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I'm Leah, and in a lucky twist of fate, I've landed my three dream jobs: book editor, writer, and mother. Since having my son in December 2008, my work-life has been in constant flux - full-time? part-time? freelance? working at home or in the office? It depends on the day and which way the wind is blowing - and figuring out how to keep it all going is a constant challenge. Heck, I'm still getting used to the idea of being someone's mom.

Check out my profile on Work It, Mom! and my personal blog, A Girl and a Boy.

More mothers say they want to work full time(?!)

Categories: child care, economy, happiness, time management, working from home

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Ever since having kids, I’ve said (and predict I will continue to say for a very long time), that my ideal working situation is part-time–whether out of the home, in the home, on a boat, with a goat…whatever. Most of my mom friends seem to feel the same way, which is why I was surprised to read that the number of mothers who say they’d prefer to work full time has risen dramatically in just the last five years. Mothers who say they’d prefer to work full time increased from 20 percent in 2007 to 32 percent in 2012, according to a Pew Research Center survey (link goes to an overview) of 2,511 working parents (both men and women) conducted at the end of last year. Are you as surprised by this as I am?
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Working at home, with the kids

Categories: the home office, time management, working from home

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When you hear the label work-at-home mom, do you picture do you picture a woman who works from home and also happens to be a mom or do you think of a woman working at home while her kids are there? The label is up for grabs for anyone who wants to use it, and I certainly wouldn’t say that one definition is any more accurate or difficult or heroic than the other, but I will say, having now done both, that they definitely can be different, and at times vastly so.

I kind of hate the image I chose to accompany this post because the idea that “working mother” equals “woman on a laptop while holding a baby” is a misguided and/or uninformed interpretation of how many versions of work-at-home motherhood there are out there. And yet…here I am, the lady on a laptop while holding my baby. (We do not, however, wear matching outfits that also coordinate with the giant arrangement of fresh flowers giving a “pop of color” to our sparkling white kitchen. Right now, for instance, I am wearing green plaid pajama pants that belong to my husband, and the baby is wearing oatmeal in his hair.)
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Getting back into the swing

Categories: freelance, maternity leave, pregnancy, time management, working from home

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It’s back-to-school time for the kiddies and back-to-work time for me. Remember how I thought I’d take two weeks off work after having my baby and then just jump right back in? Well, here I am with a seven-week-old and I’m still chugga-chugga-ing at the station and only just now starting to move (slowly, slowly) down the track.
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Freelancer maternity leave: Can it be done?

Categories: freelance, maternity leave, pregnancy, time management, working from home

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Just thirteen more days until I’m officially on maternity leave from what I call my “day job”–working at home part-time for the book publishing company I’ve been with for ten years. Thirteen more days until I can ignore that email account, those Dropbox notifications, the pressing pressure that I am responsible for hundreds and hundreds of pages of someone’s near-and-dear-yet-riddled-with-typos composition. Thirteen days!

What shall I do to celebrate? Spend mornings napping in a hammock? Indulge in a six-hour Pride and Prejudice marathon? Throw a handful of confetti and then collapse in a heap because I really, really, really need this break?

Yes, I should definitely do all of those. Definitely. Right after I finish writing those four articles and proofing those ten posts and cleaning up that eighty-page file and invoicing for those three jobs. Then I will relax. I mean, I’ll relax if the baby doesn’t need me for something, because chances are he’ll arrive before all my freelance deadlines do, a situation that’s…not ideal.
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Is freelancing worth the cost?

Categories: freelance, time management, working from home

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When it comes to picking up extra work, I’ve gotten more finicky with age. I won’t work on anything for just anyone and whatever price, and although that makes it seem as thought the extra money is less important to me now than it was when I was twenty-two, it’s actually more important, it’s downright integral. The difference now is that there’s not just a cost to the client but a cost to myself, and it’s not always easy to balance that out.   
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What do you outsource?

Categories: child care, time management, working from home

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Some days it sure feels like I’m trying to do it all myself, but even in my darkest woe-is-me hours, I know that I definitely, definitely am not. It would be hard to overlook the hands-on support of my does-more-than-his-fair-share husband, and then there are the “it takes a village”-style friends and family who are a part of my son’s life too, but when I take an even bigger step back and look at all the balls I’m juggling on an average day, and I see how impossible it is to do that alone, I realize how much I rely on not just a village but a sprawling network of helpers (paid and not) to keep things running (relatively) smoothly, and I imagine most other working mothers do too.
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Isolated WAHMhood

Categories: the home office, working from home

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There’s a lot of advice out there about how to stay connected to the world if you spend most of your days in charge of a small person who calls you Mama. Join a playgroup! Frequent library storytimes! Sign up for mommy-and-me music classes! Join baby bootcamp! Start a blog! All this in the name of forming contacts with other parents of small children, presumably as much for our own sanity as for our kids’ social development. But what do you do if you’re home all day without your kid?
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Parenting against type

Categories: time management, working from home

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My husband is a spontaneous, adaptable good sport who shines under pressure and thrives on improvisation. And since every yin must have its yang (or is he the yang and I’m the yin?), I’m his other half, the one who depends on structure and consistency and all the pieces of my life fitting together just so or else THE WORLD IS ENDING AND WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIIIIIIIE. For the most part we’ve found a way to make this work in our relationship, but unfortunately we don’t always get along with our jobs as well as we do with each other: He works regular hours in a building across town, and I work eight a.m. to whenever, and wherever, depending on what day it is and who needs me. I’m the one on call for sick days and holidays, I’m the one playing chauffeur, and I’m the one working late into the night because my nine-to-five was interrupted at 10:30 by a toddler spouting volcanos of vomit all over daycare.
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What’s your end-of-the-workday ritual?

Categories: time management, working from home

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You know the saying “I’m working for the weeked?” I think it stops being true the second you have kids. Kids seem to be of the collective mind that oh-hell-no o’clock is the perfect time to wake up EVERY DAY, and none of them have even heard of Loverboy. What this means for me is that most of the time I’m not working for the weekend but working for the end of the workday; forget spending several days apart from my job, I’m excited for those several hours each night, when I might have some peace and quiet and time for myself at last before it all begins again in the morning.

Because I mostly work from home, defining the end of my workday is both harder and more important, and a lot of the time I don’t manage to do it very well. On thing I think might remedy that is having a consistent after-work ritual to help me shift the gears from workbrain to homebrain. I have some ideas, but I’m also taking suggestions. 
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Is working from home making you fat?

Categories: working from home

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Don’t hate me because I bounced back. I promise that I diligently ate my way through the postpartum haze and I always chose sitting down instead of situps, and yet, no matter what I did, the baby weight just seemed to fall off, and four months later I was feeling fit and fly and ready to rock my pre-preg jeans, just in time to return to work. But, you see, it wasn’t my fault. It was the fault of that other kind of genes. There was truly nothing I could do about it.

And so, resigned to my speedy metabolism (but of course I wasn’t resigned; I was thanking my lucky stars and praising the heavens), I kept eating whatever I wanted and I dutifully adhered to my sedentary lifestyle and then my baby got older and breastfed less and then I got older and my body got slower and…well, here we are, a year and a half later and I’m not feeling so fit and fly and foxy anymore. My weight is more or less the same as it’s always been, but my stomach has taken on the softness of a fresh-baked doughnut (no coincidence), and my butt is spreading across the couch cushions like an army set to conquer the living room, each dimple of cellulite a minion on a mission. 

It’s been happening to me for a while now, this motherbody, but I really began to notice the difference when I started working from home almost exclusively. (For a while I was going into the office one day a week, but wouldn’t you know that day was always Tuesday, aka Doughnut Day?)

So how has working from home negatively affected my body? For one, my office isn’t a place where everyone has a bowl of candy on her desk for grabby passersby, and aside from Doughnut Day (a relatively new phenomenon), the only regular free-for-all goodies are herbal tea and fruit from someone’s backyard organic tree (welcome to Berkeley). This means that when I’m in the office I pretty much stick to the healthy lunch and healthy snacks I’ve brought from home, which is a textbook way for me to keep myself on track.

When I’m working at home, though? There’s a stocked, doorless pantry right in my field of vision all day, and instead of only eating when I’m hungry, I eat because I’m bored or anxious or sleepy or because I’m procrastinating or even just because the food is there, staring at me. For the most part, I’m not eating junk (usually), but I’m definitely eating more overall. When I’m at home, it’s easy to turn that morning cup of tea into a second morning cup and then an afternoon cup and then an early evening one too, and with milk and sugar to boot. And no matter what time of day or night, I can always go for a bowl of cereal. Add to that the fact that I don’t have to sneak my snacks from a receptionist’s bowl, and I can’t even be guilted into cutting back, even just to save face.

Based on what I’ve experienced in most workplaces (bottomless coffeepot, monthly birthday cakes, catered meetings, Doughnut Day, Bagel Day, Hot Dog Day…), I think it’s unsual that I actually have an easier time controlling my food environment in the office than I do at home (save for those damn doughnuts). As for fixing the situation, I have a variety of options–install a locking door on the pantry? rediscover exercise? hire a personal assistant to give me withering looks whenever I go for another granola bar?–but I’m also open to suggestions.

Anyone else experienced work-at-home weight gain? Anyone found a way to beat it? 

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