Well, for all four of you that read my blog, you may have noticed I’ve had a blogger’s fallout. My last post was in the beginning of March. In today’s fast pace life, that might as well of been a decade ago. Well, I have no good excuse except for being a busy working mommy – which is what this blog is about so I think you’ll forgive me, right?
So now that my hiatus is hopefully on a hiatus, I have big plans for the blog. I am planning a makeover in the next month, so keep an eye out for a new look (not me, the blog). I also plan to juice up the “Fresh from the Juice Box” section, ‘cause let’s face it the kid stuff is just funny. Finally, I plan to add a section titled “Mommy Mitigation” – a section just for us moms.
So, unless another alien virus/bacteria starts to take over my household again or I get assigned some ungodly work project with unmanageable deadlines, I promise to be a better blogger buddy.
Don’t give up on me just yet…
Monday, May 17, 2010
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Fabulous Find: The Phonyphone App
I just found a cute new app through www.babycenter.com for the Apple iPhone. The app simulates a "fake" phone for your kid to pretend with. If you have an iPhone, this app would be great for entertaining your little one while at the doctor's office or in the grocery store. Love it!
If you don't have an iPhone, another trick that I have used with my toddler is a calculator. I carry a small calculator in my purse and use it to entertain her while we are out and about. It works great. She can push all the buttons she wants, and I don't worry about her dialing a foreign country or texting my boss!
Check out the Phonyphone App today!
If you don't have an iPhone, another trick that I have used with my toddler is a calculator. I carry a small calculator in my purse and use it to entertain her while we are out and about. It works great. She can push all the buttons she wants, and I don't worry about her dialing a foreign country or texting my boss!
Check out the Phonyphone App today!
Monday, March 1, 2010
Fresh From the Juice Box
Tales from a toddler...
As a parent we do everything we can to make sure our child is learning all the right things, like the ABC's and 123's, but sometimes we do too good of a job.
The other day, my daughter was having a toddler tantrum over not wanting to help pick up her blocks. The more I asked her to help, the more she messed them up. She even started throwing the blocks around the room making more of a mess.
I had enough, so I told her that I am going to start counting to ten and if she didn't help me I was going to start taking toys away from her for the rest of the day. She looked me dead in the face, picked up a block and threw it! "That's it!" I started to count "One...Two...Three..."
Then, she bursts out "Four...Five...One...Two" (she only knows up to five). She then walked around the house counting over and over to five. What I thought was a brilliant lesson is chances, turned out to be a briilant lesson in counting!
As a parent we do everything we can to make sure our child is learning all the right things, like the ABC's and 123's, but sometimes we do too good of a job.
The other day, my daughter was having a toddler tantrum over not wanting to help pick up her blocks. The more I asked her to help, the more she messed them up. She even started throwing the blocks around the room making more of a mess.
I had enough, so I told her that I am going to start counting to ten and if she didn't help me I was going to start taking toys away from her for the rest of the day. She looked me dead in the face, picked up a block and threw it! "That's it!" I started to count "One...Two...Three..."
Then, she bursts out "Four...Five...One...Two" (she only knows up to five). She then walked around the house counting over and over to five. What I thought was a brilliant lesson is chances, turned out to be a briilant lesson in counting!
"30 Minute Meals" in 3 minutes?
The idea behind of celebrity chef Rachel Ray's "30 Minute Meals" concept is clear - quick, easy, tasteful meals. But what happens when you don't even have 30 minutes to feed the hungry mouths around the table? I need 3-minute meals!
One of the biggest challenges I have as a working mom is dinner time. I commute 34 miles each way to work. My daughter is in full-time day care near my office, so by the time I pick her up and head home, we're pushing dinner time. She is starving the minute we walk in the door, most often I am too. These days, it seems no matter how fast the meal seems to cook, it's never fast enough for my little toddler who is already tired from her long day and commute.
On our worst day, we pick up a pizza or fast food and shove it into our face on the drive home. On a good day, I've made something in the slow cooker. Yet, there are only so many roasts and chili you can eat and we definitely do not want to continue the eating out situation. Small snacks sometimes hold her over, but often fill her up and ruins her appetite for when dinner is finally ready.
Solution! Well, my new concept - I don't think its really "new" so I am not even going to claim to be inventive on this one - but Tonight's Dinner Tomorrow. Basically, make tomorrow's dinner the night before so all you have to do is re-heat. Dinner is ready in seconds when my family walks through the door each night.
For this to work, clearly you have to plan ahead. It also helps to be able to "re-purpose" meals. For example, take your left over pork roast from the night before and make pork sandwiches or tacos the next night. The key here is to re-heat, not cook. Think about this when you're grocery shopping. It's not only a time saver, but a money saver. Re-purposed left overs can really add up to some extra dough in the bank account by not throwing so much in the trash on expiration day.
So for all you mommy chefs on the go, try this concept out and let me know if you find any great recipes to share with us.
One of the biggest challenges I have as a working mom is dinner time. I commute 34 miles each way to work. My daughter is in full-time day care near my office, so by the time I pick her up and head home, we're pushing dinner time. She is starving the minute we walk in the door, most often I am too. These days, it seems no matter how fast the meal seems to cook, it's never fast enough for my little toddler who is already tired from her long day and commute.
On our worst day, we pick up a pizza or fast food and shove it into our face on the drive home. On a good day, I've made something in the slow cooker. Yet, there are only so many roasts and chili you can eat and we definitely do not want to continue the eating out situation. Small snacks sometimes hold her over, but often fill her up and ruins her appetite for when dinner is finally ready.
Solution! Well, my new concept - I don't think its really "new" so I am not even going to claim to be inventive on this one - but Tonight's Dinner Tomorrow. Basically, make tomorrow's dinner the night before so all you have to do is re-heat. Dinner is ready in seconds when my family walks through the door each night.
For this to work, clearly you have to plan ahead. It also helps to be able to "re-purpose" meals. For example, take your left over pork roast from the night before and make pork sandwiches or tacos the next night. The key here is to re-heat, not cook. Think about this when you're grocery shopping. It's not only a time saver, but a money saver. Re-purposed left overs can really add up to some extra dough in the bank account by not throwing so much in the trash on expiration day.
So for all you mommy chefs on the go, try this concept out and let me know if you find any great recipes to share with us.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Stay-at-home Mom vs. "Working" Mom
I thought long and hard when developing the angle of this blog because a site dedicated to the "working"mom could be any mom. Being a mom is work, no matter how you slice it. However, I only know what I know and I've had a full-time job the whole time I've been a mom. I do often wonder though, why do we make such a distinction between the two. Are our mommy worlds really that different?
I don't know where all the competition started. Maybe it started in the industrial age when women went to work to provide for their family while the husband went to war. Society gave a false embrace to the new role of "the mom" in the workplace making it more acceptable to deviate from the prior Joan Clever type role for women. Maybe it's even more recent than that.
My generation is the "I want it all and I want it all right now!" We want to have college degrees, careers, equal status with our male counterparts, but we also want a family and the white picket fence - including having all the little ducklings at home. Women now tend to feel like we have to give things up to become a mom, instead of in our mother's and grandmother's day where it was the goal, it was just what they did. We now tend to try more to just fit motherhood into our schedule and hope for the best.
It seems the decision to stay home with your kids is harder to make these days as well. Taking the whole financial part out of it, it's hard to walk away from something you worked hard for, something you trained for, something that defines a little piece of you. We're told our whole childhood that we can be what we want, be a doctor, a teacher, a lawyer, etc...but when it comes down to it having a family doesn't really fit into those worlds well. Even now, some employers still place a stigma on moms, it's a hassle for them that you have a child to care for and they don't often make it easy on you.
On the contrary, if you had a certain lifestyle before you had kids and certain financial responsibilities, its hard to walk away from a pay check. It's hard not to want to maintain a certain lifestyle for your children. Not to mention the current economy, which has forced more moms back into the work world without much choice.
My point is either way is it's hard. It's hard to give every ounce of yourself up to dedicate your life to raising kids, missing out on adult interaction and self fulfillment. It's also hard to leave your precious little one every day to be raised by someone else and miss their first smile, their first words, their first steps. You never get those moments back. Yet, either way as moms we do it. We do it because we love them, we do it because we're moms!
So we're not at war with each other, none of us have the better deal. We're all just making it work for whatever reason we have to make it work. And as a working mom, trust me I don't judge the stay-at-home mom, I am envious of all the precious moments you get with your little ones. I am envious that you had the courage to say, no matter what my little one is my life now.
I don't know where all the competition started. Maybe it started in the industrial age when women went to work to provide for their family while the husband went to war. Society gave a false embrace to the new role of "the mom" in the workplace making it more acceptable to deviate from the prior Joan Clever type role for women. Maybe it's even more recent than that.
My generation is the "I want it all and I want it all right now!" We want to have college degrees, careers, equal status with our male counterparts, but we also want a family and the white picket fence - including having all the little ducklings at home. Women now tend to feel like we have to give things up to become a mom, instead of in our mother's and grandmother's day where it was the goal, it was just what they did. We now tend to try more to just fit motherhood into our schedule and hope for the best.
It seems the decision to stay home with your kids is harder to make these days as well. Taking the whole financial part out of it, it's hard to walk away from something you worked hard for, something you trained for, something that defines a little piece of you. We're told our whole childhood that we can be what we want, be a doctor, a teacher, a lawyer, etc...but when it comes down to it having a family doesn't really fit into those worlds well. Even now, some employers still place a stigma on moms, it's a hassle for them that you have a child to care for and they don't often make it easy on you.
On the contrary, if you had a certain lifestyle before you had kids and certain financial responsibilities, its hard to walk away from a pay check. It's hard not to want to maintain a certain lifestyle for your children. Not to mention the current economy, which has forced more moms back into the work world without much choice.
My point is either way is it's hard. It's hard to give every ounce of yourself up to dedicate your life to raising kids, missing out on adult interaction and self fulfillment. It's also hard to leave your precious little one every day to be raised by someone else and miss their first smile, their first words, their first steps. You never get those moments back. Yet, either way as moms we do it. We do it because we love them, we do it because we're moms!
So we're not at war with each other, none of us have the better deal. We're all just making it work for whatever reason we have to make it work. And as a working mom, trust me I don't judge the stay-at-home mom, I am envious of all the precious moments you get with your little ones. I am envious that you had the courage to say, no matter what my little one is my life now.
Fresh From the Juice Box
This is a new idea for the blog. From time to time, I will write a little story in the form of a toddler moment. This is also a great section for you to leave your stories too.
Fresh from the Juice Box
The other day as my toddler and I were doing our pre-bedtime ritual of learning our body parts - we're working on our face part right now - she got a little streak of devil in her as we were pointing out our eyes. Her quick little fingers thrusted toward my eyes and she plucked out a chuck of my eyelashes. Despite the eminence pain associated with this, I tried to calmly explain to her that she needed to be more careful. She seemed to understand and kept chanting "Mommy, eye." "Mommy, eye."
The next afternoon, we were again playing and just in casual terms I was commenting on her long beautiful eyelashes. Then, I remembered my lack of eyelashes and jokingly said "Since you have so many eyelashes can you share some of yours with mommy?" Not even expecting her to remember the night before, she replied without hesitation, "No. I'm gor-geous!" ... I think we have to work on the sharing part, but not so much the self esteem.
Fresh from the Juice Box
The other day as my toddler and I were doing our pre-bedtime ritual of learning our body parts - we're working on our face part right now - she got a little streak of devil in her as we were pointing out our eyes. Her quick little fingers thrusted toward my eyes and she plucked out a chuck of my eyelashes. Despite the eminence pain associated with this, I tried to calmly explain to her that she needed to be more careful. She seemed to understand and kept chanting "Mommy, eye." "Mommy, eye."
The next afternoon, we were again playing and just in casual terms I was commenting on her long beautiful eyelashes. Then, I remembered my lack of eyelashes and jokingly said "Since you have so many eyelashes can you share some of yours with mommy?" Not even expecting her to remember the night before, she replied without hesitation, "No. I'm gor-geous!" ... I think we have to work on the sharing part, but not so much the self esteem.
Welcome!
Welcome to my blog. High Heels & High Chairs is dedicated to the working mom. Let's face it, it's hard to be everywhere for everyone in your life. The work-life balance is emotional, conflicting and even tormenting. A constant mind battle of wondering if you're doing the right thing for your family. If you're being a good mom, a good career woman, a good wife, a good friend, a good person. When you succeed at work, it feels like you're failing as a mom. When you're being a good mom, work falls behind. You feel like you can never win and maybe you can't, but we can sure talk about it. Mommi-hood and work balance is the most challenging thing I've ever taken on and I don't even know if I am succeeding, but I sure am trying.
I am not an authority on all things "mom" and in terms of the lifetime commitment it takes to raise a child, I am still in my infancy with a just one toddler at home, but I am a mom and a working one who struggles minute by minute to be good at everything, to raise this perfect human being while saving some part of my own humanness.
So if you're a high heel, suit wearing, power mom by day and the bath giving, tear wiping, diaper changing mommy by night...strap on your Manolo's and your diaper bag and let's ride out the challenges and insanities together!
I am not an authority on all things "mom" and in terms of the lifetime commitment it takes to raise a child, I am still in my infancy with a just one toddler at home, but I am a mom and a working one who struggles minute by minute to be good at everything, to raise this perfect human being while saving some part of my own humanness.
So if you're a high heel, suit wearing, power mom by day and the bath giving, tear wiping, diaper changing mommy by night...strap on your Manolo's and your diaper bag and let's ride out the challenges and insanities together!
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