We took care of my brother’s dog over the weekend, and Saturday night, after tucking the littlest two into their beds, I grabbed her leash to walk her once last time before I settled down to my freelance work.

It had been a hectic, crowded kind of day, and I’ll have to admit, bundling up and slogging outside in the rainy dark was very, very low on my list of “things I want to do now that the kids are asleep and I have a moment to myself.” Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just finished twisting our 12-year-old’s curls into about eleventy-billion tiny, two-strand twists, and my hands are still slick with conditioner. The little two are tucked in bed, stuffed animals clutched in their sweaty little hands. The other big kids are playing “Rock Band” with my husband, just a couple of feet away from me in the family room. It’s past bedtime, and bits of conversation (like “We should be concentrating our efforts on Killasaurus,” and “Daddy! We should play San Francisco now!” and “That’s such a sweet song and then they hit you with the ‘f’ word…”) grasp the edges of my concentration as I try to write.

I could — should, really — go to another room so I can get my work done. I mean, the work has to get done. But I’m loathe to leave. Even when my husband hands me the mic and asks me to sing “Maps” — an obvious sign that I’m not going to get much done if I’m also expected to sing lead — I don’t go.

Sometimes, the thing that really gets in the way when I’m trying to juggle work and family is myself. Read the rest of this entry »

When I went back to work after having my first baby, I was working days while my husband worked nights. He’d hang out with our baby during the day, then take her in to the office at the start of his shift. My shift ended when his started, and he’d hand her off to me and I’d take her back home for what I called my Second Shift with the kids (my first baby was also our fourth child).

I often said that the thing that made returning to work after my first maternity leave most manageable, for me, was the knowledge that my baby was spending the day with her dad instead of with someone I didn’t already know and trust. So Carolyn Hax’s piece over at The Washington Post today really struck a chord with me. 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 »

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 »

When I’ve got several articles to write and even more to edit and traffic was ridiculous and the baby is screaming and the big kids are arguing and dinner’s not ready yet and there’s a bill from the orthodontist waiting at home with more than two zeros before the decimal point, I look at the chaos and think, “Man, this might make for a good story.”

The thing about being a journalist is that you tend to be on the look out for story ideas all the time, everywhere. And when you do get around to writing them all up, not everything in your notebook ends up in your story. And then, once your editor has gotten a hold of it, you’ll find that not everything you put in your story ends up in the published version (I’m a newspaper editor in real life, so I can vouch for this — I do a lot of trimming). What are you supposed to do with all of those ideas that you don’t have time to work on yet? 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 »

In one of my all-time favorite movies, This is Spinal Tap, aging rockstar David St. Hubbins muses, “It’s such a fine line between stupid, and … clever.”

There are times when I traipse across this fine line daily, at home and at work. Usually, though, I’m going from clever to stupid.

The Clever: L.’s hideously croupy cough resurfaced a few weeks ago, and I took her to the doctor. Our pediatrician wasn’t in, so the appointment was with one of her colleauges, whom we’d never seen before, but hey, my child was sick and had been for a while, it was starting to affect her sleep and her school, and so I took her in.

The Fine Line: The doctor we saw didn’t know us, didn’t take more than a minute to listen to her breathe semi-deeply exactly four times (without coughing), and didn’t take more than 30 seconds or so jump to a big conclusion about me — that I must be an overly anxious, first-time mom who felt guilty about sending her kid to daycare — and diagnose accordingly. Read the rest of this entry »

When I first saw the ad, in a post over at Get in the Car!, I thought it was a cool, retro snapshot. And then I took a closer look.

(You can, too. Just click on it.)

There’s something Rob and Laura Petrie about the whole thing, but the pots on the stove look kind of like the modern-day, hard-anodized cookware I love. The husband’s got that “casual Friday” thing going on, and the wife looks like maybe she just got home from work, in spite of the apron. The backsplash is kind of 1970s, but there’s no avocado- or goldenrod-enameled appliances in sight.

And yet… the ad pretty much flies in the face of everything a generation of women fought for. The journal entry clinches it: “Tuesday. Today I found the perfect paper towel! Viva is so soft! I used it to wipe sauce of Tom’s chin, but I couldn’t wipe the smile off his face. Is Viva really paper?”

Please pass the soma! As if we working moms weren’t stressed out enough, now there’s this resurgence of 1950s ideals to contend with. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things I always tell other parents — especially other working moms who are struggling with their juggling of career and motherhood — is that they shouldn’t feel guilty for letting their little kids watch TV if they need to get their work done.

It’s something I really believe is OK. It’s something I do more often than I’d like. And it’s something that makes me feel like a total hypocrite because, half a lifetime ago, when I was a nanny, I never turned the TV on when the kids were around. Ever.

Read the rest of this entry »