You know what I love about Thanksgiving? The only thing anyone expects is food. And then comes Christmas.

My husband bought a newspaper on Thanksgiving and promptly pulled out the pages and pages of ads. "Look what a great deal on this TV!" he said while I pecked away at the keyboard on some work I wanted to get done before we began cooking.

"We have a TV," I reminded him.

"I’m just saying, it’s a good deal."

Five minutes later, as I saved the most recent changes to an invoice, he was gushing about the price of new laptops. "We have computers," I said.

"I didn’t say we had to get one. But maybe the kids…"

"No. No laptops for Christmas this year," I said. "We don’t have the budget for it."

And just like that, I both verbalized and passed on the holiday fears that had been creeping up in the back of my mind since the beginning of November. How are we going to buy all those presents this year?
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For me, winning as a working parent means finding the balance between paying the bills and enjoying time with my loved ones. It’s also having a relationship with my kids, my spouse, my extended family, my friends, my community and myself. That said, it often seems like the purpose of the game itself is to somehow find enough time and money to make all of that happen within one lifetime. For an average player like me, there’s simply no way to survive - let alone win - without using a few cheat codes now and then.
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The name of this column, “Full Time, All the Time” refers to the nature of my mobile and digital work life. It’s a nod to the fact that I’m always available and never quite free, thanks to the Internet. But it isn’t just my professional life that has been changed forever by my virtual lifestyle. My personal life has been both blessed and cursed by the far-reaching tentacles of the web.
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In the last month, I’ve worked in a hospital room, at my mother’s kitchen table, from a balcony overlooking a Mexican beach, and in my own living room. My work is location independent, which means I’m free of the confines of a cubicle. It also means I don’t have co-workers in the traditional sense. Sometimes this blows. But as I’ve learned in the face of heartache and disaster over the last few weeks, I am not alone. Far from it, in fact.
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