I've Finally Discovered Child Labour!

I’ve long suspected that I am too soft on these kids of mine. I’m a stay-at-home mom with a Type-A personality who thinks that in order to get things done right, I should do it myself. And I wonder why I’m so exhausted and frustrated with the household duties? 

In the past, we’ve had half-hearted attempts at chore lists. My biggest downfall was not being consistent and insistent, letting things slide and then never getting things back on track. I often made things too complicated. Charts are great but we spent far far too much time choosing our stickers then actually getting things done.

Well, my children have had a rude awakening this week. I was inspired in part by a recent visit to a friend’s house whose dutiful children (aged 9 and 11) assisted with the dinner set-up and clearing with nary a rolled eye in sight. I was awestruck! How could I get a piece of this action, I wondered? It wasn’t long before I was dropping suggestions at our weekly family meeting and drawing up various lists of daily and weekly chores, hoping that I could get the kids to buy into a paradigm shift in our home.

When the children awoke today for the first day of school, they were greeted by their expected updated-for-the-new-year morning and evening to-do lists. The usual items were there: feed fish, brush teeth, empty lunch bag, homework, etc. But there was something different.

This year I included some fresh new items: clear breakfast dishes AND put them in the dishwasher, make sandwich and assemble lunch bag, clear dinner dishes AND put them in the dishwasher and...”daily chore: see chart.” I directed the puzzled minions, I mean munchkins, to a new addendum to the fridge clutter: a list of daily and weekly chores, divided among the three of them. I’ve kept it simple: unload the dishwasher, help with dinner, sweep kitchen floor daily and clean bathroom (with help), dust & vacuum main floor and wash kitchen floor weekly.

With some gentle and persistent encouragement this evening, I was positively amazed at what these 7 and 9 year olds are capable of contributing to the household! I enjoyed their company in the kitchen before and after dinner and was thrilled to not have to do every little thing myself. Eureka! I am kicking myself for not getting this started earlier but I am looking forward staying the course. I’m hoping that if the kids feel more like a contributing member of the household perhaps they’ll feel like contributing more. It’s a long shot but I’ll let you know how it turns out.

The Lady Who (Sometimes) Lunches

Tomorrow is the first day of October. Where did September go? Here I thought that I’d have all of this free time to write once the kids started school full-time. Suddenly I realized that nearly a month has passed and I’ve barely come up for air.

The question I get the most is “What do you do with all of your time these days?”. It’s not an easy to question to answer but I honestly find myself so busy that the clock seems to move from 9:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. in a nanosecond. The opportunity to do housework, laundry, groceries and cooking without kids underfoot has been refreshing. I’ve also found time to work out (somewhat regularly), volunteer at the school, install Sirius satellite in the minivan, help organize our local Terry Fox Run, start my French classes (with homework!), organize a street party, volunteer as a Sparks leader, finish training to work on Election Day and to do all the other little administrative things that fill my day.

The best part about being a SAHMOSAK (stay-at-home-mom-of-school-age-kids) has been the opportunity to catch up with friends. I will be honest here. I have become a “lady who lunches”. I have gone out with different friends about five or six times for lunch. A woman has to eat, right? And what better way to reconnect with a friend than over a meal you’d have to eat anyway! It’s hard to make evening plans when a spouse has to be consulted or a sitter has to be booked and we all get so busy with our lives. A break in an otherwise hectic or solo kind of day, midday get-togethers are made for this.

There are many many blogs out there that discuss the difficulties of making new mom friends. I used to worry about that. Am I connected enough? Do I have enough friends? Am I liked enough? I realize now that the relationships with the friends I already adore and the people that I meet with whom the friendship blossoms effortlessly are the women to keep close and the bonds to strengthen. If a friend makes me feel like I’m more of my authentic self, this is a friend to cherish. I am too old to try to be someone I’m not.

This is the part of my life that I didn’t realize was suffering from neglect. In a busy world of raising kids, tending to a family and running a household, it’s easy to forget how important these connections are. My friends enrich my life in so many ways. They are my sounding-boards, my shoulders to cry on, my fountains of advice, my standup comics, my pillars of strength, my partners in crime, my sisters-(and brothers)-in-arms.

And so to you, my friends, a toast! With a sandwich and a salad and maybe a beer. If this is what it’s all about, I’m thrilled to say that I am a “lady who (sometimes) lunches”.

Image © Melissa Schalke | Dreamstime.com

Happy New (School) Year!

It’s been a while! We've had a nice long busy but relaxing summer, enjoying lots of northern get-aways and day-trips around Toronto. All three kids have learned to ride their bikes, thanks to a week-long camp at Pedalheads. And we have all gotten along well- for the most part. Finally, here it is just mere days from... the start of school! “The most wonderful time of the year” to quote a well-appreciated and overplayed commercial.

This is it. This is the moment I’ve been waiting for. The day when all three kids enter full-day school and I suddenly have six and a half hours of ME time. Don’t get me wrong (and if you are a parent I know that you don’t), I love my children and I love spending time with them. But when you spend as much time with anyone as I do with my children, you’d also be anxious for a little breathing space.

I’ve always thought of the first day of school as my New Year’s Day. The memory of blank notebooks, freshly sharpened pencils, squeaky clean sneakers puts a bounce in my step. It’s a blank slate and a time of renewal. The crispness in the air, the crunchy leaves underfoot and a new year begins.

It’s time for a few resolutions: to get and stay organized, to stay on top of agendas and homework and reams of paper, to volunteer more in the classroom, to get the kids to make their lunches (a new resolution for this year).

I’ve learned a few lessons over the past school years. We’ve already printed our “Things to do in the morning” and “Things to go in your backpack” charts and posted them in bedrooms and at the front door. The dressers are organized, the kids have tried on pants which invariable shrink 2 inches the morning of the first chilly day. Extracurricular activities and our daily routine have been discussed. Homework plans are almost complete- most important as all three will have homework this year much to my dismay (but that’s another post). My next step is to draw up a list of lunch ideas with the kids and prepare our weekly chart to post on the fridge.

And me. What am I going to do with all my time?? At this moment with my to-do list for the next few days a mile long and not a minute to spare with three kids underfoot, I am fantasizing about the hours and hours of time to myself to read, to write, to drink coffee, spend time with friends, work out, nap.

But will those six and a half hours fly by if I’m not organized and will I end up feeling useless and frustrated if I’m not accomplishing a multitude of tasks? I am a chronic list-maker (if you haven’t already noticed) and that combined with my first-born personality traits means that I have to feel like I’m accomplishing something or I end up feeling like I’ve accomplished nothing at all. Talk about demotivating! My non-exhaustive to-do-in-September list includes gutting out the “not-so-spare room” (aka the office), purging and organizing ALL the toys and books, cleaning out and organizing the closets and cupboards, tackling a million other little jobs around the house, blogging regularly (I promise!), improving my French, becoming a Sparks leader and preparing fantastically nutritious and delicious meals in advance.

What will happen? Will I over-schedule and exhaust myself or will I turn into a couch-potato, hanging out in cafes, gossiping with other SAHMs and eating bon-bons by the case? Or will I hopefully end up somewhere in between? What is going to make me feel fulfilled? Please stay tuned...

Image © Natalia Klenova | Dreamstime.com

What's It All Worth?

It’s tax-time in Canada. That time of year when we look at the numbers and realize our monetary worth. For a stay-at-home mom, it can be a bit depressing.

As I assemble all of our tax documents and start plugging the numbers into the latest tax software, it is like a slap in the face. Yes, here it is in black-and-white. My personal total income for 2010 was...$2400. And that was courtesy of Canada’s Childcare Benefit program that provides me with a whopping $100/month per child under 6. (For childcare? Really?? How far is that going to go? But I digress). Surely I am “worth” more than that!

Each year, Salary.com releases it’s Annual Mom Salary Survey. For 10 years, Salary.com has been calculating how much an employer would have to pay to hire someone to do all that a moms does, figuring that a mom does a hybrid of ten different jobs at a small “company”: laundry machine operator, janitor, van driver, computer operator, housekeeper, day care centre teacher, cook, chief executive officer, psychologist, and facilities manager. In 2010, they calculated that a stay-at-home mom would earn CAN$132,288/year for working about 99 hours/week.

Now that’s more like it. Or is it?

Last week, a “plague” descended on our house. It started with my son then within hours all three kids were vomiting every couple of hours for three days straight. The cleaning, the laundry, the nursing, the comforting! And to make matters worse, I started to feel ill on the second day and by the time the kids started to feel more like themselves, the plague had felled its fourth victim: me. For at least three days, my bedroom looked like a M*A*S*H unit with four bodies strewn across our king size bed- and puke bowls scattered among those bodies.

Upon reflection, I’d like to amend Salary.com’s figures. They should include a nursing salary (at least part-time) as well as hardship pay (did I mention the laundry and cleaning of all kinds of bodily fluids?) and of course hazard pay (if I wasn’t cleaning all those bodily fluids, I likely wouldn’t have been exposed to that nasty virus myself). Add that all up and I’d estimate my hypothetical salary at least a million dollars. Maybe two. At least I don't have to pay hypothetical income tax.

Now if only I could get a non-hypothetical paid vacation.

Image: dreamtime.com

And what do you do?

Image credit: www.zeroratio.wordpress.com


The scenario: Any social gathering. I’m introduced to someone. After a few pleasantries, the conversation invariably turns to a discussion of career.

“And what do you do?”

“I’m a stay-at-home mom of a 7-year old boy and 5-year old twin girls.”

This is often followed by uncomfortable silence and a meager attempt to acknowledge how busy I must be, a quick change of the subject then a thinly veiled excuse to extricate themselves.

It’s a conversation killer.

I have always wanted to be a mother. As the eldest of four children, I knew at a very early age that I wanted to have children of my own. When my husband and I decided to start trying after 2 years of marriage, I was thrilled and couldn’t wait until that little stick showed me a plus sign.

When I became pregnant with our first son L, I was working on Bay Street for a brokerage firm (not exactly a family friendly environment). I loved being home for the 12-months of maternity leave and hated leaving him at daycare to return to a job that I had discovered I didn’t love. Soon after, we decided to start trying for a second baby and were quite surprised to become pregnant with twins when my son was only 14-months old. And so when L was not quite 2 years old, we were blessed with identical twin girls- K and M.

Yes, your math is correct. That is three kids in less than two years.

A review of finances and some soul-searching confirmed that it would make sense for me to stay home with the kids until they started school. My husband’s career was on the cusp of taking off and having a stay-at-home spouse would enable him to work late and travel if necessary. I was thrilled (and a bit trepidatious) to be fulfilling my lifelong dream of making a career of parenting.

Nearly six years later, I’ve weathered a gazillion diaper changes, potty training x 3, kids learning to walk, talk and talk back, starting school and homework, mountains of laundry, endless meal preparation and housework. My son is in grade two. My daughters are in SK. In six months (yes, I’m counting), all three will be in school full-time.

So where does that leave me? I’m still at home with the kids. My husband’s job has him traveling at least twice a month for up to six days at a time and it still doesn’t make sense for me to go back to working outside the home, at least if I want to maintain my sanity. How do I justify my existence? I consider raising healthy and considerate kids to be my full-time career. My days are filled with the usual unending household duties, coordinating school activities, obsessively reading parenting books and blogs and, from time to time, finding a few moments for self-reflection.

I hope you’ll join me on my journey of redefining my identity as a SAHMOSAK (stay-at-home mom of school-aged kids). I am certainly no “lady who lunches”. Commiserate with my (mis)adventures in raising pre-tween kids and the joys and challenges that are sure to follow. Perhaps I’ll find that being a SAHMOSAK isn’t such a conversation killer after all.

Happy reading!