You know how Serial was like the hugest deal ever last year? I totally stuck my head in the sand while friends – especially those who enjoy a good mystery like I do – lost their collective minds over it.

Podcasts just weren’t on my radar. It’s kind of funny, thinking back to all the driving between Dallas and Houston I did while we were dating and engaged, but I steadfastly stuck with my radio stations on those drives, or maybe Tim Keller’s marriage sermon series coming out of the puny little speakers on my iPhone 6 plus. (I understand that that sermon series, which is amazing and was so helpful to us in premarital discussions and how we decided to go about figuring out what Lauren and Steve look like married, is basically the same content 20+ years earlier as can be found in Keller’s far more recent book The Meaning of Marriage. I haven’t read it yet, but we have it and it’s just a matter of time, both because I love Keller and because I’ll take all the help I can get.)

2015 did, however, see me get really into the beautiful world of closed Facebook Groups; although I was only really involved in one (an NFP group, which, for this new FAM user, was mighty handy), it was SO helpful to be able to reach out and ask questions and get quick answers from people with more experience than me in reading charts and such.

Then a friend mentioned a group on Facebook, and I joined. Due to positive peer pressure (all the cool kids were doing it!) started listening to the Sorta Awesome podcast (which is what brought the group together, of course – it is the Sorta Awesome Hangout group). Y’all, I love it. It’s amazing. It’s giving me such a sense of freedom to listen to these women – Megan Tietz, her cohosts, and her special guests – share from their lives. I am trying really hard to figure out this housewife thing, and how to do it well with the health problems I have. It is so refreshing to learn how different women handle even the most mundane things like whether or not to have a cleaning routine. I am being inspired to try new routines and tactics; I am being challenged to think of things differently (like vacuuming your swept-up piles of dirt instead of busting out the ever-frustrating dustpan); and I am being given the freedom to create with my husband whatever works best for us. Tim Keller talked about that in his sermons, but I feel I am finally starting to figure out how to do it.

The group is amazing, too – where else can you get feedback from over forty women about the most appetizing ways to eat cottage cheese in less than 24 hours? It’s all women, but not at all prissy or frilly. People post about all kinds of things – books and getting your kid to stop picking her nose and everything between. I am so jazzed about it.

One of the presents my husband got me for Christmas is a fabulous bluetooth speaker. So it’s quite convenient that I’m now 1) cleaning a lot more and 2) thus have at least double the podcast listening time, right when I have a fabulous way to listen to it all over the apartment. I’ve hopped on the podcast bandwagon. I’ve downloaded a bunch of podcasts, and I’m about to jump into Serial head-first.

The era of the podcast has begun.