by Guest Blogger on October 29, 2013
Welcome back to our Working from home with… guest post series! Today writer/editor Kathleen Fordyce shares her tips for working from home when you have little kids at home with you. Enjoy!
Tips for Working at Home with Kids
Since giving birth to my son more than five years ago, I have had different opportunities to work from home. As a single, working mom, the flexibility helps me cut expenses on commuting and traditional daycare, seek out projects that interest me and enables me to spend precious time with my little guy.
While it has its perks, working from home is not always easy. There are days when I have back-to-back deadlines, my son is clamoring for more attention, paper airplanes are flying over my head, the babysitter is unavailable and the neighborhood kids are all knocking at my door asking if we can come out and play.
Over the years I have come up with some coping mechanisms in order to be able to work from home with a baby, then a toddler and a 5-year-old in half-day preschool. My son just started full-day kindergarten, but I still work with him at home in the afternoons, vacations and sick days. With a little planning, creative solutions and good time management, I believe any parent can work from home with kids.
Here are a few tips to help you get started: [click to continue…]
by Guest Blogger on September 18, 2013
This summer I ran a series on blogging professionally and working from home (thank you for ALL the comments and emails in response!), and this fall we’re going to be exploring the work-at-home life in a different way – by featuring guest posts and interviews with other moms who work from home. I’m excited to introduce our first guest, Sarah Stewart Holland of Bluegrass Redhead and Salt & Nectar. Check back weekly this fall for more tips, stories and interviews from real-life work-at-home moms!
-Meagan
I’m not looking for a perfect life, I’m just looking for a happy one:
4 Lessons I’ve Learned As A Work-At-Home Mom
I never planned on being a work-at-home mom.
In 2009, I left my job as a legislative aide on Capitol Hill to move back to my hometown of Paducah, Kentucky, and raise a family (and somehow convinced my husband to go with me). I was seven months pregnant with my first son and assumed I would return to work after he was born. Since I had a law degree and the accompanying debt to pay off, the next logical step was to take the bar exam, which I did…when my son was two months old.
Now, if you have any experience with the bar exam and are good at math, you know I started studying when he was only about a week old. Since studying for the bar exam is a full time job, thus began my career as a work-at-home mom. I would spend hours on the couch with my son propped up on a breastfeeding pillow as I learned the rules of evidence.
Despite the Boppy’s contributions, caring for a newborn and studying for the bar exam were not exactly complimentary tasks and I failed the exam. This was my first lesson as a work-at-home mom. Know your limits. Sure, I passed the most difficult portion of the exam (just sayin’) but a few points shy is still a few points shy. Everyone told me I was taking on too much but I didn’t listen.
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by Guest Blogger on May 22, 2013
Today’s guest post is by Heather Caliri, writer and blogger at A Little Yes. Find her online at HeatherCaliri.com.
Photo courtesy Sergio Alvarez
I’ll happily cook a three-course chicken dinner. I’ll willingly gather laundry and drop it in the wash. But for a long time, washing dishes, especially by hand, was my least favorite chore.
But moving to a house without a dishwasher changed that. I’m spending more time up to my elbows in suds. And to my surprise, I find the energy spent, the rhythm and focus of cleaning plates inspiring. Because when it comes right down to it, everything I know about creativity I learned from washing dishes.
Doubt that dishwashing has much to teach about handicrafts, starting a small business, or using your imagination? Think again. [click to continue…]
by Guest Blogger on May 10, 2013
This post is the final installment of our reader-submitted guest post series, My Path to Motherhood. For more about the series, read this post. To read all posts in the series, click here.
Sixteen years ago, I labored and Lamazed and my first tiny child squawked his way into the delivery room, making his sunny-side up entrance into this world. My world changed that day, and then it changed again and again, in ways I never would have imagined in back when I was young and guileless and selfishly happy.
But let’s back up, because really, the biggest change happened a few years earlier, while I was doggedly climbing the corporate ladder in Seattle.
Everything about the Seattle years was lovely, despite the rainy season. The outdoors call to every resident and my new husband and I dove right in. We hiked and biked and explored the magnificent coastline of the great northwest. We reveled, too, in the excitement of being downtown, spending Saturday nights at the Trattoria, our favorite restaurant, drinking red wine, eating too much pasta, and contemplating the future. It was a magical time, and I was happy.
And then, one by one, it happened: our friends started having babies.
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by Guest Blogger on May 3, 2013
This post is part of our reader-submitted guest post series, My Path to Motherhood. For more about the series, read this post. To read all posts in the series, click here.
I am a planner. It’s a control thing. I think deep down I’ve always known that control is an illusion, but that didn’t stop me from pursuing it or from trying to plan as much as possible, even in the face of uncertainty.
Motherhood is a prime example of something I’ve been planning for as long as I can remember. I’ve always loved babies, and as a child my plan was to get married in my twenties, have four babies, and stay home with them. It didn’t work out that way, but I continued to deny my subconscious suspicion that the terms “family” and “planning” might just be polar opposites.
Undeterred, I came up with Plan B. [click to continue…]
by Guest Blogger on April 26, 2013
This post is part of our reader-submitted guest post series, My Path to Motherhood. For more about the series, read this post. To read all posts in the series, click here.
It was shortly after my birthday when my boyfriend popped the question. It wasn’t a marriage proposal, but a baby one. He was twenty five and wanted to be a young dad and at twenty years old, I wanted nothing more than to be a mom. We didn’t tell anyone what we were planning. Our friends and parents already thought we were a crazy impetuous duo, having moved in together after just six months of young love, but hey, we’d known each other for two years!
It was ten long months later that I finally registered a positive on the stick. In that time I had become slightly, um, obsessive. I read everything I could get my hands on relating to conception and pregnancy and in my crazed state, I seemed to have lost my ability to count properly. Thankfully, once I figured out my actual ovulation dates, we were golden.
Throughout my pregnancy I continued to read, and form opinions. Opinions on the best prenatal care, the most natural way to give birth, how my baby would eat and sleep. As my belly got bigger, my social life shrank. I still had movie nights with friends, and I’d attend the odd concert, but their lives of partying and serial beaus seemed farther and farther away from my own in a committed relationship, contemplating my future as a mother.
Then, our beautiful baby boy arrived, and the friends? They disappeared. [click to continue…]
by Guest Blogger on April 12, 2013
This post is part of our reader-submitted guest post series, My Path to Motherhood. For more about the series, read this post. To read all posts in the series, click here.
Motherhood is tricky business. It’s defined differently by different people and cultures; in fact, my daughter was 8 years old before I felt comfortable being acknowledged on Mother’s Day. My path to motherhood came with a prefix: Step. I am a stepmom. [click to continue…]
by Guest Blogger on April 5, 2013
This post is part of our reader-submitted guest post series, My Path to Motherhood. For more about the series, read this post. To read all posts in the series, click here.
If you ran into me at Target this morning, you’d immediately think, “Wow! She has her hands full!” You’d witness a sweatpants-clad, 30-ish woman, pushing a cart with three-year-old twin girls strapped in the in the front and an active five-year-old begging for the Lightning McQueen mac-n-cheese.
What you probably wouldn’t realize is how much I struggled to become a mom and how my journey has impacted not only my parenting, but also my worldview. [click to continue…]
by Guest Blogger on March 29, 2013
This post is part of our reader-submitted guest post series, My Path to Motherhood. For more about the series, read this post. To read all posts in the series, click here.
I touched my 39-week pregnant belly, placing both hands beneath the swelling bump. It was the night before I was to be induced and I couldn’t sleep.
My soon-to-be son thumped a foot from the inside and I smiled. I’ll hold you tomorrow, I thought. After 39 long weeks I would finally see your eyes. My pregnancy included nausea for seventeen weeks. I feared I would lose you. Unexpected bleeding when I found out I had placenta previa. I feared I would lose you. An emergency room visit and diagnosis of the flu. I feared I would lose you.
My first pregnancy was painful and exhausting. But it was also the most beautiful experience of anticipation I have ever felt.
Everyone I knew that had kids talked about this phenomenon that happened when you became a mother. They told me that the bond was instant. They discussed the births of their children as if they were monumental, life-changing moments. I hoped mine would be like that.
We’ve all seen births happen on television and in the movies. This beautiful moment happens when the brand new baby is placed in their mother’s arms pink and screaming. That’s what I pictured. Half the fun and angst is not knowing what your birth will be like. We all want control and we all think we’ll have it. But it doesn’t always end up that way.
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by Guest Blogger on March 22, 2013
This post is part of our reader-submitted guest post series, My Path to Motherhood. For more about the series, read this post. To read all posts in the series, click here.
“I have to tell you something,” I said hoarsely, not at all sure how I would manage to speak the next words aloud. I’d caught a cold while I was in New York, but it wasn’t congestion closing my throat.
I was perched on the hearth of my fireplace, across from my best friend, Kirsten, who was lounging sideways across my purple love seat. My ex took the couch part of the set the previous year and I hadn’t got around to replacing it. I was usually the only one sitting in my living room, anyway.
I was 38, divorced, and gave notice last month at the job where I had worked for the last 10 years because I was burnt out and exhausted. I was starting an MBA program in the fall but I didn’t know what would happen after that. This was the first time in my life I had not had a plan. My dreams of career, family and relationship all felt out of reach. It was terrifying but I was desperate. The last month had felt like I was teetering on the edge of a high cliff, praying my feet would find solid ground.
This week I should have been in my office telling my team I would no longer be their manager, but instead I was home, blowing my nose and worrying about my late period. [click to continue…]
