Each day I spend as a mother, I learn just a tiny bit more about how to weather the ups and downs.  With every report card pointing out areas of improvement, kid that comes home saying he had a bad day, and frantic trip to the doctor, I get just a tiny bit better at not totally FREAKING OUT.

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I have my own anxieties and health issues (which I haven’t gone into yet so much on my blog; still getting up the courage) and I think, like so many moms, I often feel ashamed that sometimes everything is not just totally peachy!  Being a mother means steering the ship, holding down the fort, being the LIONESS, and when the lioness feels like she can’t quite keep it together, it’s sheer agony.

Some things that really lift my spirits are the mom blogs I follow that I’ve come to know and love.  These wonderful story-tellers and photographers enrich my journey as a mom on a daily basis.  Reading them is like my little espresso, my pick-me-up. They provide clarity, inspiration, warmth and a very important reminder: we all have our issues, but don’t forget about how magical the experience of parenting is. Don’t gloss over the moments, be they big or small.

So with that long introduction, here were this week’s best blogs for me:

Kelle Hampton, Enjoying the Small Things: Kelle is such a gorgeous writer, and her blog really does make me appreciate those little moments with my children. Plus her photographs are simply stunning! She recently welcomed her third baby and wrote a beautiful birth story about his arrival.

“These moments?  I have them forever,” she writes.  “These are the ones I’ll go back to both when things are rough and when life feels glorious.  When parenting is hard, when years replace days in separating me from the moment he arrived, when I don’t have the answers and he’s not tiny and I’m not the one and only thing he needs for survival, I’ll remember what it felt like to be handed my son–how quickly and deeply that love began, and I’ll find perspective hidden in these memories.”

I urge you to check it out — but be warned that if you’re anything like me, it will make you want to have another baby!  (Don’t worry, honey!).

Jessica Shyba, Mommas Gone City: Jessica is one of the bloggers I’m addicted to on Instagram (Kelle too!)  Through her blog, I fall in love with my own city of New York over and over again. This week Jessica wrote about taking her kids to one of my favorite places, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“I loved watching them absorb the different paintings and statues, and interpreting for themselves and often aloud. I can’t imagine how experiencing art could be nearly as magnificent without having my children around to demonstrate right along with me,” she writes.

This blog post seriously made me begin planning a long overdue trip to that amazing museum this Saturday.

Glennon Melton, Momastery: I’ve been reading Glennon’s blog for awhile, actually since before her post “Don’t Carpe Diem” went viral. This week she wrote a piece titled “Or Maybe It’s This” that really spoke to me about some of the challenges of living your life out in the open. I struggle sometimes with talking about the personal issues of me and my family.

“The details make us people, but the essentials make us human,” she writes. “And when we share the deep stuff, the real stuff, the hidden stuff — we learn that the details are just hurdles we must get past in order to get to the essentials, in order to get to that place of vulnerability, that truthiest place where we learn that at our cores, We Are The Same.”

I certainly don’t think I do this as well as some of these other ladies, but I do try to make other new mamas feel less alone and helpless and anxious than I did with my first baby.

Lisa Belkin, HuffPost Parents: I know where to turn whenever there’s a hot-button parenting story in the news. I can always count on Lisa Belkin to break things down and cut to the core of the issue, like with this week’s buzz around Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s ban on working from home. Lisa wrote one of the first stories I read about the news, and then today has another piece that gets at the heart of the problem I see with this kind of a blanket policy.

“When I need to get writing done I have learned not to sit at a desk; I need a coffee shop or a shady spot in my backyard,” she writes. “But I have co-workers who can’t focus as well out of the office; the laundry beckons and their brain doesn’t engage. Good management means sorting the work and the workers in the most productive ways. Mostly that means trusting your employees. The work has to be done. Doesn’t it make most sense to allow a worker to do it as best she can?”

So there you have it — a few of my favorite reads from the last week.

What about you? What bloggers do you love to follow? Tell me in the comments!