Everyone help me welcome Maira M. to Effing Happy! Maira, I’m so glad you’re here.💜 And while I’m saying hello, this is probably a good time to say hello to the rest of you, too. 😊 Come in. Poke around. Make sure you can access the 2am Companion and play with it a little. It’s there for those moments when your brain is spinning and you need somewhere to put all the thoughts that feel SO VERY IMPORTANT at 2am. And if you feel like it, reach out and introduce yourself. Tell me a little about you, your family, what brought you here - or hey, just say hi. No elaborate introduction required. I’m really glad you’re all here. We have some very exciting things in the works, and I’m looking forward to building this little corner of the internet with you.

Something new just landed in the classroom, and I want to tell you why I made it. I've been thinking a lot lately about how most affirmations just don't fit our lives. They're beautiful and well-meaning and written for someone whose hardest day looks pretty different from ours. "Good vibes only"? Absolutely lovely. It is also not what I need at 11pm after a school call, a meltdown, and coffee I reheated twice and forgot about - both times. So I wrote some that do fit. 30 affirmation cards built for parents who are in the thick of it, covering everything from why your body deserves rest to why other people's opinions about your parenting are noise, not data. Honest ones. True ones. The kind nobody says out loud but everybody needs to hear. You can find them in the classroom. Download, screenshot, print, do whatever works for you. What hits home for you? And, if you're brave today: what would you add to this deck?

🎉Welcome to the place where we stop pretending this is fine. If you're here, I'm guessing you're a little tired of parenting spaces that feel like they were designed for a completely different family than yours. The ones where "have you tried a reward chart?" is the answer to everything. Yeah. Not our people. This is Effing Happy, and we are absolutely your people. I'm Jennifer, and I've been in the trenches of complex-needs parenting for over 20 years. I've done the hospital waiting rooms and the 2am phone calls and the cleaning up of things I never thought I'd be cleaning up. I've also done the DBT training and the Family Connections program and the suicide prevention work, because when you're parenting kids in crisis, you become a very specific kind of expert whether you signed up for that or not. This community exists because parents like us need a place that can handle our reality, the whole messy, exhausting, sometimes-terrifying, still-somehow-loving reality of it. ➡️So let's do this. Drop a comment and tell us who you are and what brings you here. You don't have to sanitize it. You don't have to make it sound okay. Just tell us what's real, and watch how fast you feel less alone. I'll start: I'm Jenn, I'm a mom of four, two of whom have complex needs that have kept me on my toes in the most demanding way imaginable, and I built this community because I spent years looking for it and it didn't exist yet. Your turn.