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This episode is sponsored by our friends at CheruBalm.

A few months ago, we happened upon Kristyn Brown’s amazing Saints Project when scrolling through Instagram and we were hooked. We knew we wanted to share her work with you and get a behind the scenes look at the project.

Kristyn is a wife, mama, and a photographer who was inspired to start photographing people to portray different saints. In this episode she shares the story of how the project began, how she chooses which saints to portray (as well as the faces to photograph), and how this creative project has brought her into closer friendships with the saints.

Part way through the interview, Christy realized that this episode would air on All Saints Day! We call that positively providential!

We loved talking to Kristyn about our favorite saints and how they’ve entered our lives and helped us in our journey of faith. We know you’ll love getting to know Kristyn (and the saints she brings to life in her photographs) in this episode, so grab a cup of coffee and enjoy!

How to connect with Kristyn:

• Kristyn’s website
• Instagram
• Kristyn’s Etsy Shop

This episode is generously sponsored by CheruBalm, a lovely little Catholic company that makes handmade chrism-scented baby balm out of natural ingredients safe for sensitive skin. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of smelling a newly baptized baby’s forehead, you know how good that chrism scent smells! These lovely tubes of baby balm are perfect for stocking gifts, baptismal gifts, or baby shower gifts.

And CheruBalm has generously offered Fountains of Carrots listeners a lovely 20% off discount code! Just head over to the FoC discount page to grab your code and enjoy some swoonworthy scents for baby’s skin.

(And psst! Haley’s running a CheruBalm giveaway this week, so you can head over there to enter and four lucky winners will receive some chrism-scented balm.)

Come hang out with us!

• The Fountains of Carrots Raspberry Cordial Social Club on Facebook (our Facebook group)
• Connect with Haley on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and her blog
• Connect with Christy on Facebook, Instagram, and her blog

You can listen to us on iTunes, and we’d love a quick rating or review. If you have an android device we’re also on Stitcher. And as always, you can find all links, show notes, upcoming guests, and listen to all episodes at Fountains of Carrots.com.

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We’ve wanted to have Tommy Tighe on the show ever since Haley’s family met the Tighes on their road trip around the country last summer.

Tommy is a husband, father, and marriage and family therapist in the Bay area. He writes for CatholicMom.com and Aleteia and co-hosts the Catholic Hipster Podcast with Sarah Vabulas. He is also king of Catholic Twitter (did you even know there’s such a thing?). His Catholic hipster book will be published by Ave Maria Press Fall 2017.

We don’t remember an episode where we’ve laughed so hard as we did with Tommy. We cover Haley’s composting toilet, what the heck Canadians dip their french fries in, and the insanity of social media. But the conversation does get very serious when we discuss the death of Tommy’s newborn son, Luke, this past spring. Tommy was willing to share about the pain his family has been experiencing and how we all can do better to support families experiencing grief or crisis. He has some great wisdom to share about how to show up for your friends when they’re suffering and what to say and what not to say.

We loved talking with Tommy we think this episode is going to be helpful and inspiring. It’s a great episode, so grab some coffee and listen in!

Tommy’s article:  A Letter to the Lady Annoyed by my Kids at Mass

How to connect with Tommy:

• Tommy’s blog
• Twitter
• Instagram

Come hang out with us!

• The Fountains of Carrots Raspberry Cordial Social Club on Facebook (our Facebook group)
• Connect with Haley on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and her blog
• Connect with Christy on Facebook, Instagram, and her blog

You can listen to us on iTunes, and we’d love a quick rating or review. If you have an android device we’re also on Stitcher. And as always, you can find all links, show notes, upcoming guests, and listen to all episodes at Fountains of Carrots.com.

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Sometimes the internet is a great place! Haley’s husband Daniel became Twitter friends with Dr. Gregory Hillis and then Haley met the Hillis family during last summer’s big road trip and visited the Abbey of Gethsemani (where Thomas Merton lived) with them. One minute you’re driving through beautiful Kentucky, and the next you’re eating dinner at a hermitage with monks and somebody you’re husband knows from Twitter. It’s like magic.

Dr. Hillis is our first of Christy’s fellow Canadians to join us on the podcast.  He is a historical theologian with particular expertise in patristics and joined Bellarmine’s faculty in August 2008.  In addition to  Christian spirituality, ecclesiology, sacramental theology, 19th and 20th century Roman Catholic theology, and Eastern Christian history and theology, Dr. Hillis studies Thomas Merton and we thought he would have some great insights into Merton’s work to share with you (we were right!)

In this episode we talked about Merton’s conversion, which of his writings Merton newbies should read first, why people are scared of Merton, and his emphasis on dialogue with other faith traditions. We also chatted about Wendell Berry, how the vocation of marriage is a call to generous love, how we are sacramentally connected to other Christians through baptism, and advice from Dr. Hillis about the beauty and complexities of interfaith marriage.

It’s a great episode, so grab some coffee and listen in!

Links for this episode:

Getting Started with Thomas Merton: A Reading Guide: My Unquiet Heart

Haley’s Why You Should Take Your Kids to Caves, Monasteries, and Fancy Hotels

Books we talked about:

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master, The Essential Writings

Thomas Merton: Essential Writings

The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton

The Intimate Merton: His Life from Journals

How to connect with Dr. Greg Hillis:

• Greg’s blog: My Unquiet Heart
• Twitter

Come hang out with us!

• The Fountains of Carrots Raspberry Cordial Social Club on Facebook (our Facebook group)
• Connect with Haley on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and her blog
• Connect with Christy on Facebook, Instagram, and her blog

You can listen to us on iTunes, and we’d love a quick rating or review. If you have an android device we’re also on Stitcher. And as always, you can find all links, show notes, upcoming guests, and listen to all episodes at Fountains of Carrots.com.

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We are thrilled that we get to share this awesome episode featuring our friend Kendra Tierney. Kendra is the author of A Little Book About Confession for Children and the voice behind the wildly popular blog Catholic All Year. She is also homeschooling mom extraordinaire and is about to welcome her eighth baby to their home in sunny California!

We had a great conversation about how to use social media, avoid Instagram envy, respect our kids’ privacy, and protect our children from inappropriate content on the internet. Kendra also shared some great tips for aspiring bloggers!

Related post to what we talked about today:

Haley’s post on Instagram Envy.

Kendra’s post about what she loves to see on a blog.

To connect with Kendra:

• blog 
• instagram
• facebook
• twitter 

You can listen to us on iTunes, and we’d love a quick rating or review. If you have an android device we’re also on Stitcher. And as always, you can find all links, show notes, upcoming guests, and listen to all episodes at Fountains of Carrots.com.

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It’s hard to choose a favorite episode, but this one just might be ours.   Listeners kept requesting a podcast with Leila Lawler and we thought it was a great idea. We can’t wait for you to get inspired by all the wisdom she has to share!

Affectionately called Auntie Leila by the readers of her blog, Like Mother, Like Daughter, Leila Lawler co-authored the beautiful book The Little Oratory published by Sophia Institute Press. This episode is going to be a life-saver for anyone who desires to center their home in prayer and especially for young moms. Get ready to hear some practical and beautiful steps to draw us into a daily liturgy!

Leila’s lovely book:

The Little Oratory

We chat about restoring wonder and beauty in our homes to draw our families close to God and how our family traditions should reflect our families and not someone else’s. We talk about how we don’t have to do every liturgical activity/tradition and we don’t have to do them as well as so-and-so from Pinterest does them.

We also discussed dealing with toddler tantrums and whiners and how more sleep, more food covers a multitude of toddler maladies as Auntie Leila writes in this post about whining whiners and how to cure them.

Find Auntie Leila…

• Twitter
• Instagram
• Pinterest

You can listen to us on iTunes, and we’d love a quick rating or review. If you have an android device we’re also on Stitcher. And as always, you can find all links, show notes, upcoming guests, and listen to all episodes at Fountains of Carrots.com