My mom was a stay-at-home mom for nearly all of my growing up years. It wasn’t until my youngest sister was about to start kindergarten that she got a job outside of our home. She baked chocolate chip cookies for us every single year on the first day of school. Our house smelled like the warm beginning of fall and the heady scent of baked cookies and, to this day, that combination brings me back to those afternoons, running up the driveway into my mom’s waiting hug to share every little part of my day with her. I have my own house, our own traditions, and kids who run up my driveway to see me, and yet I still “go home.”
I want that for my own kids, a sense of walking in the door and knowing what to expect: that the towels are in the same place they’ve been forever or that the paint may change, the furniture may get updated, but the space is somehow exactly the same as it always was.
When my husband and I got married and talked about having our own small humans, I knew I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom like my mom was. I wanted to make chocolate chip cookies and wrap my kids in sheets that smell like all of their childhood memories. I wanted to be on the PTA and walk to the library with a little trail of ducks behind me. I wanted to read chapter books out loud and bake bread and make a stellar tater-tot hotdish.
For a lot of years, we made that happen. I had a laundry day; getting into the doctor was never a problem because my schedule was always wide open. Driving to piano lessons, gymnastics, the grocery store on a Tuesday morning when there are no lines…all things I could do because my job was literally taking care of our family and house. One summer we were gone more of July than we were home; I took the kids on a road trip that included camping and an extra, extra long stay at my sister’s house. If we wanted to head to my parents (and thus, the beach) we could leave on Sunday morning and come back whenever we pleased.
But all good things must come to an end and I knew that my footloose and fancy-free ways would not last forever. Our kids are getting bigger, they’re involved in more things. Our baby will start preschool in June and kindergarten is only a year away so it was time for us to consider what our next steps were going to be…specifically, what my next steps were going to be. How do we want to help our kids with sports fees and college tuition and weddings? Honestly…we’ve started asking ourselves more seriously what we want our retirement to look like. We’re not old, but we’re no longer spring chickens either, and these are the conversations that we have now.
Not one to really embrace change, I knew that it would be best to ease into working full-time, and so last fall I started looking into and checking off the very long list of things that it takes to get licensed to open a daycare. Besides the fact that there is a huge need in Lake County for childcare, the bonus is that this is also a job that I can do in my own home. I am my own boss, I set my own hours and if I want to work in yoga pants and flip-flops, it’s totally dress-code appropriate (I should know, I wrote the employee handbook). It turns out that preschoolers are my jam, I love planning things for them to do each week and reading them stories and listening to their imaginations explode all over my living room. And the babies…oh, the babies I get to snuggle! I know that our family is complete and I’m not even a little bit sad about that, but I do love sniffing a small baby head regularly. And the best part is that I’m still here when my son runs up the driveway in the afternoon to tell me all about the details of his day.
I’m still working, though, and so my time is very much not what it used to be. If I forget something for dinner, I can’t just run to the grocery store at three in the afternoon because now I have a house full of kids. Here are a few things that helped me ease into this new season of being a working-mom.
- Our calendar is color coded. Everyone has their own color: from each family member, to the school calendar, to things we do as a family, to the daycare schedule. I have one main calendar on my phone that I can break down into just the family, just the daycare, just the school days off. It has saved my sanity because I know exactly what’s going on.
- Meal planning. I plan breakfast lunch and dinner. I shop the sale ads. I go once a week to the grocery store and maybe a second run for milk and fruit. Nothing is a spur of the moment meal I found on Pinterest at 4 in the afternoon that I have exactly 3 things for and so a trip to the store is “necessary.” I know what we’re having at least one week out, and if I’m really on the ball, it’s a two-week menu.
- Before I even start meal planning, I write on my menu who’s going to be where on what days. Is there an activity or will my husband be working late? Those things dictate whether or not I need to have an advanced prep dinner (like a crockpot meal, or soup or a hotdish I’ve made ahead of time that just needs to be reheated). I’m usually working until after 5 and I don’t want to have to scramble to get dinner on the table for my family after I’ve had a full day of small people underfoot. We used to have Friday Night Pizza and Movie, but my kids totally got burned out on pizza, so now I’ve changed it to once a month pizza night and the other Friday nights are dinner and a movie, so whatever I’m making needs to be able to be eaten in pjs, in the living room with room leftover for popcorn. Sometimes Friday dinner is just popcorn.
- My kids know that on Saturdays we clean so that on Sunday we can be together and do something fun. That means that everyone is responsible to help sort laundry, clean bedrooms, change sheets, sanitize all the things…you know the drill. And the best part is that they’re big enough now to understand that we all work together so that we can all reap the benefits on Sunday. That’s not to say that we don’t tidy up during the week – I cannot handle waking up in the morning to dishes/toys/mess everywhere, but I also realize that I don’t have the energy to get into the deep cleaning every night. I’m tired by the end of my work day and the last thing I want to do is sort, wash and fold laundry. So instead, it works for us to save the big clean for Saturday and the smaller, tidying up for the week nights.
- I have learned to let some things go and my husband has learned to pick up some of my slack. I wash dishes all day long (3 years running of no dishwasher; a saga of a story that I’ll spare you the details of but suffice it to say we lived for several years with a half-sized dishwasher and when it stopped working, we realized that we’d need to do some kitchen remodeling to fit in a full-sized dishwasher) so my husband is really good about doing the evening round. And we have resorted to using paper plates several evenings a week because it is just one less thing to do.
I’m still getting used to this whole working-mom gig. There’s a lot that goes into running your own business, and I’m still figuring out how my time is best allocated. My husband and I are both figuring out this new normal for our family, and while I know we will tweak what works best for us as time goes on, so far I think we’ve made a good decision for our family.
