People who know me well often say that I grew up taking care of other people’s children. I started babysitting when I was about 11, and mothered — or smothered, as the case may be — my brothers well before that. I worked as a nanny for years during college and ran a playgroup for toddlers when I was in my early 20s. So it wasn’t much of a surprise that when I got married, it was to a man who already had three kids of his own.

Contrary to popular belief (think Snow White, think Julia Roberts in Stepmom, think pretty much any soap opera or sitcom) stepmotherhood has been neither traumatic nor dramatic for me. The kids were very young when I came into their lives — just 5, 3, and 1 year old — and on my wedding day, four years later, I exchanged vows with them as well as with their dad.

Interestingly enough, life as a Working Stepmom was different than life as a Working Mom. After all, they were somebody else’s children, right? Wouldn’t their “real parent” handle all of the rough stuff, leaving me ample time in which to work?

Well, when you’re parenting, step or not, you’re a parent. That’s really all there is to it.

For years, I arranged playdates, kissed boo-boos, changed diapers, soothed away bad dreams, packed lunches … the list of real, honest-to-goodness “Mom”-type stuff goes on and on. But things didn’t really change at work when I was “just” a Stepmom. I still worked nights, usually 3 to 11 p.m., so my colleauges never saw me race to meet a daycare deadline (they do now that I’m on days). My annual performance reviews still ended with a little tidbit about what I needed to do in order to advance through the ranks (oddly enough, they don’t now). It wasn’t that I was expected to work overtime as much as it was that I was expected to want to work overtime, because I wasn’t “really a parent.” “You can stay late tonight, right?” my then-boss once asked as he got ready to duck out early. “It’s not like you’re rushing home to see your stepkids, right?”

Um… actually, I can’t. Because, yes. Yes, I am.

Working stepmoms: Do you feel like you’re considered less of a working parent than your colleauges? Why or why not?

There are times when you’re juggling work and parenthood and more balls end up on the floor than in the air. When that happens to me (like it did today), these are a few of the things I do to try to pick those balls up and keep juggling:

1.) Re-do your to-do list. I write one out every morning as soon as I get to work, and today I looked at it and noticed that I’d written things like “clean the blue bathroom” and “make lasagna” and “put winter coats away” — things that didn’t need to get done immediately (and things that I couldn’t possibly do from work, anyhow). So I threw that list away and started over, this time writing down only the things I absolutely had to get done before I went home. The second list was much shorter, which made me feel much better. And I actually got most of it done.

2.) Cut yourself a little slack. I don’t know about you, but I don’t own a cape. (I did, once, during an brief fling with the SCA many years ago, but we won’t go there.) Since I don’t own a cape, I can’t be Super Woman. There will be times when I can’t do it all, and today was one of them.

3.) Take a break. It was gorgeous in Boston today, and I went for a walk. In the middle of the day. Even though we were a person short and work was piling up and I had a stack of stories to edit. It took just 15 minutes, but when I came back I felt recharged. Yay, sunlight!

4.) Give yourself a treat — now. The usual advice — motivate yourself by setting a goal and getting a reward when you reach it — doesn’t work for me. I find myself thinking, “Well, I’m not done yet, and that cheesecake is just sitting there, taunting me.” So, have some of the treat. A little smidge. Even if you think you don’t deserve it. Because, really, you do.

5.) Draw the circle. Someone once told me that the best way to draw a circle is to start by drawing a circle. Sometimes, the only way to get it everything done is to start at one end and keep going.

I hate to vacuum.

I checked with my mom on this one, and, apparently, I’ve hated vacuuming since well before I could walk.

Alas, some of the people who live in my home routinely put bits of whatever they find on the floors into their little mouths, so vacuuming is a necessary evil. I still try to avoid it as much as possible. Unfortunately, so does everyone else in my household, so it usually falls to me anyway.

Women may be shattering glass ceilings at work and in politics, but it seems like we’re pretty much where we’ve always been at home. A 2007 study conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University and George Mason University found that, after marriage, women take on a larger proportion of household chores than their spouses do. In fact, overall, men averaged 9.41 hours’ housework per week to 21.13 hours of housework by women, and the higher the marriage rate in the 28 countries studied, the higher the proportion of housework carried out by women. Read the rest of this entry »

Tuesday (April 22) is Earth Day, the 38th annual celebration of environmental awareness. While “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” has become the eco-friendly mantra of our generation, there’s more to going green than adhering to those three Rs and toting your groceries in cloth bags (though if you’re feeling crafty, try sewing your own). Here are a few other simple things you can do to preserve our planet.

1.) The next time a light bulb burns out in your home, replace it with a compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL). The newer models, like Sylvania’s micro mini CFL, get bright quickly but draw very little electricity — the 13-watt twist replaces a 60-watt incandescent bulb — and are designed to last longer than older types of CFLs.

2.) Do your spring cleaning naturally. Lemon juice and olive oil can replace smelly chemical-laden wood polishes; inexpensive white vinegar is a naturally non-toxic disinfectant (the smell dissipates more quickly than you think, too); and conventional baking soda makes a great scrub for stubborn stains. (Check out this great discussion for more green cleaning ideas.)

3.) Eliminate junk mail. Instead of just tossing those catalogs, credit-card solicitations, and sweepstakes offers into the recylcing bin, stop the junk mail from getting to you in the first place. GreenDimes will show you how for free (or, for a one-time $20 fee, they’ll do it for you — and plant five trees on your behalf). Want to learn more about combating junk mail? This New York Times article is a good place to start.

4.) Get rid of your gas guzzler. Hybrid vehicles are hot right now, but you can take transportation to an even-greener level by exploring biodiesel or raw-vegetable oil-fueled cars and trucks.

5.) Get your kids in on the act. “Design Squad” on PBS is holding a “Trash to Treasure” competition for kids age 5 to 19, with a $10,000 prize going to the designer of the best re-engineered invention made using everyday materials. For more information, check out pbs.org/designsquad

Want to do more? Get involved with the Greenies Group at Work It, Mom!, and share your ideas for Earth Day there (and here, in the comments)!

We’ve all heard about the importance of networking. It helps you get ahead in your career. It helps you build your business. It helps make life easier in general. If you’re on-ramping after a leave of absence, maternity or otherwise, your network can keep you in the professional loop. Networks like ours here at Work It, Mom! keep me sane when I feel like no one else I know can relate to what I’m dealing with as a working mom.

When you work outside the home, networking with your business colleagues is nearly a no-brainer, even if you can’t make it to the big conferences. You sit near them at the office, you run into them in the cafeteria and local lunch spots, you trade ideas after meetings, you can subscribe to industry newsletters and publications and keep up with the trends that way.

But networking with old friends? When you’re juggling more-than-full-time work and parenthood, who has time for that?

That’s why I love Facebook. Love it with big, puffy hearts. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not a financial expert. I don’t even play one on the Internet (or anywhere else, for that matter). But, like most people out there, I worry about money — how to earn it, how to save it, how to manage it, how to get as much as I can while spending as little as possible.

I’ve found that, for my family, the most straight-forward and simple money-saving tricks work well but, at some point, “just spend less money” isn’t helpful advice. How do you spend less money when you’re spending it on essentials? What if you can’t tighten the monthly budget by cutting out cable because you need to have high-speed internet access for your job?

Here are a few of the tips and techniques that work for my family:

1.) Use credit cards wisely. Most get-out-of-debt experts urge you to freeze your credit cards (often literally, by putting them in a zip-top bag filled with water and stowing them in your freezer, so you have time to rethink your impulse purchase while you wait for the plastic to thaw). It’s great advice if you’re stuck in a deficit-spending rut, but if you choose a credit card with some sort of bonus — cash back, points, frequent flyer miles — and you pay the bill in full each month, you’re getting more for your money than just the stuff you had to buy anyway. Paying my youngest kids’ daycare tuition with my frequent-flier-mile credit card gets us four round-trip plane tickets a year.

2.) Get an enormous freezer and buy in bulk. We have a large family — five kids, ranging in age from 14 years to 17 months old — and having a chest freezer in the basement means that I can take advantage of sales on otherwise expensive things (like meat) that my family eats most often. But even if you have a smaller family, a chest freezer can still work for you. Make meals ahead of time and freeze them; on nights when you have no time to cook, heat and eat something from your own frozen restaurant instead of spending money on unhealthy fast food.

3.) Clip only certain coupons. Yes, I clip coupons — I work for a newspaper, they’re easy for me to get a hold of. Why spend $4.99 on something when I can buy the same item for $3.99? But I only clip coupons for things I’m buying anyway. So, cheese sticks for my preschooler’s lunch box, yes; yogurt in a tube, no.

4.) Take advantage of pre-tax opportunities. Any time your employer offers you the chance to put money aside (dependent-care or medical spending accounts, for instance) or pay for something (like your health-care premiums) on a pre-tax basis, do it. It lowers your taxable income, for one thing and, for another, you end up paying less out-of-pocket in the long run. Think of it this way: If you’re in the 28-percent tax bracket, you have to earn about $139 in order to spend $100 in post-tax dollars. Wouldn’t you rather put that “extra” $39 to good use?

5.) Keep track of your spending. You need to do more than simply balance your checkbook these days. Tracking your spending can  help you stick to your budget, and it also helps you understand where your money is going, so you can adjust when you need to and plan when you’re able. The tools at Mint.com are great for this. After tracking four months worth of our credit card spending, I discovered that we’ve actually been spending more money on gas lately than we have on food. Time to figure out a way to start saving up for that hybrid!

How do you make the most of your money?

On a recent national holiday, as I was scrambling to figure out how I was going to juggle work and childcare, I realized that I didn’t actually have to drive in to the office that day and, for some reason, my kids’ daycare was actually open.

My husband didn’t have to drive in to the office, either. But he’s so used to having to catch up on work from home, and I’m so used to having a big bunch of freelance irons in the fire, that it took us a while to see the potential in the situation: Work (optional) + daycare (open) = pre-paid childcare and time to ourselves. Alone. Read the rest of this entry »

What with all of the hustle and bustle and preparation for BlogHer Business, I thought I’d ease my own disappointment about not being able to go (and about missing all of those great speakers and not being able to meet and network with so many fantastic bloggers — sob) by offering up a little something to help those of you who are going feel a little better about the trip.

You already understand why it’s really good to take advantage of network opportunities like this. Your kids, though? They don’t necessarily get it. And, if they’re little, the biggest thing they’ll register is that you’re going somewhere — gasp! — without them.

1.) Leave them something to listen to while you’re gone. Make your own book-on-tape of you reading your child’s favorite story. Don’t forget to include a reminder to turn the page! (”Next page, Sweetie!” is better than a generic “beep,” though any funny noise will do.) If you sometimes sing your tot to sleep, tape that, too.

2.) Bring along one of their stuffed toys, and take pictures of it in your hotel room. If you’re feeling especially brave, take the toy out on the town. Email the photos home for your kids to look at, with a little note written from the toy’s point of view (or look at them together when you return).

3.) Send postcards. It doesn’t matter whether you’ll be away for a day or for a week, your child will be thrilled to receive something in the mail, even if it arrives after you get back. No time to buy some? Bring a card or two with you and mail them during the trip — the picture on the front matters way less than whatever little note you jot on the back.

There are as many coping strategies for things like this as there are kids, so please, share yours in the comments!