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Coach Karen | Helping blended families create harmony at home 🏡
Feng Shui + Life Coaching for stepmoms, co-parents, & bonus families
✨ Author of The Blended Home

07/29/2026

Belonging in a blended family is not just a feeling. It is something that can be measured — and intentionally created. 🏡

Research on children in blended families consistently shows that those who report a genuine sense of belonging have measurably better outcomes across multiple areas of life: academic performance, emotional regulation, quality of friendships, and long-term wellbeing. The factors most strongly associated with that sense of belonging are not the ones most of us would guess.

It is not grand gestures or perfect family dynamics. It is three specific things: feeling heard in everyday conversations, having some physical space in the home that is unmistakably and undeniably theirs, and witnessing genuine respect and warmth between the adults in the household.

That last one is the one I think about most. Children in blended families take their emotional cues from the relationship between their parent and stepparent. They absorb the energy between the adults constantly and quietly. How you treat your partner is a belonging signal your children are always reading — more powerfully than almost anything you say directly to them.

This research shaped some of the most important sections of The Blended Home. Because the question worth asking in your home is not only whether your children know they are loved. It is whether they feel like they belong. Those are different questions with different answers.

What is one thing that has helped a child in your life feel like they truly belong? I would love to read your stories in the comments.

07/27/2026

Twenty years from now, your children will smell something and remember your home. What will they feel when they do? 🕯️

Scent is the sense most directly connected to memory and emotion — and it may be the most underused tool in creating a home that genuinely feels like one. Chapter 5 of The Blended Home closes with this idea: incorporating calming scents like lavender or vanilla in your family room reduces stress and enhances the overall atmosphere. The research on this is clear. But the reason I find it most meaningful goes beyond the science.

Every home has a scent. Most of us have not chosen it consciously. But we could. A consistent, welcoming fragrance in your shared family space creates something that no decorator, no renovations, and no family meeting can manufacture: a sensory signature. A smell that becomes associated with safety and belonging and the specific feeling of being home.

For children in blended families who may feel torn between two households, a space that smells calming and familiar is one of the quietest ways you can say: this is also yours. You are welcome here. You belong.

Does your home have a signature scent — intentional or not? I would love to know what yours is.

07/23/2026

A man who survived Auschwitz called himself the happiest man on earth. And he meant every word of it. 🤍

The Happiest Man on Earth by Eddie Jaku is the memoir of a Holocaust survivor who lost nearly everyone he loved and then made a deliberate, daily choice to build a life worth living. He survived the unimaginable. And then he tended to joy the way a gardener tends to something fragile and precious and entirely worth the effort.

I read this book thinking about blended families — about people who have known loss, known rupture, known the particular grief of a family that did not survive. About the courage it takes to open your heart again and build something new. Eddie Jaku’s answer to that question is one of the most profound things I have ever read: happiness is not something that happens to you. It is something you tend, like a garden, every single day.

A blended family is exactly that kind of garden. It requires daily tending, consistent care, and the willingness to believe that what you are building is worth the effort even on the days it is hard. This is the most important book I will recommend all year. If you have already read it, please tell me what it gave you. I want to know.

And to every person in this community who has chosen to build again after loss — this one is for you.

07/21/2026

Next book author update — and the honest answer is that I am still in the listening phase. Still gathering. Still letting things surface. And I have made peace with the fact that this is exactly where I am supposed to be right now. 📖

I shared in April that I was beginning to brainstorm the next book — something that lives in the same world as The Blended Home, built around the same questions of belonging and connection and what it means to build a family on purpose. Since then, people have left comments that I have been sitting with and saving. Things they wish existed in a book. Questions no one has answered for them yet. Parts of their experience they have never seen reflected in anything they have read. Those responses are my research right now, and they are some of the most valuable material I have.

Here is what writing The Blended Home taught me about writing a second book: there is enormous pressure to immediately begin the next thing. And it is almost always the wrong pressure to give in to. The first book taught me things I could not have known before I wrote it — about my reader, about my voice, about what I was truly trying to say. The second book deserves to be written from that knowledge, not in the absence of it. Rushing the brainstorm to get to the writing faster produces a faster book. Not a better one. I want the better one.

So the question I asked in April is still open, and I mean it more now than I did then: if you are in a blended family, what is the question nobody has fully answered for you yet? What part of your experience have you never found in a book? Your answer might genuinely shape what I write next. Please share it below.

07/17/2026

One of the shortest books I have ever recommended. Also one of the most important — especially for anyone who is so busy holding a family together that they have forgotten to hold themselves. 💜

Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It by Kamal Ravikant began as something he wrote for himself during one of the darkest periods of his life. The premise is as simple as it is demanding: commit, genuinely and repeatedly, to loving yourself. Not as a feel-good affirmation. As a discipline. As the thing you return to when everything else has fallen away.

Here is why I think this book belongs specifically in the hands of anyone navigating a blended family: the role of stepparent, of partner in a complicated family structure, can quietly hollow you out if you are not paying attention. You pour yourself into children who are still deciding whether they want you. You manage loyalty conflicts that feel both entirely your problem and entirely outside your control. You show up consistently for a family that did not start with you. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, the relationship you have with yourself becomes the one that gets the least attention.

The most important relationship in your blended family is the one you have with yourself. Everything else flows from that foundation. This book is a reminder of why that is true — and a practical path back to it.

You can read it in an afternoon. You will think about it for years. Have you read this one?

07/15/2026

Some books teach you something about listening that you did not know you needed to learn. This is one of them. 🌷

Under the Tulip Tree by Michelle Shocklee is a dual-timeline historical novel set during the Great Depression. It follows Roseanna, a young journalist interviewing elderly formerly enslaved people as part of a New Deal program, and Frankie, one of those women whose story becomes far more than just an interview. At its heart, it is a book about what happens when one person finally makes space for another person’s whole story to be told and genuinely heard.

As someone who writes about blended families, I kept thinking about how much this story mirrors the work of building a home with people who have histories that began before you arrived. Every person in a blended family — children, partners, stepchildren — carries a story that started before this family existed. One of the most loving things we can do is make room for those stories rather than asking people to set them aside. Belonging does not require erasing where you came from. This book reminded me of that in the most beautiful way.

Michelle Shocklee writes with extraordinary care. If you love historical fiction with genuine emotional depth, this one will stay with you long after the last page. Have you read her work?

07/12/2026

Two hundred million Americans say they want to write a book. Fewer than three percent ever finish one. ✍️

The writing and publishing world is full of numbers that most people — including most writers — do not know. And some of them genuinely change how you think about what it means to bring a book into the world.

Of the manuscripts that are completed, the vast majority are never submitted to a publisher or literary agent. They stay in a drawer. The ones that are submitted face rejection rates that can exceed ninety-nine percent at traditional publishing houses. Self-publishing has changed the equation significantly — it now accounts for the majority of new titles published globally each year. And yet discoverability remains the central challenge for every author regardless of how they publish. The average self-published book sells fewer than one hundred copies in its lifetime. The authors who beat that number almost universally share one characteristic: they built an audience intentionally and consistently, before, during, and after publication.

I share these numbers not to discourage anyone, but because I believe the dream of writing a book deserves to be pursued with clear eyes. Finishing a book puts you in a category that most people who want to write never reach. Publishing it places you in a smaller one still. And building a community around it — which is exactly what this page is about — is the work that makes the difference between a book that sits in a warehouse and one that finds the people it was written for.

Are you working on a book, or have you thought about writing one? I would love to know.

07/09/2026

Overhead lights say: this is a space for doing things. Lamps say: this is a space for being. 🕯️

Chapter 5 of The Blended Home looks at how small environmental shifts change how a family room actually feels — and lighting is one of the most immediate. Soft light from lamps or string lights signals to your nervous system that the hard part of the day is behind you. It invites you to exhale rather than to continue producing.

For a blended family, that evening exhale matters more than most of us realize. The family room should be the place where the doing of the day is finished and the being together begins. Soft lighting helps make that transition happen almost automatically — not because of anything that is said, but because of what the space is communicating on its own.

And for children, especially those who arrive at your home carrying the energy of a different household, a room that feels warm and unhurried and calm sends a message before anyone has greeted them at the door.

One simple thing you can try tonight: turn off the overhead light in your family room and switch on a lamp instead. Notice what changes in the room and in the people in it. I would love to hear what you observe.

07/05/2026

I do not read many books that make me want to immediately get up and do something. This one did. 🔥

Not Impossible by Mick Ebeling is the story of a man who kept solving problems that everyone else had declared unsolvable — not because he had special resources or expertise, but because he refused to accept that impossible was the final answer. He built a 3D-printing lab in Sudan to create prosthetic limbs for child soldiers. He developed technology to help a paralyzed graffiti artist paint again. He did things that had never been done before, repeatedly, simply by deciding to start.

Here is why I am recommending this to the blended family community specifically. So many people come into a blended family having been told — or telling themselves — that it is too hard, too complicated, that the odds are against them. And statistically, blended families do face real challenges. But Ebeling’s philosophy is built on one idea: if you solve the problem in front of you with everything you have, the impact ripples further than you can see. That is exactly what showing up for your blended family every single day looks like. You are doing something that feels impossible some days. This book will remind you what human beings are capable of when they decide to keep going.

What is something in your life you have been calling impossible? I would love to hear it in the comments.

07/02/2026

Your family room is already doing something. The question is whether it is doing what you want it to do. 🏡

Chapter 5 of The Blended Home looks at four ways your shared living space is quietly shaping connection right now — whether you have thought about it or not.

First: how your furniture faces each other changes whether people talk to each other. Seating that curves inward and creates a natural gathering shape invites conversation in a way that a room organized around a television simply does not. It is a small shift with a surprisingly significant effect.

Second: doing things together in the same space — even quietly, even without interaction — builds emotional bonds over time that conversation alone cannot create. Shared presence is its own form of closeness.

Third: color is doing something in a room before anyone sits down in it. Warm tones communicate safety and comfort to the nervous system in ways that we absorb without consciously noticing. Your walls are already speaking.

Fourth: a space that visibly includes every person who lives there is doing belonging work that words sometimes cannot do. A child’s drawing on the wall. A photo that shows the whole family. A shelf with something that belongs to every person in the house. These are not decorating choices. They are belonging declarations.

What is your family room currently saying to the people inside it?

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