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.

Many experts say that figuring out the times of day during which you’re most productive is one of the keys to becoming more organized and less stressed out. You should also keep track of what you do with your time; one way to do this is by keeping a time log, according to personal development guru Steve Pavlina. The results may surprise you.

“The first time I kept a time log, I only finished 15 hours worth of real work in a week where I spent about 60 hours in my office,” he writes on his website. “Even though I was technically about twice as productive as the average office worker, I was still disturbed by the results. Where did those other 45 hours go?”

Using his time log, he could see that he was spending too much time checking email, doing tasks that didn’t need to be done, lingering over meals during the workday, and catching up on the news, among other things.

Sound familiar? It did to me.

Aside from that burst of (probably) caffeine-fueled energy around 9 a.m., my productivity peaks at about 1 a.m. and then again around 4 p.m. –  not good, given that I need to leave work by 5 or so most days.  I’m dragging again until almost exactly midnight — that’s when my second wind blows in and I get some of my best work done. I either have to go to bed right before that energy rush hits, or work through it and stumble upstairs around 3 a.m.

OK, so… what am I doing with the rest of my time?

Aside from home-and kid-related tasks, my biggest time suck is… myself. Call it by any other name — Facebook, e-mail, reading blogs, skimming the newspaper, what have you — the point is that I allow myself to be distracted by plenty of things when I really should be concentrating on the task at hand.

So maybe, for me, getting up earlier isn’t the answer. Forcing myself to focus is.

If only I could get an expert to weigh in on how to do that, I’d be all set.

When are you most productive? How do you get motivated stay focused on the task at hand?

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.

7:33 a.m. Climb back into my skin. Decide I need more coffee.

7:45 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. Destroy family room. Pat myself on the back for not turning on the TV, then kick myself after I notice the extent of the destruction.

8:46 a.m. Try to wake 10-year-old and 12-year-old for karate practice. They are not so much on board with the waking, having been up three hours past their bedtime playing “Rock Band” on the XBox-360 with their Dad who, like them and their 14-year-old sister, is still asleep.

9 a.m. Dress preschooler in the world’s tiniest karategi. Take pictures of her practicing “X low block” and “hook kick, round kick” until she refuses to perform for the camera.

9:10 a.m. Husband stumbles downstairs, thanks me for letting him sleep in (awwww), says something about how revitalizing a solid eight hours of sleep can be. I hand him the toddler and load preschooler into the car to go to karate.

9:29 a.m. Arrive on time for 9:30 class. Studio is dark and locked. Didn’t know class was cancelled.

9:30 a.m. Preschooler nearly learns a new word. I tell her what I really said was “fudge,” a word she already knows. Decide to go grocery shopping instead.

10 a.m. Preschooler practices “X low block” in produce section.

10:30 a.m. Load groceries into car ($62.78 after sales and coupons; need to make another trip later in the week), drive back to karate studio to see if it’s still locked. It is.

10:55 a.m. Arrive home. Everyone is eating breakfast. After being fine for the last hour, preschooler bursts into tears about karate having been closed, and then asks if she can eat a pile of cookies as a snack in order to “feel all better.”

11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Honestly, this part of the day is kind of a blur. My husband spent the entire weekend editing video, and I found myself wishing he’d just go to the office because it’s easier to not be annoyed by his temporary unavailability if he’s not right here in plain sight. I know I did four loads of laundry. I know I put away the groceries. I know I distributed ice pops and fed everyone lunch. I know I put the toddler down for an all-too-short nap, and that I refereed a few fights (including one that broke out after one of the big kids started lecturing the other two big kids about their previous fight) and ordered all three big kids to read in separate parts of the house because I was certain that they were going to kill one another if they stayed in the same room. I looked at my to-do list and realized that there was no way any of the freelance work on it was going to get done. I listened to the toddler imitate his older siblings and try to say “I’m bored” (”Ah-m buhd”), drew outside with sidewalk chalk, played some sort of running and kicking game using an enormous beach ball and, inexplicably, a squash racket, and then started cooking dinner while the preschooler fell asleep on the couch after insisting that she wasn’t tired. I persuaded my husband to join us for dinner, because I was sick of telling the kids he was working and shouldn’t be disturbed (and, also, because he was working at the dining table and, well, we kind of needed it for dinner).

After dinner, there were baths and bed and cleanup and laundry. And, in spite of all of this, I still feel like I didn’t get anything done. And I’m trying to understand why.

Is it because none of the stuff I got done was on my mile-long to-do list? Or because there was no finished project to show off at the end of the day? Or was it because, while I was wrangling kids and household, my husband was toiling away on a career-related project and, therefore, what I was doing didn’t seem to qualify as “work” to me?

Whatever the reason, and as much as I love my family, I am psyched to go in to the office today. I’ve already put “make coffee” on my to-do list, so I’ll have something to cross off right away. You know, just so I can feel like I’m getting stuff done.

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.

With gas prices skyrocketing and airlines imposing new and bigger fees for everything from checked baggage to warm soda, “home” is becoming a hot travel destination. Hotels are marketing “getaway” packages to their local clientele. AAA offers “Drive Vacations” to make road tripping trendier (even with gas costing more than $4 a gallon, it’s still cheaper to drive than fly if you’re taking kids along). Camping and hiking have become popular again.

But for some of us, staycationing has always been the norm. Yes, gas prices are high, but stress levels are even higher when you cram five kids into a car and hit the road for hours at a time. Add in a handful of food allergies, which makes it impossible to indulge in fast food during the trip, and stress levels can reach a whole new high. And if any of your kids are still in diapers, it’s worth noting that hell hath no fury like that of a preteen stuck next to a toddler with a blow-out.

(That didn’t happen this trip, thank goodness.)

The biggest upside to staycationing, for this working mother, at any rate, is that I know the territory. There was a point in my life where exploring a new city would have made my heart go pitter-pat; lately, though, just the chance to avoid the daily commute makes me giddy. I live near a big city — there are plenty of museums to visit and cultural events to attend; they’re close enough to do easily if I have a few days off, and far enough away to be impossible with my regular work schedule. Staycationing gives me a chance to take advantage of the things right in my own backyard… why deal with packing and plane fare, especially during one of the most crowded travel times of the year?

Do you have summer vacation plans? Or will you be staycationing this summer?

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?)

So last night, after I finished coaxing my 12-year-old’s tight curls into a zillion sleek, two-strand twists, after The Jonas Brothers struck their last chord and I cajoled the big kids into bed, after the toddler woke up for no good reason and was soothed back to sleep, I started trying to get ahead of my morning juggle.

Fives sets of clothes laid out and ready to wear. (I didn’t get around to doing mine yet). Six lunches packed. (Five for the kids, one for me. My husband is on his own with the lunches, since he keeps forgetting to bring them to work.) Seven loads of laundry washed, sorted, folded and put away. Bag-o-stuff-to-take-to-school packed and by the door.

All organized and neat and ready to go, and yet… I am dreading the morning.

I’m cranky first thing in the morning, but that’s nothing compared to five kids who don’t want to look at sunlight at 7 a.m., let alone venture out into it. I just remembered that I didn’t remind the big kids to pack their bathing suits and towels and whatnot into their camp bags — another thing to while pressed for time. And I’m sure that’s not the only thing I’ve forgotten.

Working moms, what do you do to make your mornings go more smoothly? Share them with me, please!

So. Ready? Here are five things we do to keep our grocery bill down:

1.) We use our big freezer. We have a huge freezer in the basement. I love my freezer. I buy meat and divide it into meal-size packages and freeze it. I buy extra bread when it’s on sale and freeze it. I cook extra meals and freeze them. I roast tomatoes from our garden and freeze them. I make homemade dairy-free ice cream and freeze it. On hot days, I fantasize about standing over my open freezer and gazing lovingly into its icy depths for long, cool hours at a time, but I restrain myself.

2.) We buy in bulk. What, you don’t have a huge freezer in your basement? You can still buy in bulk, just buy non-perishables like toilet paper, paper towels, garbage bags, laundry detergent, and stash those in your freezerless basement. You’ll still save money.

3.) We buy ingredients instead of products. Those little single-serving Jell-O packs that my preschooler loves cost about $2.50 for four. But a package of actual Jell-O costs 39 cents to 50 cents and makes five to six single servings. I know that Jell-O hardly counts as an ingredient, but you get my point: It often costs less to buy the acutal ingredients than it does to buy the finished product.

4.) We make ethnic foods. We eat meat often, and it’s a star ingredient, but it’s not the biggest thing on the plate. The USDA recommends that adults eat five to six ounces of cooked meat a day – that’s about the size of a deck of cards, and most people eat a lot more than that in a single serving. A painless way to reduce the amount of meat you eat is by making ethnic foods like Indian-style curries or veggie-intensive stir-fries.

5.) We shop to replenish my pantry. Aside from perishables like milk, eggs, and vegetables, we rarely shop for food to use right away; instead, we shop to replace the items we’ve used from my pantry and freezer. So, if there’s a great sale on something we use often, we can stock up without it blowing our budget.

And now, five ways to save $100. (At first, I thought the question was how to save $100 a WEEK, and I went all dizzy. But $100 a month is doable):

1.) Bring your own lunch. If you buy lunch at work, and you spend $7 per lunch, bringing your own lunch four days a week (treat yourself on the fifth, if you want) saves you $28 a week, or about $112 a month.

2.) Bring your own coffee.  I drink tea at the office, but I love a good cup of coffee (or three). Invest in a sturdy travel mug and commute with your own coffee instead of buying it on the road; you’ll save anywhere from $5 to $35 a week or more. (If you can’t live without your latte, put some milk in a container with a tight-fitting lid, shake it up well, and voila! Frothy goodness to go!)

3.) Drink tea at work. Did I mention that I drink tea at the office, even though I’m a coffee drinker at home? There are two reasons for this: a.) the coffee at work costs $2.50 a cup and tastes like brown crayons melted in a hot water, with a little ground mulch for flavor, and b.) a box of 20 jasmine-green tea bags costs less than $1 at my little local Asian grocery store, fits nicely in my desk, and hot water is free. So, instead of paying $2.50 for a cup of gak, I pay five cents for a cup of jasmine-scented deliciousness. Two cups a day saves me about $25 a week. (OK, fine, $24.50.)

4.) Ditch the juice boxes. Last summer, I was packing seven juice boxes A DAY into my kids’ lunchboxes. That’s 35 juice boxes a week. That’s crazy. This year, everyone is getting a screw-top Nalgene bottle filled with homemade lemonade, and I’m saving at least $10 a week, maybe more.

5.) Cook an extra dinner on the weekend, and stash it in the freezer. There are plenty of recipes — chili, stews, curries, lasagna, pork chops — that take practically no extra effort to double up. Later in the week, save the $10 you were going to spend on a pizza and pull that extra meal out of the freezer instead.

What are you doing to save money right now?

Maybe you saw a typo in the split second that the email system was processing. Maybe you wrote the missive in a fit of anger, and belatedly realized that it needed a re-write or several in order to be considered anywhere near diplomatic. Or maybe, in that moment the email was still on your screen, before it flew out into the ether, you saw that you had addressed it to the person you were writing about instead of the person you were writing to.

A May post on the New York Times’s Freakonomics blog made me laugh and cringe at the same time. Or, rather, the comments did. I could totally relate. I’ve inadvertently hit “reply all” instead of just “reply” (who put those two buttons so close together?). I’ve had horrible typos that I didn’t see until it was too late (most memorably, an unfortunate misspelling that made the word “count” into something much more offensive). And there has been a time or two when I was so caught up in what I was planning to write that I addressed my email to the subject of my rant, instead of my confidant. (I’ve been on the receiving end of that kind of email as well. It isn’t pretty. And it can ruin a professional or personal relationship.)

Many years ago, after being told to forward certain news stories to a certain editor, I received two emails one after the other. The first was polite: “Thanks for the stories!” The second was much less so: “Will she f*@cking stop sending us stuff already?”

Apparently, the person hit “reply” instead of “forward” on that second one. She apologized immediately, but I’ve never forgotten it, and our work relationship was strained after that.

I was thinking about that incident yesterday, when I wanted to fire off an angry email to someone. I really, really wanted to write a rant that would burn the eyeballs. I was full of anger, irritation, and indignation, itching to type it out of my system and into someone else’s.

Instead, I waited. I took deep breaths (didn’t help). I gave myself a time out (didn’t help). I poured myself a tiny drink (helped a little). (Yeah, it was early in the day, but college rules applied: It was past noon, I was in my own home, and I’m over 21.)

What stopped me from writing it? These three things:

1.) An email is not a secure document. How would I feel if one of my kids read that email? What if it was forwarded to someone else? Would not be good. You should never send anything in an email that you wouldn’t be comfortable putting on a post card.

2.) Hitting “send” is akin to hitting “publish” — and anything published on the internet is public record, even a supposedly “confidential” email. (Need more of a deterrent? Check out Worst Email Ever, and be glad that something you wrote isn’t up there.)

3.) I still don’t have an “unsend” button, so once it’s out there, it’s out there. Did I really want it to be out there?

I didn’t.

But what if you still want to send that angry email? If it’s a reply, erase everything in the “to,” “cc,” and bcc” fields before you type the first letter — that way, it won’t go anywhere, even if you automatically hit the “send” button. Type whatever you want, as angrily as you want, and then hit “save as draft” instead. And then walk away for a while.

Yes, it can wait; if it were truly urgent, you would have picked up the phone instead of logging in to your email.

Hours later, from home if possible, re-read your draft. Chances are, it’ll require major revisions and probably still won’t be worth sending.

But, if it is, at least you can catch those typos.

OK, friends, confess: What’s the worst email faux pas you’ve ever made?

You know the effect Kryptonite had on Superman? Well, for this SuperMom, Mama Drama does the same thing. It kills me.

If I don’t seem sufficiently killed, though, she takes it to the next level: lip trembles, sniffles increase, and her huge brown eyes overflow while she looks like she’s heroically trying to hold back the tears. And then she starts explaining it all away — “I’m just tired,” “I feel shy,” “I was afraid you were going away.” At this point, my Fortress of Solitude is wrecked and I just want to fall apart myself, even though she doesn’t know it.

Today, it started at school, while I was taking my toddler to his daycare classroom in the same building. She came over to the door between the two classrooms, and I must not have been paying attention, what with holding a squirming 19-month-old on my hip and trying to talk to the teachers and put everything in his cubby and all, because she was already at the tears-welling-over stage and was moving into the full-on Mama Drama stage: the explanations.

“Mama?” she quavered. “I just feel too shy for school today.”

I wanted to tell her to buck up; she loves school! She loves her friends! She adores her teachers! We do the same drop-off five days a week and she’s always been fine with it! I can understand not wanting to go to bed but, hey, come on, this here place is fun!

I handed my toddler off to his teacher and turned to my little girl, but one of her teachers had gotten to her first. As I was about to explain that this was just Mama Drama — she’s fine, she’s not sick, she slept well, she scarfed down her breakfast, blah blah blah — he knelt down and looked her in the eye and gently asked her what was wrong.

“I’m just… shy… today,” she sobbed, turning away from me. I could have left then, I suppose, since she wasn’t focused on me anymore, but I was too busy being killed.

“But you were a little shy yesterday, right? And you got better, right?” he asked her, voice all soothing and rational, speaking quietly so she had to stop crying in order to hear him. My quip about Mama Drama got stuck in my throat.

“Right?” he asked again. She agreed.

“So you’ll be all better today too, right?”

She agreed again. And gave him a hug and skipped off to play.

He got up, winked at me, and went back to the kids in his classroom. And I left for work, feeling like the least patient, least compassionate, worst mother in the world, but grateful that she has such caring, calm, and kind teachers (who, thankfully, are immune to Kryptonite).

Did I mention that we don’t have air conditioning? We don’t.

But my office does. So while my youngest kids were splashing in the kiddie pool and my dear husband was sweating over yard work, I daydreamed about going to the office to beat the heat.

A few years ago we stopped torturing ourselves and bought window units, but man, those suckers are heavy. And New England weather is unpredictable — on Thursday, it was in the high 50s, on Friday we reached the low 60s, and then on Saturday we hit the mid-90s before getting drenched in a torrential downpour the likes of which I haven’t seen since I was a kid visiting family in India and Mumbai was still called Bombay. So heavy AC units + not knowing if we might get frost next week = we have the technology, but we aren’t using it yet.

We are gazing longingly at it, however, and wondering when we turned into such wimps.

I feel like a wimp at other times, too, longing for the office when the temperatures are closer to tolerable but my energy and/or patience levels are not. At those times, my commute feels like “me” time, and I get to work and gaze at the pictures of my gorgeous children and forget that sometimes my little angels can quickly morph into hellions. I sip green tea at my desk and blast through my to-do list, feeling productive and in charge, and that wimpy, “why can’t I handle this?” feeling dissipates.

And when I get back home, the hellions have morphed back into sweeties who race over to me shrieking, “Mamaaaa!” and wrap themselves around my legs before I can even put down my bag and, well… it’s enough to make home feel heavenly again.

Even without air conditioning.

When are you coming home? I miss you.

Instantly, I wished I was home.

Has that every happened to you? You’re secure in your choice and/or need to work — more than that, really, you are happy about working outside of the home — except when, suddenly, you’re not.

What do you do?

I’d like to say that I shut down my computer, announced to my boss and coworkers that I was needed elsewhere, and jetted home to my kids immediately. But I didn’t. I emailed her back — something loving and supportive that included a link to I Can Haz Cheeseburger or something funny like that — and got back to work.

And now, months later, I’m still wishing I had just shut everything off and gone home.

What would you have done?

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.

I considered writing that vacuuming the family room floor was something I do “just for me” because the fact that it has actual visible debris seems to bother no one else. But that just seemed pitiful, so I didn’t. Instead, I turned off my computer, tucked my cell phone in my bag, and walked away — for the entire weekend.

OK, so, not quite the entire weekend, but for an entire weekend day and half of the day after that. That much non-connectivity is a long stretch for me. I didn’t check my email. I didn’t check my voice mail, neither on my cell phone nor on my office land line. I didn’t obsess over stories not yet researched or written.

Instead, I played with my kids. I baked banana bread for breakfast. I helped my husband put in the garden — and “helped” should totally be in quotes, because my thumbs are not so much green as they are nearly non-existent. Really, I “helped” mainly by staying out of his way and keeping the kids busy and planting six lettuce seedlings in pots on the deck — seedlings that look so much healthier now, a week later, that I’m certain they got replanted when my back was turned.

Sure, it wasn’t a luxurious break by any stretch of the imagination. I didn’t take a candle-lit bubble bath. I didn’t pop open a bottle of Champagne or indulge in an elaborate dinner. I didn’t run out and get a new outfit or a manicure or a massage.

But I didn’t vacuum the family room floor, either.