I’ll just come out and say it:

We rarely eat dinner together as a family.

Our daughter is three and a half and she goes to sleep at 7pm. She eats dinner around 5:30-6 — either with me or the sitter, depending on the day. If I eat with her, I’ll snack on something — but it’s too early for me to eat a full dinner and my husband isn’t home yet at that point.

My husband and I eat dinner together, but it’s often in front of the TV. We both work hard and this is our only time to unwind. I know we should be sitting at the nice dinner table, savoring our food, and discussing our day, but 70% of the time we’re too wound up for that. Read the rest of this entry »

This weekend we went to visit our friends in New York. (I will spare you from any whining in this post about how much I miss New York. I promise. But I do, a lot.) Invariably we got into a conversation about work and how we all work too much, are sleep-deprived, don’t see our kids enough, don’t go on enough vacations, and so on. You know, the usual working families discussion fare. And then the mom said something I think so many of us can relate to: ” I like to work, I like what I do, but I just want to be able to do less of it — to work less than full-time.”

I certainly fee this way. I’ve always worked full-time and in my previous career in investing, full-time meant more than 8 hours a day. I’m pretty open on this blog about the fact that running Work It, Mom! involves working around the clock and usually putting in 10-12 hour days. I rarely complain because I LOVE what I do and I feel lucky to have the opportunity do create something that I think benefits other women. But I am exhausted and sleep deprived (which is starting to affect my health), I don’t see my daughter, my husband, or my family and friends as much as I’d like and I’d love to work less.

The thing is, I can’t. Read the rest of this entry »

Prelude: If you live in one of those enviable climates where the weather is perfect all the time, there is plenty of warmth and sunshine, and you don’t know what it feels like to break your ice scraper while trying to remove an inch of ice from your windshield, this is not a blog post for you.

It’s snowing.

Yep, the first year that we have a driveway to shovel, a car to clean off from snow (no garage here), and our daughter in daycare (which has snow days as opposed to our nanny, who didn’t), the first snow has come earlier than in many previous years. Most likely it will just be an inch or so, and might turn to rain by morning, so it’s not technically anything to worry about. (Funny enough, my daughter and I had completely different reactions to this not really being a storm. Me: “Oh, good, just a little snow.” Her: “Oh, no, mommy! There isn’t enough snow for a snowman and you promised that when I wore my warm winter coat there would be!” I miss being a kid.)

The potential–extremely unlikely in this case–of having a snow day on Monday got me thinking:

Why can’t we schedule snow days? Read the rest of this entry »