Summer has never equaled downtime for me, not since I was a teenager (and, given that I was working at my mom’s restaurant by the time I was 12, maybe not even then). This year, for the first time in a decade, my stepkids didn’t spend the summer with us (teenagers!), but while I missed them a lot, my summer schedule wasn’t any less hectic for their absence.
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Most of the time, I work from my home office, a little yellow room filled with a cluttered desk and stacks of books and product samples. But this week, I was in New York City, where most of my team is based. I had a series of meetings to attend and people to meet, and most of my usual workload to finish.

It made for a long and hectic day, but what really struck me wasn’t just the 400-plus-mile round-trip commute or the working printers or the free coffee. It wasn’t just the face-to-face conversations with the actual people I work with, to whom I talk at least twice a day, every day, even when I’m in my home office. It wasn’t just the make-up and nail polish I put on or the fact that I was wearing a suit instead of looking like the insomniac workaholic that I am.

The oddest thing was the way that I packed up my computer, gathered up my stuff, and left the office at the end of the day.
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The other morning, I was caught up in creating costumes for dress-up day at my kids’ camp, and we were running late. I threw a jumble of (healthy! nutritious! lovingly prepared!) stuff into their lunch boxes, nagged them to finish eating breakfast, and finally grabbed their backpacks, tennis rackets, swim suits, towels, and herded them into the car. Then I went back for the costumes, and then for my wallet, and then we left for camp.

(This is not a post about the importance of organization or how to streamline your mornings by preparing the night before. Obviously.)
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I was wiped out and still working on deadline when my parents-in-law, whom I love dearly, called to say that they were about two hours away.

They were driving up from Florida to stay with us for a couple of weeks. I had seven loads of (thankfully, clean) laundry in my bedroom, a spare bedroom full of bags and boxes designated for the attic, and carpets so full of fur from my rapidly shedding dog that I considered scraping it all into a pile and telling the kids we had a new pet.

It was time for extreme measures. And my favorite extreme measure, in cases like this, is what I call “fake cleaning.” Here are five ways you can whip the house into some semblance of order—as long as your guests love you (and don’t look too closely):
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My daughter was humming a tune that sounded a lot like “Bingo” while she was drawing the other day. When I scooted closer to her on the couch to get a peek at what she was doing, I heard that she had made up new words to go along with the song:

There was a girl who worked a lot
and Lylah was her name-o
L-Y-L-A-H, L-Y-L-A-H, L-Y-L-A-H
and Lylah was her name-o!

The drawing was actually an illustrated guide to the song’s new lyrics (spelled phonetically, of course—she’s only in kindergarten). I thought I was doing a pretty good job of getting out of work mode and morphing into Mama mode during the window between school pick-up and bedtime. But apparently not.
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When my now 6-year-old daughter was a baby, my mom gave her a fuzzy cream-colored toy Easter bunny that my daughter, for whatever reason, named Minno.

Minno quickly became a permanent fixture in our lives, traveling with us to and from that hectic early-evening childcare hand-off my husband and I had, snuggling with our daughter at bedtime, even occupying the high chair with her.  I quickly realized that all hell would probably break loose when (not if) the bunny got lost, and decided to get a couple of identical backups. Which is when I discovered that the bunny had been discontinued a couple of years earlier.
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My youngest two kids have entered The Age of Soccer Practice and Games Every Weekend Rain or Shine, and suddenly, my schedule looks like three people’s calendars got melded together in a horrible laboratory experiment a la “The Fly.”

The irony is that three years ago I wrote this:

On the one hand, I’m all for kids having plenty opportunities to learn and grow and do things that have captured their interest, but I’m talking about a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old here. They’re in preschool and daycare while my husband and I work full-time, and, honestly, we’re so busy during the week that it’s kind of a relief to not have extracurricular commitments on the weekends. But, on the other hand… am I depriving my kids?

Whoa, times have changed.
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Things I’ve realized recently, in no particular order:

1. I actually like picking up the clutter and wiping down the tables when I volunteer in my youngest daughter’s kindergarten classroom. But I’m overwhelmed by the idea of doing it consistently in my own home.

2. I always thought I loved nightgowns, but I don’t. I like having them, and lounging around in them, but not sleeping in them.

3. Sometimes, I’m so focused on the daily minutiae of raising my kids — must make dinner, do laundry, dig up money for field trip, find inhaler, wrap birthday presents, set up playdates, get to soccer practice, etc. — that I forget that I’m supposed to be focused on the long-term — that is, teaching them how to navigate life.

4. I need to find a better way to manage my to-do list. I’ve been making “have-done” lists more than ever because my to-do lists make my eyes twitch, they’re so long and filled with impossible-to-do-in-a-day things.

5. Even though I work from home, I’m still scrambling at 5:30 to pick up the kids, clean up the house, and get dinner on the table at a decent hour. Why is that?

What have you realized about yourself lately?

I knew it was time to leave my last job when my boss told me that she didn’t believe that I was actually working on the days I worked from home.

I had been with the company for more than 15 years — a decade longer than she had, in fact — and had negotiated my one-day-a-week work-from-home schedule with her boss more than a year earlier. The deal was that I would take on a lot of extra work that wasn’t part of my job description in exchange for being allowed to telecommute once a week. To hear her say that flexibility was “a perk reserved for outstanding employees” and she wanted to “take it off the table” in order to better monitor my performance made me wonder: For parents who work outside of the home, is telecommuting a perk or a necessity? And how does taking away an employee’s flexibility encourage productivity?
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My youngest kids have discovered the value of money and, since I’ve been trying to instill in them the value of earning money, rather than just receiving money, right now they’re all about doing random chores for a quarter.

“Mama, can I earn some monies?” my 4-year-old son asks, dish rag in hand just in case I say yes.

“I made my bed this morning! All by myself! Without anyone telling me to!” chirps my 6-year-old daughter. “Is that worth a quarter? Or is it worth two quarters?”

I’m thinking they may be ready to start getting an allowance, even if they’re too young to have anything to spend it on. But while I contemplate how often and how much, I’ve noticed that I’m starting offer up a quarter here or there in exchange for, well, a minute or two of peace.
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