Have you ever reached the end of summer and thought, Wait… did we actually enjoy any of that? Or did we just race from one thing to the next, barely catching a breath? Yeah, me too.
If your calendar is already filling up with end-of-year parties, graduations, and a never-ending to-do list—and you're feeling that familiar overwhelm bubbling up—you are absolutely in the right place.
This week on the Nourished to Bloom Podcast, we're kicking off a brand new summer series all about crafting a season that nourishes your soul—not just your schedule.
In this first episode, Kara Trochta invites you to hit the pause button and ask a radically different question: What do you want this summer to feel like? Not what Pinterest says, not what your neighbor is planning, not what the summer camp brochures promise. YOUR summer. Your family. Your vibe.
Here's a glimpse of what you'll hear in Episode 61: 🌞 Kara's own childhood memories of magical, imperfect summers—from fort-building to cousin chaos—and how those simple moments stuck the most 💡 How to create a realistic summer vision grounded in being, not just doing 📔 A simple yet powerful journaling prompt to help you define your summer's vibe: What's your ONE word? What three things matter most? And what are you saying NO to this year? 🙏 Why giving yourself permission to slow down (and even get a little bored!) could be the greatest gift you give your kids—and yourself
This isn't about chasing a Pinterest-perfect summer. It's about being present, letting go of pressure, and choosing joy on purpose. And it all starts with a clear, grace-filled vision.
Ready for your challenge? Take ten minutes this week to journal, pray, or simply reflect on what you want your summer to feel like—not just what it should look like. Choose your word. Let it anchor you as the school year winds down and the season shifts.
✨ If this episode encouraged you, would you pass it on to a fellow mama who could use a breath of fresh air heading into summer? Share the podcast with a friend, and let's start a ripple of intentional, joy-filled summers—together.
Join The Nourished to Bloom Community: www.community.karatrochta.com
Instagram: www.instagram.com/karatrochta
The Nourished to Bloom Podcast Show Notes: www.podcast.karatrochta.com/shownotes
00:00:00
May is here. We talked about this a couple weeks ago, that we were
00:00:03
climbing that roller coaster and we finally hit the top and we're
00:00:07
coming over that ledge and man, it is in full
00:00:11
swing. All the things are May some,
00:00:14
right? The end of year parties, the
00:00:17
graduations, the first communions, Mother's
00:00:21
day birthdays, dance recitals, finishing baseball
00:00:25
season. Like, let's just cram everything we possibly can
00:00:29
into, you know, these last few months, my kids actually
00:00:33
only have 14 days of school left. Their summer's gonna be
00:00:36
here before I know it. And in the past, I remember
00:00:40
trying to create the perfect summer partly out of
00:00:44
fear of, like, my kids are home from school and what am I gonna do
00:00:48
now and then, partly because I felt that pressure that the only way to
00:00:52
be a good mom was to have the perfectly planned
00:00:55
summer. And it always left me feeling
00:00:58
guilty, overwhelmed, and like halfway through
00:01:02
just giving up. And so today we're going to
00:01:05
kick off a series on how to create a joy filled
00:01:09
summer. And in this first episode, we're really going to
00:01:13
focus on creating our summer vibe. What do you
00:01:17
want this summer to feel like? So I hope you'll join me in the
00:01:20
podcast and let's get ready to create a
00:01:24
summer full of peace and calm and
00:01:27
intention. Welcome to the Nourish to Bloom
00:01:31
podcast where your faith meets your health. I'm your host, Kara
00:01:35
Trta, a registered dietitian and certified Catholic coach. And I'm here to
00:01:38
help you cultivate a deeper connection with your body, your spirit
00:01:42
and the nourishment that sustains them both. In a world
00:01:46
filled with noise and confusion about food, health and
00:01:49
body image, this podcast offers truth and healing from a Christ
00:01:53
centered perspective. Together, we'll untangle the deep roots of
00:01:57
diet culture and discover what it means to truly care for
00:02:00
ourselves through joyful nourishment of mind, body and
00:02:04
soul. We're here to dive into the transformative power of intuitive eating
00:02:08
coupled with the rich teachings of our Christian faith. With every
00:02:12
episode, I'll be cheering you on, offering insights, inspiration
00:02:15
and practical tools to help you heal your relationship with
00:02:19
food and embrace the beauty of your body as a temple of the
00:02:23
Holy Spirit with confidence and courage that
00:02:26
can only be found in Christ. Join me as we journey together
00:02:30
towards a more holistic approach to wellness. One that honors the wisdom
00:02:34
of your body as God's creation, the teachings of our faith,
00:02:38
and the unique purpose you're called to fulfill.
00:02:41
You were made to bloom, to come into
00:02:45
full beauty and health in order to bear good fruit for the Lord with your
00:02:49
life. So if you're ready to nourish your body, feed your soul,
00:02:52
and bloom into the best version of yourself, then you're. In the right place.
00:02:56
And I'm so happy you're here. Welcome to Nourish to
00:03:00
Bloom, where every day is a sacred invitation to
00:03:03
thrive. Hey there. Welcome back
00:03:07
to another episode of the Nourish to Bloom podcast. So
00:03:11
happy to be here with you this week. Like
00:03:14
I said in the intro, my kids have 14 days left of
00:03:18
school, and it is going to go by so quickly. And there are
00:03:22
so many things that are packed into those 14 days, including
00:03:26
another field trip, some substitute teaching, fifth
00:03:30
grade graduation, fifth grade party, dance
00:03:33
recital. I don't know, probably more things than
00:03:37
that. And so you're probably feeling a lot of that pressure and that overwhelm,
00:03:40
too. And then on the other side of that coin, there's that
00:03:44
kind of maybe nervousness or anxiousness of like, oh,
00:03:48
gosh, summer's coming. What have I done to plan for it? And maybe you have
00:03:52
done some planning. Maybe you kind of know what vacations you're going on or
00:03:56
if your kids are going to go into those, into certain camps. But,
00:03:59
like, there's this balance that comes between. We feel like we have to have
00:04:03
everything perfectly planned. But then we get to the time that summer
00:04:07
hits, and it's like, well, gosh, our schedule's just as full in the summer as
00:04:11
it is during the school year. And we did that to
00:04:14
ourselves, right? And so when, you know, we're
00:04:18
starting to experience that warmer weather and school is
00:04:22
letting out, we totally are feeling that pressure to have the perfect summer
00:04:26
plan. It starts creeping in and it builds.
00:04:30
And oftentimes, like, we're not even sure or we're not even, like, realizing
00:04:33
that this is what's happened. Because there's this unspoken
00:04:37
expectation that during the summer, we have to pack every
00:04:41
day with exciting adventures or crafts or
00:04:44
vacations and just have this perfectly
00:04:48
organized schedule for our kids. Not too much screen time, make sure
00:04:52
they get outside and play, eat perfectly healthy meals, because
00:04:55
we have the time to cook, right? Here's the thing.
00:04:59
Those expectations are 100% unrealistic and
00:05:03
unsustainable. So I'm inviting you and in
00:05:07
challenging you to let go of that pressure this summer
00:05:11
and focus on what you really want your summer
00:05:15
to feel like. That is what today's
00:05:18
episode is all about, creating that summer vibe.
00:05:22
When you get to August and your kids are back in school and you look
00:05:25
back on that summer, what would be the one word emotion that you would want
00:05:29
to use to describe it. Do you want to create a summer
00:05:33
that was joyful, A summer that was realistic, A
00:05:36
summer that was spontaneous or intentional
00:05:40
or peaceful or just
00:05:43
fun. So to start off, I want you
00:05:47
to take a step back and think about your own childhood summer.
00:05:52
When you think back about the best memories of
00:05:55
your childhood and during the summer, what stands out?
00:05:59
Was it the expensive vacations and trips
00:06:03
or perfectly planned activities? Or was
00:06:07
it the boredom that came with summer and being left to your own
00:06:10
devices? And there's no right or wrong answer here. Right.
00:06:14
Because trips can be fun. They can be lasting memories. Like I have
00:06:18
a memory of going to New York City with my mom and her sisters
00:06:22
and my cousins. And we had an amazing time in New York
00:06:25
City. My uncle had to drive us around in a 14 passenger
00:06:29
van in New York City. I want you to picture that. And I was on
00:06:32
the one of the oldest and I think I was in fourth grade and there
00:06:35
was, gosh, probably 10 of us at the time, 10 kids at the time. So
00:06:39
just picture that. It was probably chaos and so stressful for
00:06:43
our moms. But that is a summer trip that I remember and it was so
00:06:46
much fun. But at the same time, I can also look
00:06:50
back on summers when we were left to our own
00:06:53
devices and quote, unquote bored. And we
00:06:57
were just told like, go play and played with our
00:07:01
cousins. I lived in the country, I didn't have neighbors and so kind of spent
00:07:04
all of our time together with our cousins. And at the time my mom, my
00:07:08
sister and I were living at my grandparents house. And
00:07:12
my grandfather was a farmer. So we had pastures and he had
00:07:16
cattle and there was brush and a farmyard
00:07:19
and there was a bunch of old fence posts laying
00:07:23
around. And so my cousins and I,
00:07:26
we built forts out of these fence posts. And we created our
00:07:30
own town. We called it May Town because my grandparents last name was May, but
00:07:33
we called it Maytown. And we had our own rules. We had a
00:07:36
sheriff, we had a jail. We took care of discipline and anybody who was
00:07:40
misbehaving, they went to jail. We
00:07:44
just built these different buildings in these different homes. And we use
00:07:48
our imagination and we just played right? And another
00:07:51
time my grandmother was so upset with us. But like I said, my grandfather
00:07:55
had brush and cattle. And so naturally you would have cattle die.
00:07:58
And there was one summer that we hauled a wagon up to the brush
00:08:02
line and back and forth multiple times and found all
00:08:06
these cow bones not from the same skeleton because they were kind of scattered
00:08:10
everywhere. But we found enough bones to Build a
00:08:13
skeleton of a cow in my grandmother's yard. And she was
00:08:17
so angry with us. But those are really the things that stick
00:08:20
out. And so
00:08:24
what do you want your kids to remember about
00:08:27
summer? And if the summers in the past haven't
00:08:30
been what you wanted them to be, if you've been over scheduled, if
00:08:34
you felt like you've had to Entertain your kids 247 and you've
00:08:38
been exhausted and overwhelmed and over scheduled, you can start to
00:08:42
shift, you can start to make a change. So thinking about what do you
00:08:45
want this summer to be like? Is it more about simple
00:08:49
moments that weren't really about being busy or doing
00:08:53
more, just being together, present
00:08:57
and relaxed? And is that what you want your summer to be like?
00:09:01
Or do you want to go on these grand adventures? Like I said, there's no
00:09:04
right or wrong way. Just doing it and
00:09:07
aligning your summer and, and the way you want to feel about your summer
00:09:11
with your expectations and what you want out of it, instead
00:09:14
of relying on everybody else's expectations of what a good
00:09:18
summer, quote, unquote, should look like.
00:09:21
Because it can be really easy to get caught up in all these
00:09:25
ideas that summer has to be this whirlwind of activity,
00:09:29
and we can feel the pressure to do it all with the epic
00:09:32
vacations and Pinterest perfect crafts. Or on the
00:09:36
flip side, we feel like sometimes we're just trying to survive the chaos of having
00:09:39
our kids home and just making it until they go to school again. And
00:09:43
neither one of those extremes is a fun place to live.
00:09:47
So what if there is another way? What if you could find that balance and
00:09:51
create space for what truly matters to you and your
00:09:54
family? And so this is where I really want you to lean in
00:09:59
instead of getting swept up in the rush of all the things you feel like
00:10:02
you should do. Take a moment and reflect and be
00:10:06
intentional and design what you really want this
00:10:10
summer, what you and your family want this summer to feel like?
00:10:14
What are the emotions that you want to feel that you want your
00:10:18
kids to feel? What are the experiences and the memories that you
00:10:21
want to create? What. How do you want to challenge your
00:10:25
kids to grow? How do you want to challenge yourself to
00:10:28
grow? What is something that maybe you've been putting off
00:10:32
for a while that you want to try to learn? One of our
00:10:36
goals for my family and I is to try to start to
00:10:40
learn Spanish, because we live in Texas and it
00:10:43
would be so beneficial. But then we're also maybe planning a trip to
00:10:47
Rome in the next year, and Spanish and Italian is pretty close from
00:10:51
what I hear. But overall, in the long run, Spanish would
00:10:55
benefit us more. So I don't know. We'll see. But that's kind of something that
00:10:58
we've talked about as a family that we want to learn. The other thing I'm
00:11:02
challenging my kids to do is each one of them has to
00:11:05
plan and prepare a meal every, every week
00:11:09
to help them build those skills, those life skills of cooking. And we can do
00:11:13
that in the summer because we have the time, because we've sat down and we've
00:11:16
intentionally planned about this is what we're going to do, and this is how we
00:11:19
want our days to feel. But we don't have that
00:11:23
pressure anymore to do it all the way that I used to.
00:11:27
And so I want to offer you this kind of practical
00:11:31
journey journaling tool to help you really create that
00:11:34
summer vision or that summer vibe. So all you have to
00:11:38
do is grab your journal or your phone or a voice
00:11:42
memo and ask yourself these three simple questions.
00:11:48
What do I want this summer to feel like?
00:11:52
And you can even simplify this even more. What is the one word
00:11:56
emotion you want to feel this summer? Because
00:12:00
when you know what that one word emotion is, that emotion has
00:12:03
the ability to help you plan the actions that you're going to
00:12:07
take, plan how you're going to show up. And then it also helps you
00:12:10
understand what are the thoughts that you need to have? What do you need to
00:12:14
be thinking? What does your mindset need to be in order to achieve
00:12:17
this emotion?
00:12:21
Number two, what are three main things you want to focus
00:12:25
on creating with your family and you can kind
00:12:29
of think about. This is in,
00:12:32
like, kind of categories, right? Maybe you want to have. Maybe you want
00:12:36
to allow everybody to sleep in, and you just kind of have a slow, peaceful
00:12:39
morning where, you know, maybe you are sleeping in late and you're.
00:12:43
You're waking up and you're spending time together in scripture, just that
00:12:47
slow, peaceful morning. Or maybe you want to be
00:12:51
able to have an outdoor adventure one
00:12:54
time a week. And what does that look like? Does that mean going to a
00:12:57
nearby lake? Does. Or river? Does it mean going to an
00:13:01
amusement park? Does it mean going on a hike? Like,
00:13:06
what does that look like for you? What are three main things you want to
00:13:09
focus on creating with your family? I already
00:13:13
mentioned two for me, right? Helping my kids learn how to prepare and
00:13:17
cook, get more of those kitchen skills, and then kind of work
00:13:20
on maybe learning a new language. Those are kind of two things that
00:13:24
we're focused on. I haven't really thought about the third one, but this is where
00:13:28
it's fun because you can invite your family to be a part of this too,
00:13:31
right? And here's the last one because we
00:13:35
tend to over schedule and because we look at all these camps that
00:13:38
seem like, oh, the most amazing adventure for our kids and so we want to
00:13:41
sign them up. But really asking yourself what do you
00:13:45
need to say no to this summer in order to say
00:13:49
yes to the things that matter? To the things that you
00:13:52
want to make a priority? Those three main things that you want to
00:13:56
focus on. And remember, this isn't about
00:13:59
perfection, but it's just about really learning to let go of
00:14:03
expectation and creating a space for what is really
00:14:07
important and what really matters to you and your family
00:14:11
and learning to say no to over commitment or
00:14:14
unrealistic expectations. So you are saying yes to
00:14:17
things that align with your values and that will
00:14:21
really bring you a truly joy filled summer.
00:14:25
So that's your homework. Spend 10 minutes journaling or
00:14:29
praying about what you want this summer to feel like. Not what it should
00:14:33
look like on the outside, but what you want it to feel like in your
00:14:36
heart and your soul. And like I said, once you get that
00:14:39
vision locked in, that's going to be your anchor for everything else
00:14:43
this summer that is going to drive what you are going to do and the
00:14:47
decisions that you are going to make. Just picking that one word emotion
00:14:51
is going to give you the clarity that you need to make the best
00:14:55
decisions for you and your family as you start to plan this summer
00:14:58
or as you start to just live this summer.
00:15:02
So like I said, we're starting this series and this is just
00:15:05
the beginning. So in the next couple episodes we're going to dive into
00:15:09
how we can practically start to bring that summer vibe, that
00:15:13
summer vision to life without feeling
00:15:16
overwhelmed. So for now just
00:15:19
sit with that vision, sit with that vibe and let that be the foundation
00:15:23
to guide your way this summer. Thanks again for
00:15:27
joining me this week. I would love for you to share the
00:15:31
podcast with another friend. Someone who maybe needs some healing when
00:15:35
it comes to their relationship with food and their body, or maybe needs
00:15:39
some work in their mindset and really learning how to live that craft, Christ
00:15:42
centered perspective, or someone who is looking for help
00:15:46
in how to create a joy filled summer. I would love for you to be
00:15:49
able to share this podcast with someone that you know. And thanks again
00:15:53
for tuning in this week and all the other weeks. Remember,
00:15:57
beauty held is a seed, beauty shared is the flower. It is your
00:16:01
time to bloom. Hope you have a beautiful and blessed week, and I will see
00:16:04
you right back here next week. Talk soon. Bye.