Balancing work and motherhood? Get real!

If there’s one thing working moms, stay-at-home moms and every other sort of moms can agree on, it’s that work-life balance is a joke. Too often, the joke’s on us.

Today, the Strollerderby team was thinking about bringing you a list of tips on how to balance work and motherhood. Problem: none of us know how to do it.

Unless we’re Carolyn, who practices mother-daughter yoga while her assistant types for her.

At the end of the day, we’d love to have a strong sense of professional accomplishment while we’re reading bedtime stories to our clean, fed, smiling children. But let’s get real. That balancing act never quite happens as planned. So we may as well embrace the chaos. Forget trying to balance and celebrate your natural, disheveled self!

Here are our top 11 tips for unbalancing work and motherhood: Continue reading »

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Can You Resist the Parent Volunteer Vortex?

This school year, will you be sucked into the (cue scary music) “The School Volunteer Vortex”?

On her blog Late Blooming Mom, 45-year-old working mother Holly Sklar describes her initiation into public school volunteering and the onslaught of all these Uber Volunteer Moms who are clamoring to suck her into her ranks. Two weeks into her kids’ kindergarten year, and she’s already fed up.

In a blog post highlighted on the New York Times’ Motherlode blog, she writes:

I have filled out dozens of forms from the [parent booster] club, not to mention the kids’ teachers, all to do with what activities I can volunteer to be a part of, in the classroom and outside of it, ranging from re-shelving library books to driving kids to and from field trips to helping to organize and run any of the myriad of fund-raising events and activities that occur throughout the year. I’ve been told of mandatory commitments per child at the school, e.g., every family has to work one traffic safety shift, at pickup or drop-off, per child, during the year. I have been invited to no less than four volunteer events, and I’ve already missed two of those. I’ve been asked to contribute the “suggested” amount per child – and nothing that you can pay in ten installments is cheap –  because, though a public education is free, a great one is not — especially nowadays.  Every day brings more mail in the kids’ backpacks, offering additional ways to get involved.

If I get another piece of paper from the parent association, it’s quite possible my head is going to explode.

Continue reading »

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Maybe this is retro. Maybe it’s not furthering the advancement of women in office careers, or the acceptance of motherhood as a legitimate part of a working woman’s life. But to the questioner at the New York Times’ Motherlode blog who asks how to handle bringing your baby to work, I have only this to say:

Don’t. Continue reading »

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As any working mom will tell you, balancing a family and a career can be a challenge.  Kids’ dental visits, doctor’s appointments and school responsibilities often must be dealt with during business hours, creating a conflict between a mother’s personal and professional life.  But when your child has autism, those conflicts can be more frequent and ultimately more costly to your career. Continue reading »

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The war between the stay-at-homes and the works-full-times just got thrown a loop. A new study claims neither of you is making healthy kids. It’s moms who work part-time who keep the pediatrician away.

The study out of the University of New England in Australia tracked some four thousand five hundred families and found moms who work just part-time were more likely to have kids who were a healthy weight and consumed less junk food. Continue reading »

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In case you missed it (and with less than $1 million grossed domestically, let’s face it, you probably did), the world of moms blogging got its Hollywood ending on the big screen late last fall.

And now Motherhood is coming to DVD, with Uma Thurman as frazzled stay-at-home mom with a blog and writing career aspirations Eliza. So why should you ignore the dismal domestic ticket sales and watch it anyway? Continue reading »

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She orders around two little boys at home, so it’s no surprise Sarah Thomas became the first woman to ref a college bowl game this week. She’s good at what she does.

The mother of Bridley and Brady has been making a name for herself in recent years doing things her son’s have an automatic right to based simply on their gender. Thomas has gotten there based on her skills and her talent. Continue reading »

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