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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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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After watching this “60 Minutes Overtime” interview with CBS foreign correspondent Lara Logan — who was beaten and sexually assaulted in Cairo last week, prompting some media executives to consider pulling their female reporters out of Egypt — I’m struck by one observation she shares.

In the interview, which aired in September 2010, the 39-year-old journalist describes coming under fire while with US troops in Afghanistan. “I ran for cover. Usually, I would run for the cameraman,” she says. “But once you have two little babies at home, you have a little different perspective on things.”

As working moms, we’re all too aware of how other people may (or may not) perceive us once we become parents. Studies show that the age-old gender gap has been replaced by the motherhood penalty. Some companies woo parents with work-life balance-improving benefits and then penalize employees for using them. We worry that we’re seen as slackers if we have to dash out of work to pick up a sick child, or if we can’t stay late to work on an important project.

But what we don’t often talk about is whether our feelings about our jobs change when we have kids. Not whether we’d rather work from home (or go into an office) or whether we want to downshift from full time to part time or opt out of the workforce entirely. I mean how becoming a parent can influence the work we do, and the risks we’re willing to take while doing it.

So, let’s talk. Did you view your job differently once you became a parent? What do you do, and how did your perspective change?

Photo: CBS foreign correspondent Lara Logan in Iraq (Photo from CBS News)

I’ve got two teenage stepdaughters who are breathtakingly gorgeous, and a sweet 6-year-old daughter who looks up to them in every way possible. The clothes they wear, the makeup they dab on, the way they straighten their hair or leave it curly and wild — she makes mental notes about all of it, and those notes come together in her little head like pieces of a gigantic puzzle. The “this is what you are supposed to do when you are big” puzzle. The “this is what is appropriate” puzzle. Whether the big kids like it or not (and there have been times when they don’t), they are their little siblings’ role models.

It’s probably why pop-culture stuff like this throws me for a loop. I mean, seriously. I know that Jersey Shore is a guilty pleasure for a lot of people. But to let your 11-year-old be made over in Snooki’s image? By Snooki herself?

W. T. F. ?
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I went to pick my little kids up from preschool the other day, and when I got there I found my 4-year-old son curled up in a small ball on his caregiver’s lap.

The backstory: He and his buddies had been playing (probably superheroes, their current obsession), and playing escalated into rough housing, which escalated into arguing, which escalated into fighting. One friend grabbed a toy out of my boy’s hands; another defended the first, and that was just too much for my little guy to bear. He burst into tears — a common enough occurrence at home, but a rarity at school — and, since I wasn’t there, climbed into his teacher’s lap for reassurance.

I got there about half an hour later, and there he was, all cuddled up. And, instead of feeling protective or territorial or jealous, instead of feeling guilty for not being there when it all happened, or angry that his feelings had been hurt, I just felt… grateful.
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Here in the vast frozen north — a.k.a. New England, post-blizzard — we’ve been dealing with snow days, too-cold-to-venture-out days, and how-did-it-get-so-dark-out-already days. Which means that my kids have been spending more time in front of the TV than the American Academy of Pediatrics would like.

And that’s just TV. Add in the time spent playing Wii (it counts as exercise if it’s too crappy to go outside, right?), the time in the car with their Leapsters, and the time I’m on deadline and I hand them my iPhone and, well, that’s a lot of screen time.
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Right up until about a week ago, I was much more Grinch than Cindy Lou Who about the holidays.

The whole Santa thing brings me far more stress than good cheer. I like Christmas, all right, but I’ve never really loved Christmas. I do, however love Thanksgiving, and have complained mightily about the differences between the two, but basically it boils down to this:

Thanksgiving is about food and friends and family, and the only thing you need to wrap up are leftovers, if you’re lucky.

Christmas is about presents and obligations and rushing around and wrapping up reams of stuff that no one really needs in yards and yards of pretty and sometimes expensive paper that you buy intending to throw away almost immediately.
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I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the way women interact at work, the way we interact as mothers and as friends, and the way we inadvertently undermine our professional and personal relationships. And I’ve come to a pretty liberating conclusion: Much of the time, it’s about insecurity. But you can’t control other people’s behavior, only your own. Which is why you can’t make other people’s insecurities your problem.

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This has been a hectic week. This has been a tiring week. This has been a wonderful week. And all for the same reason:

I started a new job on Monday.

And I love it. I remind myself that I already know how to handle feeling overwhelmed, that it’s important to remember to breathe, and that, after years of backtacking, I can relish the feeling of moving forward again.

This post would be very different if I hadn’t gotten the job, or if any of the challenges I’ve faced over the last year had turned out differently. Which made me wonder: Is gratitude relative? Or can you choose it, the way I think you can choose to be happy?
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Most of the time, when working moms talk about networking, we’re talking about our career networks: coworkers, mentors, people in the (name your) business. But there’s another network, one that we tend to take for granted, one that is just as important — or perhaps, when it comes to our sanity, even more so: Other working moms.
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