I love being up early, but I’ve never been good at getting up early. I’m grouchy and groggy in the morning, even though I’m instantly awake multiple times in the middle of the night if any of the children so much as wimper. (Hmmm… connection, maybe? Nah.)

Right now, in order to get everyone and everything ready for 8 a.m. camp and school, I need to be up by 6. No matter how much I get done the night before, it seems that I still need that much time to get the ball rolling (or juggling, as the case may be) in the morning. This morning was so hectic, in fact, that I’m considering getting up even earlier, even though the idea of the alarm going off at 5:30 makes me cringe.

Once 9 a.m. rolls around, though, I’m raring to go. The problem is that by then I’m usually stuck in traffic on the way to work, crawling along the highway or hugging the speed limit on a winding back road. Read the rest of this entry »

I am wiped out. Completely. So much so that, in lieu of a proper post, I’m just going to blog my Saturday for you:

1 a.m. Go to bed.

3 a.m. Get up, go to toddler’s room. Toddler is shrieking like he’s being eaten by lions, but stops and smiles the instant I enter the room and chirps, “Monnin’, Mama!” It is not morning.

3:25. a.m. Back to bed. Glance at husband, who can sleep through anything and is, in fact, doing so.

5:45 a.m. Back to toddler. Tell him that it is still not morning.

6 a.m. Back to bed.

6:30 a.m. Give up, go to toddler’s room, concede that it is, technically, morning. Change nastiest diaper on earth. Why do 20-month-old boys eat crayons, for God’s sake?

7 a.m. Take him downstairs before he wakes up the rest of the house.

7: 07 a.m. Ahhhh, coffee.

7:15 a.m. Ahhhh, more coffee.

7:20. a.m. Make breakfast. Fruit and granola and yogurt for toddler and preschooler, who I am certain will appear behind me at any moment.

7:32 a.m. Preschooler materializes by my side and stands there, silently grinning, until I notice her and jump out of my skin. Read the rest of this entry »

If vacationing close to home — or “staycationing” — is the newest travel trend, I’m waaaaaay ahead of the curve.

We almost always stay home for the summer. I say “almost” because there have been two exceptions: In 2003 we drove to Niagara Falls because the kids were complaining that they’d never been to another country (hello, Canada!), and last week I had to research a couple of family travel stories and so we went to an old-fashioned amusement park and careened down a snow-less ski slope on a bobsled and spent a night in a tree house. It was way cool. The kids loved it. My husband and I did, too, but I think that, while the kids came home re-energized after our little adventure, us parents were more exhausted after our “vacation” than we had been when we left. Read the rest of this entry »

My morning routine is usually pretty easy. I try to get up before my toddler and preschooler, fail to do so about 95 percent of the time and, instead, wake up to whining and crying, get them washed and dressed, get myself washed and dressed before they destroy my room and/or OD on Dora the Explorer, feed them while chugging coffee and packing up their two lunches and their bag-o’-stuff-for-school, and load them into the car for drop off at preschool and daycare before heading into the office.

OK, that doesn’t sound very easy, but really, it is. Comparatively speaking.

Summers are trickier. Five kids instead of two. Extra curricular activities to coordinate. New parents to meet before agreeing to sleepovers with new friends. Camp, karate, and horseback riding drop offs and pick ups in addition to preschool and daycare. More errands. More housework. Way more laundry. And less time in which to do it all, because I’m more than willing to stay up late watching “Camp Rock” with my big kids when I should be doing my freelance work instead. (Hey, they’re only young once. And life is short. Got to have priorities, right?) Read the rest of this entry »

I was supposed to write a short article recently about what I, personally, as a mom, do “just for me,” and I was stuck. I couldn’t think of a single thing.

Which is ridiculous, of course, because I must do some things just for me, right?

I used to get a massage once a month, but stopped late last year when we were faced with a bunch of unexpected household expenses, and suddenly it seemed unjustifiable to spend $75 a month on just myself. I don’t go clothes shopping for fun — even though our youngest is now 19 months old and I’m back to my pre-pregnancy weight, my body hasn’t gotten back into it’s pre-pregnancy shape and probably never will, and that makes for a less-than-thrilling shopping adventure. I don’t take any cool classes or have a regular “girls’ night out” or get my nails done or have spa days in my candle-lit bathroom after the kids go to bed.

So, as I was rubbing my eyes and trying to write about how I spend my “me” time, I realized that, recently, in my daily work-life-career-parenting juggle, the “me” ball seems to have rolled under the couch and gotten lost among the dust bunnies. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been looking for advice, lately.

Summer is just around the corner, and that’s when my work-life juggle really ramps up. My body is telling me that I need more sleep (it lets me know by giving me lovely hints like a double ear infection and an inability to string three words together after midnight, which is usually one of my most-productive times of day — er, night). We’ve got some great things happening here at Work It, Mom!, and I want to spend plenty of time on them. My day job slows down in some ways — there’s rarely a ton of summertime news for a newspaper — but my department handles longer feature stories and summer is THE time for those. And our big kids are with us for nine or 10 weeks, so meals are bigger, groceries need to be purchased more frequently, and there are seven schedules to coordinate instead of the usual four.

But the advice that’s out there — especially advice for working moms — is so one-size-fits-all and obvious and, well, next to impossible for any working mom to actually do that I feel like it’s all a big joke, or maybe a spin-off of that old Monty Python sketch, “How to Rid the World of All Known Diseases”: Read the rest of this entry »

Bedtime is kind of my thing in our household. At first, it was because my husband worked nights and I was the “night-night parent” by default; now, I generally start the routine, hand off one freshly bathed small child to Daddy, and put the other small child to bed before making the rounds with the big three (who are old enough to get ready for bed on their own but still want — or, at least, allow — me to tuck them in and kiss them goodnight; they’ll be parents themselves before they understand how grateful I am for this).

Recently, after I’ve put our 3-year-old to bed and settled in with her for a cuddle, she’s been turning to me and saying, very seriously, “Mama. I can’t go to sleep right now. I have work to do.” Read the rest of this entry »

My home office is tucked into a little alcove near our master bedroom, a gap between my closet and my husband’s, just wide enough for a small desk pushed up against the window. My dinosaur of a computer takes up most of the space under the desk (seriously, the computer is older than three out of our five children — my Palm Pilot has more memory), and my behemoth of a monitor eats up most of the desk top. When I need to scan or print something, I have to rearrange components and put the printer on the floor.

I used to have a proper home office, back when we first bought the house, before our youngest two were born. That room became the nursery. I moved my large desk into a corner of the guest room and took over most of the closet with my file cabinets and, um, crap; then we turned the guest room into our oldest daughter’s bedroom, and I downsized my workspace in order to cram it into that alcove.

I spend a couple or four hours there every night after the little kids are in bed — which is usually about two hours after I get home from my regular full-time job. My at-home nook is quiet, and the window is nice (plenty of natural, um, moonlight, I guess). I was pleased with it for a while — and then our big kids came up for an extended visit and there I was, upstairs, in solitary, shackled to my clunky desktop and my workload when I desperately wanted to be downstairs with them. Read the rest of this entry »

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?

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 »