It’s the last week of school in Fulton County and we are very excited to take our annual June blog break. We hope you are looking forward to a fun summer as well. So while you are making your to-do lists and packing your sunscreen, load these new podcast episodes up on your phone and give them a listen.
Yes, these are all parenting episodes, but all of my other listening has been #Scandoval and plant care. I’m in it deep, guys…
Continue reading
In Tuesday’s post, I compared parenting to a job. In this post, I want to talk about how you and your partner function as a team to raise your kids and run a household. There are a lot of different versions of team parenting, mostly the concept of including grandparents, teachers, babysitters, other caregivers, and coaches as your kid’s “team” to help support their development. TEAM is also an acronym in our Hunt, Gather, Parent review. But for this post, I am exclusively talking about the primary parents/guardians and we’re keeping on our career goggles.
Continue reading
In March, I went through a job transition. To figure out my next career move, I weighed the options with Troy; should I find another full-time job? Do I need a full-time job? Do I pivot to a different industry? Is it necessary for me to stay-at-home?
In my job search, I looked for the following: competitive salary and vacation time, hybrid scheduling but mainly work from home, travel is a plus, retirement matching, and hourly flexibility to accommodate for my family’s schedule. If I was getting really picky, I’d go for summer Fridays and complimentary meals like at Google. Honestly, I was looking for perks that let me be as available as I could with my girls while still giving me a salary, exciting responsibilities, and time to myself.
They always say that being a parent is the hardest and best job there is, so I wondered what it would be like to be a stay-at-home during my compulsive LinkedIn browsing. It’s estimated that the average SAH parent does the equivalent of three jobs, and if paid to scale, would make over $100K per year. Working parents are at their salaried jobs for 40+ hours/week, and then come home to “the second shift”. Yes, everyone’s family is different and how they manage their lives and raise their children is completely personal. But what would happen if we started applying our job search standards to parenting?
Continue readingIt’s time for another playdate review. This month, we chose the Georgia Renaissance Festival. Both Mary and I have gone to RenFaires in the past and we each took our children last year. But for this year and this blog series, we decided to make it a full-on playdate.
Same review rules apply: The playdates need to be something new that the kids have never done before. In this case, it was a full day out with another kid. True, our kids have been to this location before, but this is not a family trip. Subtle difference there. Also, the faire had more involved activities than the standard meet-up-at-the-park and had multiple applications of sensory/development function.
Continue reading
For this month’s Child(ish) Read, I wanted to do something a little different. The books I choose are normally about child development or parenting; but truthfully, most of these books are sub texturally written for moms. Women are the prime audience buying parenting books, so they are written with that lens.
Every time I’m in the bookstore and I see a book specifically about fatherhood, more likely than not they heavily rely on the same tropes: sports references and tired dad jokes.
I was once reading a fictionalized memoir written by a dad to his children and it was pretty much a rip off of How I Met Your Mother. The book even referenced How I Met Your Mother.
And going back to the sports thing, do you really need endless comparisons of holding your baby like a football to make the subject of being a good parent interesting? Slam dunk.
Truthfully, I don’t really take any of those fatherhood titles seriously because in no way, shape, or form would a book like that fly if written for an expectant mother.
We hear so many statistics that Millennial dads are more involved with their kids than in generations previous; not only from the time they spend, but the actual splitting of responsibilities. If this is true, I want to see fatherhood books reflect this shift in mindset. So, I gave this compare and contrast a try.
Continue reading
Child(ish) Advice 