File this under: Advice I Hope To Take In The Future.

I had a busy weekend this past.. er… weekend.  (My writing!  It is awesome!)  I had a guest in from out of town and a big Halloween party that we attended.  As usual, that means I have had an extraordinary amount of work to get caught up on since Monday, and almost no energy or focus with which to do it.  This happens every single time I have a three day weekend.  It also happens every single time I have guests in from out of town, or a holiday falls over the weekend, or I take a weekend trip.

If my weekend is busy, my Monday workload starts to bleed into Tuesday.  And then Wednesday.  And by about Thursday I’m just barely starting to feel like I’ve caught up.

It occurred to me on Monday that perhaps what I should have done was anticipated that I was going to be particularly run down and planned ahead a little better.  Or a lot better.

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Hello my gorgeous, awesome, and totally put-together Full Time, All the Time readers.  It’s been a while hasn’t it?  I hope you haven’t forgotten about me while the fabulous Miss Britt held down the fort here.  I’ve been on an unexpected blogging hiatus.  I wish that I had witty reasons for my short-term leave of absence, but the truth is that life smacked in the face.  Then the gut.  Then push me down and kicked me some more.

In other words, I suffered through my first Summer Break as a working mom. Then right when I felt like I was getting it all in control, life sucker-punched me in the face with Kindergarten.

When my son finished preschool in June, we decided (and by “we” I mean, I thought I had the best idea ever) to let our son have a real summer.  We spent lots of time at the pool.  I spent countless hours shuttling between home and a morning-only summer camp.  We played outside with our neighbors.  Saw nearly every PG or G movie in the theaters. And my son finally found bravery to ride his bike without training wheels.  It was fantastic.

I also spent hours upon hours working late into the night to make up for the lost hours during the day. 
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I am one of those women who struggles under the delusion that everything is my job.

And my responsibility.

And my fault.

I’ve never found that I can do everything, but that hasn’t stopped me from trying.  Or from feeling incredibly guilty when I fail.  Asking for help has been a last resort for me for as long as I can remember.

When my husband and I first started living together and sharing household expenses, I avoided asking him for money to pay bills.  I’d be down to my last dollar and in tears before I would bring up the uncomfortable topic of money and needing him to give me some of it.  He was always baffled that I hadn’t asked sooner.  We finally had to set up a joint checking account just to remove the option of me trying to handle everything on me own.

Issues.  I have them.

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Several years ago, my mom took me to a Franklin Covey seminar for my birthday.  As part of the package, I got a Franklin Covey starter kit that included a planner and all the planning pages for the first year.

That planner - and the system behind it - kept me organized and sane for years.

I always knew where I was supposed to be and what I was supposed to be doing.  I never worried about forgetting anything and I was never haunted by that nagging worry that I was letting something slip through the cracks.  It was wondeful.

I’m not sure exactly why I stopped using Franklin Covey planners.  It might be because it was too big to take with me everywhere.  Or maybe it was because my husband bought me a Palm Pilot for Christmas one year (which I hated).  Or maybe I just got bored and distracted and before I knew it - I was a total and complete unorganized mess all over again.

Until recently.

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We live just two miles away from a high school that has been closed for one week due to Swine Flu. Two schools elementary age children have become infected in the last day — both living in the same city as my son’s preschool. More schools in California are considering closing as a precaution. And it leaves me wondering… Where are all these kids gonna go during the day?

If the point of the school closure is to isolate children in hopes of keeping the outbreak to a minimum, you can’t simply just put your kid in an alternate childcare. Sure they may seem fine today. But with a waiting period of 7 days, a normal kid today can be a sick kid next Tuesday.

I feel like I’m one of the lucky ones.  If my son’s school were to close for a period of time, I can work from home 100%, have a supportive boss, and lots of family near-by that would be able to step in if needed. 

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I remember learning about “Arsenic Hour” when I first had my babies.  Every day, at about 4 in the afternoon, the baby would get fussy.  The hours from 4pm to 6pm were filled with whining and crying and rocking and juggling and all around chaos for everyone in the family.

I don’t have babies anymore, but I still dread the beginning of the end of the day.

Now the crabbiness sets in about 5 or 5:30.  Ironically, that’s when I get off work so you’d think I’d be ecstatic.  But it doesn’t take me long to switch from work mode to prep mode and my mind is filled with the ever evolving list of things that need to be done.

Child care pick ups, dinner, homework, baths, dishes, maybe some laundry.

And all before the kids have to be tucked into bed.

I notice my husband fading fast at this time of the night, too.  He’s tired from working and trying to get dinner on the table and lunches packed for the next day.  And all the while I can see him stealing glances at the couch, counting down the minutes when he can flop.

The unfortunate thing is that these are our prime family hours.  With school, day care and two working parents, the daily time we have with all of us together is after work and before bed.  I hate that we’re wishing those hours away.  But our biorhythms seem to be working against us.

Here is where an expert would offer some advice, I suppose.  Maybe insert a list of ideas for getting through the afternoon slump.  But I haven’t got a clue.

Do you?

How do you perk up in the late afternoon and early evenings?

I had to take a morning off this week to register my son for Kindergarten.  A month ago, I had to take an afternoon off to get the last of the immunizations required to register him for Kindergarten.  Two months ago I had to wake up at 5am to stand in line to get an appointment to register him for Kindergarten.  Plus I spent a few more hours filling out form after form, getting original copies of all our bills for proof of residency, and checking then re-checking we had everything we needed to register him for local public school.

If Kindergarten is this complicated, then I’m never gonna survive college applications.
The last two months have been so stressful in our house.  I’ve got a pretty good grasp on our day-to-day operations.  As long as there isn’t any emergency or last-minute schedule change, I tend to do pretty good at balancing what I’m balancing.  But the amount of work that went into just getting ready to register my son for school nearly put me over the edge.

How I am ever going to make it through the school-age years working full-time?

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Working from home without childcare is like rock climbing without safety.  You may be able to do it, but it you fall it’s gonna cost you big time.  I did the working from home without childcare for 1 day a week for three years.  In order to do it, I had to drastically change the way I worked on that day.  Babies and toddlers can be 1000 times more demanding (not be mention impossible to resist) than whatever is going on at work.   

When my son was born, I demanded that I work from home at least one day a week.  Friday was the planned day.  The entire staff knew that I would be working from home and so the volume of issues that I dealt with turned to Monday through Thursday.  I’d make sure conference calls were strategically scheduled during during Sesame Street hour or nap time.  I purposely made my workload more administrative for Fridays.  Status reports on projects, submitting expense reports for reimbursement, catching up on the insane amount of email that I received the rest of the week, sending out meeting requests to my team for the following week. 

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One of my girlfriends and I recently ran away for a long weekend roadtrip.

That in and of itself is no big deal.  I am fortunate enough to travel fairly often - especially considering I work full time and have two children at home.  I also steal Sunday afternoons here and there for girlfriend time and “me time”.

I’m no stranger to balancing family and relationship time with friend and me time.

If you would have asked me two weeks ago if I knew how to relax, I would have said “Absolutely!”  I probably would have even lectured you about the importance of “learning to let go” and “taking care of yourself once and a while”.

But this weekend was different.  This weekend helped rejuvenate me and prepare me for the great balancing act of real life even more than usual.

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Ever since my son was born, I’ve fought hard to break working mom myths.  I worked harder than ever to avoid the mommy-track by keeping focused at work.  Then at home, I tried to become “Mother of the Year” by making every meal, baking birthday cupcakes from scratch, and keeping a tidy home (alright, I utterly failed on that last one). 

After suffering from balance burnout last year, I’ve started making some changes in my life.  One of those was to stop focusing on the stuff that I’m not doing (and stop feeling guilty about it) and to start thinking positive about the stuff that I do accomplish. 

The Upside to Being a Working Mom

• Since my spouse and I both work, we have “double coverage” for our son’s health insurance.  That  means no out of pocket costs for any trips to the doctor. 
• My son barely watches any TV and has an active imagination, thanks in part, to a play-based preschool that he attend during the day while I work. 

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