Who’s the Boss: You or the Nanny?
When you employ anyone to help you care for your child you are likely to feel anxious. Why? Because anyone who cares for your kids needs to be SOMEONE YOU LIKE and SOMEONE YOU TRUST.
Unfortunately, the only people who get the endorsement of “like” and “trust” are already very close to you. The anxiety we feel when we hire an unknown person is because you’re leaving your child with someone you won’t get to know until after they’ve started working.
So what do you do if you determine a nanny is your best solution for child care? (more…)
Adulthood Revisited? Reset Your Grown-up Self, when your Baby is just too cute!
Have you ever felt so entranced by your baby that you lose track of yourself as a grown-up? I don’t mean in the chronological sense of your age but in the sense of your role. Are you Mommy, the cuddler-nurturer, at one with your infant? Or are you Mommy the leader, an example for all the little ones who are going to grow up in your home? Sometimes we need a wake-up call to merge the two into the one person our children call “Mom.” (Not to mention regaining the identity of co-producer with the other adult member of the family).
My mother gave me my wake-up call at 3:00 am, one Tuesday morning, when she walked into my kitchen where I was more or less pretending to enjoy playing goo-goo-gah-gah with a baby who obviously thought it was 3:00 in the afternoon. (more…)
Does Baby ALWAYS Come First?
In 2005, the author, Ayelet Waldman, wrote an essay for the NY Times declaring that she loved her husband MORE than she could ever love her children. All hell broke loose in the mom universe. A mother of four, she asserted that if one of her children died, she could get over that, but without her husband, her life would “have no joy.” She could not “picture a future without him.” (more…)
Taking Care of Yourself – The importance of Recharging
Me Time
Have you ever put a week of your life on a spreadsheet and accounted for every hour of your time? Have you ever tried to find time for the “ME” in your life somewhere on that spreadsheet? (more…)
NOT Guilty!
I don’t believe I’ve ever read a book, watched a television show, a movie, or even had a conversation about raising children that didn’t involve or suggest “maternal guilt.” If it wasn’t spoken, it was intended to be said, and if nobody blamed a mom outright for whatever was wrong, it is always implied. (more…)
Choosing Child Care: The Infant Center Surprise
For a lot of parents, it seems impossible to even consider the night and day of being at home with your baby vs. having your baby go to child care or a child care center while you are at work. But these days, thanks mainly to forward thinking employers who wanted to retain high performing moms in the workforce, infant centers affiliated with businesses are often standard bearers of high quality child care. The Working Mother Magazine makes an annual list of the 100 “best” companies to work for, and their list of benefits often begins with the child care center. (more…)
