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Strollerderby
Have you ever been asked in an interview if you would consider yourself a skilled multi-tasker? To a parent this question is laughable. We can cook dinner, hold a phone conversation, and change a diaper one-handed all while another little person is pulling on our pants leg in an attempt to break our concentration.
Unfortunately, the skills we develop as parents hold little value for our employers. When inquiring about our ability to remember and recall information quickly, our future boss is unlikely to be impressed that we have Good Night Moon and 15 other children’s books committed to memory.
Check out this list of jobs parenthood would qualify us for in a perfect world. Continue reading »
Eating as a family has benefits for kids.
New research has identified a powerful prevention tool in the fight to keep our children fit and healthy: Family meals. We already know that eating dinner together has psychological benefits. Regular family dinners have been said to help prevent behavioral problems, eating disorders, and even suicidal thoughts in children. Now we hear that eating together as a family reduces the risk of childhood obesity by 12%, and increases the chances of your children eating healthy foods by double that amount.
Knowing family meals are what’s best for kids doesn’t make it any easier to make them happen. Juggling schedules and appetites can be so daunting that many, if not most parents throw up their hands and feed the family whenever time allows. How do you eat together as a family when one, if not two parents doesn’t get home until well after your kids are ready to eat? Continue reading »
When you work at home with your kid, when are you not on the clock?
While I appreciate the concept behind Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day (which is today), I wonder if there’s a day in which we can leave them behind. Or, more specifically, if I can actually go to work without my daughter.
I started working from home when she was born over two and a half years ago and I haven’t stopped – working or doing it from home. It was by choice (and not an easy one at that), and while I don’t regret it, I’m not sure that having her watch me work all day every day is necessarily what Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day is meant to do.
It’s Take Your Daughters And Sons To Work Day, an event that has grown out of the old-school Take Your Daughter To Work Day. It used to be that this day was a feminist action to show girls the many different kinds of work their moms do outside the house. Now it’s grown into an opportunity for all kids to see what their parents are doing when they go to work each day.
I work at home. My kids see me at work every day in my little home office. They know exactly what I do. I think this is great for them. As my colleague Meredith puts it, the kids are with me at work whether I like it or not.
My husband is a different story. He’s a scientist in a university lab. The kids see him head out the door for work each day, and eagerly anticipate him returning home each day. What he does in the hours between is a bit of a mystery.
Or it would be, if he didn’t take them to work with him.
Being a working mom makes me a good role model for my daughters
Being a working mother feels like a constant compromise. When I’m at work I’m distracted by my kids. When I’m with the kids, I always have work at the back of my mind. I’m never fully in one world or the other. Working and parenting are a tightrope walk: give too much to either, and the other will fall apart.
As a writer, I work at home, at a job with flexible hours. I can work at 1 a.m. if I need to, and I often do. I can work for fifteen minutes and then take an abrupt break because the kids are fighting over whose turn it is at the piano. I can work while they eat a snack. I can do some parts of my job while hanging out with them at the playground.
In some ways that makes my job ideal for working motherhood. In others, it makes the juggling act even harder. When I can always be working and always be parenting, the line between the two blurs. It’s hard to show up for either work or parenting with my undivided attention.
I’m sure it’s all worth it though. This conversation with my daughter explains why.
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 »
Is this lipstick discreet enough for UBS?
It’s not uncommon for companies to maintain an employee handbook outlining procedures for its staff to follow. In fact, it’s typical protocol. But when the Swiss bank UBS sent its Swiss retail banking staff a manual outlining the guidelines, there must have been quite a collective guffaw. The 43-page code book includes specifics on proper dress and mannerisms geared to engage their customers. Sounds normal enough, right?
Read on.
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Wendy Michaels 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
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