This past weekend my daughter went to a birthday party where the activity was to make a mask out of clay. My daughter is almost four, while the party was for a bunch of seven year-olds (we’re friends with the family so she was invited), and she couldn’t do this on her own, so I had to help out. (It turned out that many of the seven year-olds also couldn’t soften the clay/shape it/cut it/attached parts to it on their own, but that’s not the point.)

After I helped my daughter get her huge chunk of clay into a mask that did actually look like a cat, it was time to paint it. My daughter jumped to it and as you can imagine, the colors were all over the place, the red from the mouth was running into the face, the brown from the nose was running into the mouth, and when she took a huge brush of yellow (to do the eyes, mommy!) it splattered all over the blue background color.

As I was watching her do this, I was having an internal debate. I can summarize it like this: Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s guest blog post is by Toni. If you’d like to guest blog on the Work It, Mom! Blog, please email your post to nataly@workitmom.com. It should be somewhere around 300-400 words and on a topic relevant and interesting to working moms.
I often daydream about things I am passionate about such as photography and creative writing. I would love to be able to take a photography class and get involved in a writing group. I’ve even considered joining National Novel Writing Month, but again I am putting it off until next year. Why is it so difficult to make creative dreams come true simply because I am a working mom? Is it due to the fact that the little time I do get outside of work is too valuable because it’s the only time I spend with my family?

I know there are women out there that make it happen. They take on the entire world and somehow fit it all into the mere twenty-four hours that God gives us each day, but I really don’t see how they do it without sacrificing quality time with their loved ones. I see my kids for about an hour, if I’m lucky, before I go to work and then another hour to ninety minutes when I get home from work before they head off to bed. Who am I to take that time away from them just to fulfill my own selfish desires? Not only would I feel guilty because I was taking their mother away from them even more often than I already do, but I would truly miss them even if I was absent only an extra hour each week.

I suppose that is why my creative dreams continue to sit on the back of the dusty “to do” shelf. Read the rest of this entry »