By Leah from Working on Motherhood and A Girl and A Boy

Now that I have almost an entire year of parenting under my belt, I finally feel like I’ve earned the right to throw out advice to anyone, at any time, and at 90 mph, like an automatic ball-pitcher gone haywire. Heads up! I’m coming straight at you! After all, what better way to make mom friends than to tell them exactly how to parent, right?

Okay, obviously unsolicited advice is not what moms want to hear, and least of all when they’re new moms trying to navigate the perilous landscape of parenthood on top of being sleep-deprived, strapped onto the roof of the Hormone Express, and worried that their insides and outsides have been rearranged beyond repair. What new moms don’t need is someone telling them what to do or, worse, someone telling them that they’re doing it all wrong. What you need is love, support, encouragement, respect, validation, and, okay, maybe a few gentle nudges from someone who’s been there. (That’s me!) Oh, and you probably also need a shower.

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By Nadine from Martinis for Milk

“Play Batman with me Mommy,” my almost-five-year-old son,Nate , calls to me as I’m caught checking my Blackberry again. I look up at him, wanting to make him happy, but completely clueless. “OK, but you’ll have to tell me HOW we play Batman.”

I have a dirty secret. I don’t know how to play with my kids.

While my husband creates intricate games and stories in moments, I seem to be missing that gene. But he often works nights, leaving me home alone with two kids under five. Here’s how I get creative with quality time.

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By Samantha from Back To Me

When we got pregnant I had a few fears about our impending bundle: the wee one would be colicky (check!), would rage against the car (dodged that bullet), and would be a bedtime h8r.  In fact, the sleep issue was the one I was most concerned about so I made sure to read up on ALL the sleep solution books I could get my water retaining hands on.  The main theme?  GET THEE TO A ROUTINE AND QUICK, WOMAN.  This was a no-brainer for me as it made complete and total sense.  Routines help kids feel secure, know what’s coming next and not throw them into a rabid frenzy with each bed time transition.  So that is what we did.

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By Jen of Quarter Life Crisis

The thing I loved the most about breastfeeding when I was on maternity leave was the ease. When I needed to feed the baby (read: ALL THE TIME, it seemed), my milk was always just ready to go. It was the perfect temperature and consistency, and I didn’t have to fuss with formula and bottles. If I needed just a few more minutes of precious sleep in the early morning hours, my husband would bring the baby into our bed so I could nurse him on my side while I continued to snooze. And thanks to a recent law passed in my state making breastfeeding in a public place a civil right, I could feed my baby wherever, whenever.

The plan was to breastfeed for up to a year, for the bonding experience and health benefits it provided my son, yes, but mainly because I didn’t want to pay for formula on top of all our other newly acquired baby expenses. As my maternity leave came to a close, and I started to prepare for my return to work, continuing to breastfeed suddenly seemed difficult. I began to feel a little apprehensive about the prospect of pumping at work – would it interfere with my workflow, would I be able to produce enough milk for my son’s insatiable appetite, would my co-workers look at me differently as I made the twice-daily trek to my make-shift lactation station?

All were valid concerns, but fortunately for me, the answers were mostly no, mostly yes, and definitely not. I got lucky in that my employer was extremely supportive of my endeavor to continue breastfeeding. Before I came back to work, I sat down with my boss and let her know my plans. I was very clear about when I would need to pump (once in the 10 a.m. hour, once in the 2 p.m. hour), and that if it ever interfered with meetings, I could easily adjust my schedule. Cognizant of the time I’d spend away from my desk and work, I proposed a shorter lunch break to make up the time. Thankfully, my boss wasn’t too concerned about the time it would take to pump. “Just do what you need to do,” she said.
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By Kelly from Don Mills Diva

I am a pretty typical working mom balancing a pretty demanding job and a really demanding pre-schooler and you know what I don’t need?

I don’t need one more article telling me that if I just treat myself to a nightly bubble bath, my time-crunched schedule will magically seem manageable.

I agree that leisurely bubble baths are relaxing and perhaps even necessary once in a while, but encouraging working moms to indulge does not constitute useful advice about how to successfully make the most of our time.

If you’re like me, what you would really appreciate are a few practical tips that can help shave minutes off your daily routine.

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By Mona from Kirida

When I gave birth three years ago, my mother flew across the Pacific Ocean from Saipan to our Seattle home to assist me in those first few sleep-deprived and chaotic weeks. It was a true lifesaver to have my mom around, to make our meals, do our laundry and keep our house tidy while we were doing our best to be new parents without losing our sanity.

The trade-off though of accepting my mother’s wonderful help was accepting my mother’s bountiful uninvited advice. From the moment we brought my son home, she filled my ears with what he should be wearing (mittens all the time!) to how I should change his diaper (with lots and lots of baby powder!).

Her advice even extended to my role as a wife, even going so far as to write a list of “Mona’s Wifely Obligations,” which included making sure my husband had freshly pressed pants for work, even though he is a GROWN MAN with a master’s degree and is very capable of doing this for himself.

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By Natalie from Bloorb

I, Natalie, am a geek. And no, not a geek like I write code and buy the latest gadgets, but a geek like I get both small and big thrills from getting stuff DONE, from making stuff TIDIER, from feeling more FREE of things. While most would call it nesting (or even “being anal”), my husband calls it “geeking out” – something I do quite often.

In my house – while my husband would kill me for writing this – nothing thrills me more than ticking stuff off a to-do list. As a project manager by day, I know that the simplest stuff ALWAYS falls through the cracks if it’s not written down, so at home, I write it down! If it’s cluttered, piled, or just plain annoying – I write it down, and that means, eventually, it gets done! Because even if it doesn’t get done RIGHT AWAY, I can at least sleep easier knowing that it WILL eventually get done – because it was written down.

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By Jen Wilson of Hey Mrs. Wilson

Bullying is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. I can safely say that I hate it. I was bullied mercilessly as a child and therefore know first-hand how damaging it can be. I was never physically hurt, but I think that if I was, those wounds would have healed faster than the emotional ones. I was a nerdy kid. I wasn’t at the top of my class, nose stuck in the books, but I wore mismatched sweat suits, I had glasses, and I hadn’t a clue about social norms.

One memory that sticks out in my head is of two girls chasing me into the church nursery yelling repeatedly, “Split ends! Split ends! You have split ends!” I remember begging for a hair cut after that. I also remember being even more self-conscious than I already was. In Jr. High, one of my “best friends” would constantly pick at any imperfection she could find. Her favorite one was my crooked chicken legs. She loved to make herself feel better by making me feel horrible about myself. I also had a habit of moistening my lips, and was teased so mercilessly by the girls on the basketball team that I eventually quit the team, telling my disappointed coach that I really just didn’t like basketball all that much.

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By Kami Lewis Levin

Ladies, we were flat out lied to.  Period.  All those teachers, parents, adult role models, and TV characters who constantly reiterated to us girls that we can do anything we put our minds to were effing liars.  They didn’t find it necessary to share the fine print with us.  They didn’t consider disclosing the gravity of the situation to us.  Just like nobody told us that giving birth hurts like hell, nobody told us that choosing to be a working mom is a one-way ticket to our very own three-ring circus.  Except the clowns are our children.  And sometimes our husbands.  And we are the tightrope walkers, fire-eaters, hoop-jumpers, trapeze artists, and lion tamers.  And, on occasion, the lions.  I am woman.  Hear me roar, damn it.

After my second kid was born and operating under the mistaken assumption that I could give both my family and my job 110% of my energy (I was never very good at math), I spent the better part of the past year experiencing my own very special brand of culture shock.  The kind where you just have to go to bed by 8.  The kind where getting dressed to impress is simply not an option (you know, the whole drool, snot, poop, spit-up factor).  The kind where a date with your husband involves a drug-addict like dependency on Netflix.  The kind where your personal identity decides to go on hiatus, leaving a confused, spent, and in my case, fat, out of shape and depressed, shell of a person behind.

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By Sally McGraw from Already Pretty

Tell me that you hate getting presents and I’ll tell you that you’re full of lies. We ALL love presents, for Pete’s sake. I mean, when someone puts in the time and energy to pick out a thoughtful gift, receiving that gift lights us up from the inside and reminds us how beloved we truly are. And that’s priceless and precious. But it’s also just plain fun to get stuff, and gifties from friends and family provide little surges of joy whenever they land in our eager laps.

But there are some gifts that you can only give to yourself, and many of them will make you feel happier than a gorgeous pair of Prada boots or a brand new iPod. There are some gifts that center around self-knowledge, self-care and self-esteem, and it’s best for us to procure them on our own terms and on our own time. There are some gifts that we deserve year-round, not just around the holidays or on our birthdays, and now seems like as good a time as any to enumerate them.

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