need to take an audit of what we're doing and decide is this. Really doing what I want it to do is this really serving the purpose that I want it to. But it's also so helpful for us to see and reflect on how, yes, that was a lot of work, but look at how it helped us build joy in our. Family and in our motherhood, and then it makes those traditions so worth it. Remember, small changes on the inside, bring big results on the outside. Thank you for joining me for another episode of Inside Out Mamas. My hope is that our time together inspires more feelings of peace, confidence, and joy in your mama journey. Be sure to subscribe so you never miss a show. And if you're ready to take these insights even deeper, head over to brittany turley coaching.com to check out my digital workshop. Designed to help you reduce daily mom overwhelm without adding to your to-do list. Thanks for listening. And remember, small changes on the inside, bring big results on the outside.