Staying Connected in Marriage While Raising Kids

Last week’s episode about mom rage sparked so many honest messages from moms who felt seen and encouraged — thank you to everyone who reached out and shared your stories. If you haven’t listened yet, I would encourage you to go back and give it a listen.

This week we’re shifting the conversation to something that often gets overlooked in busy family life: our marriages.

When you’re raising kids, managing schedules, and juggling all the responsibilities of family life, it’s easy for your relationship to slip into the background. But strong families are built on strong marriages.

In this episode I’m sharing how Micah and I stay connected through different seasons of life — from when our kids were little and bedtime meant couch conversations, to now with older kids and busy schedules where sometimes connection looks like a Costco run together.

I also talk about the Alpha Marriage Course, why investing in your marriage matters, the importance of having friends who pray for your relationship, and four simple habits that help marriages stay strong.

Whether you’re newly married, raising little ones, or navigating the teenage years, this episode is a reminder that your marriage is worth protecting, investing in, and fighting for.

4 things to do for your marriage this week

1.  Have fun together (laugh)

2. Look in each others eyes

3. Pray together

4. Physical Touch. 

Adventure Challenge Date Book 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hey, I'm Kate, Mom of Seven, Coffee Lover, and Believer in finding joy in every season of motherhood. This is Praise, Prayer, and Protein, where we talk faith, family, frugal living, and the real life mom hacks that make it all work. Let's dive in.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

Hey friends, and welcome back to the podcast. I am so glad you were here today. But before we jump into today's topic, I just want to take a few minutes to say thank you. Like, seriously, from the bottom of my heart, I want to say thank you to everyone who reached out after last week's episode. Last week I shared a really vulnerable story about mom anger and mom rage and losing my temper at the end of March break. It honestly was one of the hardest episodes I have recorded. But that message and the messages that came in after just have been blowing me away. I cannot believe how many of you moms have reached out to me telling me that you have felt seen after listening to that episode, that you feel heard and that you feel like you are not alone. And that really makes the world to me. It really means the world to me. Honestly, I had a few people say it was the best episode they'd ever listened to. Um, that one hardly took me any time to do work. Like some of them I do so much work, so much uh scripting and so much research. And that one I just like felt like the Lord just say share it. I did, and it's had a huge, huge response. So thank you guys so much. If you listened to that and it did resonate with you and you messaged me, I just want to thank you for sharing your story. I know it was really vulnerable for you too. I even got a few voice messages with crying. That was so vulnerable for you. So thank you so much for reaching out and for sharing uh with me. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, I would really encourage you to go back and give it a listen. And if it actually encouraged you, would you please share that episode on your social media or share it specifically with a number or not a number? Can you please share it with another mom? Um, this podcast is to encourage moms in every walk. And I know mom rage and mom anger is a huge topic. Um, but other moms will only find it when you share it. So if you could do that, that would be amazing. Because the more we break the shame around things like mom rage, mom anger, um, the more freedom we will find as moms and where they're supposed to be. Our marriages can sometimes slip into the background. Not intentionally, it's just life and it just happens. So today I want to talk about how to stay connected as a couple in the middle of having a busy family life. One reason this topic is on my heart today specifically is because we are about to uh start our seven-week alpha marriage course here at Day Spring. This will actually be our third time we've hosted it uh as a family, and we absolutely love um the marriage course and this ministry. Our connection to alpha marriage comes from many, many years ago. Back in 2010, Micah and I attended the course ourselves at a church we were part of at the time called Glad Tidings. At that point, we had been married about five years. We had Evan and I was pregnant with our second baby. And I remember those seven weeks so clearly. Every week we would go to the church for a date night. A teenager from our church would come and babysit Evan for us, and we would show up and be served a beautiful three-course meal. I remember the food just being so good. I wrote down the menu beside uh the menu in our book of uh what the week was and what we ate. The food was just so good. It felt so fancy compared to our normal life with a toddler and a baby on the way. Um, and then we would watch the alpha video teaching, and then we would go back out to have our dessert and work through the workbook together. It was honestly such a gift to our marriage in that season. Then, fast forward about eight years in 2018 when we were living back uh on the land where Micah grew up, and we have a ministry building here called Day Spring Ministry, and we had the opportunity to start running alpha marriage here at Day Spring with our extended family. It felt like such a full circle moment. We had been served so well in those early years of our marriage, and now we were getting to serve other couples. Since then, we have had 20 couples go through this course. And this year we have 11 couples who will be starting tonight, which is so exciting. These 11 couples get to spend seven weeks uh on date night. They get to enjoy amazing food and an intentional time to work on their marriage. And we are just so excited for them. If that sounds like something you would ever love to do someday, I'm gonna put the alpha marriage course. It's called the marriage course and it's through alpha um in the show notes. You could go check it out. They have a website, um, they have a map you can see where it's being done, um, maybe in your area. And you can just check out the resources it has um there. Definitely worth checking out. But here's the thing the course is amazing. Courses like that are always amazing. Investing in your marriage uh like that is so valuable, but there are also many seasons in life where that's just not possible. And when Mike and I took the course, we only had one kid and one on the way. And we are incredibly thankful for the youth in our church who came and babysat for us. But there were so many other seasons in our marriage where we simply could not get out of the house for a date night like that. And that's okay. Marriage connection doesn't always have to look like a fancy date night. Sometimes it looks really simple. So when our kids were little and everyone went to bed at 7:30, and that made our evening connecting really easy. We would put the kids to bed and then Mike and I would just sit on the couch together. Sometimes we would watch a show, sometimes we'd drink a cup of tea, sometimes we would just talk, we would go through the week ahead. Like, what does your schedule look like? Where do the kids need to be? What's happening this week? Those were little moments of connection that just mattered so much. Date night didn't and doesn't need to look fancy. It looked like two exhausted parents curled up on the couch are trying to reconnect after a really long day. But of course, now that our kids are older, things look different. Again, like seasons and parenting is uh we're always parenting in a different season. Uh, things look a lot different now. Everyone stays up later and some later than we would like, or that we actually want to stay up. And it's actually a lot harder to find a quiet time in the evening to just sit down and connect with Micah. So our conversations sometimes they look a lot different. Sometimes it's texting back and forth during the day, just trying to manage the chaos of our life. Sometimes it's grabbing a Saturday afternoon together to run errands. I love when our kids are like, hey, can you guys just go out for a few hours so we can just be alone in the house by ourselves? You go with dad and run errands. Um I love that. We just had one of those days yesterday. Uh we went to Costco together. We ran and got chicken food. We just got a bunch of things done that we needed to get done. Honestly, uh, it's nothing fancy, but it's just us singing our favorite tunes in the cars. We're driving from store to store and just spending time together all laughing. One of the funnest things we started doing as a couple um a few years ago was the Adventure Challenge date book. Uh, I'm gonna link it in the show notes, but this is a book with 50 scratch-off date ideas. You scratch off the date and then you have to do whatever it says. And it has been so much fun because it pushes you outside of your normal date night routine. Our normal routine for us is grabbing dinner at one of our favorite restaurants uptown. But this book has made us do some really silly, spontaneous things that we probably would never have tried or even thought of otherwise. So honestly, it's brought so much laughter into our marriage. And it's not something we do weekly or anything like that. Like I think on my bingo card, I try to do maybe four a year, like one a quarter, like one in the winter, one the spring, one the summer, and one in the fall. Um, so it's not a weekly thing. We definitely have not made it anywhere close to the 50 dates that we need to, but it's a book that's gonna last for quite a while. Another thing that has been really fun in this season of having older kids who can babysit and you can go out more often is double dating. Um, going out with friends who are in the same stage of life, friends whose kids are friends with our kids, and we just end up talking about life and parenting and marriages and just having fun together as adults, just like without any responsibility. These friendships have been such a gift and we love going on double dates. Daily check-ins are still super important for Micah and I uh before we go to sleep. So uh as we're getting ready for bed or laying in bed, it's just a simple like, how can I pray for you about this week? And sometimes that turns into really meaningful conversations uh because we're alone and we can feel more um free to share things without the kids hearing us about like what's really hard in our life. Uh it's sometimes it's really quick. Sometimes we're so tired that I fall asleep mid mid-prayer before he even says, Amen. I am passed out. But it's just a little check-in that helps us to stay connected. One thing we learned in our premarital course that was so important that we've tried to do every year is to do something for your marriage. Do something for your marriage every year. It doesn't have to be huge, uh, but it does have to be intentional. So it could be reading a book together about marriage, it could be listening to a podcast together, taking a course, going to counseling, just investing in your relationship because a marriage doesn't grow um by accident. We all know that it grows uh with intentional effort. So sometimes we need to learn to be better communicators or how to actually fight better or how to um love each other better or respect each other better. So we just are always on the search of trying to do something like that once a year. We've read lots of books and podcasts and sermon series. Sometimes on our church actually does like a marriage series once a year, but other churches will do it too, and they'll have access and resources to that. So we'll just listen to a sermon series on marriage by other pastors and preachers. And that has been really beneficial to us. Also, another thing that we've been trying to do is to get away for a few nights every year. I know it's not always doable when you have little ones, but actually, when we had our number four, I think he was nine months old. We'd been married nine years, I think, at the time, because I was like, oh, we should really go away for our 10-year anniversary. And Mike was like, no, we're gonna start now. We went away for two nights. So it's two full nights so you can sleep in, get some rest, especially in those little stages, find uh someone you trust or parents or siblings to watch um your kids and just get away to have fun together, to laugh, to go on dates, to just be responsible for no one. That's what I always tell Mike. I just want to go away and be responsible for no one, eat whenever we want to eat, eat whatever we want to eat. Um, one year I was so pregnant, I was like, I'd literally just want to lay in a hotel room and watch cash cab and eat junk food. So just to get away um to do something like that is also really beneficial for your marriages. Crystal and I talked a few weeks ago. If you haven't had time to go back and listen to her and I chatting on the podcast about having a safe friend for your marriage. This has been something so beneficial to her and I both, uh having each other that we can text when we're having a hard moment, friends who are gonna pray for you, friends who are for your marriage, friends who aren't gonna tear your husband down or, you know, say mean things about him and actually mean it. But just like people who are for your marriage, who are gonna encourage you, who are gonna pray for you, who are gonna um know when you send this crazy emoji that you've agreed on, they know, oh gosh, okay, I'm gonna be praying. They're like in a battle, they're having a fight, they just need um covering. So definitely find a friend who can pray um for your marriage. But I just want to be really, really clear about something uh to let you know that Mike and I actually don't have a perfect marriage. We've had to work really, really hard at the marriage we have today. Um, so I definitely don't want you to hear this and go, oh, they're so lucky they can do it all. No, we've had to fight for it. We've had to put these in place so that we can have a thriving marriage because around year seven of our marriage, we walked through a really, really difficult season involving an addiction. It was one of the hardest seasons of our life, those first seven years of our marriage. But it also uh around year seven, things began to shift because celebrate recovery came into our life. Um, Micah has been involved with that ministry now for almost 10 years, and I joined him in 2021. And the journey has been incredibly healing for both of us. So please, please, please never listen to this podcast and think we have it all together, or this marriage one and think we have it all together. These are things we have done to fight for our marriage. I'm not sure if I'll ever open up on this podcast about what happened, but if you are really interested and you want to know about that, we actually were on another podcast sharing about it. So you can just slide into my DMs and ask me for that, and I can send you um that podcast. So as we are closing, I want to talk about a reel that I recently um saw and I actually shared it. I don't often share reels in my stories from other people, but I want to start doing that because sometimes they really uh impact me, uh, other reels that you see. And I share them a lot in our group text and all kinds of fun things with my friends. But this one really impacted me, and it was as we were getting ready to plan for alpha marriage, but it talked about four habits that strong marriages tend to have. I loved how simple they were, and so I wanted to end um by sharing them with you. So you don't need any pen and paper. I'll have them down in the show notes for you. But the first one was just to have fun together, to remember what it's like to date, to laugh together, be silly together. Marriage doesn't always have to feel like constant work. It should have really great moments of joy where you're tears running down your face because you're just laughing so hard or you're having fun together, or you're just being um yourself. So just have fun together. The second habit was to look in each other's eyes. We are not very good at giving each other full attention anymore, but actually putting your phone down when they walk into the room or when they have something to say to you and giving your spouse that full attention. The third habit was praying together. I know that can feel really awkward sometimes as couples, but it doesn't have to be complicated. Sometimes Mike and I just thank God for the day and pray for our kids, like before we go to sleep at night. And the fourth habit was physical touch. This is like hand holding, putting your arms around each other, just simple connection. And I actually really, really loved that reminder because sometimes it is the simple things that keep our marriage stronger. So those were things are gonna be in the show notes. That is your homework for this week. So wherever you are in your marriage today, whether things are feeling really easy right now or actually really, really hard, I want to encourage you, your marriage is worth investing in. It's worth protecting, it's worth fighting for. Thank you so much for listening today. And if you enjoyed this episode, could you please, please hit that follow button in Apple Podcast or Spotify, leave a review. Those are also super, super helpful. I would love to just see five or 10 new reviews this week from you. If you have not left a review yet, please do so. And please share this with someone who might need some encouragement. I had some really great hitting high numbers at the beginning, but lately things have started to shift a little bit. And I know that it's only from you guys sharing the podcast, putting it on your social media, sharing with friends that is how people are going to find my podcast. So if you could share that, this is shameless plug, please, please. I would love to see your Instagram stories, your Facebook stories, your Facebook feeds um filled with hey moms, if you're a mom, go check out this podcast. I've really loved it and it's so rad. Hope you have a wonderful week.