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Good morning moms, today is October  6th, 2025 and it is time to clock into your Monday meeting.  But before we get down to business, let's have some water cooler chat, shall we? Now to rewind a little bit, before we had kids, we were connected  women.  We had friends, we had jobs outside of the home, we knew what the hot gossip was in the celebrity world, and we could stay up late enough to watch Eliminations on Dancing with the Stars, but... As moms, we often only have our kids to chat with. Our favorite song is Purple Monkey in a Bubble Gum Tree, and we've never even heard of the stars on Dancing with the Stars. I envision the Modern Mom to be home for our mom coworkers to get caught up on that water cooler style chat. So we have something to bring up with other moms in real life on the playground  and be that missing community that we all need. So without further ado, here is this week's break room brief. Taylor Swift dropped her 12th studio album on Friday. I went to the official launch day movie celebration at AMC theaters and I was in good company and not just because I brought my own mother, but because opening day brought in nearly 16 million dollars and is projected to have done 25 to 30 million dollars over the weekend. She also broke records on Spotify for being the most streamed album on a single day. But despite doing big numbers, there is some discourse amongst fans. Some Swifties feel like the album delivered something other than what they were expecting of Taylor. I'm probably not the best person to weigh in here. I mean, I was interviewed by the Today Show saying, that I wanted her next album to be about her finding her marital bliss and that is kind of exactly what we got here with TS12. But this is a great talking point for when you run into a new mom on the playground this week. Ask her if she's listened to it and what her thoughts are because you know that she has some. But no matter what, you've really got to give it to Taylor. She does a great job of keeping secrets and holding her cards close to her chest because I really thought we were going to be getting a Super Bowl announcement from her. Also having a great week is bad. Bunny, who will be headlining the Super Bowl halftime show this year. He also hosted the season premiere of SNL over the weekend with Doja Cat as the musical guest. Season 51 brings four new cast members and five departures, including Heidi Gardner, who had previously been the longest tenured female star and also personally one of my favorites. I was kind of sad to see her go. And speaking of stars, Lauren Graham, Lorelai Gilmore herself. was awarded a star on Hollywood's Walk of  Fame.  And there to cheer her on were her Gilmore castmates, Scott Patterson,  who is of course Luke Danes, Kelly Bishop, who played her mother, Emily Gilmore, Yannick Truesdale, who was Michelle Girard, and Matt Zuccarri, who of course played Logan Huntsberger. Lauren also even joked that she's not one to pick teams, but Rory's other boyfriends were not in attendance at her ceremony.  So Logan got a point in his column. I don't know about you, but my opinion on Rory's boyfriends has really changed over the years. As a teenager watching the show for the first time, I was definitely firmly team Jess. I kind of had like a bad boy thing going on myself and I thought that he could relate to her on an intellectual level. But now that I'm older and can think about kind of big picture things,  I really think that Logan was the best choice for her. Now, if you have no idea what any of that was about, you need to either turn in your millennial card or get over to Netflix and get educated because October is the perfect time for a Gilmore Girls marathon and you  are past due. And finally, I know you have heard of gentle parenting and tiger parenting, but what about dolphin parenting?  Now, this is based on the results of an 80 year Harvard study.  Dr. Shimi Kang came up with the new parenting style that encourages blending rules and structure with freedom  and is, quote, firm yet flexible. Dolphin parenting has only six pillars, which are to be balanced and collaborative, like setting a homework routine, but letting your child choose the order in which they complete it. Don't over schedule your child. Strike a balance between activities and idle time for exploration and open play.  Don't over instruct them. like model new tasks, but then stepping back instead of hovering and correcting every move. Don't overprotect them. Let them climb a little bit too high on the playground under your very watchful eye, of course, but still letting them make their own choices. Like dolphins, you would create a pod of support for your growing children, bringing grandparents, neighbors, or other mentors into the fold so you're not your child's only guide.  And the final pillar is to be adaptable and open to changing plans instead of clinging to them. Now as a mom of three, I feel like this is the most aligned with my natural parenting because I simply just do not have the time to hover while they complete a task or be too overprotective simply because I am busy playing zone defense. But I want to know your thoughts as well. As always, you can find me at caroline underscore debtman on Instagram, but also the modern mom pod as well. And for today's mom hack Monday, I have a kitchen hack that I just. have to fill you in on. If you follow me on Instagram, you know that on Fridays, I usually make homemade pizza for my kids for dinner and I make the crust with Rhodes Dinner Roll Dough.  Rhodes is, well, it's spelled like Rhode Island, R-H-O-D-E-S, if you're looking for it in the freezer section of your grocery store. They make frozen bread and roll dough and you essentially just let it rise on your counter and then I use the roll dough to make the pizza crust, but I've also discovered that they have frozen bread dough. I like to keep a package of their frozen white bread in my freezer so that instances like today when I find myself out of bread inexplicably.  I mean my kids eat a lot and they don't always tell me when they've eaten everything but it's really kind of disconcerting to go from having like every bread product known to man in the bread box to having literally zero. But anyways I took a frozen loaf of bread dough out of my freezer this morning and put it in a bread pan.  It's thawing and rising on my counter right now and in a few hours I can bake it up as homemade bread  without actually having to do all of the homemade steps myself.  And that, my friends,  is a mom hack. Seeing as this is the first full week of October, if you haven't already ordered your kids Halloween costumes, that is something that you should be putting on your to-do list this week. My kids have been pretty decided about what they wanna be for Halloween for a few weeks now, but I did put off ordering it until I was sure that they weren't gonna change their minds before the big day. I'm not gonna lie, my oldest was kind of toying with the idea of being a traffic cone, and I was really kind of hoping he would swing back around to pick that.  You know, for personal reasons, I feel like that would be hilarious. But they also keep bringing up what my husband and I are going to be dressing up as for Trick or Treat. And generally we don't dress up, but I feel like maybe this year we should. So I was looking into maybe like a couple's costume idea. And I did see that at Walmart on the shelf of couples costumes  right beside the avocado and the toast  and the wine and the cheese couple's costumes, there was also a s'mores throuple costume. There was a graham cracker,  a piece of chocolate, and a marshmallow. um I don't know where Walmart is trying to take this directionally, but  I guess I applaud their commitment to diversity. Anyways, we will not be participating in  that costume trend, but I am open to a great couple's costume idea. If you have one, please let me know.  And while we are touching on calendar management, I do have another couple of things that you should make sure are on your family's calendar ahead of the busy holiday season coming up. If you have young children like I do, and you are going to want your spouse or partner to be participating in the trick or treat,  Make sure that you make a calendar event that will get them home on time and send it to their work calendar. If you need your spouse to leave the office by four o'clock on Halloween, which is a Friday night, by the way, make a calendar event from like 3.30 to five and say like, hold for trick or treat, invite your spouse's work calendar. This ideally would keep their coworkers from booking meetings in that time and make for a less stressful evening at home. But you know what they say, we're not going to assume. And something else for your calendar.  If you are one to send holiday cards, you are going to want to have the perfect picture for your greetings this year. If that involves a professional photographer, you need to start doing your leg work now. A lot of photographers already have their mini sessions posted. If you don't have a photographer that you like to work with, you can find one pretty easily on Instagram just by searching. But if you are not somebody who goes the professional route, what I like to do is set up a camera like just on a tripod or just lean it against something  on thanks. giving because everybody's already dressed up in like fall ish festive outfits. You can do them outside. We usually end up doing them on the couch just because again, three kids,  but everybody has their hair at least brushed. Outfits are generally coordinated.  It's a good time to be snapping a family picture regardless of whether or not you're going to share it widely. A local photographer had a like mini photo session for the fall and I signed my youngest up for it because my older two have school pictures, but she doesn't really have anything just for her.  And like my mom and my mother-in-law like to display their grandkids' school pictures.  And I wanted Pearl to have something of her own as well.  And it was the cutest little photo session, watching her just do her little poses and big smiles. if you're not into the professional photographer scene, doing it once in a while. isn't a bad idea. mean, don't take offense to it and don't take it personally, but a lot of times your kids don't give you their best smiles. A professional photographer with a rubber chicken, now  that's how you get it. And now it is time for our next segment, which I am calling the Mom Hall of Fame.  When I have a guest host with me, we are going to be doing a fantasy style draft of our favorites of a specific category. But as I am by myself this week, you will just be hearing my favorites of a specific category, which today will be my favorite songs from the Life of a Showgirl, which is of course Taylor Swift 12. Now, like I mentioned, I  went to the movie theater to see the premiere, but before that I actually actively avoided any spoilers. I didn't listen to any of the songs. I knew very little. I knew a couple of the track names, but that's about it. So heading into it, I had no background experience to base it on and I was listening to everything for the first time. So my top three tracks from Life of a Showgirl, Number three would be Wishlist. I didn't really know what to expect with this track because the title has like the S's as dollar signs. It was giving me kind of like Kesha vibes. But after listening to it, it was actually a little bit trad wifey and like it was about how she wants to have a house in the suburbs with Travis, raise a couple kids with a basketball hoop in the yard, which  literally I'm sitting in my house in the suburbs looking out the window at the basketball hoop in my backyard. have a couple kids. I have a husband that I love madly like. It's  relatable. And besides the fact that I'm half-baking homemade bread today, that's pretty much the only trad wife vibes I have about me.  regardless, wishlist number three. Second place for me was The Life of a Showgirl, which features Sabrina Carpenter. This is the final track on the album and it actually has clips. from the Eras tour. The melody is really catchy. I like the story that she tells through the lyrics. It's a nice song. And my number one favorite is from the opposite end of the album, the very first track, The Fate of Ophelia. I don't know how much you remember about Hamlet from high school, but I actually remember quite a lot about it. I'm a little bit of an English nerd and I'm sorry to have to tell you that.  But I actually remember a lot about Ophelia  and I can heavily relate to her lyrics about having somebody come along and save you from drowning in the melancholy. Maybe that's why I like Taylor so much is because we both have kind of checkered history of dating. And thank goodness we both had a blank space to write our husband's name in because yeah. But I encourage you to talk to the other moms around you this week. Ask what their favorite tracks are, strike up a conversation, maybe even a friendship. Just break out of your shell a little bit. It's hard, but it's worth it. On that note, I've kind of been on my hosting and friend making grind lately. I've been seeing it all over social media and other podcasts I listen to. Shout out Kelly and Liz on the Carpool podcast. We're kind of losing the plot here on in-person friendships. And I think that we're basing too much of our friendship making skills on our online interactions. I don't think that we are meant as humans to have our friendships exist on our mutual following list on Instagram. And as much as I love social media, it's not very social anymore. And I feel like we need to be breaking offline and having real in-person conversations, interactions, friendships, what have you. Over the past two weeks or so, I have volunteered at my kid's school three times. There's a new student in my son's first grade classroom and we invited his family over for dinner one evening. We grilled on our deck. They have two kids, we have three kids, all are kind of similar ages and they all played together in the yard and us parents kind of caught up on the deck and it was really, really lovely. So in the week ahead, I really encourage you to kind of take personal stock of where you are at in your in-person friendships. If you're like I was and kind of like rusty and out of the game, Maybe something like having your kid's friend over for a playdate and inviting the mom to stay and hang out with you. It doesn't have to be a dinner party. You don't have to like go above and beyond. Just offer her a cup of coffee and to sit while your kids play. She doesn't have to be your new BFF. Talk to somebody other than your spouse and your kids this week. And I can almost guarantee you that it will lead to more. It will be a waterfall effect because you will feel better about yourself  and your social skills and  the fact that other moms are also deeply craving that personal connection, whether or not they know it. And finally today we have the Modern Mom Mailbag, where I answer questions submitted by you, my mom coworkers. Today's question comes from Emily in  Utah.  Caroline, how do you reset your house when the week just completely got away from you? Like the laundry's backed up, the dishes are everywhere, and you don't even know where to start. Well, Emily, this is a really good question.  I feel like it's one that I could have written myself. When everything is kind of in disarray all together at the same time, I kind of take a step back and take stock of the situation as a whole.  And then I pick the task that is most important to me moving forward. So say this day in question is a Friday and we have a busy weekend of kids sports and I know that all of the uniforms are in the laundry. The first thing I'm going to want to do is start a load of laundry so that I can at least have the uniforms clean and dry for those Saturday morning sports. So we'll get a load of laundry lined up, ready to go. We'll hit play on that. Then the next step, what is the next most important thing? Are we coming up on a meal time? Do I need to get something started? Do I need to have dishes ready for that meal time? Once that ball is rolling in the kitchen, it's really easy to continue doing things like loading or unloading the dishwasher, picking up the counter, wiping it down. My counters are always sticky. My kids sit. on bar stools at my counter for their meals. So there's always at least like some kind of smeared something that I need to wipe up. I swear, I my counters like four times a day and they could probably use it eight. And now from my kitchen, I can see my living room and like part of the playroom as well. And I will kind of just go line of sight. So I'll go from the kitchen now that it's like somewhat tidied, I will take that energy into the living room and tidy. It doesn't need to be. all the way clean. I don't need to make sure the floors are vacuumed, but doing things like folding the blankets and putting them on the back of the couch, making sure there's no Legos on the coffee table. My dog is 15 and she can't hold kibbles in her mouth anymore, so she'll leave them on the floor in the living room, so there's always a couple pieces I have to pick up and throw away or put back in her dish. So things like that that make the room feel like it's cleaned and tidied and put away, but doesn't necessarily need to be spotless. I usually leave the playroom for very last because I like to at least loop my kids in on cleaning it up and have them take ownership of creating the mess by also putting it away. Whatever you choose to do in your house is your business, but that's how I like to do it. So I do that last, I involve my kids, and again, this will probably be the messiest room in my house for the next 26 years. So  I don't really put too much stock in having it all the way clean, but I like for it to look like... I can walk across the room without stepping on something and impaling my foot. As long as there's no goldfish in the carpet and the toys are on the shelf, I can live. That's how I begin the process of resetting my house when just like everything kind of has hit the fan. But other strategies that I've used that might be helpful in your home is setting a timer. I found that 15 minutes per room is a really good kind of finish line. You can get a lot done in 15 minutes. especially if you put your phone down, which actually leads me to my next tip here, which is gonna sound a little bit silly if you're not already like dipping a toe into content creation, but set your phone up somewhere and put your phone on video record on time-lapse mode. This works  so well because you get to see the progress like sped up. So you see your whole 15 minute timer  of cleaning  in like 30 seconds. So it was really rewarding from that standpoint, but also because your phone is recording your time lapse, you can't be on it. So if somebody texts you, you have to wait until you're done with that 15 minute block to reply to them. You're not stopping to check if you have any new views on TikTok because your phone's busy. You're busy. Your hands are busy. So I know it might sound a little bit weird, but try it. Trust me. And when you do try it, I want you to post it to your stories and I want you to  so that I can see it and I can share it so that everybody knows  that this is a tried and true mom house cleaning hack that you probably wouldn't have thought of by yourself because it's  weird. My final tip for getting back on track when the week has just gotten away from you,  we have a basket that's like stairs shaped and I put it on the stairs  and when I'm going through  say the kitchen and I find something that actually belongs upstairs and not in the kitchen,  I can throw it in the basket and then next time I'm going upstairs, I can take the basket and put it back  where it actually goes.  This method works well for people who are actually putting things away all the time, uh which naturally is not myself. So we do have the stairs basket, but we actually don't use it much anymore because I found myself emptying it like once a month and that's just really not proactive.  So if you are someone who is apt to actually put things away,  The basket stairs method is actually really helpful. And if you're listening to this and thinking,  have no idea what a stairs basket looks like, I will link one in the show notes for you along with everything else that I have mentioned in today's episode. If you have any questions about something or you want to read more about something, check the show notes because I've got you there. And with that, that wraps up our first full episode of The Modern Mom. I hope you enjoyed our Monday meeting. If you did, Please be sure to leave a five-star review, especially if you're listening on Apple podcasts or Spotify. And in addition to a five-star review today,  if you have two kids, if you are a mom of two children, I want you to also leave a text review. I want you to tell me what you liked most about this episode. Just a quick little love note and then hit post. Doesn't have to be anything huge or like glowing, just like, hey, I liked the format. But five-star reviews and text reviews really help these platforms. push this podcast in front of other moms who might really be needing this kind of a community. And if you yourself are not already subscribed, please do that as well.  And with that, I will see you next week with a new Monday meeting with a fun and fantastic guest host. I hope you have a wonderful and productive week and I will see you right back here next Monday for The Modern Mom with Caroline Dettman.