My husband and I have one daughter, who just turned five a few weeks ago. (I’m still in partial denial, but she reminds me frequently, so it’s hard to forget.) For a long while since she was born we both thought that we’d just have her and that’s it. But lately — say, in the past year — we’ve been talking a lot about whether or not we’ll have another kiddo. Maybe it’s the fact that our daughter is a delight and things are relatively easy at this age. Maybe it’s because most of our friends have now gone on to have more than one child and it’s giving us food for thought. Or perhaps it’s just that while we’re still fairly young (early 30s), life does seem to be flying by and we’re starting to think of those BIG fundamental life questions, like, say, how big of a family we’d really like to have.

This decision about how many kids to have is ranking fairly high on the-really-tough-parenting-decisions scale, at least in my book. So naturally, I’ve been talking about it a lot. And here’s what’s struck me:

By a huge margin, the most popular reason people give me for having more kids is so that our daughter has a sibling. (It’s also one of the most popular reasons listed in the comments on my Why is it such a crime to have an only child post.)
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A few Fridays a month I try to leave work a little early to pick up my daughter from school. We spend a little time together and then I bring her to gymnastics class, and catch up on work while she learns to climb rope or do backwards rolls.  But it’s the summer, gymnastics is over, and this past Friday I needed to get back to the office for a late afternoon meeting. So, I brought my daughter with me.

I work for an extremely family-friendly company and consider myself pretty freaking lucky. The benefits are great, we have a lot of flexibility, and there is this general sense of trying to help employees blend their work and family life a little bit easier. And it’s not uncommon to see a kid or two at the office if the parents need to get something done but for some reason don’t have childcare for that period of time. When I told my daughter we were going to mommy’s work, she seemed excited and I was relieved that I didn’t have to perform some insane juggling act to be a mom and get some work done.
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We are friends with another couple whose daughter’s regular bedtime is 9pm or later. She is five, the same age as our kiddo, who goes to bed at 7-7:30pm. Both of our friends work pretty long hours and get home around 7:30 at night or even later and to spend some time together as a family they moved their daughter’s bedtime later from the time she was pretty little. Obviously you can’t do this with all kids, but she is great about it and sleeps a bit later in the morning than most kids I know, until about 8am or so.

I’ve thought about doing this. On a really great day, I get home at 5:45 and hang out with my daughter until she goes to bed. It’s not a ton of time, but it works, especially when we do something fun, like dance around in the living room or play a game together. But on less-than-great days, when there is a ton of traffic or I am late getting out of the office, the time we spend together feels too short. If her bedtime were later, we’d have more time together.
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We just got home from our daughter’s 5th birthday party. It was great — no major meltdowns, everyone had fun, and she came home smothered in chocolate from a cupcake and paint from painting a plaster princess. Mission accomplished.

My friend, one of the other kid’s mom, helped me unpack the cupcakes and remarked on how pretty they were. I told her that we special-ordered them from this great little bakery, complete with purple butterflies and purple flowers, as requested by our daughter. They weren’t cheap and a simple cake would have done the trick, but the birthday girl wanted these and we obliged.

I told my friend that while I’m happy to see my kiddo be all giddy when she saw the special cupcakes, I was conflicted about ordering them. Well, not so much conflicted as it gave me pause for thought. Cupcakes were a bit of a no-brainer — sure, they’re a bit more expensive than a cake, but not materially so. But as our daughter grows, there will be other things that she really, really, reeealy wants, and drawing boundaries will become tougher. I can see it coming.

Generally, I’d say that we haven’t been guilty of extreme spoiling to this point.
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Over the weekend a few of my husband’s colleagues came over for dinner. (I have to just take a minute and brag, in the most unashamed way possible, about the rockin’ dinner menu I pulled off. It included my wrapping a large piece of salmon in dozens of lemon slices and bay leaves, tying it with kitchen twine and grilling it in a fish basket — absolutely none of which I’d done before. You’ve got to give it a shot - here’s the slideshow on how to do it.)

OK, back to the actual topic of this post. So we’re sitting around and talking after the delicious dinner (promise, last mention of that), and one of the guys mentions this big project they’d just finished. I knew that my husband was working more than usual, but besides that, had no specifics on what was going on with this big client deal and I said this much to his colleague. He was really surprised and that’s when we got to talking about work-talk with your spouse.
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Today my daughter turns five.

Wow.

Somehow this seems like a really big birthday. It is, I guess, a big birthday, and even though I’ve tried to “prepare” myself for it for a while now, I’m still kind of freaked out that our little baby is now very much not a baby, but a quickly-growing little girl who starts kindergarten in September. Wow again.

I like to make lists and I as sat here wrapping her presents (a scooter and a game) and trying not to get too sentimental every time I glanced at her baby picture on the side table, I started to think about what I’ve learned about this whole life-work juggle during the past five years:

One of the toughest things is the constant feeling of not being able to do 100% as a mom or as a professional. This really got to me for the first few years after my daughter was born. But what I eventually learned is that I need to accept that it’s impossible to EVER do 100% as a working mom and as long as I feel like I’m giving my all as a mom and as a professional some of the time, I’m doing all right. (Trust me, fighting my inner perfectionist on this hasn’t been easy.)
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I was catching up on some online reading (aka procrastinating at work, which I try not to do but can’t help at times) and came across this article about some new research about women’s happiness.

According to the new research paper, titled The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness, the lives of women in the US have improved significantly during the past 35 years but women are less happy today than in the past. And not only are women less happy but they are also less happy than men, whose happiness level has been rising over the past several decades. There are likely many reasons for the decline in happiness as more and more women have gone into the workforce, but the fact that working women are also handling a huge amount of responsibilities at home — and are thus working two shifts instead of one — is a major contributor.

It’s a new paper, but the findings aren’t new — I searched through the archives and found a blog post I wrote in response to some similar research, titled Has feminism failed to make women happier? But this topic really bugs me, mostly because it’s really personal and I don’t know what the answer is.
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The last couple of Fridays I’ve left work to the sound of my colleagues chatting and sharing beers in the background. No, I don’t work in a bar, but I do work in a place where it’s common to grab a beer after work on a Friday and catch up about non-work stuff in our fabulous kitchen/communal eating area. It’s relaxing, fun, great for building relationships, and something I almost never do.

After I became a mom I changed some things about the way I worked. I started to procrastinate a lot less and focus on being productive and getting stuff done as efficiently as possible a lot more. I stopped going out for lunch unless it was an important meeting or I really needed a break because working through lunch gave me an extra hour of being productive. And I cut out most of the non-essential networking outside of work, including dinners, conferences, and other get-togethers, including Friday beers.

This is far from ideal and I know it.
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Our daughter is about to turn five (if anyone has found a pause button for age, please let me know) and she’s been a girly-girl from the time when she could express her desires and preferences for toys, books, colors, and clothes. She loves dolls and princesses and she’s never been very much into Legos, cars or trains. If it were up to her, she’d spend her entire day dressed in her fairy dress up, magic wand and “special wings” (her words, not mine) included.

I know there are some parents who get annoyed when someone gives their daughter a princess-related toy as a gift and who think that princesses are just terrible role models for girls. I’m not sure why, but I’ve never really worried about this — and I say I’m not sure why because as a strong, opinionated, independent woman part of me thinks that yes, I should care. But my daughter is young, princesses are fun, and I seriously doubt that watching princess cartoons will make her believe that all she needs to do in life is look pretty, talk sweetly, and find a prince to take care of her. (And if she does grow up believing this, we’re to blame as parents vs cartoons and princess toys.)
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I recently had lunch with a friend whose daughter is a few months younger than ours. We got to talking about our last few weekends and she told me that the number of her daughter’s activities, birthday parties, and playdates that fill their weekends is overwhelming. “Before she was born we thought that she’d fit into our life but it turned out quite the opposite,” she told me.

I thought this was an interesting way to put it. My husband and I probably fall somewhere in the middle of the parenting spectrum. We definitely spend a fair amount of time taking our daughter to activities (I write this right after we got home from her ballet class), but we made a decision a while ago to have at least one afternoon every weekend where we have nothing planned, including playdates. We buy our share of educational games and I have a sign-up form for kids’ drama club sitting on my desk, but we’ve also thought it was really important to let our daughter just play and hang out. And because I really can’t stand playgrounds or children’s museums, we’re almost never there and I’ve stopped feeling guilty about it a long time ago.
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